On Counting Down

I’ve now been in Panama for over a year. I don’t exactly know how long its been. I’m not really that in to counting up or down, but I know that I’ve finished more than half of my time here, and it’s strange. Today I went to a meeting and talked about someone I don’t know coming to work in my school, in my community and to live in my home. I’ve joked in my community that as soon as I leave someone else will come, and they will forget all about me, and just like they have called me Shawn or Francisco (names of previous volunteers) the next volunteer will possibly be called my name – just a ghost of the volunteer left that has left behind a pueblo and a people to move on to a more concrete reality. I came to this place and called it my own, but like so many of the things we try to own, we soon end up knowing the control belongs to them, and not to us.

I’ve been finding a rhythm lately. Last week I was in Panama City to finish the Peace Corps Panama magazine I edit, and before heading back to the community I spent a day at the third annual International Book Fair in Panama City.

(here is the story I wrote for the magazine, pura ficcion)

Juliet

Her name was Juliet, but she didn’t go by Juliet. She went by Alice. Juliet didn’t suit her. Juliet was for the defined, she had said. Juliets wore gowns and fancy shoes and worst of all, Juliets thought Romeo and Juliet was the most beautiful work of literary genius to ever go from ink quill to parchment. She thought Romeo and Juliet was shit. So she became Alice, and he loved her for that.

They stood next to each other, swinging back and forth on the jungle gym of bars on the bus ceiling. Her hair ponied to one side, she wore a flowerless sundress that tugged on her curves and matched her green eyes, giving them a subtle power. Her ankles were braceleted, her neck tanned, and on her shoulders were the few freckles he had used to play connect the dots with while she slept. They traveled east and watched the sun rise over the ocean. He preferred the view from his mountain home, but she loved the ocean. The first day they spent together they sat on a rotting dock, four feet hanging just over the water. She had studied every piece of algae as if it were a live strand of human DNA. He remembered how the sun shone over her shoulders as she slowly lowered herself from his side on the dock into the water. How after she slipped in, the only thing left of her were small circles of ruptured water where she had disappeared below. How she had come and gone quickly. How he didn’t even know if she had been real to begin with.

He remembered that same day he had lied to her. Not harsh lies, not lies to cover up some deep and hurtful secret, but the lies he found himself often telling: little white lies, but he never considered them white at all, his were gray and crumbling lies, ones that at the time he was sure she knew were lies from the beginning, ones he had no reason to tell, that were transparent, yet he told them anyway. The more he told, the more he believed them as true. It was funny though, how those gray and crumbling lies seemed to hold up through the test of time, like once they left his mouth, they stopped crumbling and became a concrete block and after there was no turning back. And that was how it started.

It lasted just over a year. Her last three days she spent with him. He bought her lunches and sweated at her side when she wanted to walk or take one of those old American school buses lit up with lights and portraits of half naked white women. They shared a bed that shared a room with five travelers with blonde hair and smelly backpacks, and even their time alone they spent running from one place to another, seeing it all one last time, but for him it wouldn’t be a last time. She was leaving, but he wasn’t leaving with her, he was to stay put, to finish.

He watched her as she stared out at the open ocean, that last time. Just like the first it wasn’t the ocean’s vastness he was drawn to, but how she admired it. He tried to imagine crabs scuttling, fish flopping, momentarily left behind by the tide, but there was only the sun climbing on the horizon and the mound of water receding. He saw no ocean marvels that morning, what the ocean left behind were only rocks, garbage and rivulets of water, and until that moment, he had never realized how far apart two people could be as they stood next to each other.

She reached around his waist, touching the red button, calling for the next stop and on the way back her hand brushed against his chest, grabbing hold of the right side of his shirt. For a second he thought she was trying to pat the spot where his heart was, but it couldn’t have been so. It had to mean something else. He felt her fingernails through his shirt, and he looked at her, and at that moment he wanted to scream all the romantic absurdities he had only ever heard in the movies.

“I think it’s better if I stay here,” he finally told her. Her sunglasses slid down her nose just slightly and she looked at him over the frames, questioning. “Give me a hug then,” she said to him. He turned to face her. There were things he wanted to say. He had made plans to say them. He made the plans, the plans were made, and as he made the move towards her, to bring her close and put his mouth on her ear to softly tell her exactly what he wanted to say, the bus shifted gears and he moved in slow motion, out of control and his hand missed her shoulder and the vertical gray bar and landed right on her breast. “Gotcha,” he remembered saying, but she didn’t smile, she didn’t even react, and the bus soon stopped and she descended and he stayed put, the bus door folded softly shut and they continued traveling east, the dust from the door settling, the air conditioner leaking, and him staring out searching for one last glimpse of the ocean.

Now, let me say a word about literacy in Panama. It’s pretty low. I mean, people can read, but typically it’s the bible (which after you’ve memorized it, is it really reading anymore?) or passages from school text books. The literary individual is hard to come by, there are few popular Panamanian authors, and if you really search around, the “avid” reader has probably delved in to a little Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but it doesn’t go much further than that. SO, I went to the book fair with a few fellow volunteers, to feel it out, to search for an elusive work in Spanish by a Chilean, Alejandro Zambra, and to make connections for library projects we are all working on (in different parts of the country). We made stops at the Ministry of Education stall, saw what other provinces were doing, and tried to say the right things to the big wigs of our provinces. Next we moved to make some contacts with organizations working in the area that could support us – with donations but especially with training on how to utilize a library space and the books within. We all made a few contacts, the majority of the organizations only worked near Panama City, which wasn’t super helpful for my program, but I got some ideas from what the other Volunteers were doing and hoping to do.

My library is a little, complicated. I no longer work in the school where my library is located, and beyond that, the “librarian” there isn’t much of a librarian. I wouldn’t say it’s her fault, the job librarian just has no real meaning in the school – her main job is to make bulletin boards, to make copies, to give students a 5th grade natural sciences book when the teacher asks for one. It’s not complicated, but it isn’t what we think about when we say “librarian.” So, I have recently started working with a girl in my community to get books and work with high school students to travel from one school to another in my distrito (district/county) and actively read/ask questions/play games/ sing songs with elementary students. The home base is going to be the elem. school in my community. We’ve started slowly, but I’m excited to get things moving on a more regular basis.

Other than that, I’m still at the high school, plugging away, laughing when my students reply to my “What’s up?” with an elongated “It’s aaaaaaaalllll good” or when I give them instructions and they respond, “Word, teacher.”

It’s a small victories kind of thing, an ‘I need another coffee’ kind of thing, an open world beyond a simple ‘buenas’