Bangkok - 2nd Training Day

This first day of class went well. Dave and I got to the office around 7:45 to set up and check on things. Students arrived on time and were ready to roll at 8:30. I think it was a pretty grueling day for them but everyone seemed to be getting it. ‘Course all the set up, config, and background stuff doesn’t really mean anything to them yet because they don’t really see how it all fits together.

Dave and I talked a bit on the way to the office about class structure and if there’s a better way to put it together. I hope he’ll have some suggestions after he’s seen the whole thing.
We had lunch at the cafeteria. Pong said it was on floor 2 and an elevator load of us trouped off to floor 2 only to find more offices and no one who could tell us (in English) where the cafeteria was…and no one in our group who could speak Thai. We went down to the lobby and tried to ask at the front desk but they didn’t speak English either. Finally, I just mimed eating at him and he pointed to the building next door.

We got there but it wasn’t obvious if/where there was a cafeteria. About that time, Prasert caught up with us and led us around the other side and up the stairs to the café.

We had our choice of many Thai foods. I picked a couple, having no clue what they were. It was all good, but mostly way more hot spicy than I like to eat. Dave, Philip and Yaobang took some stuff that looked kind of like pork fried rice without the rice. Apparently, it was very hot. Yaobang (from China) couldn’t eat it at all. Dave ate it sweating and nose running. Philip, (world traveler and adventurous eater) said it was the hottest thing he’d ever tasted.

Jeab brings snacks into class at regular intervals…plates of cashews, rambutans, guava, oranges or other fruit. Longon…not to be confused with the longans already mentioned…are similar to longans except they’re less round, more pear-shaped and the fruit grows stuck directly to a branch (like Brussels sprouts) instead of in a cluster (like grapes). The flesh is similar in taste and texture to longans but comes in sections, like an orange, instead of one solid fruit like the longans. Sometimes there’s a seed in one or more of the fruit sections; sometimes there’s none. The longons have a little more flavor than the longans…they’re both sweet and juicy but the longon flavor is a little more complex.

After class, everyone pretty much went their own way. Philip and some others went straight to an electronics/IT mall, 2 stops past the hotel. Dave and I dropped off stuff at the hotel, changed clothes and went to the Suan Lum night market.

It was like Chatuchak, only for tourists so the aisles were wider, it was well-lit, clean, airy and smelled a lot better. Quality of goods was generally higher as were prices. Still, bargains could be had if you looked.

I saw stone rubbings like I bought at Wat Pho for 400 Baht going for 100 here. They weren’t the exact same images though…the ones I got, I’ve only seen at Wat Pho.

I didn’t buy anything. Dave got a pashmina shawl for his wife and a wooden vase thing.
There was a huge Ferris wheel there. We’d seen it the previous day from the sky train but didn’t know it was part of the market. It makes a handy marker for finding the subway entrance though. There was also a huge beer garden with a band playing and we found some ATMs and a currency exchange. It definitely caters more to tourists than locals.

A sub ride home (28 Baht if you buy a token, 24 if you use the card), then bed.I slept a little better. I woke up around 1:30 again and repeatedly after that but managed to go right back to sleep pretty easily. I had a nasty sinus headache at one point so I took some decongestants and acetaminophen, which helped.

Bangkok - 1st Training Day

After waking up around 1:30 and then every 45 minutes or so after that until around 5 when I never went back to sleep, I finally just got up at 6. Good thing. I’d set both my travel alarm and the room alarm for 6:30 but had forgotten to actually turn either of them on.

Speaking of which, the alarm in the room is part of a “master panel” on the nightstand. All the lights in the room are controlled by this panel which also contains a clock. The clock is set from some master timer somewhere and you can’t change it. You can set the alarm time, though. It also controls the AC level (high, medium or low) but you set the actual temperature with the thermostat on the wall.

The room lights were a bit of a puzzle to figure out when I first got the room. I walked in and hit light switches but nothing came on…the room stayed completely dark. I’d been in a hotel in France once where they had to do something in the office to enable the lights in the room…probably to keep you from checking out and leaving all the lights on or something. I started to head for the front desk (since, in the dark, I couldn’t even find the phone) but remembered that someone would be bringing my bag up soon and figured I’d just wait for that.

