Sunday, 2 July 2006 02:33 pm
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deckardcanineHappy Halfway Day, everybody. As in halfway thru the year. In my childhood, it was proposed as a pseudo-holiday in which you do a lot of things halfway, but I do that quite enough the rest of the year.
On the subject of earlier times, ever since I heard an estimate that we have a completely different set of cells every seven years, I've had a habit of thinking of how and where I was seven years ago. Right now, that puts me on my exchange trip to Panama in the summer before my 12th-grade school year.
I think it was Chirpasee who suggested that I post about it someday. Here goes.
The exchange program was AFS, one of those organizations that annoy me simply by never spelling out their acronym anymore. The trip was 35 days long and split among time with two host families in different parts of Panama and time with the other students and our supervisors. There were many girls – I never learned all their names – but only four guys other than me, not counting Belgian supervisor Hugo (later nicknamed Juice, because a mispronunciation of his name equals the Spanish word for juice, jugo).
The most traumatic aspect of the trip was dealing with the other guys. I had no trouble befriending one of them – incidentally the one I considered my only match in Spanish skills among the students – but he got sick after he stepped in a bush and came out with a few hundred bug bites. In one way, that’s just as well; otherwise, two of us would have to share a bed at the third-class beach resort. But two of the other guys were already friends from school, and the other one rarely had any trouble being one of them. By the last week of the trip, I saw them as one guy with three bodies.
The first sign of trouble was when they swore that a particular girl had seen my lowers in the shower thru the little holes in the wall. My rational mind told me that this was impossible from the holes’ angle, and besides, why would she tell them about it? But my literal and morbidly curious mind got the better of me, and I wound up pissing her off by asking. I accused the liars of besmirching a woman’s name, and they said, "Besmirched? Is that Shakespeare?" (Actually, I learned it from "The Simpsons.")
The real turning point, however, was when they pressured me into drinking rum and coke until I got drunk, for the only time in my life. I’m not sure how drunk I really was on that less than three plastic cups’ full: I repeated myself a lot, but I was counting the number of times I repeated myself. Part of me enjoyed being drunk, thinking I could be as lousy as I wanted and get away with it, including the exclamation, "I wanna [expletive] all you women!" Another part of me wanted to show off my resistance to drink, so I used big words like "inebriated" and acknowledged that I was going to hate myself tomorrow. It’s too bad my friend Alex wasn’t there; he had long wanted to see how an uptight, reserved guy like me would act when drunk, and I wouldn’t do it again.
(The most interesting part to me was when I slipped and found myself amid shards of the lid on our bunk’s toilet tank. We didn’t let the manager or our supervisors know that I’d been drinking, but I claimed responsibility, even tho I had no memory of the crash. Hugo told me that the manager wanted to charge me something like $28, supposedly the full price of a toilet, because it’s hard to buy just the top of a toilet in rural Panama. We didn’t even know what to call that part. I would’ve found this very funny if I weren’t expected to pay. And you know, I don’t think I ever did; I think AFS handled that.)
If the mucho vomito, the lack of appetite, and the missed voyage down the river didn’t make me regret it, there was the fact that the three guys wouldn’t let me live it down. This was their idea of being friendly; after all, their friends didn’t let them live down drunk incidents. But from then on, I noticed far too often that they liked to make suggestions for things I didn’t want to do, with an implicit insult to my status quo. They gave me several nicknames, some of which they incorporated into their mocking activity of "freestyling," something I needed to rehearse before trying.
On perhaps our third-to-last day in Panama, I’d had it with them. I don’t feel like saying exactly what happened, but while nobody got hurt, I was exceptionally uncivilized. I’m just glad it didn’t happen sooner, or I don’t know how I’d get thru the rest of the trip.
One of my reasons for opting to go to Panama was the community service hours counting toward my high school graduation requirement. Our work including painting buildings, hacking vegetation (with machetes, to my boyish delight), planting trees in the rainforest, cleaning things up, and serving in a soup kitchen. I got some spattered paint on my clothes, care of Hugo, but I decided to wear the stains with pride from then on.
