I Can´t Kick That High Dang It!

Well, three weeks in site and I´m still alive. I drank the water and I even drank milk straight from the cow. Well, I`m not really sure to be honest with you. My host mom came home yesterday with a Pepsi two liter bottle full of milk. She said her sister`s husband has a farm in a neighboring town and the milk came from one of his cows. She was telling me how much she loved it and that it was great and wanted me to try some, but not too much because sometimes it gives people a stomach ache, but that she was used to it and it never bothered her. So I put my big boy pants on and chugged down a glass. No stomach pains yet. But there were chunks of fat in it and it kinda reminded me of orange juice with pulp. There was a gritty kind of texture to it, as if there were little tiny little pieces of sand in it. I had some more with my cereal and some platanos for breakfast. It was good.

I`m living with a host mom named Juana in a nice little home in the mountains. The town is located at about 3,200 feet so the climate here is much cooler than the lowlands. Great weather for sleeping, which I`m finally doing again - YAY sleep! For the moment I´ve got in-door plumbing, an in-door bathroom, electricity and tile floors. Oh yeah - I´ve got it good. The pressure on the water is pretty much non-existent because she doesn`t have a water line into the house. Instead she has a raised tank that she pumps water into and then it flows down to supply the house. And there`s no fridge, but compared to people living in the comarca I`ve got it made in the shade.

On the other hand, Juana does think I`m a little crazy. I`ve been running to the baseball field and back three or four times a week, which I`m guessing is about two miles. This is considered very odd behaviour and I get a lot of strange looks when I´m running. I`ve also been using some of those crazy exercise bands I tucked in my luggage. She looked at me like I was an alien the first time I used them. She was like ¨What are you doing?¨and I said that they were for exercise and then she just stared at me for about 20 seconds like I had just cut up a cat with a butcher knife and was feeding it to children - then she went back in the house. She also gets frustrated with me sometimes when I don`t understand what she`s saying. Sometimes I can look up a word or two in the dictionary or just figure it out with hand gestures or by using different words. Sometimes I throw my hands up in the air and we just let it go. And sometimes I nod and go - Oh....si... - like I understand, even when I don`t.

She`s really nice though. She loves to garden and has tons of flowers, plants and herbs around the house. She even sells them to people or to businesses in town. She also has a few plantane, banana and orange trees. She uses the herbs to cook with, make tea and even bathe with. She was showing them to me the other day and was picking all the herbs and asking me to smell them. Then she took one and said something like - Oh this one smells really good, it`s not normal, but I like to bathe with it¨and then she just laughed and laughed and I was like ¨Really?¨ and she said ¨Yeah, I bathe with it!¨ and then she laughed out loud again wiping her eyes. It was pretty dang funny. She also sells Avon, which I got a big kick out of (who knew there was Avon in the mountains of Panama) and she makes all sorts of little decorative bath towels, hand towels, sheets, pillow cases, table clothes and that sort of thing. She gives them to her daughter who sells them at the bus terminal in the city. And she LOVES tele-novelas. Her favorites are El Fantasma de Elena and Alguien Te Mira (The Phantom of Elena and Someone is Watching You). They`re just hokie soap opera`s, but we watch them a lot at night. It`s really pretty fun and great practice for my Spanish. Plus we talk about what`s happening on the show as if it were really important. Great fun.

I`m pleased to report that I taught my first English class the other day for an after school program and I think that it went really well. At least I think the kids enjoyed it, but who knows. The schools are kinda crazy here. The kids just do pretty much whatever they want and the teachers do too. Eat and drink in class, use their cell-phones, talk in groups, get up and walk right out of class and come back 10 or 15 minutes later....it`s pretty much pandalerium. One day after observing a class, the teacher told me she had to go to town and I could wait in the library and she would come back to get me for the next class. I wasn`t in the library five minutes when a student came and said that the teacher had told her to come and get me. I said - ok, what do you need? - And then the girl said ¨She said you`re supposed to teach our class today.¨ I was like ¨What!?¨ But I went anyway and just asked them for their names, age and where they were from in English. It`s crazy, they`ve been taking English since elementary school and more than half of them couldn`t say a complete sentence in English. No wonder Panama`s education system is so poorly ranked. When I taught my after school class I laid out some ground rules first. No talking when I´m talking, no getting out of your seat whenever you like, if you need something or don`t understand raise your hand. And then I said - and no cell-phones! If I see a cell-phone I´m going to take it and you can have it back after class. They had this kind of dumb-founded look on their faces, but they did what I said and the class went really well. At one point a girl from outside came to the door (which you can´t close) and started talking to a girl in the class. I went to the door and asked her what she needed. She said she needed to talk to so and so. I told her no, she`s in class now. She just looked at me and said ¨no?¨ I said ¨no.¨ Then she stared at me for a moment as if to say - Are you joking? - I told her she could talk to her friend after class. I turned around and all the students were staring at me like - Oooo, he´s tough - But that`s how it is here. They`re used to doing whatever....crazy.

I also took my first Tae-kwon-do (sp) course. The instructor is a 16 year-old girl at the high-school. She teaches mostly little kids, but I figured it was a good opportunity to get to know some kids in the community and get in shape. Unbeknownst to me, in Tae-kwon-do you don´t use your hands to strike your opponent. Arms and hands are only used to block with, so everything is kicking. Well, first off, during our warm-up stretches I had some 12 or 13 year-old girl pushing down on my back trying to ¨help me¨ touch my face to my knee, which at the moment is an impossibility. Then the instructor had me kicking this pad she was holding for an hour and a half. And it kept getting higher and higher which made it very difficult to hit since I was using my foot! That was two days ago and I´m still sore. I wish I had some pictures because no doubt they`d be hysterical. Me yelling ¨Kiop!¨ and kicking a pad held by a girl 18 years younger and a foot shorter than me. But it was fun and should definitely help my flexibility. They were really disappointed at my stretching abilities, or lack thereof, and seemed genuienly distraught that I couldn`t even come close to doing a split. Guess I`ll have to work on that. Chao for now, or should I say......Kiop!!