Pura Vida

Ok, I will admit to not understanding Costa Rica´s tourism (?) motto: pura vida. It means pure life, but that just seems nonsensical to me. Well, it didn´t make much sense until recently. I realized that without some major barriers to life experience (ok, so my computer won´t start up and I have virtually nothing left to read) there is an extreme point of experiencing your surroundings. Probably something similar to a trek through the Costa Rican rain forest...though I am in the hot dry flatlands of Panama. Truly, I feel that I am vibrating at a different frequency, that when the breeze blows and the leaves flutter, part of my spirit is similarly fluttering and enjoying the ride. So, I´m super duper bummed about having potentially lost ALL the photos on my computer (archives which went back to my NYC days), though I haven´t given up hope in the Mac Genii in the USA. However, I´m spending even more time hanging with my community, I´m reading books in Spanish (Gabriel Garcia Marquez...it is quite a challenge but the only novel I have left), I´m listening to the radio in Spanish (generally trying to find a decent station that plays non-80´s, non-DJ sound-effects heavy, non-romantic Spanish, non-religious music), I´m standing in my front door smelling the air (a mix of wonderful blossoms and smoke because we are in the burning-grass season). Obviously, if I had a lot more time left to go, I may not be feeling so free and easy. But I recognize a change in myself: less freaking out about immediate problems, more faith that issues will get resolved in time, a lot more ability to just be purely alive and within my surroundings. Completamente viva (completely alive) doesn´t quite have the ring that pura vida has, but I think that´s a good way to understand it.

Stay tuned for my list of lessons learned...which I have to re-write from memory since it was saved only to my computer.

Helados de Panama

Double posting today! Check below for a more serious article...

As long-ago promised, here is my opinion on and a guide to the frozen treats of Panama. If you are ever in Panama, you could use this as a well-researched list. If not, maybe you’ll just enjoy reading my thoughts on this issue.

Duros: Found anywhere with a freezer, often in a small-town kiosk or just out of someone’s house. These are the plastic-bag popsicles. Fruits, drink mix, coconut and milk, or rice-and-milk or rice-and-pineapple are blended up and poured into tiny plastic bags, which go in the freezer. Often you get a choice of “aguada” (half-frozen with some ice in the center) or bien congelado (well frozen). To eat, one bites off a corner of plastic, tries to find a place to properly dispose of the little piece (good luck), and sucks out the melting deliciousness. At ten cents, a serious bargain. Fifteen cents is reasonable especially for something a bit more involved (like if there’s milk, coconut or rice). If someone wants to charge you more, there better be strawberries or something else really special. As I mentioned, there is a major range in flavors. My favorites are coconut and pineapple, and obviously guanábana but it’s pretty rare. I avoid the rojo or koolaid (pronounced coo-lay-ee), the nance (a fruit I just don’t like). The arroz con piña and arroz con leche are made from rice cooked with a lot of water and whatever flavoring, and then blended up and frozen. Excellent choices but hard to come by.

Cones and cups: Can be purchased in bus terminals, supermarkets, mini-marts. 30-40 cents, always hit the spot. I have only seen the cheaper national brand, Estrella Azul, sold in this form, but it’s really not bad if you avoid a few deadly flavors. Safest flavors: chocolate, chocalmendra (chocolate nut), galleta (cookie), vainilla (vanilla), dulce de leche (rare, excellent), guanábana. The grape nut (pronounced gray-noo) is a favorite for some, but to me it’s just like a vanilla with flavorless cereal in it. Casablanca (white house) is a mysterious name for a pinkish ice cream (it has mildly fruity bits in a vanilla base) but I continue to order it since it’s not too bad and I want to figure it out. The ones I avoid are: naranja-piña (orange-pineapple), cereza (cherry), fresa (strawberry), all too artificial in color and flavor. I don’t like the nance fruit, I can’t imagine the ice cream tastes too good, so I’ve never tried it. Neopolitano is a conundrum, mixing two acceptable flavors with a third bad one, and generally it’s the strawberry that overtakes the flavor of the other two. If you have communication troubles, your best bet is pointing to a brown or white in the freezer case and avoiding crazy colors. Cups (tazas) are generally 5 cents more than a cone (cono), but you don’t risk toppling the scoop (most scoopers have not learned proper technique, sadly). My top three: galleta, dulce de leche, Casablanca.
Carts: Carts are ubiquitous at parades, but not hard to find on normal days. Di’Bari and La Italianita sell wonderful popsicles, both fruit and ice cream. With these I tend to choose as I would choose a duro, coconut or fruit. I find the La Italianita ice cream to be a little artificial but not bad. My go-to for these is always the guineo (banana). It tastes fresh, sweet, banana-y and not at all fake. It’s like a smashed banana (apparently I was a fan at a very early age, and remain one to this day), frozen on a stick. Fresa and coco are also winners, but I must admit I have less experience with the flavor range on these carts. As I mentioned, during parades there are more carts, and sometimes you’ll see homegrown operations selling something surely delicious. Make your own judgement about hygiene, but a strong stomach can probably handle this stuff okay. I once had a real winner, something called Helado Tableño which hailed, as the name suggests, from the town of Las Tablas, which is in the heart of one of the dairy-producing areas (the Azuero; Chiriqui also has a lot of good dairy). I’m not sure what made it specifically tableño, but it tasted sweet and creamy, almost like coconut.

