the hissing came across four lanes of traffic.

it was a sunday afternoon and i was walking down the central avenue holding my umbrella like a shield. my safeguard, youthfully decorated by mint colored hearts, was making its best attempt to deflect rain droplets that were being carried wayward by a southeast wind.

unfortunately, my paraguas couldn’t do me the same favor when it came to catcalls.

hsssssssss.

i made the grave mistake of turning to look. i found four firemen, one feverishly violating the air gyrating his hips as he gripped on to his invisible temptress as if to say, “hey baby, you’re next.”

swoon.

WHAT?!!! WHAT?!!! i spat back waving my hands. this was not my day.

the four adult men nervously glanced at each other uncertain of how to proceed. i turned around and found about fifteen people staring at me awaiting the next bus. i smiled genteelly and gave a cautious wave as if to say, “really, i’m not usually like this.” i would like to say i felt better after blowing off some steam, but i did not. i felt agitated and angry, but as often happens with volunteers, the mantra of “oh, that’s just the culture” was licked by a general feeling of, “hey buddy, screw you”. after less than a month in my site, i have been called princessa so many times that i am beginning to think it’s my actual name. 

if this was the states...

if this was the states.... an oft repeated statement by many a peace corps volunteer. if this was the states, i would be eating chocolate coated sushi washed down by a generous mug of beer while taking a hot shower and reading the new york times. if this was the states, i would have called up the fire department and filed a formal complaint. But this isn’t the states, and so i am to aguantar all of these cultural peccadillos i encounter with as much patience and courage as i can muster.

my sitemate, jake, is decidedly cool. he is from california, wears skinny jeans, and smokes cigarettes. 

“oh, yeah. you’ll get catcalled. female volunteers say that this is the worst place for it in the country”, he informed me between deeply inhaled drags.

jake explained that even women catcall here. that they were coquetas. my host mom, a 72 year old women that lumbers around in house coats, was transformed into a puddle of goo when jake walked through her front door. she unabashedly flirted with him, and even playfully patted him on the bottom. jake’s eyes opened wide clearly shocked, but tickled by the novelty of the situation. while for him flirtations from the opposite sex are empowering, or at the least, entertaining, for me they feel threatening even if this is not their intent. this is not to say that every time a guy whistles at me i think he is going to run across the road and violar me. it is more that i resent being made to feel “this way”.

and so how is it that i feel when this happens? what is “that way” for any male wondering who has assailed an unsuspecting woman crossing the street in rush hour traffic with some derogatory comment?

i feel scared. i feel disrespected. i feel compromised... oversimplified... objectified.

last week i was ambling down the road to a store when up ahead i saw a group of men constructing a house. needless to say, i was outnumbered. i carefully considered my options. was there an alternate route i could take? did i really need to go to the store that badly? i like to think of myself as a fairly confident women, but i was reduced to a skittish mess as i tried to avoid impending harassment. i put on an act like i often do and scurried past them, my nose shoved into a book i feigned reading not noticing the upside down text in front of my face. the whistles came anyways despite my greatest efforts at achieving invisibility.

i wonder how these advances serve their perpetrators. is it a way of demonstrating male bravado to fellow comrades in a sort of assertion of alpha male-dom? maybe. is it how they bond? possibly. do women ever stop, or maybe even hiss back? not that i’ve seen.

i remember reading eat, pray, love by elizabeth gilbert and her expressing shock at the dearth of sexual advances by strangers in italy. according to gilbert, italian men, who were renown the world over for their jeers, somehow got the memo that this was not acceptable, and that some women really don’t appreciate unsolicited comments by desconocidos. she also talked about how she felt that maybe she was missing out on something having arrived following the culmination of the italian version of, “hey baby!”. 

maybe i will miss the whistles when i leave this place, or when i past whatever that benchmark age is and am no longer considered palatable, digestable, consumable by the majority of men. i celebrated my 28th birthday last week and found for the first time i was really considering my age and becoming older in a culture that worships youth and vitality, especially among women. what happens further down the road? do i just become less and less attractive with each page removed from the calendar? or attractive, but just to my partner? where do we fit in the larger scale of beauty as we age? is it “all downhill from here” as people often say? 

