¡Panamá!

Monday dawned. There was sun. It was warm and dry. After thirteen winters in Pennsylvania and the likelihood of spending the rest of my winters north of the frost line, I will never again take such a beginning to the day for granted.

We took off a bit late but none the worse for it.

The Cardona Lube Center of Bribri

Roadside diesel service

The first surprise came fifteen minutes past the border with Panama, when we pulled into the police-slash-military checkpoint. We had gotten the vehicle fumigated ($) and our passports stamped ($) and any goods cleared by customs ($), but we were now informed that we hadn’t paid the municipal border crossing tax. It seems that now as of a few months ago, we were supposed to get a stamp on our passports issued by the municipality or county for the vehicle ($) and for each occupant ($). The same agent who castigated us before sending us back waved us through with a big smile when we returned, so we looked at the whole incident as a bad mosquito bite.

Little house in the big woods

Little house number two (as it were) in the woods. Air-conditioned comfort.

David’s bush house was in order, so after an hour or so of lunch and setup he began work with Benicio.

Benicio

After dinner we worked well into the night on a thorny problem with his verb system: what do –kä and –te mean? (There are another dozen and a half examples of the same structure.)

Base	Gloss	Base + kä (‘high’?) [Utter change of state or location?]	Base + te (‘inside’?) [Temporary change of state or location?]
mäke	tie (rope around the neck of free animal)	hang (animal already tied up)	tie (leashed/collared animal to post)
	make a bundle	suspend (tie ends to something)	bind bundle
	lash poles together to make one long pole	suspend	lash (rafters to ridge pole)
mete	hit	?spread out (dead) animals (on ground)	untangle (tangled leash of an animal)
	hit	spread out (grains to dry)	untie (tied sack)
täke	shoot (with projectile)	line up (e.g., people or animals for beginning of race)	kick
		line up (old cloth, leaves, etc., by hanging [to make enclosure])

Did you figure it out? Neither did we.

It rained much of the afternoon, but it cleared up enough around sunset for me to go down to the river for a wash, where I was joined by a boy of about fifteen from the hamlet in the holler below David’s house. I found out later that the reason he didn’t say anything to me was that he was mute, but we smiled at each other and enjoyed the river.

Bush Breakfast: Beef ’n Beans Enrique

Erasmo came shortly after breakfast on Tuesday and David worked with him through the morning while I crammed yet some more for the linguistic teaching I’m supposed to be doing next week.

Erasmo in action

Wednesday we spent most of the day asking Erasmo more questions about the verbs and eventually had to give up. Then we transcribed a text about three men who were swept away from their house in a banana plantation by a flood not long ago and looked at ways to get such information as definitions into a database.

After sundown we went down into the holler to visit the family of the mute fellow who had joined me at the river. David was able to converse easily in Guaymí, so there wasn’t any Spanish for me to try to follow except for “veinte años” and “Papua Nueva Guinea.” So I just looked around and compared what I could see to what I remember from Papua New Guinea. PNGans would have been sitting on the ground; these folks sat on a bench and offered us hammocks. Much of the framing of the house was sawn timber, which might also be the case with PNGans near major roads. Papua New Guineans would have insisted that we stay until they could offer us food; these folks gave us a dozen pejavayes (oil palm nuts) to take home and cook. All in all it was a good visit.

Pejavaye on the hoof. The tree is like the coconut palm to the left except much higher and covered with thorns. Some distance from where I was standing there was a large crowd of people watching a daredevil climb one of the trees and harvest the nuts. I didn’t realize the significance of the event until after we’d driven off.

Thursday morning Erasmo shows up, and after checking with David to make sure I had the right preposition (I wasn’t even close) and that asking would be polite (it would), I asked Erasmo “¿Está lista para trabajar?” (“Are you ready for work?”) He smiled and said he was, at which point I realized I’d used the form for addressing the question to a female. After I’d corrected myself, David noted that Erasmo may not have noticed the error, since Guaymí conversations don’t do much with gender (or even number), so Guaymís are constantly making mistakes with gender in Spanish.

So near to Timbuktu, yet so far . . .

We spent Friday morning brushing up the transcription of the story and looking at the verb system. Then it was time to pack up to come back, leaving Erasmo in Changuinola, where his wife had been in the hospital the whole time he had been working with us. 

It was good to get back to Costa Rica. Not only did they not charge us to cross the border, they provided us with some humor.

Another sign said (quote),

attetion:

complete form both
inputs and outputs the
country a person or
national extrageras

If you think that’s funny, you should hear me speak Spanish.

Anyway, we made it home. I didn’t fall into anything I’m allergic to or catch any other bugs. I move to Timothy’s place on Sunday and begin work on Monday at 8am sharp. (I’m not sure if that’s hora gringa because I’ll be with a gang of expats or hora latina because they’ve all been in Costa Rica a long time.) I think I’ve got a good curriculum planned for the folks there, certainly a better one than I had when I left Lansdale.

So I'm almost halfway done and still grateful for the opportunity so many people have given me to be here, especially as Ginny tells me how much winter you’ve been given to enjoy. Thank you for your prayers for me, and may God bless you as you serve him there!