Hasta mañana.

Hasta mañana, which we learn as “see you tomorrow,” and whose literal translation is “until tomorrow,” is the Panamanian way to say goodnight.  It also is used in the sense that we learn it in the states.  So here, instead of saying good night to someone, we say “until tomorrow.”  It’s both an expectation and a goodbye, as if trusting you will all wake up to face another day.

“Hasta mañana, sweetie,” says my neighbor to her kids as I step shivering out of my cold shower behind the house.  Everyone next door is getting ready for bed, as am I, since it’s just past nine o’clock and we all have school in the morning. Hasta mañana, squeaks back little Dona in her tiny voice.  Hasta mañana, mamá, says seventh-grader Daniel.  

I recognize their voices as if we were standing in the same room talking while I shake out my sheets for bugs, hang up clothes I’ve strewn about in my frantic rush to change into shorts and a tank top after walking home from school in long pants and a button-down shirt.  We live on top of each other, practically.  Their bedroom walls and mine are only a car’s width apart—I know this because Donny’s red truck fits snugly in between our two houses.  Once, I sneezed while getting ready for bed and my neighbor shouted “bless you” from inside.  

Hasta mañana, chimes little Dona again as I turn off my light.  I hear their fans switch on, and then only distant sounds of dogs yelping and buzzing crickets, the occasional squeak from the geckos crawling up my walls, and a rooster who feels the need to make sure everyone should know he exists.  I close my eyes.  Hasta mañana, I think to my neighbors.

….

And then shuffling.  And a curious murmur.

….

Dona, déjà eso! Leave it alone, Dona.  Dona squeaks something unintelligible back.  José, get in bed! José replies with something along the lines of “I’m going,” which means he’s probably messing with something in the kitchen.  I open one eye.

José, I told you not to touch the fridge! 

I hear the distant sounds of aaaeeeehhhhh.

No.  No you’re not going to--

AAAEEEEEEEHHHHHH.  It comes through the concrete walls as if they were sheets.  

Dona squeaks something again.  No!  You don’t have to be up!  Go back to bed!

I remember how I don’t want kids yet.  I am so tired.

RRRRrrring.  My neighbor answers.  Hello?  Hello? Aaaah, where were you, I was trying to call you.  I need you to send me that thing you told me you would send me.  And the family? Where are you? What are you doing? What do you mean they have a quiz tomorrow?  Daniel!  A ten minute long rebuke commences.

I am too tired to grumble.  I hope for someone to call me, too, so I can say “hey, I’m really tired, in fact, too tired to talk, I really need rest.  Call me tomorrow.” My friends do not sense my desperation from their cozy, noise-free homes up town.  

Dona, déjà eso!  Squeaks.  And you, stop crying!

Duermense, carajo! I think of a semi-controversial children’s book that made the New York Times bestseller list earlier this year.  

And then, somewhere between the shuffling and the whining and the rebuking and the excuse making, all I hear again is crickets, geckos, dogs, the rooster.  

Whether the noise has stopped or whether my brain has hit a threshold, I don’t know.  But at least it’s safe to close my eyes again…hasta mañana.

Poco a poco.

I sat in my hammock reading one afternoon after school and my seven year old neighbor waltzed up to my porch.  Can we play, he wanted to know.  “No,” I told him, “I’m a little tired and relaxing from a hectic school day.  If you want to read with me, though, you can grab a book from inside and join me.”  I keep a small box of story books in Spanish in my house in an effort to encourage kids to read on their free time, knowing this is a bit of an uphill cultural battle.  However, since the other kids on the street had been interested, I knew Jose felt comfortable walking in a grabbing a book from the box.  He sat down on the porch next to the hammock and began to lazily flip through the pages.  I noticed he wasn’t looking at the words.  “Jose,” I said, “you have to read the words.  Why don’t you read out loud so you can practice?”  He shrugged.  “Es que no sé.”  I don’t know how.   The words vibrated between my ears.  You don’t know how to read and you’re seven?  This seemed like a catastrophe.  How could he not know how to read?  Jose had bounced around for the last year between two fighting parents who eventually separated and his grandparents’ house (my neighbors), where he usually stayed when neither of his parents could take care of him…which was beginning to be more and more often.  Perhaps last year, his first year of elementary school, was lost in the chaos of a breaking home.  Maybe he never learned because there was no one at home helping him.  I sat down next to Jose on the porch and tried to help him sound out the words, to no avail.  “Poco a poco, Jose.”  Little by little, just try, you’ll start to see the pattern.  He would stare back at my blankly and shake his head.  He simply didn’t know and had no idea how to begin.  I was at a loss.  