Meanwhile, I happened to notice a small box on the wall just inside the door that looked like a key card holder so I stuck my room card in the slot and Voila! The lights came on, along with the AC. And they stay on as long as the card is in the slot.

I had breakfast in the “coffee shop” again (free, with the room) and on the way out met Rulik, Tom and Rachel coming in to eat with Philip.

The whole gang met in the lobby at 8:30 with Pong and Prasert to shepherd us through the subway to the office, since none of us had ever been there before.

Dave and I had bought subway passes the day before so we waited off to the side while the rest of the people bought cards. You pay a 50 Baht deposit and then add however much money you want. It works kind of like a phone card…you can add more money to it whenever you need to and whenever you use it, the amount gets debited from whatever your balance is. When you’re done with the card, you turn it back in and get whatever money you have left on it plus your deposit back.

It’s very convenient. Whenever you use the subway, you just swipe the card instead of buying tokens. And you pay less (about 10%) for what you use. For example, if you buy a token to get to the office from the hotel, it’s 18 Baht. If you use the card, it’s 16. Whenever you swipe your card at the turnstile, the display tells you how much that trip was and how much you have left. It’s definitely easier than tokens. You don’t have to wait in line to buy a token or have the right change.

At the office, Philip set up for the agronomy meeting while Dave and I set up in a couple of offices. We caught up on mail and made copies of handouts. We had just finished the copies about the time lunch arrived…pizza, garlic bread, chicken wings and bacon twists. There was seafood pizza and veggie for the Indians and Pakistanis.

When the meeting started again, Dave and I left to head for the river. Jeab said the best way to get there was take the subway to sky train station then the sky train all the way to the end then get a river taxi to go upriver to the Grand Palace. She said a taxi would take an hour and a half (because of traffic) but it would be 20 minutes the other way.

We stopped by the hotel to drop off stuff then back to the subway. It was pretty easy to find our way to the stations and make the connections. At the end of the line, we got off and headed to the river…mostly, right below the station.

We found a boat headed toward the palace. It turned out to be a tourist boat as opposed to a regular taxi. The difference being there was a ‘guide’ pointing out landmarks along the way and it cost more. The tourist boat up the river cost 18 Baht…coming back on a regular boat costs 13.
By the time we got to the palace, it was too close to closing time so we didn’t go in but we did check out Wat Pho while we were in the area. The wat closes at 6 but they started closing the buildings around 4. We could continue to wander the grounds until 6, just not enter the temples where the Buddhas were.

We left Wat Pho and took a ferry across the river (3 Baht…about 7 cents) to Wat Arun (temple of the dawn). There are no buildings to go inside but the chedis (pagodas) were all covered in colorful tile pieces. Not exactly like a mosaic…the pieces were shaped and very 3-D.

We ferried back across the river and caught a boat back to the sky train pier. By then, it must have been quitting time as all the boats were packed with people. The sky train too. Sometimes there were too many people for the train and some had to wait for the next one.

We got on a sky train and, as the door was closing, realized we were heading the wrong way. So we got out at the next stop and went down to the other tracks to go the right way.

We got back to the hotel around 7:15 to find notes under our room doors saying the gang was meeting at 6:30 to go to a nearby seafood restaurant. Oops! We ended up eating at the hotel “coffee shop” again. I had the pad thai in an egg-pillow that Philip had the night before. It looked good, and it was. Just a bit hotter than I really enjoy eating…even though I’d ordered it “mild.” I also had a custard/flan sort of thing for dessert. It was ok.After that, shower, review of the class material for the next day, then bed. I slept great until about 1am then it was the same ol’ wake every 45 minutes or so until I finally never went back to sleep and got up at 5.

