Gardens and Car Trips and Potlucks, Oh My

Giddy moment as I'm sitting here thinking about all things Panama... ONLY 2 WEEKS TO GO!!!!!!!!!!! Its so hard to believe that we have already completed 3 weeks of classes, with just 2 to go before leaving the country. As this trip countdown continues, the surrealism of the situation continues to blow me away. When I try to picture how my life will be in Panama, the more uncertain I become. My mind cannot seem to reconcile normal things such as homework, reading, papers, etc with everything Panama will have to offer. I keep trying to imagine reading a book and glancing out the window at the rainforest, or contemplating a history paper I have to write while watching the Shaman perform a healing ritual.... What will it be like to be a student, a researcher, a teacher, a traveler, an adventurer, an apprentice, and a tourist all in one? Soon enough, we'll all find out...

This past week has been filled to the brim with reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic [not so much] (The 3R's of education anyone?). Sorry about that, I had a moment when I started to list reading and writing as large time commitments from the past week. As I was saying, last week caused me to experience how life must be for majors which require different types of homework than what I am used to. Being a Biology major, who is much more adapted to spending 10 hours in lab before writing a lab report than having a 10 hour reading marathon before drafting multiple analytical essays, I can definitely say I am gaining an appreciation for everyone who has spent their entire college careers doing these kinds of things. It is interesting to look back on it and see how different people have felt about the homework load. On one hand, most of the Bio majors seemed to share similiar sentiments as myself; a bit shell shocked by alot of work that reminds us more of our distant high school past than of our current college career (note to Joey and Ashlee: I used a semicolon and thought of you guys. Thanks for helping me define this mysterious, yet awesome, punctuation mark). On the other hand, the more reading intensive majors likely found last week to be normative and even quite easy (note: I did not verify this by actually asking). Either way I have really come to enjoy the mixture of majors in my classes, not only for the different perspectives that they bring to class conversations and activities, but also for the awesome individuals that compose them.

On Wednesday night, our Panama group had a potluck dinner. Overall, it was a pretty good night. I ended up making a fruit salad, and added my dish to the many other tasty foods lining Chad's kitchen counter. I think I must have tried a little bit of almost every dish, and I can confidentally say that I am proud of our group's cooking skills; It wasn't too bad for a bunch of stressed college students who had a paper due the next afternoon. The night involved lots of talking and story telling in addition to the good food. A few of Chad's particularily graphic tales of snake bites will forever have me looking at the Magruder snakes with a bit of a weary eye.

The highlight of my week was most definitely my group's trip (minus Traci, recent survivor of the MCAT) to the Botanical Gardens in Saint Louis. Joey, Ashlee, and I awoke bright eyed and bushy tailed at 4:30 am Friday morning and loaded into a car to make the 3 hour trip to Saint Louis. After spending these three hours rocking out to whatever Joey's ipod had to offer, some Glee (!!), we arrived at the Monsanto Building to meet with Mary Mcnamara, the woman I have been corresponding with over the past week. She greeted us with a friendly smile (a theme of the day) and handed us our research visitor passes. These passes were pretty awesome as they got us into basically any building we wanted for free. After treking across the Garden grounds, which were pretty beautiful considering the time of year, we made it to the Lehmann Building. Upon entering this building we were greeted by even more friendly people who seemed to be waiting for our arrival. Since Tom Croat, the Panamanian flora curator whom we were there to speak with, was busy interviewing applicants we spent some time with Mary Merello. Mary was a very nice and interesting woman who had recently spent some time in Panama collecting specimens. She started off by showing us how they store their pressed samples. The photo on the right gives an idea for the sheer magnitude of the number of specimens contained in this building. These shelves are organized by family, country, etc etc, with Panama samples having its own organizational marker, due to how much focus there has been in the country since the construction of the canal. These numerous red shelves were motorized to compress together, eliminating the aisle, for the easy/compact storage. The storage/organizational system employed here was very impressive, and the room full of dried plants gave off a nice aroma. Mary tried her best to give us some guidance for our project, since we are still trying to find out how to narrow our focus. She was able to give us some recommendations on useful books and let us borrow her copies for a few hours.

A bit later Tom was finally free to speak with us. As was made apparent by his calloused fingers and excited aura, Tom was a man who had spent his life following his passion for plants. He has spent over 5 collective years in Panama, and is the world's foremost Panamanian plant collector. It was amazing speaking with a man who clearly loved his work. From pulling multiple books off of the shelves to speaking animatedly about anything we could think of, Tom was more than willing to help us in any way possible. After speaking to Tom and Mary I definitely feel much better about our project having more of a direction.