In the following days, as I mulled over Jose's reading abilities and those of the other kids in school, the reality hit me.  New books in Panama are very expensive relative to the budget most households have to manage.  Adults to do not read because of the lack of available literature, and kids do not read at home both because their parents do not like reading and because there are no books.  I remembered my time as a young reader in kindergarten.  My parents read to me ever since I could remember and I have such fond memories of reading that I never imagined a kid could feel otherwise about books.  Then, while complaining to a friend about how my neighbor couldn’t read, my friend corrected me.  “He’s what, in first grade?  Of course he doesn’t know how to read.”  Again, I was abashed.  I knew how to read by the time I was five.  “You learn to read in first grade here.  In kindergarten all kids learn how to do is trace letters and recognize them.  You have to do that before you read.”  So Jose wasn’t behind.  He was normal.  It turned out I was up against a much bigger monster than I thought—the system.

I have been working for over a year trying to get the kids I know interested in reading.  Thanks to a jump-start in the form of a donation from the U.S. Embassy, one of the two public librarians and I began hosting story hours in the library and inviting the small students from the elementary school.  Over the past year, attendance has fluctuated and the story hours have morphed but they have kept on, and my moment with Jose reminded that what we are doing is huge, even if most of the time it is small. A couple of months ago we started encouraging the kids at story hour to draw about the stories we read to them, and then encouraged them to help us read the stories.  One Saturday, as we closed down story hour and the kids made to leave, one asked, “Can I take this book home with me?”  He wanted to draw more.  I paused, somewhat shocked.  “Of course you can.  They’re for taking home.  Tell Jenny and she’ll tell you when you have to bring it back.”  A chorus of replies sounded.  “You mean we can take these home?!”  It had never occurred to me to explain to the kids that this was how the library worked.  I assumed they just knew.  Almost every kid at story hour that day checked out a book.  Finally, after a year of rocky starts, Jenny and I realized we had clumsily stumbled on a formula that worked.  Poco a poco, I thought, and I thought of Jose.  

The flood of kids in and out of my house is continuous but they have not lost interest in the books.  Each has his or her favorite, and the other day Eduardo, who everyone calls Pipe (pee-pay) even hid a book under my fridge so no one else could read it.  Even Jose’s two-year old sister comes over, puts her hands all over the books and mimics what she sees the older kids do.  Jose slowly began to bring home work that would lead him to reading.  As the months passed, I listened as his grandmother (who is my neighbor) painstakingly drilled him on phonetic combinations.  

It is now October, and a few days ago Jose’s silhouette appeared in my doorway.  “Chelsea, que haces?”  What was I doing?  I was on my way out to the porch with a book.  “You want to listen to me read?”  he asked.  Of course I do, I said.  Jose marched proudly to the book box and grabbed the book The Little Tin Soldier.  He curled his knees up, balanced the book on them and began to sound out the words, realizing that what he read corresponded to the pictures.  His little sister shuffled in and grabbed a couple of books, too.  She plopped down on the ground and opened a book upside down.  Her grandmother called her from next door, clearly worried she was trying to grab something breakable.  “Dona!!  What are you doing??”  Dona, in tiny voice, squeaked back, “studying.”  Her grandmother looked at me and smiled.

Poco a poco, I thought.  And I let Jose’s shaky words and Dona’s made up ones fill up my porch.

Wonder

Forrest is grinning wide with his eyebrows raised.  He watches intently as the seven stories tall iron gates of the Panama Canal slowly swing closed behind a massive container ship and twenty-six million gallons of water from Gatun Lake begin to inch the hulk up.  His shoulders start to shake a bit as he does a little dance of joy.  Forrest is twenty-five, like me, and is visiting me over the long weekend he has off from law school.  It’s the first time either one of us has seen the canal.  I appreciate it because of its history and its impact on Panama as a nation and on the rest of the world.  I imagine Forrest appreciates it because he’s an engineer.  Neither of us can really believe that we are looking at one of the greatest engineering feats of the twentieth century.  Not a single part of the original Panama Canal has had to be replaced; the sheer size of the operation is hard to fathom.  In spite of being a mere twenty yards away from the ships, the crews waving back to the visitors at the Miraflores locks look like the toy men in Thomas the Tank Engine. Perhaps even if you don’t know the decades-long political, physical, geographical, and technical struggle its builders had to overcome, the sight of the canal is truly humbling…the first time.  