Ayutthaya

I had my alarm set for 6:30 but woke up at 6 and wasn’t going to go back to sleep so I got up, showered, dressed and went to breakfast at the hotel “coffee shop.” I say “coffee shop” because that’s what they called it but it was way too fancy to be a mere coffee shop. The breakfast buffet was HUGE…one very large service island and 4 or 5 slightly smaller ones. There were your traditional breakfast foods (cereal, fruit, cheese, bread, yogurt and 6 kinds of juices, including watermelon) plus regular meal type foods of the Thai, Chinese, Japanese, American, Hawaiian, etc. persuasions. I had some egg casserole stuff, lots of fruit, some cheese and OJ.

Before going down for breakfast, I looked for an iron in the room so I could press my class clothes…they really needed it. But there wasn’t one in the room so I put everything that needed it in a laundry bag for the hotel staff to press. I had 3 shirts, 1 pair pants, 1 dress and 2 skirts ironed for 835.67 Baht (about $22…includes 10% service charge and 7% VAT). They were hanging, neatly pressed in my closet when I got back. They did a really good job.

I met up with Philip, Dave, Max (former Pioneer agronomist) and Pong (woman from the office who will be in my training) in the lobby to head out for our day of sightseeing. We headed to Ayutthaya, the former capital city of Thailand. On the way, we stopped at a convenience store to get some bottled water. Dave and I got a 12-pack of bottles for 75 Baht (about $2) and a couple of chilled bottles for the road for 9 Baht each (about 20 cents). Gas costs about 27 to 30 Baht per liter (a squidge less than $4/gal). They also sell ethanol, only there it’s made from cassava instead of corn.

The day started out cloudy, which we didn’t really appreciate until we got out of the car and it got sunny occasionally. When the sun came out it got really hot in a hurry.

In Ayutthaya, we stopped to get wat (temple) guides then went to the elephant palace. For 20 Baht you could buy a small basket of sugar cane chunks and pellet packs to feed the elephants. We fed a baby elephant and watched it do some tricks then went on to ride the big ones for 200 Baht (~$5). You climb up a little tower that gets you even with the elephant’s back then you step onto its back and sit in the howdah (padded bench you sit on under a sun umbrella). Your mahout (elephant handler/driver) then takes you out along a small waterway, past some temple ruins, across a street and out to a body of water with some more temples nearby. It’s not a long ride but it is scenic.

The mahouts definitely get the best ride. They’re sitting on the elephant’s head/neck and hardly move around at all. But sitting in the howdah on the elephant’s back you roll from side to side with each step. Pretty much all the pictures I took from the back of a moving elephant came out blurry or of something I wasn’t really trying to aim at because it was so hard to hold the camera still.

When we got off the elephants we were plied with photos taken of us and then the exit through the gift shop. I succumbed to a small black elephant-with-baby carving and a couple of notebooks made of “100% elephant dung.” (450 Baht total)

We saw the ruins of several wats after that. Admission for farang (foreigners) was 30 Baht. Admission for locals is 10 Baht.

Ayutthaya was the original capital of Thailand, until about 400 years ago. While still the capital, the Burmese invaded in 1765 and pretty much burned it to the ground, destroying a large part of the city and all the temples. The wats we saw were all more or less destroyed by the Burmese during that time. They occupied Thailand for 40 years or so until the Thais kicked them out again. After that, the capital was moved to Bangkok in 1782.

We passed by some trinket and fruit vendor stalls and there was not a single fruit I recognized. We tried pamelo, which looks like an enormous, green, slightly pear-shaped grapefruit. The rind is pithier and falls off the fruit better than a grapefruit. The fruit looks a lot like white grapefruit. It wasn’t particularly juicy for all that and it had a vaguely citrus-y taste…neither as tart as a grapefruit nor as sweet as an orange. It was actually rather bland.

There was a pile of durian …larger than the pamelos with a hard, cone-spiked exterior. You have to handle them with gloves. The vendor cut one open while we were there with a small machete. There’s a lot of inedible, fibrous pith inside the spikes that contain 4 or 5 edible sections. They’re a yellowish-cream color and shaped like squat bananas. In the car on the way here, Philip was talking about them and described them as smelling like “garbage-y onion” but said they tasted a lot better than they smelled. The spiky outside of the fruit didn’t have much of a smell and I didn’t get close enough to the actual edible part to say one way or the other.