Not everything worked according to plan, of course. We once rode standing up in the back of trucks with bars to hold onto, getting rained on quite a bit. It was actually a strangely wonderful experience. Another time, not all the vehicles could make it, so – as I understand it, anyway – we relied partly on the kindness of strangers to take us to our destination. The boys rode in a care with two Americans. One asked where we were from, and when I said D.C., he said, "Oh, do you go to Wilson?"
…Who would’ve thought that a random stranger in Panama could guess my high school in one try?
Ah, the rainforest, my favorite biome. Here I saw black-bordered butterflies in all colors of the rainbow except green. A guide once caught a black frog with splotches of sky blue. The only exotic mammal I recall was the agouti, which didn’t hang around long enough for good observation.
The beach had its own wildlife. Aside from slightly invasive geckos and crickets, it taught me just how much crabs move forward and sideways and how quick they can be at the sight of danger. Panamanians had no trouble catching them with no special equipment. I recall a boy teasing one’s claw with his finger, and then it got a death grip on his shirt. Crabs can be cute.
Of course, not all creatures were so pleasant. I got so many bug bites I stopped caring, which is partly good because Deet was making my skin green. One of the girls’ bunks at the beach had about 300 dead ants after spraying. Later, I was glad to see that they weren’t the 1.5-inch variety forming huge hills and some of the mile-long parades in the forest.
One of the first things I was told before coming to Panama was how to deal with fruit. The rule was, "Peel it, boil it, cook it, or forget it." I generally adhered to that rule, but when a guide snatched some berries off a tree and offered them, I took one without consequence. I also quit doing special preparations with the rural water after a while, again without consequence.
There were two kinds of fruits in Panama that I had never heard of before and have not seen since. One was the pipa, a large yellow coconut-oid that suburban families would grow in their backyard to drink the milk. The other, whose name I forget, had a spiky shell and a thick pit, and in between was a goo that tasted like a peeled grape. I ate many of those and regret that they must not be easy to grow in or ship to the U.S.
More to come.
On the subject of earlier times, ever since I heard an estimate that we have a completely different set of cells every seven years, I've had a habit of thinking of how and where I was seven years ago. Right now, that puts me on my exchange trip to Panama in the summer before my 12th-grade school year.
I think it was Chirpasee who suggested that I post about it someday. Here goes.
The exchange program was AFS, one of those organizations that annoy me simply by never spelling out their acronym anymore. The trip was 35 days long and split among time with two host families in different parts of Panama and time with the other students and our supervisors. There were many girls – I never learned all their names – but only four guys other than me, not counting Belgian supervisor Hugo (later nicknamed Juice, because a mispronunciation of his name equals the Spanish word for juice, jugo).
The most traumatic aspect of the trip was dealing with the other guys. I had no trouble befriending one of them – incidentally the one I considered my only match in Spanish skills among the students – but he got sick after he stepped in a bush and came out with a few hundred bug bites. In one way, that’s just as well; otherwise, two of us would have to share a bed at the third-class beach resort. But two of the other guys were already friends from school, and the other one rarely had any trouble being one of them. By the last week of the trip, I saw them as one guy with three bodies.
The first sign of trouble was when they swore that a particular girl had seen my lowers in the shower thru the little holes in the wall. My rational mind told me that this was impossible from the holes’ angle, and besides, why would she tell them about it? But my literal and morbidly curious mind got the better of me, and I wound up pissing her off by asking. I accused the liars of besmirching a woman’s name, and they said, "Besmirched? Is that Shakespeare?" (Actually, I learned it from "The Simpsons.")
