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To say that Boquerón is a small town is almost an understatement.

Some 1,200 people live here. About the same as lived in Orleans, Mass., where I grew up on Cape Cod, but Orleans was much “bigger” in some respects than Boquerón. Orleans was the shopping center for what is known as the “Lower Cape.”  People bought their groceries at the First National or the A&P, did their drinking at the Land Ho, the Orleans Inn or the Packet Landing Inn. If you got sick you went to Dr. Burk (his entire phone number was the numeral 6, though all you had to do was tell the operator you wanted to talk to him and you’d be connected) and you took his prescription to Livingston’s Pharmacy. There was Snow’s and the Smith Brothers for your hardware needs and Nickerson Lumber for the things you needed to build with. There was a bank and a savings and loan, three churches, several real restaurants, the Catholic grammar school, the public grade school and the high school for kids from Brewster, Orleans, Eastham and Wellfleet. We even had a movie theater and “summer stock” theater in town.

Boquerón’s not like that. At ALL. There aren’t any grocery stores. There are two “Chinos” that are like Seven Elevens in the States where you can pick up a limited supply of food staples, a few hardware odds and ends to tide you over until your next visit to David or Bugaba. There are also several “Tiendas” which offer an even smaller selection of goods. They’re building a Banco National office which will be the first in town. You can get something to eat at a couple of “fondas” which are unregulated eateries where you can get a lunch plate meal for three dollars or less including a soft drink. If you want a beer with your meal and go to Las dos Katherines you can buy one at the Chinos next door. There’s one grammar school, and one bar that you really don’t want to go into for a drink. There’s a Catholic Church, a Kingdom Hall and two other evangelical churches in Boquerón.

Downtown Boquerón is the Palacio Municipal, a covered basketball court and the town park with benches to sit on and a bandstand. Almost exactly three years ago I wrote this post about the town. https://onemoregoodadventure.com/2010/10/18/a-quick-peek-at-boqueron/

This past weekend the little town of Boquerón held a BIG celebration. It’s called a Festival Patronales. My good friend Omar in Panama City who writes the wonderful blog, http://epiac1216.wordpress.com/  tells me, ”

The young man in the gray shirt behind the couple is a neighbor of mine.

The Bomberos (Fire Department) Band from Bugaba

The first of the many schools participating

There’s always a tribute to Panamanian culture, the Pollera

The fight against breast cancer knows no national boundaries

Panamanian kids like pounding on things. For the boys it’s drums

For the girls it’s glockenspiels

Posing so mom can snap a photo during a pause in the action

One of the most often asked questions on forums about living in Panama is “How much does it cost to live there?” It’s sort of like asking, “How much does a car cost?” My answer to the cost of living question is always, “How much you got?”

But it IS less expensive for me to live here. Compared to what I was paying to share a duplex in Fort Lauderdale each month allows me to live here in Boquerón for more than THREE months.

Another savings is in electrical costs. Now, granted, the stove there in the States was electric (which I hated) and here I cook with gas ($5.50 for a 20 lb. bottle that lasts me three months or so). My electric bill in Fort Lauderdale always ran about $125/month. Yesterday (Sept. 24th) I got my electric bill for the month of August. It was for $8.91!

I LOVE it here.

One of the reasons my rent is so reasonable here at my house in Boguerón is that I have been maintaining the yard for the past two years. Doing it myself rather than paying someone else to do it.

Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but you have to understand how things grow down here. People have joked that you could stick a two by four in the ground and it would sprout roots and grow. Well that’s really not that much of a joke. Just take a look at this:

Recently it’s been harder for me to keep things up the way I’d like. It’s not that things are wild and overgrown so much as it just isn’t what I’d like it to be and as I’ve said, it’s a two hour lawn and I’ve got a one hour back so I’ve been less than enthusiastic about strapping on the weed whacker and going out to do battle with the grass. The last time I did it it took three days altogether. Half of the front lawn one day, half a couple of days later and the back yard a couple of days after that. I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t work through the pain, and there was still some that I just didn’t get to. My lease is up at the end of October and the house is on the market. I’ll probably stay here until it sells, and who knows how long that will be? And I want the house and grounds to look as best as possible.

Yesterday at my neighbor’s they had a man with a weed whacker doing their lawn. I went up there and asked the man, who is a Charles Bronson look-alike, to come see me when he was through up there. A half an hour later he and my neighbor came down to see me. I asked him how much he would charge to come cut the grass twice a month. The odd thing was, that everything I said to Charles Bronson in Spanish, was repeated to him by my neighbor as if he was translating somehow. Anyway, we agreed to a price of $25 ($12.50 a visit) and shook hands on the deal.

I asked him to come next week. He said he’d be here on Wednesday. We’ll see. It’s Panama, after all.