Pong bought a kilo of longan which she shared with us. Longans look like small, round white potatoes only they grow in clusters like grapes from a tree. To eat them, you put your thumbnails together against the skin and pry it apart. The skin pops right off leaving a smooth, clearish fruit that you pop in your mouth right from the skin. There’s a smooth, shiny, black pip near the stem end that you spit out. It’s sweet and juicy and very tasty!

We also had some rambutan …among ourselves, called “that hairy fruit.” The fruits are sort of egg shaped and sized. The peel is mostly red with a lot of ¾ inch tendril-like ‘hairs’ covering it. The hairs start out red near the base but are a pale yellow-green near the tips. You eat them in the same way you do longans…pry apart the skin with your thumbnails and the fruit pops right out. It’s the same sort of clear-white color as the longan and is similarly juicy and sweet. However, the pit in the rambutan is more almond shaped and clings to the fruit. You don’t want to get too vigorous about chewing off the fruit as there is a thin, fibrous skin over the pit that is kind of astringent if you get into it.

At this vendor stop, I bought a fish mobile made from ti leaves and intricately painted. I haggled the vendor down to 200 Baht for it. Pong said they hang these over baby cribs to entertain the wee ones. I thought I’d hang it in my atrium to swim in the breezes there…if I can get it home without crushing it. It’s a fairly large fish with 3 strands of smaller fish hanging down from it…all in deep red and metallic gold.

Around noon Pong and Max took us to a restaurant along the Lopburi River. Lucky for us, the menus consisted mostly of pictures of dishes so that it wasn’t so critical that we be able to read Thai or understand the English translations of the dish names (if you don’t know what it means, ”tom yam kai” doesn’t make any more sense than the Thai characters for it). Nonetheless, we let Pong order for all of us. We had tom-yam soup with shrimp (tom-YUM!), roasted prawns (the biggest I think I’ve ever seen…complete with head, legs, long skinny pincer arms and eyestalks), some sort of green leafy vegetable with mushrooms in a light brown sauce, and some fish cake-like things. It was all very tasty, even if I have no idea what most of it was.

While we ate, we watched the boats on the river. Mostly they were ‘long-tail’ boats (long, narrow, wooden boats with a car engine mounted toward the back and a long straight drive shaft extending into the water to drive the propeller) but also some dinner-cruise type tourist boats and multi-part barges loaded with sand headed to the city.

When the barge first started past the restaurant, we wondered how it was going to negotiate the turn without hitting the bank on the far side of the turn. Then the back of the barge came into sight and we figured it out. The barges had tugboats at both ends. The front tug would pull the barge chain downstream and the back tug would come into play when the barge needed to negotiate a turn. It would pull upstream on the caboose end to keep it from slamming into the outside bank of the turn. It works. As twisty as the river is, that back tug is kept very busy!
After lunch, we headed back to Bangkok and dropped stuff off at the hotel before heading to the weekend market at Chatuchak by subway.

The Chatuchak market is like the local farmers market only on atomic steroids. It’s in a park that covers 190 rais (35 acres) and the more than 8,000 vendor booths are packed in under a huge roof or spilling out into outdoor aisles. This is where a lot of the locals shop, in addition to tourists, so it has everything you could possibly want from staple home items like toilet paper or detergent to exotic (and endangered) animals (alive or dead for the pot or pets).

At times, it was very claustrophobic inside…the chaos, the press of people, the heat, the lack of air moving, not being able to see much past the next booth. I’m not claustrophobic to begin with but there were moments...

Philip was looking for silk for his wife. Dave was looking for whatever. I ended up with a couple of pillowcases (200 Baht), a placemats/chopsticks set (200 Baht), a scarf (100 Baht) and some incense (100 Baht).

Dave and I had planned to come here on our own before Pong and Max offered to take us out for the day. I was really glad we had them with us. They shepherded us through the subway system (very clean, new-looking and easy to use once we got started) and helped us negotiate the maze of the market. They also warned us several times about the dangers of pickpockets and staying past 6:00 when the main shops close.

