Category Archives: panama

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.

It’s another tranquil morning up on the mountain in Potrerillos Arriba, Panama, like the countless billions of mornings that preceded it and the billions to come. Sitting out on the front steps with my morning cup of coffee the sky slowly lightens to my left as the sun starts to climb up the mountain range over there and you can make out the towering cloud formations. The sound of the rushing water in stream hidden behind the trees on the east side of the property plays counterpoint to the crowing of roosters in the neighborhood. A dog barks in the distance. The lights of David in the distance below are no longer visible as the day progresses and the Pacific coast comes into view.

It’s calm and comfortably cool here. Being linguistically challenged at the language of my newly adopted country means I don’t watch the local news on television or read the local press so I was completely unaware that there has been tumultuous rioting going on in two widely separated parts of the country.

A recently passed law has upset environmentalists and union members to the point that they have taken to the streets in the Capital in the east and Changuinola, in the western province of Bocas del Toro. Changuinola was once the hub of the nearly collapsed banana trade in Panama.

In Panama City protesters marched in the streets to deliver a letter to the President decrying the new law and were met by police in riot gear. I enjoyed watching the truncated live broadcast of the Tour de France on ESPN.

Things were much more violent in Changuinola.

There hundreds of people have been injured in clashes with the police and one death has been reported. As a result a curfew has been declared throughout the province and people have been ordered to stay in their homes. What this means to the tourists visiting Bocas del Toro town on Isla Colon is unknown.

But as far as I know it’s business as usual in the City of David and life up here on the mountain goes on as it always has. Though a resident of Panama I am, never the less, a guest in the country and am specifically forbidden to become involved in its political life. Sure, everyone can have their opinions on a subject but acting upon them as an outsider here is forbidden. Quite frankly in this instance I prefer the tranquility of ignorance. Besides, it’s my birthday today. Me and Tom Hanks. Oh, yes, O. J. Simpson, too, but I doubt he’s going to enjoy it a whole lot.

I’m going to have a second cup of coffee.

This morning as I was walking down our driveway here in Potrerillos Arriba, Panama, to unlock the gate I noticed some beautiful pink flowers growing among the weeds. I’ve always loved flowering things. Perhaps I’m genetically disposed that way through my paternal grandfather who used to grow what were referred to as “cut flowers for the trade.” Not only did he have large fields of gladiolus of which he produced several new varieties, but he also had greenhouses though they were in ruins when I was young.

These flowers are those of the Mimosa pudica (pudica=shy).

Wikipedia describes the plant as a creeping annual or perennial herb often grown for its curiosity value: the compound leaves fold inward and droop when touched or shaken, re-opening minutes later. The species is native to South  and Central America but is now a pantropical weed.

Mimosa pudica is well known for its rapid plant movement.

Like a number of other plant species, it undergoes changes in leaf orientation termed “sleep” or nyctinastic movement. The foliage closes during darkness and reopens in light.

The leaves also close under various other stimuli, such as touching, warming, blowing, or shaking. These types of movements have been termed seismonastic  movements. The movement occurs when specific regions of cells lose turgor pressure, which is the force that is applied onto the cell wall by water within the cell vacuoles and other cell contents. When the plant is disturbed, specific regions on the stems are stimulated to release chemicals which force water out of the cell vacuoles and the water diffuses out of the cells, producing a loss of cell pressure and cell collapse; this differential turgidity between different regions of cells results in the closing of the leaflets and the collapse of the leaf petiole.

The plant has serious medicinal qualities because of its alkaloid called mimosine which has been found to have potent antiproliferative (used or tending to inhibit cell growth <antiproliferative effects on tumor cells)  and apoptotic ( a genetically determined process of cell self-destruction that is marked by the fragmentation of nuclear DNA, is activated either by the presence of a stimulus or by the removal of a stimulus or suppressing agent, is a normal physiological process eliminating DNA-damaged, superfluous, or unwanted cells (as immune cells targeted against the self in the development of self-tolerance or larval cells in amphibians undergoing metamorphosis), and when halted (as by genetic mutation) may result in uncontrolled cell growth and tumor formation—called also programmed cell death) effects.

Its extract immobilizes the filariform larvae of Strongyloides stercoralis (threadworm) a nematode that can parasitize humans in less than one hour.