my style here is decidedly matronly, that’s for sure, which make the catcalls all the more surprising. it’s kind of like what i would presume a nun wears on a weekday. it’s sort of missionary/librarian sheik: ankle grazing skirts, hair pulled back in a bun, and purplish framed glasses that i spend a good portion of my day pushing up the bridge of my nose in a futile battle versus incessant perspiration. 

much of the moda for women in panama is overtly sexual not taking into consideration age nor body type. the tighter, the brighter, the better. women often take great pride in their physical appearance and there is something to be said for that. feminist notions of beauty have called into question women’s tendency to fixate on physical appearance. is dressing overtly sexual a symbol of liberation, a sort of scantily clad bodily declaration of independence, or just another example of being under the thumb of misogyny? at what point is beauty no longer something we radiate and have dominion over and instead becomes more about indulging a consumer based society that dictates to us what value we have based on superficialities? maybe it is simply up to every individual woman and where she divines to draw the line between being feminine and being anti-feminist.

last week i took a trip to santa catalina, a surf town on the coast, and met a couple of men who were environmental lawyers from the norway. both grew up in a country pointed to as a paragon for gender equality. after a leisurely savored bottle of red wine, differences between men and women came up and one of them remarked that he felt as though in the field of development in latin america, much energy had been focused on women. very true. and that, he didn’t understand why this was so. uh-huh. given that women were already liberated here. huh. 

apparently i was the one who hadn’t gotten the memo this time. 

true, women in latin america do not wear burkhas, and women in the states can, in theory, pursue most any career field we choose, but we are still fettered by cultures that often see us as the weaker sex. it is easier to see the more overt signs of women’s progress in the fight for equality, but all of the subtleties, all of the nuances that exist within a cultural and societal framework are really what constitutes the daily experience for both genders. they often are immeasurable in statistics, but are really where our realities and stories lie. 

this is my story...

everyday a small part of me struggles to understand why things are the way they are and how i can change them to create a space that prioritizes equality over power.

this is our story...

• women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property.
• two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls, and 75% of the world's 876 million illiterate adults are women.
• of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70% are women

for more information, visit the following:

www.worldbank.org/genderinag

más para allá

i met josé torres in the back of a pick up on the interamericana.

he was headed home and i was returning from visiting a local school garden. i had been liberated from the office where i spent a tedious week reviewing documents and not even the approaching menacing clouds could dampen my high.

he smiled curiously as if to say, “girl, who hit you with the happy stick?”, and i shrugged back knowing any explanation i tried formulating would just end up sounding silly. josé, turns out, is the director of a local school. his stooped posture that seemed to be accustomed to ducking through low doorways, only served to accentuate his tall agile frame. he smiled easily and without hesitation. a few stray hairs marked his upper lip, a paltry attempt of a mustache making him look even younger than his 27 years. he pointed to a distant mountain top lined with pines.

that’s Cañazas.

Cañazas. i repeated it in my head as i tend to do any new word trying my best to commit it to memory letting it ruminate like a stew in a crockpot. he told me about the communities struggles and they sounded all too familiar: isolated. poor. no work.

i nodded knowingly and felt my heart sink hearing a song that for me never got old and always had the same effect.

“i would like to visit your community.” josé smiled, but tentatively and gave me a sideways glance.

“¿Le gusta caminar?"... do you like to walk?

my response would best translate as the following: “oh my god! are you kidding me?! i love walking! walking is my favorite!!!”

this is no joke. walking for me is the most natural thing, and in a sense sometimes courageous thing to do. often that simple action of putting one foot in front of the other is the only thing to be done to mitigate feelings of resignation. for me, walking is exploring and it implies moving toward something, some sort of destination.

finishing francis moore lappé’s book, hope’s edge, i found myself dogearing a page for its simple yet poignant words spoken by a member of the Green Belt Movement, an organization jump starting reforestation efforts in kenya.