The hotel itself is very high end. At least compared to places I’ve stayed before. There is staff everywhere. There’s a guy whose job it is to stand by the elevators and push the call button for you. All the rooms have doorbells outside so that no one has to knock. There’s an orchid on my pillow every night and a small fruit basket on the table with rambutans and some jujubes (look like small granny smith apples…different texture and not so much flavor). The room has a safe, robes and slippers, a fridge with water and beer in it and a number of bottles of alcohol and basket of snacks in the wet bar. The water in the fridge is complimentary…which I didn’t find out until after I’d checked out.

My room has 2 beds…full-sized, maybe smaller…a desk, a couple of sitting chairs and is half of a suite. The bathroom has a separate tub and glass-walled shower stall. The view out the window is of city as far as you can see. Up close, I look down (from the 22nd floor) on the rooftops of what must be homes…parking lots, open lots and a main street.

I was pretty well dead by the time we got back to the hotel. It’d been a really long trip getting there and I only had about 5 hours sleep that night. However, after dropping off my purchases to my room, I met Dave and Philip in the lobby for dinner at the hotel. I was a little hungry but mostly just very tired.

I wasn’t really interested in anything on the menu but ordered something and ate about half of it. The best part of the meal was the water! After sweating so much at the market, I was really thirsty and it was cold and wet! I’d ordered a ginger ale with the meal and drank that but it had a funny smell/taste…faintly like mothballs. Dunno why, but I stuck to water after that.
After supper I got some of the bottles of water Dave and I bought earlier then headed to my room. En route, Philip and I met Ashraf and Sajid, the students from Pakistan, in the hallway. Philip introduced us then they headed down to dinner and I went to my room to shower and crash.

Travel to Bangkok

Yesterday, I’d gotten a mail message from United about checking in on-line so I did that and printed my boarding pass. At home, I was all packed and ready to sleep in a little the following morning so was knitting at past 10 when the phone rang. It was Dave asking if I’d gotten a call about our canceled flight. I hadn’t. Turns out our flight to Chicago had been canceled around 8pm and United had booked us on an American flight leaving 2 hours earlier.

Good thing he called! I thought I was all set to go and wouldn’t have known any different until I showed up 2 hours late for my flight. We rearranged our meeting time and I toddled off to bed after changing my alarm to get me up earlier.

We met at work, where I left my car for the week, then headed to the airport. Because of the cancellation, we had to go to the United counter to get a voucher for the American flight and then to the American counter to get boarding passes and check Dave’s bag.

At the United counter, they told us I didn’t have a seat assignment for the Chicago-Tokyo flight. No one could say why…my itinerary and printed-yesterday boarding pass all said I did. The agent helping us was a trainee and didn’t really know what he was doing so a supervisor was called. Much confusion ensued. We finally got our vouchers and went to the American counter where they told us they had to have a ‘coupon’ from United that wasn’t in the paperwork they gave us. So we trouped back to the United counter to get the coupon then back to the American counter to finalize everything.

Eventually we got to the security gate and because of the cancellation/reschedule changes; it looked like we had purchased last-minute tickets which automatically flags you for a personal security screening. That took longer for me because I had my luggage with me instead of checking a bag. When I got to the gate, the flight was already boarding so I got right on.
In Chicago, as we were getting off the plane, I suddenly remembered that I forgot to order the coffee before I left the office. Even connecting to the network with my laptop wouldn’t help because the file was on the hard drive of my office PC.

I was trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do about it…I knew it was a fairly substantial order that I couldn’t just get from “stock” when the shipment arrived but I had no idea what it consisted of. I was thinking it was the weekend but Dave (Bless him!) reminded me that it was Friday and people were still in the office. Ann or someone could log onto my PC as administrator and get the file for me.

Once we got to the gate (hours before our flight, there was no one there, of course), Dave went to get something to eat and I called the office. I caught Doug and told him what was up. He said he’d take care of it (Bless him!). Then I called the travel service to see what they could tell me about my seat on the Tokyo flight. The agent I talked to called United and both of them agreed that there was no problem with my ticket, nothing had changed and I did, indeed, have a seat assignment. Go figure.