After leaving the Lehmann Building, following a tasty lunch at a 'green' restaurant, we headed back over to the Monsanto Building to visit the Garden's library. This library was amazing! As nerdy as it sounds, I was quite enamored with this place. It was not particularily large, but it contained a massive amount of books stored in a similar 'aisle compression' fashion as the plant samples. The best part of this library was the Rare Book room. We lucked out in being in the library when we were. As soon as we settled down to start our search, a couple of staff members requested to see the Rare Book room, and the librarian offered to let us go in with them. We accepted without a second thought and entered the room. She took us around the two tables set up in the center of the room, opening each book on display to show us the ever changing print and illustrations. The first book we saw was in Latin from the 1400s and was about farming practices. As we went around the tables, we got to learn about how old fashioned printing and illustrating worked. Did you know that each illustration in a book was at one point hand painted and text was once the result of needing to carve a wooden text block for each page of the text!? We also found out that books were often ordered via subscription, a few pages at a time sent to the person who could choose to bind them all together if they wanted. I could probably ramble on and on about all the stuff that we found out... This room held me in awe the entire time we were in there. Basically, our Botanical Gardens experience was pretty wonderful all around. It probably goes without saying that I'm even more excited for our project, and ready to work on it ASAP.

Ah, I have definitely rambled on for much longer than I originally intended and I must get back to reading.... Until next time

Reading, Reading, and, Oh Hey, Even More Reading

We have just completed Week 2 of our semester, and the major theme of this week has been a massive amount of reading material. From a nightly chapter in Born In Blood and Fire, to the entire book: Open Veins of Latin America, to the 5 JINS articles (each of which is at least 10 pages long), I do not find myself in short supply of reading material (as I'm still in the midst of reading most of these). The biggest issue I have faced this week would probably be my ever present mental battle with procrastination. While I love reading and learning about history politics, etc., I always find it difficult to sit down and read when I know that I have so much to go through. Its always ironic that I choose to put off things that take a lot of effort, in the end leaving only a day or two to get them done. Looks like I'll have to work on this and, for now, break out my ever faithful cramming skills... I don't know where I'd be without them!

One major obstacle that gets in the way of doing assigned readings, is the readings that I've been accumulating for my project (a topic which I find terribly fascinating). On Monday night, I spent a couple of hours browsing Mobius to see what I could find. The result of this literature adventure was me requesting over 10 books on topics which range from how to collect and preserve plants, to how to locate medicinal roots, to the medical use of hallucinogenic plants, etc. Its been an issue that I'm more likely to sit down and read these books for hours on end, while Born In Blood and Fire sits cold on the table next to me...

Overall, I feel like our research project is coming along nicely. We are quickly accumulating a lot of information on our topic, and have gotten a sense for exactly what our game-plan is going to be when we arrive in Panama, and get a chance to talk to the Shaman. Our major plan this upcoming week is to visit the Missouri Botanical Gardens, home of one of the greatest Panamanian plant collections in the world. We hope to get to search the Garden's facilities, from the library to the research lab, meeting every expert we can find, and taking in all the information we encounter. I am currently in the midst of trying to speak with someone at this location before we travel down Thursday night to stay at my house (a plan that I have yet to let my mom in on... But, hey, I'm allowed to have 3 unannounced house guests right!?). So far the Botanical Gardens has only met me with operators and answering machines, but I have not given up hope that I will eventually contact someone that would be willing to help us when we arrive Friday morning.

Other than all that I'm just continuing to collect everything that I'll need for the trip. A major thing that still need to be acquired are various shots/pills. I keep putting this off for some reason, most likely a result of concerns about their necessity/cost.

Ah well... 3 weeks til Panama!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Random Tidbits Of The Week:
~According to Chad, the most important holiday to those who practice Satanism is one's own birthday. As a side note, this revelation led me to peruse the wiki page about Satanism, only to close it soon after due to some odd looks I was getting from the person next to me in the library.

~I ended up signing up for a free trial of a 'prime' Amazon membership to get a book cheaply delivered to me in one day. I'm realizing that a happy result of this membership is that I can order a ton of Panama stuff from Amazon and get it delivered to my house in 2 days for free. Hopefully I do not forget to cancel this membership before my three month trial ends, and I get automatically charged $79 for 'wanting to continue my valued membership for the next year'.