Gourmet and Supermarket choices: I must admit, I’m a sucker for the gourmet ice creams. Luckily for my waistline, I can’t keep ice cream in my “freezer” (that’s what it is called, not what it does) and the gourmet shops are only in Panama City. However, I definitely have an opinion. The supermarkets and some better mini-marts stock pints through huge buckets of Estrella Azul and a slightly higher-caliber brand called Borden. There are also individual cups and popsicles to be found. I recommend Skimo Pie (that’s right, because of the way things are prounounced, it’s Eskimo pie) in a bind, though it´s nothing close to as good as a Klondike bar. However, if you’re at the supermarket, you have lots of choice. The pint is easy to polish off alone, but I have a fond memory of sharing a chocolate pint of Estrella Azul in Santa Fe with my dear dad when the family was visiting, and being satisfied with half. Supermarkets are your best bet for the better flavors, even for light and frozen yogurt options, which I haven’t tried. Moving up the scale, Bonlac brand is more gourmet, selling very delicious sundae cups (pricey! 85 cents to a dollar), as well as larger versions of the sundae flavors. Dos Pinos is a Costa Rican brand which seems to be on the game with good flavors and light options (however I find their cheeses to be kind of gross), but only sells in larger sizes so I’ve never tried it. And yeah, you can often find Breyers and some other imports, but that’s not why you’re in Panama now is it?
As for gourmet shops…La Italianita has some outlets in the malls, but if you’re at a mall you MUST go to Gelarti or Crepes and Waffles. Gelarti is something I’d eat back home, no question. They even have a mint chip! That’s generally my first choice, but those extreme chocolates and even the vanilla varieties are all very satisfying. There are sherberts and sorbets, which I’ve never tried since the creamy ones just call to me so much; I’m sure they’re good. I didn’t so much like the mixed berry compared side-by-side with a chocolate. Priced at 1.75 for a single, large scoop in a quality cone, 2.25 for the second dip, which is overkill generally. Biggest challenge: trying to pronounce the English names of some of the flavors in the way that a native Spanish speaker would understand. Why the names are in English is beyond me…which is why I have never ordered Cookies n Cream. If your Spanish is good enough, just say what it would be in Spanish. Crepes and Waffles is a restaurant with several outlets, in malls and one in the Bella Vista area of Panama City. I have only had it once, when I had a sorbet craving. I forget whether it was mora or frambuesa (blackberry or raspberry), but it was excellent. You can find almost fat-free softserve at Casa de Helados, if that´s your game. Or track down my RPCV friends Lebo and Michelle in South America for a softserve cone and entertainment. In the rapidly-gentrifying Casco Viejo part of Panama City, there are also a few gourmet shops. I unfortunately don’t recall the name of the one where I stopped, but they patiently let me try their en vogue flavors like albahaca (basil), naranja chocolate (orange chocolate) et al. If you’re in Casco Viejo, you’d find this place as it’s not a large area. However, if you hail from a foodie city, this probably is less special than it is to a deprived PCV. I think my bill was around 2 dollars and THAT you won´t get in San Francisco.

So never fear, in Panama, where it is summer all year, you can always get some ice cream!

fait accompli?

Well, I’ve been meaning to update my blog for a while, but I’m being pulled in many directions lately. I’m learning a lot, as always, and trying to give constructive criticism so that future people in my position will not have to be so stressed out! Enough said.

Happily, my community is still (or, at long last?) inviting me to work. This past month, my host mom has been harvesting a lot of cucumbers, which we had planted together. She doesn’t need my help with that, but this is part of our ongoing conversation/effort about how she ought to consider her vegetable garden and poultry-raising as her “job.” That is, she has shifted (mentally) from these being on-the-side activities to what she does daily with as much commitment as people who leave their houses for a job. A lot of the seeds I’ve given her haven’t panned out, but we were very pleased to be able to grow enough greenbeans (the short, sweet variety that are considered “quality” here) to collect the seeds. I actually imparted some seed-saving knowledge, that she should let the beans dry on the plant instead of harvesting them green, in order to save the seed. I can’t control what happens after I leave, but maybe the shift is more permanent this time than in previous years. I have to remember that she hasn’t lived in this town as long as the others, so she is, comparatively speaking, only starting out, and so the stopping and starting that has characterized my work with her is probably symptomatic of her being new at this more than anything else. She also seems to be getting more saavy about grocery shopping to include healthier choices than when I first arrived. Hard to say whether this is a direct effect from my nutrition talks with her, but I like to say I have something to do with it.

