Let me start by saying that everything you ever knew about Lila Holzman is absolutely true, she may very well save the world and may indeed be EVEN MORE incredible than we all ever suspected.
I´ve been in Panama for less than a week and am blown away at what Lila is doing in this part of the world. Not only is she a ´trooper´ (as Mallory put it best) but she is the happiest, hardest working, most organized girl-with-a-plan to have ever trooped into the Panamanian countryside.
It´s clear that she loves being here, loves what she is doing, and most importantly, is making a very real positive impact in her community. Peace Corps is lucky to have her.
Our adventure started on a Diablo Rojo: these fantastically painted and decorated decommissioned school buses from the US. For 90 cents, we were slammed into a packed bus and bounced all the way out to Chorrera, the major city in her region.
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| Diablo Rojo |
A chiva, which is a steel-cage outfitted pick-up truck, took us the rest of the bumpy way (also jam-packed full).
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| Outside the back of a chiva |
Further and further from the city, on a roller coaster of a road, the country opens up into beautiful rolling hills covered in tropical forest. Where the pavement stops, down a steep path most typically made quite precarious by slippery mud and bounding barbed wire, and a little yonder, is Lila´s house. The entire time in the country, I really couldn´t help but think how beautiful this place is. To elaborate, while it is certainly beautiful, it is also very humid, very wet, relatively buggy (although mostly it's mosquitoes and ants that are causing the problem), it can be extremely muddy, there isn´t indoor plumbing or electricity, and the shower is cold. Which depending on how you feel about some or all of those things, may affect your perception of beauty. But I think definitely for Lila, and for my short visit, it was incredibly peaceful and perfectly disconnected from the hectic world we all live in.
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| Home sweet home |
That said, It definitely is easy to grin and bear whatever the discomfort when you know you´re only visiting and will be out in X number of days, so all the more credit to Lila for her immersed experience (and the people for whom this is their daily reality). She tried to give me a little taste of what her typical life out here is like. We pasear-ed - which apparently translates into a visit-driven stroll, however is much more like rigorous hiking - to both her host families´ homes. One was much more accessible than the other. Her first host family is about a 30 min hike from the road up and back down a very high hill for the area, it was the first real "whoa, you and everyone who lives back here does this at least twice a day, including the kids going to and from school!". The head of the household gave me a tour of his coffee farm, fish tanks, home garden, and mill for grinding sugar cane. It is so impressive to see someone with so many natural resources under their domain- they survive off of what the earth yields them, literally. Less romantic, his young wife got her hand caught in that same mill and lost 4 fingers. Terrifying in general, I also am mortified at how hard it must have been to get her out and to the hospital.
Between the rain and the holiday, Panama´s Independence Day, there wasn´t too much time for working. But we also spent a morning building Lila a seed tray, and another afternoon helping a community member set up their home compost. Lila´s most recent action item has been to galvanize compost in the village in order to be used for their upcoming home gardens (The ultimate goal to grow a wider variety of food and diversify the group´s diet beyond rice and yucca).
The other primary event of the week were the holidays. Friday there was an event at the local cemetery, Saturday celebrated Panama's independence from Colombia, Sunday was Flag Day, and Monday was Colón Day. For this occasion there was an excellent presentation and parade put on by the school´s children (preschool through 6th grade) and also a baile at the local cantina. The kids were very cute and did a great job as coached by their senior teacher despite having forgotten to sing the national anthem (and announcing this in order to reconvene). Also their electronic set up (powered by the school's solar panels) was quite amusing, apparently the mic connection to the speakers only works at justttt the right angle, which the teacher was constantly fiddling with the cord to find, and when he did, would freeze in whatever odd position his arm happened to land in.
For the baile, Lila graciously hosted other nearby peace corps volunteers at her house (the furthest came from 2 hours by hike). We celebrated with white-cheddar cheese popcorn, macaroni and cheese, and boxed wine. Around 9pm - very late when you usually go to sleep with the sun- we attempted our hike to the cantina faced by an ungodly amount of mud. I've never imagined in my life so much mud, everywhere, every inch, and a few inches deep. The cantina was the same, an entire inclined yard of mud, making it a challenge for sober people to stay upright, and impossible for the drunk-off-their-butt Panamanians. People who were too drunk to carry on often just crashed to the ground and decided they may as well stay there. People actually passed out !and remained! in the mud - hopefully not face down.
All in all my week with Lila went by much too fast. I´m so happy that we were able to make my trip out here possible. I know everyone who is able to visit Lila will be amazed and impressed with the work she is doing and how quickly she adapted to this new and challenging environment. I know I couldn´t do what she is doing, really, it´s hard to capture her life in pictures and through her blog, it´s certainly even hard for a short-term visitor to understand the full impact of what she will accomplish and the barriers/difficulties/
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