The Places That Scare Us

Fear handicaps. It takes hold of you and squeezes until you cannot breathe nor move. Fear kills.  Lately I have been very afraid and that fear almost killed my happiness and my effectiveness as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I am not afraid of meeting people nor am I afraid of Spanish. I speak the language recklessly. Spewing poorly conjugated verbs and made up Spanglish nouns. I do this without shame like a toddler learning to walk. I fall all over the place gleefully ready to learn. The fear of failure is my monster.  It haunts my dreams as well as my mornings.  A huge part of it is ego. I want to be the best Peace Corps Volunteer ever. I think my group is the best Peace Corps group ever!   That ego combined with a huge need to be helpful makes the prospect of disappointing my community too much to bear at times.  My father refers to this the trap of being awesome. There have been times when my want to leave my community in awe of my ability to be witty, giving, and creative has superseded my want to simply experience. It is at these times that my lack of wit, my rigidness creatively, and my inability to give or do anything hurts the most. My first 3 months here in my community are about me learning about the place and people that I live with.  I sit for hours in a school and watch. I cannot teach right now. I cannot start any projects.  I want to pasear (visit and talk)
 to 11 houses a day yet the heat, which at times reaches 100 degrees, prevents that. I can only experience. Sometimes I fail even at that. It can be tedious and hot and there is no place to show or do. That ego and that fear of failure trapped me for many days. I couldn’t get out of bed and racked my brain how everybody would see me as fraud. All the Peace Corps Volunteers that I admire would be disappointed, as would my community. It got so bad that the thing that I was afraid of most, failing my community, I began to do. I shrunk away from the people in my community and ran to things that would give me comfort from the Monster of failure. For me, it was the easy access to Internet. For others it is food, or love, or liquor, or shopping. Whatever it is that we use to deter us from the things we are afraid of only prolongs that pain. Instead of looking at that monster we run and run creating a cycle. I was afraid of failure.  So afraid that I began to fail which would make me feel worse and want to sooth the pain of it.    

            I believe in the power of meditation and self-actualization. A leader in meditation Pema Chordron speaks at length about the power of fear in our lives. She has a book “The Places that scare you: A guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times “, and reading it helped me allot.  I knew that the only way to conquer this monster was to first look at it. Looking at it was painful. No one wants to see himself or herself as egotistical or needy. No one wants to see that they have actually not been mindful. However it is the only way to get over it.  I looked at myself and decided I had to change the pattern that I was in or I would stay emotionally stuck and would not have an effective or happy Peace Corps Service. I gave myself very small goals in order to battle my fear.  Here are the goals I made for myself:

            Get out of Bed

            DO NOT use the computer in the morning

            Leave the House

            Go to School

            Visit 2 houses

Finding peace

These things may seem very easy but when you are handicapped by fear they can be impossible. Little by little I began to be able to look at that monster and fight. I was able to be more present in the moment and exhibited more control over myself. This allowed me to give more of myself. My experiences with people in my town were rich and substantial. I was happy and at peace. Of course I am not finished. I will have to teach myself these lessons over and over again. Like a toddler I will stumble and fall many times yet I will get back up gleefully ready to try again.  I urge you all to continue to explore the places that scare you and to fight against those monsters that haunt you. Your life will be richer for it. 

Trash Day

Tears fall from my stinging eyes as I run past a tree. Bright amber flames are licking up in the air as toxic fumes fill my lungs. My fellow volunteers cough and gasp as we try to escape the smoke but it is no use. As soon as we escape we run into yet another burning pile.

It is Trash day in Los Mortales.

In the United States, we buy processed and packaged goods all of the time. When we are finished we throw it in the trash. Then once a week we drag our bins out and a nice big clean truck, more or less, comes and hauls our trash away. Our hands and homes are clean.

In most parts of Panama, and the majority of underdeveloped countries, people that are lucky enough to be able to afford packaged good use those goods...But no big clean truck comes up to pick it up once a week. Their plastics, and rappers, and alumunium, and batteries, and human waste, and scraps of food sit.. on the sides of roads or in back yards. Until trash day. On trash day; men, women, and sometimes children put all said objects in a pile and set fire to it. Those fumes and smoke bellow into the air. That air is filled with fumes and toxins that they then breath. Those same toxins settle onto their crops or on grass that their animals eat, and then which are consumed. Those same toxins settle into the water that people bath and drink out of.

Westerners have the privilege of shipping off their dirty trash to places like Africa or the middle east were they sit consumed in flames. Other times our trash is put in safe, clean landfills. So it is very easy for those same westerners to come and view the "trash days" in Panama as backwards. It is quite the opposite if we look at the history of waste here.

In the past, all of the trash in country was organic. You ate watermelon or chicken or made a cake and you could put the waste in the back yard or on the side of the rode. That waste would break down quickly and provide nutrients to the earth. Glass bottles and jars were always reused and repurposed. Folks of lower economic means back home in Philly understand this ritual very well. Our Ragu jars, and Country Crook jars were always used to hold bacon fat or left over food. However as plastics and other inorganic materials were introduced to society they would not break down. As people in the Campo were able to get more money they wanted to spend it on packaged items. These items show that you are no longer strugling that you can afford to go into the city and buy goods that used to be reserved for the middle class or rich. The only problem is that unlike those other groups of people the packaged goods were stuck. The burning of trash is a large public health issue as it increase cancer risk, asthma, and leads to other health problems. It also lowers the quality of life in these beautiful towns but the people living under these conditions don't know what to do. Thats where organizations like the Peace Corps come in!

I am part of the environmental sector. It is my job to help develop better waste management solutions with the people in my town. Already I am talking to people about the dangers of trash burning. I learned during training that we can use plastic bottles and stuff trash in those bottles. We can then bury those bottles and it protects the toxins from entering into the ground water. I am lucky in that my site does have a "trash man" of sorts. He comes once a month. Many times with only one day notice and carts away trash for 3 dollars. It is an underused service however because of the lack of information. It is my goal to streamline that process and implement a recycling program. I think that with the help of the beautiful people of Portobelillo that we can do it.