There still wasn’t anyone at the gate so I wandered down to the United Customer Service desk to see what they’d say. They agreed with Des Moines…I didn’t have a seat; I’d have to get it at the gate. Which I wouldn’t have cared so much about but everyone (except the travel service) said there were only middle seats available.

I went back to the gate and there was someone there so I went through it all again to get my seat. She said I’d have to wait until my name was called. It wasn’t long after that she called the 14 names (including mine) and I finally got my seat. As she handed me my ticket she told me it was an aisle. (Bless her!)

After that, it was board, take off and fly. By the time we’d been served a bag of snack-y stuff then lunch, I’d finished my book and we were only somewhere over the Dakotas. It was going to be a long, loooooong flight… All my other books were in the overhead bin…not impossible to get to but not convenient. I had tatting and word puzzles…

The bright spot at that point was that I had an outside aisle seat with no one in the window seat beside me so I could at least spread out and shift some. That was the highlight of the entire day and flight!

As we came in for a landing in Tokyo, it wasn’t at all what I expected. The airport must be outside the city. I never saw any city on the way in, only neat, precise little rectangles of green fields. They looked like they’d been laid out by engineers with a straight-edge. It looked sort of like landing in the Midwest except that the parcels were smaller and not square. Also, whereas in the US, houses/farmsteads tend to be spread out across the grid, here they were all clustered together in corners. It was the same with what looked like parking lots…clusters of cars parked around rectangle intersections. I don’t know why there were all those cars clustered together where there weren’t any buildings.

We wandered the Tokyo airport waiting for our next flight. Anything to not sit more! We found a duty-free shop with traditional Japanese things. Dave got Ts for his kids and I got a couple of silk hankies with traditional prints on them. Also a small green-tea container. It’s metal with a little lid but the outside is covered in a silk brocade. It has some tea in it but it was the container I thought was cool. Total, 1,500 yen.

On the flight to Bangkok, I had a window seat. It’s dark out so I couldn’t see anything except for a ¾ full moon. I was in the 2nd row back from the bulkhead and surrounded by infants and small children. They were very well-behaved, though, so it wasn’t too bad. I was way too tired to be able to concentrate enough to read so I just had to muddle through the remaining hours of the flight. Then it was going to be the tough decision…bed or shower first??

It was around midnight before I got to my room but I opted for shower first.

Companeros - Day 8

Walter needed to be at CIS by 8:30 or so and Kathy wasn’t flying back with us so they rode to San Salvador with Bob earlier than we needed to leave. We said our goodbyes to them then had breakfast, loaded up the van and said our goodbyes to the Pastoral Team then headed to the airport.

On the way, Alej called to me (sitting directly behind him in the van) to point out where his house was. I waved to it (Muevo a tu casa!). He also pointed out a maximum security prison he’d told me about in one of our previous discussions. The prison is Zacatecaluca (or something like that) but they call it Zacatraz after the US’ Alcatraz. And he asked me to write down my home address. All week, I’d been bugging him about a photo of his family. He’d promised me that on Friday (today) he’d have it but apparently didn’t. He wanted to mail it to me.

We arrived at the airport a little before 10:00 and it wasn’t open yet (!?!?) so we waited outside until they let us in. We checked bags, got tickets, paid the exit fee (up to $32 from $27.35 as in the past) and headed up to the gate to wait. And wait. Our plane wasn’t due to leave until 1:20 giving us LOTS of time to wander up and down the terminal, looking in the duty-free shops, reading, etc. We could tell when time was getting closer as the smell of Camperos chicken started to build.

The flight back to the US was without incident. The movie on the way back was even worse than the one on the way down…Roller Bounce or some such. I watched about 5 minutes of it and decided to read instead. The meal was every bit as awful as the movie seemed to be. The choice was beef burrito or chicken sandwich. I decided to try the burrito. Marcia, sitting next to me, had chicken. Neither of us ate much of either. The rest of the meal was a small Greek salad, bag of potato chips and packet of Oreos. The salad was good. I’m not normally much of a potato chip- or Oreo-eater but I ate these because there wasn’t anything else.