Fast forward to four months later when my parents visit.  I sit calmly in a plastic chair to avoid the pushing crowds vying for that perfect shot of a grain transporter coming through the locks.  Languages and an odd mix of khaki cargo shorts, cutoff jeans, button down shirts, and the occasional oblivious trophy wife swarm around me.  I am exhausted by tourism, dreading the next five visitors and our inevitable fight with the crowds at the lone visitors’ center along the canal.  The next time I visit the canal is with a group of Panamanian adult school students that I’ve been teaching English.  I don’t even bother with the observation decks this time.  I sit on the level below the observation decks and sip a coffee as a tanker rolls lazily by.

But even the simple fact that I can sip coffee while a hefty percentage of the world’s cargo floats by is something that most people I know cannot boast.  Many Panamanians, in fact, haven’t even seen it.  The day I sat below the decks with my coffee I realized that the canal wasn’t what I was coming to see anymore.    I realized I was coming to see people experience it for the first time.  Months later I stood pressed against the railing again with my brother as we narrated a ship’s passage through the canal.

There are too many things that I take for granted living here--fresh fruit at my fingertips, meat whose origin and diet I personally know, a plethora of carefully preserved and colorful traditions.  These things tend to get lost amid my struggles with the ten different commitments I manage in a week, projects that always turn out more informal than I had hoped, and day-to-day tasks that always take longer than I expected.   When people come to visit me, I get the chance to be excited about things that have gone normal. I get to step back and start to marvel again.  And you know what?  The people I live with get just as excited to share those things.  They know what they have.  Each time I’ve had a visitor, a friend has invited us over for fresh food, storytelling, and sharing.

When someone visits, they finally get what I’ve been trying so hopelessly to put into words.  There’s no way to understand the sensory overload of your first tuna until you’ve danced in the middle of one; no way to know what fresh sugar cane honey tastes like until you’ve licked it off a plantain leaf that a neighbor uses to scrape a giant cauldron with; no way to fully appreciate the immense hospitality of the people who take care of me around here until they’ve force fed you everything in their kitchen and sent you home with a heavy bag of fruit from the backyard.  If it weren’t for my visitors, I’d still eat honey and fruit; I’d still dance in the tunas.  It’s just that right when I decide I don’t really need these things or that I’m just plain tired of them, someone comes along to remind me they’re not lame.  They’re totally new.

So here they are, the celebrities that everyone still asks me about months after they've gone, whose photos are probably floating around on someone's phone,  and who were treated like family when they were here:

Forrest on a visit to a friend's parents' house in the hills.  The drying cow hide is just off to the left.

My parents with my friend Victor (dressed like a diablico) and a mejorana (the guitar) musician from town

Matt enjoying Macaracan street meat...maybe a little too much.

 

A side note:  my most recent visitor, less than a week ago, was my younger brother Matt.  He wins for having come during Macaracas’ foundation and experiencing a historical tuna where this year’s queen and last year’s queen had sort of a posse-showdown in the middle of the parade.  That’s all I can say about it.  Like I said before, you just had to be there.

Now that I'm more or less back...

Here, we have a custom.  Weekly I will pull a chair out from my kitchen to the street in front of my house to sit in a clump with my neighbors and talk.  On the way home from school I will stop at a lady’s house and wind up sitting for hours on her front porch.  As I pass by a friends house on the way to play volleyball, I stop for a few minutes (which usually turns into at least twenty) and chat.  Echar cuento, as it is known in Panamanian Spanish, literally translated is to throw out a story.  I love this translation, as I think it embodies the essence of just what you should do when hanging out is at its best.  Tell stories.  Funny ones.  Sad ones.  Scary ones.  Ones you’ve told over, and over and over again.  Perhaps we do this at home, but in English I would posit that we have failed to come up with a term that so accurately expresses the right way to do it.

So, readers, that’s just what I’m going to do.  I’m going to throw stories at you.  There may be long descriptions or analytical, introspective-type blogs now and then.  But mostly, I want you to get a sense of what stands out to me in daily life.  I promise to tell you what I tell my neighbors at the end of the day, and possibly share some of what they tell me.

So pull up a lawn chair and sit somewhere you shouldn’t.  It’s going to be a nice evening.