The real turning point, however, was when they pressured me into drinking rum and coke until I got drunk, for the only time in my life. I’m not sure how drunk I really was on that less than three plastic cups’ full: I repeated myself a lot, but I was counting the number of times I repeated myself. Part of me enjoyed being drunk, thinking I could be as lousy as I wanted and get away with it, including the exclamation, "I wanna [expletive] all you women!" Another part of me wanted to show off my resistance to drink, so I used big words like "inebriated" and acknowledged that I was going to hate myself tomorrow. It’s too bad my friend Alex wasn’t there; he had long wanted to see how an uptight, reserved guy like me would act when drunk, and I wouldn’t do it again.
(The most interesting part to me was when I slipped and found myself amid shards of the lid on our bunk’s toilet tank. We didn’t let the manager or our supervisors know that I’d been drinking, but I claimed responsibility, even tho I had no memory of the crash. Hugo told me that the manager wanted to charge me something like $28, supposedly the full price of a toilet, because it’s hard to buy just the top of a toilet in rural Panama. We didn’t even know what to call that part. I would’ve found this very funny if I weren’t expected to pay. And you know, I don’t think I ever did; I think AFS handled that.)
If the mucho vomito, the lack of appetite, and the missed voyage down the river didn’t make me regret it, there was the fact that the three guys wouldn’t let me live it down. This was their idea of being friendly; after all, their friends didn’t let them live down drunk incidents. But from then on, I noticed far too often that they liked to make suggestions for things I didn’t want to do, with an implicit insult to my status quo. They gave me several nicknames, some of which they incorporated into their mocking activity of "freestyling," something I needed to rehearse before trying.
On perhaps our third-to-last day in Panama, I’d had it with them. I don’t feel like saying exactly what happened, but while nobody got hurt, I was exceptionally uncivilized. I’m just glad it didn’t happen sooner, or I don’t know how I’d get thru the rest of the trip.
One of my reasons for opting to go to Panama was the community service hours counting toward my high school graduation requirement. Our work including painting buildings, hacking vegetation (with machetes, to my boyish delight), planting trees in the rainforest, cleaning things up, and serving in a soup kitchen. I got some spattered paint on my clothes, care of Hugo, but I decided to wear the stains with pride from then on.
Not everything worked according to plan, of course. We once rode standing up in the back of trucks with bars to hold onto, getting rained on quite a bit. It was actually a strangely wonderful experience. Another time, not all the vehicles could make it, so – as I understand it, anyway – we relied partly on the kindness of strangers to take us to our destination. The boys rode in a care with two Americans. One asked where we were from, and when I said D.C., he said, "Oh, do you go to Wilson?"
…Who would’ve thought that a random stranger in Panama could guess my high school in one try?
Ah, the rainforest, my favorite biome. Here I saw black-bordered butterflies in all colors of the rainbow except green. A guide once caught a black frog with splotches of sky blue. The only exotic mammal I recall was the agouti, which didn’t hang around long enough for good observation.
The beach had its own wildlife. Aside from slightly invasive geckos and crickets, it taught me just how much crabs move forward and sideways and how quick they can be at the sight of danger. Panamanians had no trouble catching them with no special equipment. I recall a boy teasing one’s claw with his finger, and then it got a death grip on his shirt. Crabs can be cute.
Of course, not all creatures were so pleasant. I got so many bug bites I stopped caring, which is partly good because Deet was making my skin green. One of the girls’ bunks at the beach had about 300 dead ants after spraying. Later, I was glad to see that they weren’t the 1.5-inch variety forming huge hills and some of the mile-long parades in the forest.
One of the first things I was told before coming to Panama was how to deal with fruit. The rule was, "Peel it, boil it, cook it, or forget it." I generally adhered to that rule, but when a guide snatched some berries off a tree and offered them, I took one without consequence. I also quit doing special preparations with the rural water after a while, again without consequence.
There were two kinds of fruits in Panama that I had never heard of before and have not seen since. One was the pipa, a large yellow coconut-oid that suburban families would grow in their backyard to drink the milk. The other, whose name I forget, had a spiky shell and a thick pit, and in between was a goo that tasted like a peeled grape. I ate many of those and regret that they must not be easy to grow in or ship to the U.S.
More to come.