In Houston, we had the quickest processing I’ve EVER had. The lines were non-existent at Immigration, our bags came up right away on the carousel, and there weren’t any lines at Customs, either. I did get stopped a couple times (just before Customs and again just after) by people asking me if I had all my bags…apparently it looks a little odd to be coming from an international flight with only one duffle and a day pack. Everyone else checked the bags they needed to and we trammed to our next gate.

About the time we got to the domestic terminal, Blair realized that he was missing the bag of stuff he’d bought at the airport in San Salvador…a book on the national parks of El Sal and a bottle of some type of alcohol. We figured it must have been mislaid at the security checkpoint back at the other terminal. He came to the gate with us and left his carry-on then went back to see if he could find his bag. He couldn’t. But that was the only glitch to the trip home.

Companeros - Day 7

It wasn’t. When the psychologist arrived this morning she showed me the problem with the printer. Unfortunately, about that time they were calling ‘all aboard’ for another round of canton and house visits so I had to leave. But I told her (Yolbeth) that I’d work on it later that day, now that I understood the problem.

We were supposed to visit a couple houses this morning then a couple more cantones and La Quisera (the massacre site on the edge of the Berlin municipality that is a fairly recent discovery and excavation) in the afternoon. But last night Milagro suggested that was probably a bit too ambitious and that we should think about skipping La Quisera. We all agreed!

I put on sunscreen today. I’ll probably be black with dust sticking to it, but hey, that’s even better sun protection, right?

First we went to María Elena’s house. Her mom was such fun…very animated and joyous. Bob was in a hammock and she started rocking him and singing him a lullaby in Spanish. He snored theatrically.

Then we went to Otilia’s house. She lives pretty far out on the edge of town. Her mom wanted us to see the church on the corner so we walked down there and she opened it up for us. For a small barrio church, it had an impressive altar…all glass and icons and carved wood. And bats…lots of bats flitting about the alcove.

We went back to the Casa for a bit before lunch. I spent it mostly working on Bob’s PC or the Yolbeth’s printer. I fixed the latter but Bob’s PC is still not working right.
We had lunch then loaded up the pickup for the trip to El Corazol (Ankeny Presbyterian’s community – Marcia), the farthest canton in Berlin. This was also one of the hardest hit by the flooding, as it has the river as one of its borders. I think the entire community turned out to meet with us. They were quite excited to see Marcia again.

On the way back, we stopped in Casa de Zinc (Trinity’s community – Blair), a casarillo of San Isidro. They have a very impressive water tank and collection system. While Blair was meeting with the people and taking pictures of each family group, I picked up some reddish, puce-colored seeds from the ground under the big, gnarled tree by the tank. I asked Alejandro what they were and he didn’t know. He showed them to Cecilia who didn’t know either but showed them to a woman from the community. That woman pointed to a tree on the other side of the tank grounds that had long pods hanging from the branches. Cecilia and Otilia got very excited and led me over there. They said that the pods are used to make a fruity sort of drink and they started looking for long sticks to knock some down. At first I thought they were just doing that because I’d asked about them and I didn’t want them to go to all that trouble. But they wanted several to take back to the Casa.

The pods are probably 2 feet long and as big around as a half-dollar. They’re really hard, too…it took bashing them with one rock on another rock to break them open. Once open, Cecilia showed me how the seeds are packed in there surrounded by a clear, hard, red substance that reminded me of the melted sugar of stained glass cookies. That is, apparently, the part used to make the drink. Cecilia plucked the creamy-pale seeds (Cecilia said they change color as they dry) from their red-encased homes and gave them to me then picked some of the red stuff out and put it in her mouth. The rest of the pods they’d knocked down, they gathered up to take with them.

