Category Archives: Living Abroad

Back in 1958 Marshall “Mike” Dodge and Bob Bryan recorded their first collection of “Bert and I” records. Sort of an early Down East version of Lake Wobegon immortalized by Garrison Keillor. Bert and I depicted Maine fishermen and woodsmen with dry, classic humor and spot-on Mainer accents.

One of the stories that always stuck with me was the one in which Bert won a raffle for an all-expense-paid week-long trip to Boston. When he returned everyone in town came to greet him and were hungry for details of his trip and the delights he had experienced in the big city. “Well,” he said, “there was so much going on at the depot I never did get to see the village.”

That story sprang to mind the first time I stepped off the bus at the bus terminal in David, Panama. If you want to get a true slice of Panamanian life there’s no better place than at the terminal. I just love it there and enjoy waiting for my bus to arrive to take me back up the hill. It’s a people-watcher’s paradise.

The terminal is filled with dozens of little kiosks where you can buy an eclectic assortment of snacks, ice cream and shoddy goods. There is a good sized cafeteria and a couple of small “fondas.” Street vendors walk up and down hawking belts and pirated audio CDs. Students in their pressed uniforms walk together in groups and the Ngobe Indian women and their children in their traditional mumus  add color to the parade. Over it all are the “puerteros,” young men who are sort of like conductors opening the bus doors and collecting the fares from the departing passengers, sing out the destinations of their bus routes which are plainly visible in huge lettering on the windshields of the buses.

I’ve never understood why some people say that the transportation system in Panama is so poor. I find it to be excellent. Buses run throughout the country. True, they aren’t all luxurious motor coaches and I’ve noticed that as you get away from the more metropolitan areas the buses get smaller and smaller. In my early explorations of the country I went from Panama City to Pedasí on four different kinds of bus. A large coach from PC to Santiago, then on a smaller Toyota seating about 30 people from there to Chitré. A slightly smaller Toyota from Chitré to Las Tablas and then a 12 seat rattle trap from there to Pedasí. And then there are the ubiquitous yellow taxis everywhere. Check them as they come out of the terminal exit and passing by on the street.

A word of advice…NEVER get in a cab until you have established how much it’s going to cost to get to your destination and if it sounds unreasonable to you move on. I’ve been quoted prices I KNOW aren’t right and I always ask, “and how much is it for a Panamanian?” before going elsewhere.

I have often marveled at how tenaciously trees cling to life. Not only are some species of trees the oldest living things on earth but they have an aversion to death that is enviable.

In my back yard in Fort Lauderdale there were two tree stumps just off the back porch. One was simply that. A stump. But on the other, two new branches were growing. The tree refused to succumb.

Here in Panama trees are commonly planted and used for fences. I’m not talking about grown, cut down and put in as posts, but actually planted in rows and then barbed wire, usually, is stapled into the trees.

This photo was shamelessly pirated from my neighbor Mary Farmer’s blog: http://ntsavanna.com/living-fence/ If there’s anything you’d like to know about the flora of the Republic you’ll find it here and what she doesn’t know  probably isn’t worth knowing anyway.

Of course some small trees are cut down and used as posts. Like this along the drive leading into the house here in Potrerillos Arriba.

And sometimes sections of 4X4 are mixed in:

A couple of months ago a neighbor gave the house a couple of seedlings. I don’t know what they are, but I found a couple of good spots for them in the northwest corner of the yard. In a phone conversation with the owners of the house shortly afterward they asked if the saplings were doing okay. I said I think you could stick a 2X4 into the ground here and it would grow.

Well, I wasn’t too far off in that assessment. Yesterday evening when I walked down to lock the gate at the end of the drive I spotted this. I don’t know how I missed seeing it before since I pass it at least twice a day. But there was a post that had been hewed from a tree. Top and bottom lopped off and one side planed flat. And yet this piece of wood refused to die. It wouldn’t accept what should have been its inevitable fate. There, standing proud, was a new branch reaching for the sky. A piece of lumber stuck into the ground that took root and continues to cling to life. No, not clinging to life. Thriving.

I don’t know if they grow here in Panama but the leaves remind me of the locust trees that thrived in the sandy soil of Cape Cod where I grew up.

The wood of the locust tree is extremely hard and durable. The house I grew up in was built before the American Revolution.

The small section of the house, an addition, actually, was built sometime in the latter part of the 1700s and was our kitchen. The corners were made of large hand-hewn beams and, since nails were very expensive in those days, the whole thing was tied together with two-inch thick pegs made of locust. That house has withstood countless hurricanes and who knows how many n’or easters in it’s day. And it’s still standing as it approaches nearly two and a half centuries.

