The Importance of Safe and Clean Water (FREEHOP: Health #1)

Though many of us who have lived in the developed world take it for granted, access to clean and safe drinking water is vital to ensuring productive and healthy lives. Unfortunately, many of the poorest people in the world lack sufficient access to potable water and basic sanitation. Clean water and sanitation are linked because limited access to basic sanitation systems (latrines, waste disposal systems, clean water for bathing, etc.) directly affects the ability of individuals to obtain clean drinking water. Lack of sanitation facilities force people to defecate and urinate in rivers, streams, oceans, and other areas where they are also living, playing and preparing food. This significantly increases the risk of transmitting disease. According to the World Health Organization, one gram of feces in untreated water may contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1000 parasite cysts and 100 worm eggs. Here are some important facts about sanitation and drinking water in the developing world:

• Globally, around 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation (43% of the world´s population). In Panama, 70% of individuals living in indigenous areas do not have access to potable water in their homes. These individuals are often forced to travel long distances to small rivers and streams. The dry season frequently exacerbates the problem since many existing water systems run out of water.
• Examples of diseases transmitted through water contaminated by human waste include diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and hepatitis A. In Africa, 115 people die every hour from diseases linked to poor sanitation, poor hygiene and contaminated water.
• Diarrhea is a major killer in the developing world and is largely preventable. Diarrhea is responsible for 1.5 million deaths every year, mostly among children under the age of 5 living in developing countries. Hygiene interventions including personal hygiene education and promotion of hand washing leads to a reduction of diarrhea episodes by 45%. Improvements in drinking-water quality through household water treatment (such as chlorination at point of use and adequate domestic storage), leads to a reduction of diarrhea episodes by 39%.
• Every US $1 invested in improved sanitation shows an average of US $9 return in value. Those benefits are experienced specifically by poor children, and in the disadvantaged communities that need them most.

One of the project areas of Peace Corps Panama is Environmental Health. This program focuses on health education, building and promoting the use of latrines, and building and repairing rural water systems. EH volunteers do difficult but important work in some the most rural and isolated parts of the country.

In the recent past, many areas of Panama were negatively impacted by poor access to and quality of water and in many areas, these are still significant threats. We are very fortunate because our community was connected to an underground well system in the 1960s, which has ensured a safe and consistent supply of water ever since. The addition of this water system improved the health and welfare of our community and allowed for increased economic and other social developments. However, nearby communities in our region still rely on above ground aqueduct systems which provide water less consistently and are at greater risk for water contamination. While much progress has been made in Panama, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure equal access to this vital resource.

For more information go to: http://www.who.int/topics/sanitation/en/

The Panamanian School System (FREEHOP: Education #1)

The next installment in our FREEHOP series will be an overview of the Panamanian School System (if you don’t know what FREEHOP is, click here). The Panamanian school year started this month so we thought we should share with everyone what we have learned so far.

The Panamanian school system is administered by the Ministry of Education or MEDUCA. On a national level, MEDUCA regulates curriculum for all courses and at all grade levels. Beginning this year, MEDUCA is also distributing new backpacks to all students and providing parents with about $20 per child to help with the purchase of school supplies and school uniforms (that may not sound like much, but a lot of Panamanians make around $1-2 per hour).

In Panama, all students are required to attend school through the ninth grade; before 1990, students were only required to attend school through sixth grade. Children begin their education at age 5 with pre-kinder (preschool), followed by kinder (kindergarten) and primaria (like elementary school and includes grades 1-6). School buildings for these grades are fairly well distributed throughout the country which allows for good access. However, some primarias are so small that only one teacher teaches several if not all of the grades if the student base is not large enough to employ more than one teacher. The primaria in our community is slightly larger so we have one teacher that works with the kinder grade, one teacher who teaches 1st, 2nd, and 6th grades, one teacher who teachers 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, and one teacher who teaches the English classes for all of these grades. I don’t exactly know why the grades are split the way that they are, but maybe there is a good reason for it.

Educators for these grades are called maestros (teachers) and attend 2 to 3 years of university to become certified to teach at primarias.  The maestros that work at our community’s school do not live in the community. During the school year these teachers commute up to 2 hours each way through a series of buses and possibly their own cars. One of the members of our community is a primaria teacher for a nearby school where he teaches kinder through sixth grade by himself. In other communities, teachers who are not able to commute to the school each day often live together in a MEDUCA house in the community Monday to Friday, then return home to their personal house on Friday afternoon. This was the case in our old community, where the 1.5-2 hour chiva ride each way made it impossible to commute daily. The female teachers lived together in a house during the week, and the male teachers lived together in a different house. Then everyone left midday on Friday afternoon.