The day’s rain started late in the afternoon with vivid flashes of lightning and thunder claps you could feel. They drowned out the laughter and chatter coming from the children and adults gathered at my neighbor Maide’s back porch. The two street dogs that have adopted me because I feed them lay huddled together for comfort against the storm. The rain pounded down so hard and fierce that it drowned out the sound of the rising river a few yards away from the house.

Night fell and I dined on a couple of bowls of freshly-made chili. After putting the remains of the chili into Ziplock bags and storing them in the freezer for another day, I lay out on the sofa to read the latest detective novel I’d downloaded earlier. The fierce storm had abated and the rain had slacked off when I heard “Reechar. Reechar” outside.

I went to the door, turned on the overhead porch light to find my neighbor, Maide standing outside with a towel over her head to ward off the rain. She flashed her award-winning, brilliant smile and handed me a plastic bag containing two, still hot, home made tamales wrapped in banana leaves. That’s what the group had been doing through the storm. Making tamales and she wanted me to have some despite the rain.

Yesterday I had to go to Hospital Chiriquí to pay my insurance premium for the next quarter. There are three people that work in the office, a receptionist, some guy whose job I’m not sure of and the administrator who is a woman who speaks excellent English.

The receptionist speaks some English though we always speak to each other in Spanish. She’s the one who takes the payments and prints out the receipts. She asked me, “¿Qué está pagando hoy?” (What are you paying, today?)

“Más que quiero.” (More than I want to) I said.

There was a chuckle from the administrator’s office. “Your Spanish is getting quite good,” she said in English.

“Gracias,” I replied, “y su Inglés es también.” (Thank you, and your English is, too.”

Big laugh from everyone. Those who don’t learn the language of their adopted country miss out on so much, and I think that, because I’m getting better at talking to my adopted countrymen in their language, I’m leaving a better impression of the gringos who have come here to live.

Sometimes life in Panama is like being a part of The Nature Channel. Like when you catch sight of a stunningly colorful bird flitting through the foliage in your yard, or when you see something like this:

There are several destructive insects we have to deal with here. One is a very large, black and yellow grasshopper that eats about any kind of leaf around and I often find a bunch of them happily feasting away on the foliage in the yard. I’ve found an insecticide called Dos Tigres (Two Tigers) that knocks them out almost instantly. The leaf cutter ants are exceptionally destructive, especially to citrus trees and can strip them bare in a matter of days. This is a problem for me since there are three citrus trees in my yard including a very productive lime tree. I harvest the limes nearly daily and they make a wonderfully refreshing drink.

Recently these ants have been attacking two of my trees. I sprayed their paths and nests with the Dos Tigres and within a couple of hours all activity had ceased, and there’s been no indication of their return. Parts of the trees that had been stripped of leaves are now showing new shoots. But I’m not so naïve as to believe new colonies won’t take hold. Eternal vigilance is the key.

My regular readers know I’m a big fan of Audible.com. Over the years I’ve downloaded dozens of great books to my iPod. Recently I bought several books written by my old friend, Paul Kemprecos. Paul and I worked together at the Cape Cod Standard-Times (now simply the Standard Times) back in 1964. Paul kept on as a journalist long after I returned to college and pursued other dead-end avenues of employment.

Paul created a detective series featuring a character named Aristotle “Soc” Socarides, a Cape Cod character. I read a couple of those early “Soc” books, in one of which he drops in on my family’s restaurant, Philbrick’s Snack Shack, for our famous onion rings and fried clams. Paul also co-authored several books with Clive Cussler known as the NUMA Files.

The problem I had with these books is that while I was able to download them to my iTunes folder on my computer they would not download onto my iPod. I called Audible’s help line and talked to three different reps with suspiciously foreign accents who each gave conflicting ways to correct the problem. None of them worked which is why I made three calls. My iPod is nearly 10 years old, and while it works fine with what has already been loaded on to it I really wanted to hear Paul’s books on my bus trips into David and over to Bugaba.

Fiddling around trying to get my new purchases onto the iPod I noticed when I went to the audible book section there were several lines across the screen that I’d never seen before. A fourth call to Audible was no help, so yesterday I bit the bullet and bought an iPod Nano. I’m calling it my belated birthday present since I didn’t buy anything special for myself this year. Last year I shelled out over $2,500 for a motorcycle and kit which should have been enough to serve for a couple of years. The Nano is a fraction of the size of the original iPod.

Of course it only has about half the capacity of the original and it costs less than half of what a new, large iPod does, but it also does a couple of things the original doesn’t. For instance it has an FM receiver so you can listen to live radio broadcasts. I plugged it into my computer when I got home and the new books downloaded seamlessly into the Nano.

Large or small, these things are a monument to cyber technology. I mean you can download operas and fantastic orchestral programs onto one of these things and then, using just zeros and ones they will send them directly to your brain in high-quality sound. How? Who knows? It’s sort of like flipping a light switch in your house and having the bulb brighten a room. You don’t need to know HOW it happens, just be happy that it does.