Bocas Baseball

Last night I went to my first Panamanian Baseball game. The national league has started up. Each province has a team, my host brothers and several people in my town are obsessed and listen to the games till midnight, on their radios. Bocas was undefeated with 4 wins to some formidable opponents. On Tuesday they played Veraguas, who is also undefeated. The car from the Junta Comunal ( town committee) charged a dollar for round trip. (This is an incredible bargain because usually one way to Changuinola is about $3. We packed about 17 people into this covered pick up and headed for the stadium. I had big expectations as the stadium is the first thing visible when you come into town as well as its bleachers behind home plate. However when we arrived the announced the bleachers were not done being constructed. This is classic Panamanian style, they have had a year to finish the bleachers, and they aren't ready so they probably are losing half of their seating (or standing) capacity.
Sorry these pictures came out bad it was hard shooting with the lights. The game was like a little league game, but with wild fans. At one point after an inning a Bocas player right ran over to where I was standing, whipped out his change pouch from his back pocket and gave a friend or family money to buy food. There was so much more fan-player interaction it was pretty cool.
The fans were wild. It reminded me of being at a typical Latin American soccer game. Maestro Ramòn and I were right next to the guy with the megaphone. He would either blast the siren for an entire at-bat or just shout ¨¡Ponchelo! ¡Curvalo! ¡Si puedehombe!¨(Bocas spanish has alot of Caribbean island influence from Jamaica, so lots of sortof english is spoken) Air horns where the norm as well as whistles. There was also a drum band that sounded great and they would blast reggaeton, meringue and other music between innings. The games also have 50 cent beers and $1 meat on a stick and 25 cent banana chips, and entrance is only $2. Bocas ended up getting blown out but it was still a great time. I just felt like putting in a picture of the main street in Changuinola. Today was a rare rainy today in the dry season. The street is lined mostly with Almacenes which are department stores.

Since I´ve been living in Valle, my thatch (Penca) roof has been leaking. This is especially a problem because I live in the rainiest province in Panama, that can get downpours everyday for a month. My family helped with this situation by putting peaces of sheet metal roofing over my bedroom. This worked quite well, and also kept out bats, rats (to a certain extent although I still see them in my room at night sometimes) and any basura falling from the the roof. So my host family has been saving up my $20 monthly rent to buy new Penca and have it replaced.

So for the next 2 to three weeks all of my belongings are in bags or just piled on to one side of my house, while the other side is being worked on. This also means I can´t live there because there is constantly stuff falling from the ceiling. To make a roof, they find this tree that has massive leaves, that look like palm fronds. Each frond is about a meter long. They split the leave in two, so there and then stack them to dry. Once they are dry they are placed, and tied on almost horizontally. So on the inside all you can see are the main stalks.

The other day we went to go clean the toma de agua for my part of town. Toma de agua literally means take of water, so its wherever you channel water from a natural source into a pipe. The one we just built is with is from an underground spring. This is from a creek. That means that all sorts of junk can fall into the the pipe and ultimately the tank. Also it means the water can be contaminated much easier from surface water runoff.

You can see the dam and the 3 inch pip coming out of it here. In this picture is my counterpart Vicente (President of the aqueduct) and Maestro Ramòn, who is a teacher and President of the Health Committee.
On the dam you can see a wire cage used to filter out the largest leaves and other trash.
They are essentially just stirring the water up and pushing the settled mud into the tube. They had disconnected the pipe just after the dam so all this muddy water didn´t flow into the tank.