“The most important thing is that I know where I want to go - and that I just keep walking.”

the quote conjured feelings of both envy, and accord. i knew it was true even though my life looked more like a distressing game of chutes and ladders than steady footprints marking one’s path.

my effervescent response seemed to mitigate any hesitation and we made plans: i would meet him monday morning at 5:00 am at the bus terminal. come sunday morning, however, the glow of approaching adventure had started to wane and i called up my counterpart, bonilla, at the organization i was working with...

every peace corps volunteer is assigned a counterpart, a person to be a guide and help them in work and often in community life as well. for the most part, i was getting along okay interpreting what others were saying in the panamanian accent, but bonilla’s words seemed to run into each other. he could be a bit obtuse and teetered somewhere on a pinnacle leering from side to side between endearing and irritating. he spent most meetings admiring ceiling tiles and i watched him from across the room marveling at how he bumped along, his good humor often compensating for a lack of professional savvy. still, he was my go to man and gave me the go ahead informing me that bolivar, an instructor from the organization, would be headed to the community as well.

we took a bus, a chiva, until the road seemed to trail off and so did the rest of the passengers. we hopped off and found ourselves facing a path painted the familiar red tone that seems ubiquitous in the region: great for making clay pots, but shit for planting.

turns out we would not be walking, but riding horses out to the community.

“¿sabe montar caballo?”... do you know how to ride a horse?

well, let’s see... i quickly racked my brain trying to remember if i ever had really ridden a horse before, but the only thing that came to mind was a photo of me on a carousel with pigtails cerca ’87.

“what’s the horse’s name?” i figured that if we were on a first name basis than maybe we would have a better chance of getting along.

“cholera.”

“cholera?”, i questioned. “like the sickness?”

“sí”, josé responded without the slightest hint of irony.

i waited for what i thought would be some sort of explanation, but all i got was a shrug. i shrugged back and hopped on what i decided would be my noble steed. the ride was nothing short of gorgeous. we spent three hours winding through open fields dotted with cows, fording rivers à la oregon trail, and galloping down mountainsides.

“do you know how to saloom?”, josé questioned.

before i could respond, he let out a cry resembling something like the yelp of a chucho getting nailed in the backside by a bus. the wail came back in what i took to be an echo, but was actually a response from the next mountaintop over.

so here i was 2 weeks in country horseback riding through the hills of panama, screaming like a banshee, and loving every minute of it. as soon as josé let out his cry i would let out a residual wallop of a hoot answered by an unknown stranger somewhere in the distance.

eventually my enthusiasm became less punctuated as battle cries gave way to a sore behind. for the first time in my life, i found myself wishing for some extra cushioning to help dull the throbbing pain that got worse with every rock cholera stumbled upon. luckily before long, the school came into view marking our arrival.

the communities i worked with in guatemala were decidedly rural and markedly more isolated than anything i had experienced in the states. still, they seemed to always have access to soda and junk food that left local children with smiles of rotting pegs, and rust colored hair. their crumbling teeth and small stature were often a disheartening reminder of malnutrition plaguing the community. i assumed that in panama i would find similar circumstances in the campo, but was surprised to see little chiclets of white shyly greeting me upon my arrival. turns out Cañazas is so isolated that there is no junk food. there is also no electricity aside from inside the school building which operates on a solar panel. Cañazas is by far the most isolated community i have ever set foot in and over the next few days i got to see how this unveiled itself in daily life.

for better or worse.

i have read anthropological accounts of communities in far flung places like bhutan struggling with establishing equilibrium between tradition and so-called “modernity”, and this is as close as i have ever gotten to seeing this manifested in real form. my stay was brief, a mere few days. feigning any sort of in-depth understanding would be in poor form, but certain things about the diurnal reality of Cañazas became apparent through observations and conversations i had.

the population fluctuates somewhere between 60 and 70 depending on the season. men often go to work on fincas near the coast to make cash for their families, but for the most part Cañazas is an island unto itself surviving, struggling, and in many ways thriving in accordance to elements beyond their control.

namely, nature.

that brute of a thing that many of us have spent the last few hundred years trying to tame as opposed to establishing a reciprocal relationship with. nature: our attempt to emulate god and control the uncontrollable. it wasn’t as though the people in Cañazas had made a conscious decision to work with the elements, but their circumstances made it a necessity.