My friend and neighbor, Mari, with whom I’ve worked a lot (who also tends to frustrate me with her desultory garden-tending habits) invited me to work to chop down the grass in what should be her garden beds. I was not too animated about going, since it seems all we have done in the past half a year is chop down the grass but never work the soil or plant anything. However, of course I went! I have been saying “yes” to everything lately so I won’t have regrets about what I might have missed. I asked Mari, as a way of pushing her to plan and to have a goal, what she wanted to plant. I told her I wanted to know so that when I’m in the USA I would be able to have a picture of her garden in my head. At first she answered, “no se Raquel,” which is standard. Rather than give an opinion, usually the first thing I hear is that someone doesn’t know. I gave a few ideas, and quickly it became clear that she was concerned about how to get seeds. Now, in the past I’ve given her seeds for free and not much has come of it. A combination of her character and her mother’s recent illness got in the way. But I think she’s turning a corner now. Her daughter is starting school this week (tomorrow, as I’m writing this), and maybe this landmark in her life is causing her to reflect on her goals and vision. Mari now has a paying job, and can definitely afford the basic seeds that are easy to find in Santiago, where she goes fairly often. Besides that, a lot of the vegetables that she has started to buy also have seeds one can cull from the actual fruit (tomato, pumpkin, beans). I told her this, and she agreed. So we’ll see what she ends up doing. Anyways, after we chopped (with machetes!) for a while, we sat to talk. Since I’ve been busy and she is often at work when I stop by her mother’s house, it’s been a while. I consider her one of my best friends, and we speak very openly to each other. I’ll never forget or discredit her easy friendship, which has made my service so much better.

We talked about her sadness at not losing weight or being in shape (which is harder for her now that she works in an office and isn’t on her feet all day: a major trade-off between country and city life, as we all know). I encouraged her, as I always do, to try some new things, to ask my host mom to be her exercise partner (seriously, both women are trying to get in shape and are a bit embarrassed to exercise alone in public, and I’ve been trying to get them to partner up FOREVER), etc. Though this conversation is one we often have, I’m including it because in the context of what happened next, I’m hopeful that what I am saying is getting through and sticking.

Somehow the conversation shifted, and she gave me the ultimate gift: confirmation that I have had an effect on someone in my community (her). When I was interviewing for Peace Corps, I said that I’d be satisfied if I changed only one person’s life for the better. Maybe I was exaggerating or just naïve at the time, since lately I’ve felt like I haven’t done anything or enough with my time in Peace Corps, etc. Yet what I realized I’d been missing was the simple confirmation that I’d reached this goal. Mari was talking about how someone else in town (whom I’ve never worked with though I’ve invited her to some things) had been bad-mouthing me to Mari and another woman, saying she had no idea what “that gringa” was here for and everything else bad that still really hurts to hear said. But Mari had defended me, told the third woman (an outsider in the community) that it’s not Raquel’s fault that she’d never worked with woman 1, because Raquel doesn’t force anyone to do anything but is a really good worker, a professional, who knows many things, who will always help IF YOU ASK. Mari had me tearing up at this point. She used all the descriptors I would want used about me, and believe me, I was not prompting her to say any of this. I couldn’t open my mouth because I would have started crying for real. Furthermore, Mari said that she didn’t understand why she and the rest of the community hadn’t supported my efforts more. She saw how hard I tried with the women’s health class (she made it clear that SHE understood it wasn’t a weight-loss class but a health and nutrition class), with the tree planting, with everything. She said the community should have been more involved, because I was trying to make things better for them and without me, things would just always be the same (for example the area where we planted trees would remain treeless forever). Finally, she told me that she really has learned a lot from me (she named everything we’d done together), and plans to make use of the techniques we’ve practiced together. She asked that I send her seeds from home (obviously I will, since what they get here are awful hybrids that they can’t save the seeds from). She told me that her older brother (who I always thought considered me as sort of nuts) and mother (who is indeed a major supporter) were always telling Mari to use what she’d learned with Raquel, because “Raquel, sí sabe” (Raquel, yes knows). I feel I can end my service with that one nagging question finally answered. Yes, I changed something for the better. I’m excited to check in, to visit in coming years, and to see how this change may have had domino effects. But that’s getting ahead of myself. For now, I’m simply and completely elated!