In this country, often challenged by forward planning, getting ready for the November holidays seems to be a notable exception.  In the land where just about everything is delayed, holidays never are - they always happen on time.   Panamanians are deadly serious when it comes to getting ready for a big noisy party.

Every morning the streets are blocked by the practicing marching bands.   There are drums and xylophones in taxis, sitting at the super market checkouts and waiting at bus stops.    There are young men practicing bugle calls when you least expect to hear them, mostly on evenings and weekends.  Unfamiliar with these customs and in the sleepy early mornings or late at night, I have found myself for a split second thinking there was a fox hunt nearby or civil war re-inactment in town.  In fact it was little Johnny (Juanito) up the street practicing.

We are not exempt.  We have being doing a bit of practicing all of our own.  In our case it is all about the hair arrangements. Unlike everyone else in this town we don't know how to put in the hair ornaments which consist of 28 pearl ornaments and three gold combs.    One of Beatrice's school friends aunt makes them and today she came to vist and we got our brand new set.  Big thank you to Tia Lourdes, we are very happy with our new look.

They are made to symbolize different animals such as turkeys, butterflies, scorpions and any number of different types of flowers.    There is a technique and an order to it, Tia Lourdes has even made a video to explain the process.  You start with the combs and stack the rest in from there, use an awful lot of hair spray and plenty of bobby pins.  

We will be ready, yes we will.    

As the owner of a small farm, you get a little taste of government.  You are the welfare state, the health service, the central bank and little bit of mum and dad all in one delightfully convenient package.  I have learnt my lesson not to ask so many questions about why no singing from the garden, why the long faces, what is wrong - opens up a can of worms.  

First request of the week, a bail out.  For all those of you investing in cooperative schemes, listen up.    Our little expanding village with lots of nice little new houses for local people is largely funded by loans.   These loans in the past were small ones given usually by small cooperative banks that working men and women belong to.   One of the terms of these loans was that they should be exclusive because they lent to the limit that an individual could afford.   

What appears to have happened to one of our workers, was that he has taken on other debt.   There were no checks that he was already leveraged to the hilt.  These financiers have persuaded men,  Latinos, of very limited means to take out loans they don't understand and can not pay back.   When they don't pay, their houses can be re-possessed and they loose the little they have.   Sounds horribly familiar and if you thought that double digit growth for this small country was unrealistic - in my opinion, it is and is fueled by credit.   

Worse, the agricultural worker Latino man in Panama mostly has little idea of what it means to be deliver on a commitment such as a bank loan or debt.  If you want stuff you have to work hard and pay for it.  That is the devils deal, take it or leave it.  This equation, the rules of the capitalism, and the stress that goes with that are far from understood here.   Here paternal employment laws and an almost feudal system mean workers are very unprepared for these responsibilities and are way too easy going.

The request, I am not sure I fully understood as it was in Spanish, but I think I was asked to take on the bank loan and in turn deduct from salary.   To take on the risk and the responsibility for another adults decisions.    Even the request for my help was half hearted, poorly prepared and disorganized, a lazy and rather sad and very naive request given the importance of the issue.  More so in the light of the fact that I had already made a very small loan a few weeks ago, and the attempt to pay this back with overtime work has been less than impressive.     

Thank goodness for the second request of the day from another worker on the farm, our Indigenous family:  Could he please take some of the spare wood from pruning the coffee up to his church for a camp fire picnic on Sunday and might he borrow a wheel barrow after work for an evening to take it 3 miles up the road in the rain.      

God bless him, his family and the church and this happy ending to a week of requests.  We gave him and the wood a ride up to the church this evening and are keeping our fingers crossed for good weather for the picnic on Sunday.   There is some hope.   


 

In the next life, I want to come back as a bee and be fed in a swimming pool of sugar solution with a life boat thrown in to prevent drowning.

It is raining hard, there are fewer flowers than any other month and its time to feed the bees and check that the girl friends are doing OK.    

Life on the finca is pretty marvelous for bees, even in this difficult month.  There was honey in the hives and worker bees coming back with pollen all over their legs.  Although we did not see the Queen, her activity in the brood cell department was delightful to witness.  Very healthy little colonies with big hopes for summer honey production.

We fed the girl friends some sugar solution for good measure, to tide them through the next few weeks.  My bee partner uses a great little swimming pool system for feeding.    Forget those fancy upside down feeders.   Here, my friends, we use  bee sized swimming pools with sticks thrown in as bee life boats.   

Seems to work great, and in this life time at least,  one can only imagine how fun it must be to be a honey bee swimming and feeding at the same time in sugar nectar 

 

Mangosteen are my favorite fruit.  Never tasted before living here and now slave to them.   Sometimes,  I get lucky on Tuesdays.  Today, I peeled the pink husks, sucked the seeds and enjoyed the wonderful flavor for the last time this year.  

My friend in the market brought me a little bag from his tree.   He says it is the last for another year.    Some people say they are not so good here in Chiriqui and the best ones come from Costa Rica.  My friends tree is an exception.  They are really out of this world.  Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

A good weekend despite being let down by a horse truck that failed to show up when I had two employees two horses and hours of work tied up on a Sunday;  Being told a story that the phone I purchased for a new worker was lost on the bus on Saturday night; And still more illegal blatant gardening going on by the river with no intervention from local officials charged with oversight.  

If I had a $ for every time I have been let down or shafted in this country, I would be a millionaire multiple times over.     The timing is always exquisite and no life event is immune.  Usually, you are left in the lurch when it is most critical or dangerous, never on pay days, sunny days, or when there are options.   The majority of locals here are very charming, they just don't seem to care much about you or your well-being,  unless you are family.  I am fairly confident the pain is shared and felt by almost all Panamanians as well. 

The problem for me is really not being let down in a serial fashion.  It is that I am becoming a little arrogant and smug and in danger of becoming elitist.   

It is a question of trust and integrity.  To be trusted, to have integrity,  is to be able to sleep very well at night, to fear no man and influence many.  Relying on family ties is awfully limiting, even if you have six 'wives', a hundred children and a thousand cousins.   

Oddly, I have no real problem with being shafted, cheated and let down, it has on the contrary been rather affirming.  Knowledge is power and it is fun playing this little game of life, quietly confident I have the winning hand for me.   The challenge is staying humble, so hard.

Soon we should have oodles of butterflies, for now we are crawling with caterpillars.

Big fat hairy green ones in the guava trees, black and blue prickly ones crawling around the terrace and a brown and red bumpy one on my bedroom window screen and clusters of black ones traveling in convoy up the driveway.

We have been battling caterpillars in the garden, on the fruit trees and close to the house.  The girls can not go in their favorite climbing trees, no wondering outside with no shoes and spraying some of them with dishwashing soap.  Certain types are poisonous others not.  The problem is I do not know which.

Mañana butterflies.

Look who is hiding in the lilly pond. 

Our first coffee is ripening, it is pretty early and not much of it. 

This is a hand wheel pulping machine.  If you need to process more coffee you can mechanize it with a motor.    We remove the red skins of the coffee before drying the beans.   The skins make great compost.