The Merriam-Webster definition of inertia is: a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. I think the definition could also apply to ideas, too.

For the past couple of months as I ride the bus from Potrerillos Arriba down into David the route parallels and crosses several small rivers running at a pretty good clip. Those eight plus feet of rain have to go somewhere and that somewhere is the Pacific Ocean. About three-quarters of the way down the hill on the east side of the road is a small valley and a  rather scenic waterfall. Visible I pass it I always say I should stop off and take some pictures. But inertia establishes itself and I forget about it until the next time I pass by.

This morning was gloriously sunny, though now at 3:30 in the afternoon it’s clouded over and should be raining shortly, and I shook off the lethargy, gathered up my cameras and tripod and set out on an expedition.

The first stop was in the small town of Dolega. There, a concrete-channeled river flows under the road to end up in some waterfalls at what appears to be a Union Fenosa sub station. Union Fenosa is the local electric company. I suspect there is a small generating capacity located there.

It flows under the road and divides on the other side.

You can see the waterfalls in this picture which is off of the right fork. I don’t know what happens on the left fork though it’s probably similar.

But my ultimate destination was located farther down the road in a small valley and what is called, around here, a Jardin, a combination bar/dance hall.

It sits at the edge of the river and on the other bank is the waterfall. I learned a new Spanish word today… La Cascada (waterfall). Easy enough to remember. Almost the same as the English word cascade.

Certainly no threat to the grandeur of Angel, Victoria or Niagara Falls or I’m sure other falls here in Panama, but it still has it’s own appeal. I wonder how many of the local residents scurrying from David to Boquete and Potrerillos glance over at it and appreciate its beauty?

There were three young men washing some clothes in the river and simply relaxing on the bank. Two more men came later and went swimming a bit upstream.

After taking the photos I stopped at the bar for a beer. I was the sole patron and spent a pleasant half hour or so chatting with the young bartender, Francisco. He said it was a very popular spot on the weekends and during the summer months and that Saturday and Sunday evenings were crowded with people coming to dance the night away.

In the spirit of the television show Sunday Morning, I leave you with this bit of film.

As the readers of this blog know we’ve had an unprecedented amount of rainfall here. Yesterday was the 29th consecutive day of it in July. The morning started off lovely as usual and I was able to get down the hill to David and do some grocery shopping and pick up my monthly allotment of Plavix, which makes me bleed and bruise like a hemophiliac, and get back to the house before the rain started.

Towards evening, just before sunset, as I was starting supper the off and on rain developed into a downpour complete with thunder and lightning. As I stood at the kitchen island looking out at the back veranda I saw a brilliant white spark on the concrete with a white streak of light zooming off into the back yard. There was a crack like a cap gun followed instantly by a resounding crash of thunder and the electricity was off.

This is the second time I’ve seen this happen in the same spot. I suspect there’s some rebar or metal grating under the concrete slab very close to the surface that’s acting sort of like a lightning rod.

There was nothing to do about it at the moment and there was just enough light left in the day to quickly cook my dinner before it went completely dark. Fortunately the stove is propane powered.

Down here less than nine degrees north of the equator there isn’t much lingering twilight time. Sun sets and you get perhaps 15 or 20 minutes and then it’s night. Bang. Just like that.

I don’t watch much television here. We have a satellite dish and I get movies in English along with such things as the History Channel, National Geographic, the Simpsons, Family Guy and the Discovery Channel. Unlike in the States where the t.v. was always on in the background it’s not like that here. The internet is where I spend most of my time. So, without television or the internet I resorted to that old standby; a real book. Not one of those Kindle things that run on batteries but an actual book with pages you turn by hand. There’s a nice battery-powered lantern in the house, sort of like the old Coleman lanterns we used to use when we spent the summers camping at Nickerson State Park in Brewster, Mass., when I was a kid, but without the hiss and the heat those lanterns produced.

This morning I was still able to have my morning cup of coffee. I buy my coffee as beans and grind each pot individually. But no electricity, no functioning grinder. Fortunately after a previous blackout I’d ground up several batches and there was still one left so I was able to de-grumpify myself before trying to attack the problem of no electricity.

A few nights earlier we experienced a blackout but it was area-wide. All the houses and even the street lights were out. But this time the street lights remained on though the houses below me were dark. The two houses above me showed light in their windows. I wasn’t sure if it was a partial area blackout or just me.

Unlike in the States where the main breaker for the house is actually IN the house it’s not like that here in Panama. At least not here in Chiriqui. The electric meter and the main breakers are located in structures like this.