through the school’s front gate strode a woman, her face delicately framed with purple rimmed glasses, professionally dressed despite her decidedly modest surroundings. this was elisabeth, the other teacher working in the local school. like most teachers in panama, she was not from the community, but had been assigned to work there by the department of education. she and josé occupied a small mud house on the school’s grounds separated into two separate rooms by a thin and unconvincing wall. i had spent 5 minutes in Cañazas and had been diminished to a pool of sweat while elisabeth had been there for the last two years and was a breath of fresh air. easily careening from one conversation and person to the next, she was an ebullient presence managing to uphold much of latin american’s reverence for dressing to the nines, a cultural affirmation of personal dignity that i had never really quite picked up on.

bolivar, an instructor for my host country agency who had been working with Cañazas to establish an agricultural group, was there as well. i had met him once before and felt i had found a fast friend. he was ambitious, intuitive, and spoke with passion and a sense of purpose about local agriculture.

not only were teachers there, but parents, too. mothers were busy in the kitchen preparing lunch and parents were working out in the school garden harvesting a local variety of bean called barbachoa. this was less of a school and more of a community gathering point. as students finished lunch i expected them to head home, but instead found that neighbors seemed to fluctuate in and out of the school grounds into the wee hours of the night. the fence surrounding the property seemed less for keeping people out, and more of a relic that someone had built on a whim, the gate wavering in the wind like a surrender flag at the end of a particularly harsh battle.

as the sun set, about 30 people of all ages settled into a classroom with a television mounted on the rear wall. both adults and children enjoyed an animated feature about a polar bear named berni as he went head to head with a bow tie adorned penguin in sports including tae kwon do, tennis, golf, and paragliding. i wondered as i laid sprawled out on the floor in the tropical heat at the novelty of the situation. i, a young woman from the united states, was watching something that was at least somewhat familiar to me by virtue of the place i grew up in. granted, i had never actually seen a polar bear ice skating or a penguin for that matter, but the context wasn’t completely lost on me. i wondered what it would be like to see something for the first time; to see something with fresh eyes that hadn’t been inundated with so many things that even a 3D imax blockbuster produced little more than a ho hum yawn. i contemplated the appeal of it: the colors, the images, the laughter it conjured and understood what it was like to be enraptured by the stark outlandishness of material display.

to be blunt, the polar bear was cool. probably cooler and sexier than any garden could ever be. but such is my toil: making vegetables sexy.

i made my best attempt giving a couple of nutrition talks to both parents and students. all of their questions seemed to point toward the fact that they, too, were struggling with figuring out how encroaching globalization could be processed. the palpable changes were like dandelions spreading through a garden patch. like these surly flowers/weeds, it is hard to decide if you should let them do their thing, or take a machete and lop their heads off. they are not intrinsically bad, and in fact can be quite useful. it’s just that left to their own devices, they tend to choke out some of the more feeble, yet noble plants.

what about food in cans? is that food good for us?

when we travel to the city, we see lots of “propaganda” for mcdonalds. is this healthy food?

the government has been sending us dehydrated rice and beans from brazil to feed our children. many of them do not like it. why are we getting food all the way from brazil? is food from there better for us?

i chatted with parents about daily life and found much to admire. it was a community in the sense of a physical place, but also as a living breathing entity. when there was rice to be harvested, or a home to be built, everyone helped. they depended on each other. the value of human life was upheld over the value of the market, because for them the market was something peripheral that they only entered occasionally and when need be.

elisabeth had formerly worked as a teacher in a private school in panama city, but found herself despite no electricity, despite the isolation, happier in Cañazas. maybe in fact it wasn’t despite all these things, but because of them and the sense of community they have fostered. the niños, she said, were cooperadores. they were “cooperators”.

there was no doubt that Cañazas was a humble place and one that i could see my mother visiting and describing as, gulp, an “experience”... sort of akin to reading russian literature. it may do us some good, but it would be much preferable to be seated in our climate controlled fluffy homes flipping through people magazine.

as people in Cañazas struggle with globalization, so de we all. determining daily through the products we buy, the technologies we use, and the homes we live in, where we fall on the spectrum of humanity that ranges from the most modest homes built from earth to lavish palaces that are less functional and more a display of personal accumulation. the difference is that Cañazas does not have much say in the matter, but most of us have a bit more poetic license to design our lives filtering in and out what we choose.

so cheers to the good life, and all its implicit responsibilities. we've earned it.