Joe´s Birthday Bash

The other day I went to visit one of my friends Abel in a neighboring town. I am teaching him English maybe once a week. He is a teacher but now this time of year the teachers have off so he lives at his house. I went out there to meet some of the people in his town and check out his composting latrine which still needs to be completed. He also wants to improve his family´s aqueduct. His brother had captured this owl, I´m not quite sure how, or why he still had it. He did say that they don´t like them because they eat the baby chickens.


I celebrated my Birthday in my site which was a great time. I invited a few of my neighboring volunteers to stay over the night. Kevin, Ryu, Brandon and Sara all came over. Sara brought back gifts from my family from her recent trip to the states. We made fried rice for ourselves and my host family. My host sister also made Johnny Cakes which is like a form of bread you can make without a real oven. They come out looking like buns, or bagels without the hole. I opened my presents, and then someone through flour on me. I still can´t figure out who it was because it was really dark. Apparently, this is a Panamanian tradition. I think it comes from the fact that the load up their piñatas up with flour, so when they break everyone gets white. They couldn´t afford a piñata so i guess they just throw the flour instead.

Later that night my friend Kevin brought a special present. When he showed up he was carrying a cubo. Cubo are 5 gallon buckets that are used for everything here from storing food to doing laundry. Kevins cubo was fool of ice and beer. We had a great time just catching up on our sites, and talking about all sorts of things from politics to why living in the campo can be suck sometimes.

Rather than walking down the stairs from my house ,putting boots on and crossing the muddy path to use the latrine I always pee off my porch at night. Now it was quite dark this night, no moon, and we were using a few candles out on the porch. Someone looked over at the side of the porch we had been peeing off and noticed that it had been peed all over!!! Cochino! ( see pics below) No one ever confessed to who it was.

Kevin, Brandon and Ryu