This thing serves a dual purpose. It not only holds the electric meter and the main breaker switch for the house but the bottom is where the trash is deposited for pickup. If you examine the breaker box you’ll see it doesn’t have a cover to protect the breakers from the elements. None of them around here do. And how much protection from wind-blown rain do you think that little overhang offers? It’s certainly not conducive to trying to reset a blown breaker in the pouring rain.

And this thing isn’t even CLOSE to the house. You have to walk about two hundred yards down the main drive marked by the red X.

Then another 100 yards out to the dirt road

Being sufficiently caffeinated at this point I start the trek out to the main breaker structure hoping that nothing more serious had happened than that the breaker had tripped. Just a couple of days before the owners of the house left for the States we’d had a loss of electricity that involved Union Fenosa, the local electric company, and a private electrician in order to get service restored. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go through all that again because it would mean I’d have to deal with people in Spanish over the phone.

I don’t have much of a problem getting Panamanians to understand what I’m trying to say even in my fractured butchering of their native tongue. The problem is ME understanding what they’re trying to say. At the risk of offending my Panamanian friends, Panamanians DON’T speak good Spanish. To my ear the average man-in-the-street Panamanian sounds like a shit salesmen with a mouth full of samples. They lop off the ends of their words with great abandon. Potrerillos ends up Potehrillo for example. Now, in their defense, I’m sure they’d be in the same situation if they were traveling around the U.S. where New Englanders drive cahs and hate those Castro fellers down in Cuber, and Texans drive around in pickemup trucks with gun racks in the rear windah padnah, or having someone in the Gentilly section of New Orleans telling them to wash up in the zinc.

Trying to talk to someone in a language other than your own on the phone is one of the hardest things there is to do. I found that out in France where even after three years I dreaded having to talk to someone in French on the phone. You get no visual clues as to what the other person is trying to convey.

Another problem with the Panamanian’s use of the language is that they zip through a sentence as though they were being charged by the minute. I swear I listen to them talking to each other and I just KNOW the other person can’t understand one word in ten the speaker is saying so they do what I do which is simply smile and nod their head as if they do, indeed, understand speaker.

Yesterday morning, I met a remarkable man whose name I promptly forgot. He supervises the corn field below us and he came up to chat with me for a few moments. He speaks some English but our conversation was almost completely in Spanish. I find it exceptionally rude to speak English to people whose language I can use no matter how limited my facility with it might be. I felt the same way living in France. It came to the point where I felt uncomfortable speaking with the French in English even if they spoke it well themselves. When I told this gentleman that I had a problem understanding the Panamanian version of Spanish and the rapidity with which they spoke it  he made a real effort to speak to me distinctly and slowly and I understood at least 95% of everything he said. One thing I’ve noticed in my journeys through foreign language encounters is after you ask someone to speak slowly they do so for a half dozen words or so before getting back up to speed and losing you again. But this gentleman had the ability to recognize the problem and to consciously moderate himself so we each had an enjoyable encounter. I hope to be able to spend more time with him in the future.

But I do digress, don’t I?

When I got to the breaker box I found that it had, in fact, been tripped. I reset it and coming back up the driveway I could see the lights in the kitchen sparkling through the windows. The first thing I did after turning on the computer was to grind up enough coffee so I’ll be able to brew up four cups without needing the grinder. Note to self: next trip to the grocery buy a small bag of ground coffee. Some day the electricity might be off longer than four cups-full.

The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but here in Potrerillos Arriba, Panama, it pours like you wouldn’t believe.

The term “Rainy Season” doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been happening here. There is officially a “rainy season” in Florida, but it’s a joke compared to what we’ve been going through here. In south Florida it heats up during the day and then there are isolated thunderstorms scattered around the area. Sometimes with a deluge and localized flooding, but these storms are usually of a limited duration. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve literally been standing in the sunshine on one side of the street and watched it rain on the other.

Here, though, it rains over a wide area. June and July are supposed to be the driest months of the rainy season but this year has seen the shattering of 16 year records as recorded by Ricardo Espinosa. http://joycepa.wordpress.com/precipitation-data/.

In June it rained 27 days out of 30 and dumped 43 inches of the wet on us. Here it is the 22nd day of July and we haven’t missed a day of rain yet and another record was set. Back in July 2008 38″ of rain fell. As of the 20th we’ve had 39.5″. On the 19th we had a storm like I’ve never seen before. We got 4.4″ in two and a half hours.

The mornings generally start off in glorious splendor.

By noon the rain clouds start to form

And by two o’clock it starts to rain

And then it’s like someone turned on a fire hydrant

So, if you need to do anything outside the house you better get started early and finish up by one or two o’clock. And you NEVER leave home without your umbrella no matter how sunny it is when you close the door.