~I spent about 20 minutes one night trying to figure out if it was worth more to save $7 or to have a quick dry towel that's long enough to easily wrap around myself. I ended up measuring a towel I currently own for size comparison purposes and trying it out. The decision still has not been made...

~I was oddly excited about my correct use of the word 'penchant' during my discipline presentation, mostly due to the fact that I've never used this word before in any form and was not really aware that I had encountered it before. Yay for passive learning!

Arriving in Kirksville

Upon arriving in Kirksville last Friday, I was well aware of the adventure that was soon to begin. It still seems so surreal that in less than one month's time I will be leaving the country for the first time. That day will be a day full of firsts, as it will also be the first time that I will have ever been on a plane. It figures that my initial plane experience would be one that takes me out of the country to begin my two month adventure in Panama.

I am going to Panama this semester for an eight week study abroad trip. We are leaving February 16th, for those of us flying outside of STL, on a flight that is departing at the passenger 'friendly' time of 5am. For the month that we are in Kirksville, we do have classes that we attend weekly. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have HIST 140, Latin America During the National Period, and JINS 338, Race and Ethnicity back to back from 1:30-4:20. On Wednesdays BIOL 444, Tropical Ecology, and ENVS 380, Special Topics: Panama Experience, meet back to back from 9:30-11:20 (yes you saw that correctly, no classes on Mondays or Fridays!!!! Feel free to let your envy wash over you).

So far my classes are going smoothly, and have turned out to be quite fascinating. Not only do I feel like I'm learning alot about how modern Latin America came to be, but I have also been forced to take a hard look at myself and, in a way, how I 'came to be'. As part of an assignment for our JINS class, we were told to do a self assessment pie chart and essay. This assignment required that we break our identity down into pie portions that can be completely seperated and quantified. While I disagree with the premise that a person can break down and separate portions of their personality/being, I did find this task to be interesting. I was forced to look into who I was, and find possible reasons to 'explain' why I am who I am.

My classes Wednesday mostly serve as a a way to allow us to gather together and discuss the projects that we will be carrying out while abroad. This trip focuses largely on two projects. The first project is about service learning. While we're in country we're going to be interacting with the local people, and it is our goal to leave the community in an improved state upon our departure. The projects that we hope to do range from creating a recycling program to improving roads and paths to translating signs/brochures. While I will gladly help with all of these, I am personally going to try to focus on translating signs and brochures from Spanish to English to make Omar Torrijos National Park more tourist friendly. I chose this project specifically so that I can practice my Spanish skills in a rigorous and meaningful setting.

The second project that I will be working on involves interaction with a local shaman, a medicine man and spiritual leader of the community. Our group is going to try to record the plants, etc that he uses to treat various illnesses and get a general idea for the ceremonies involved. Ideally we will be able to identify and find a sample of each plant, root, etc that he uses and record this information. In a perfect world we would hope to present all the information (in the way of which plants cure which ailments, etc) in a concise document for the community. That way, the ways of the shaman will forever be kept alive for this community. After only a week of having taken a hard look at this project, I am already in love with it. From the experience of meeting the shaman, to being able to get out in the field to collect and identify plants, to looking into the various compounds existant in these plants that could possess healing quantities, to being a part of a world which combines elements of medicine and the mystic.... AHHH even just listing it now in a babbling fashion, which I have a tendancy of doing if I'm not careful, makes me wish I could fast forward the next month!! (Is it a bit dorky that I thought of a 'time turner' from Harry Potter when I thought about wanting to control time? ....)

This week has only fueled my growing desire to head to Panama to begin what will prove to be an amazing experience! I can already sense the adventure and knowledge that awaits us all, and I cannot wait to pack up with this great group of people, and start our journey!!

P.S.
As its late, and I'm feeling a bit slap happy, I'm going to list a few of the random thoughts, 'fears', etc I've been having about this trip lately
1. I have been telling myself that I cannot freak out about every mosquito bite I get in Panama... it is most likely NOT malaria
2. People are not going to be staring at my underwear as it hangs out to dry so I should stop worrying about it
3. If I forget to pack something, it will not be the end of the world. I'm sure this item would either prove to be unimportant or I will be able to acquire it some other way
4. I should not fear young children wielding machetes. They mean me no harm, and if they do, I won't really have time to worry about it.