Back to the Casa for the rest of our last day in Berlin. I took a shower…scrubbing this time, with a bandana I’d brought from home (one of the items I never travel without!). We had supper then took photos of the Pastoral Team with Compañeros. We gave Alejandro and Walter their propinas (tips) and I gave them each a tatted heart I’d made on the trip.
We packed up and got ready to leave for the airport in the morning

Companeros - Day 6

Today was a canton (small dirt-floor community) visit day. Our first stop was San Francisco, to Miguel’s brand new house with his wife and 9-month old son. 6 months ago, when I was there last, they were living in a very small room in his parents’ house. Now they have a place of their own. Since San Francisco is Westminster’s sister canton, I spent a lot of time talking with him about the solar project and the community and how things were going. The solar project is still short about $6,000 from the Self Development for People grant money. About half the homes now have the transformers that will allow them to plug in regular AC appliances. And some people have discovered problems with the panel installation…they were installed in a prime location for the sun at the time of installation but didn’t take into account how the sun moves to a different part of the sky the other half of the year. Most of them don’t have enough cable to be able to move the panel to a better location so some people are not making much use of the power part of the year until they can get the cable work done. And there are some homes that don’t have panels at all…those who decided not to participate in the original project or, as in Miguel’s case, new houses that have been built since the project was completed.

From San Francisco, we went to Heartland’s new community, a casarillo (a subset of a canton) of El Tablon (Kathy), then Virginia (Dallas Center’s community – Nancy) and Las Delicias (Wakonda Christian’s community – Randy).

Virginia is having some internal issues. The community is somewhat divided on what sort of projects should be done and who should be doing what.

Las Delicias (where we had lunch in one of the homes) has a great water project going. They had some issues with the tank cracking during the deluge last fall and Randy spent a bit of time discussing causes and options with the community leaders that met with us.

After that, it was back to the Casa. It had been a very long, hot, dusty day riding in the back of the pickup. We’re all pretty exhausted. I’m sunburned. Everybody makes a beeline to the nearest shower. I decide it’s the best opportunity I’m going to get to take the tubes of thread to Sonia at the prison so Walter and I head that way. He talks through the gate to the guards and they let us in. Then someone goes to get Sonia who gets searched in a room just off of where we wait for her. She shows me what she completed since I left the day before and gives me back the bracelet I left with her as a model. I give her the tubes of thread and thank her profusely with a hug. The hug was spontaneous but I thought afterward that I probably shouldn’t have done that. As cool and reserved as she was, I’m guessing she’s probably not a hugger. She said she’d make a bunch of bracelets from the thread I gave her and get them to the Pastoral Team to give to me.

Walter and I walked back to the Casa and found that the meeting with the Pastoral Team was scheduled for about 10 minutes. I’m the only one who hasn’t showered yet and I feel incredibly grubby after a day in the cantones. I went up to the women’s room and said I was going to take a shower but everyone said I didn’t have time. I said I was going to MAKE time. As soon as Nancy got out of the shower I was in for the quickest shower of my life. I felt infinitely better and was not the last person to arrive for the meeting. However, after the meeting, when I went back to the room, I discovered that I really hadn’t done all that good a job of showering as the white towel I’d used and then hung at the foot of my bed looked positively filthy. But hey, it was the best I could do in the time I had and without a washcloth to scrub with.

After the meeting, the Pastoral Team took us to a restaurant in Alegría, a slightly-larger than Berlin community just up the mountain, for supper. I had camarones (shrimp)…huge ones, grilled with onions and green pepper. Everyone had sides of rice/beans, a type of pico de gallo, spicy grilled veggies and ensalada (salad) with a piece of queso fresco (fresh cheese) on top. It was seriously good, even though the head, eyes, antennae and legs on the shrimp Kathy and I had creeped out a couple of our group.

Back at the Casa, Bob talked to us a bit about the relief efforts after all the flooding with the hurricanes last fall. On our canton visits, he’d pointed out some of the places where the roads to the cantones had washed out or where “end of the line” was when they were trying to deliver emergency food packets to those who lost pretty much everything. Even having been to the cantones, knowing how they live and hearing Bob talk about it, I’m sure we still don’t really have an idea of what it was like to live through that.

Earlier, Milagro had asked me to take a look at the psychologist’s printer…it wasn’t working, she said…so I took a look at it. I booted everything up and created a document in Word that printed fine so I told Milagro that it looked like it was working ok.