After primaria, students attend premedia where grades 7, 8, and 9 are taught. Panamanian students make similar adjustments to their American counterparts when they reach middle school age. Students attend subject based classes taught by professors who teach specific courses (Spanish, Math, Physical Science, Social Science, English, etc.). However, one big distinction is that several students have to leave their community to attend premedia. Our community has a premedia that is fed by primaria schools throughout the region. A larger, and I must say quite nice, school bus makes two trips each direction, each school day to transport approximately 50 children to and from the premedia school in our community. Additionally, there are about 30 students who live in dormitories on the school campus during the week (Monday through Thursday nights) and eat all of their meals at the school cafeteria. Our school employs four people (2 men and 2 women) to watch and support these children who live at the school four nights a week.

Educators who teach at the premedia are referred to as Profesors and they attend between 4 and 5 years of university level education to earn the title of Profesor. They are also paid more than maestros.

After premedia comes media or the American equivalent to high school. Since education is compulsory only through ninth grade, high school is optional and can take on different forms for different students. Some Panamanian High Schools are geared towards students who are headed towards university while some schools provided vocational training. The closest high schools to our community are located in Las Tablas, the provincial capital of our province of Los Santos, which is approximately 30-40 minutes away by bus.

Here are a few other quick facts about schools in Panama:

• School days are roughly five hours long. In our community school starts just after seven and wraps up just after one.
• All students are required to wear school uniforms. Primaria children wear white shirts with navy blue pants or skirts and premedia and meida children wear light blue shirts with navy blue pants or skirts.
• We have seen very few textbooks and printed workbooks in Panamanian classrooms. We have been told that parents are responsible for purchasing any textbooks or school supplies that their children need.
• Private schools can also be found in Panama primarily in the larger cities. These schools can be quite expensive. The director of the school in our community told Kate and I that some of Panama’s best private schools teach most of their classes in English to prepare their students to attend universities abroad.

We will write another post soon to talk about what we will be doing in the schools and to provide more insight into the Panamanian school system.

FREEHOP: Religion #1: Catholicism and Novena

Next in our FREEHOP series I thought we could examine an aspect of the religious culture in Panamá. (If you don´t know what FREEHOP is click here). To say that Panamá is a Catholic nation would be an understatement as roughly 85% of the country is Roman Catholic. Catholicism is the national religion and classes on religion, taught by a  Catholic Priest or “Padre”, are part of the curriculum in public schools across the country. While we lived in El Bale we went to the Catholic church a lot since it was the only church in town and it was a good way to meet people. I have made the joke a few times that we got our church attendance card stamped enough the we are now bona fide Catholics but I think that I am the only person that thinks this is funny.

Catholicism has been the only religion to have a church in both of the communities that we have lived in. The services in both chapels have been pretty straight forward. The padre in El Bale (more about him in a future post) played the guitar while leading the singing and in our new community, there is a women who is a designated lead singer as she has a microphone and leads everyone in song. I enjoyed the singing much more in El Bale then I do in our new community. Though we don´t know a whole lot about the ceremonies or the customs (especially in Spanish) we are making progress and will be much more informed in the future.

The Patron Saint of El Bale is Señora Guadalupe and every year the Patron Saint day is celebrated with novena or 9 nights of mass beginning on December 3 and ending on the patron saint day, December 12. During novena in El Bale, surrounding communities participate by creating a display with fake flowers and other decorations to represent the virgin Guadalupe. Community members walk several hours with their virgins to participate in the novena and the procession that takes place on December 12. Some people walk up to seven hours to El Bale for this event. The culmination of novena is a procession of all community members and their virgin displays immediately following a morning mass. In 2009, 40 different communities brought displays. Click here for the photo album that includes our pictures from El Bale Novena 2009.

El Bale also celebrates novena for the 9 nights prior to Christmas and Easter, but these celebrations are much smaller and do not include displays. The Patron Saint of our new community is Saint Rosa de Lima and the novena is held in August.

FREEHOP: Economics #1, The Tale of Two Economies

Since we are both Community Economic Development volunteers, I thought it would be appropriate to start the FREEHOP posts off on “Economics.” (If you don´t know what FREEHOP is click here.)

The largest economic drivers in rural Panamá (this does not include the canal or international trade) are agriculture and tourism. These are fairly vague distinctions; agriculture is pretty straightforward and under the tourism umbrella I would also include tourist related products such as artisan handcrafts. Both in our new community in Los Santos and our first community in the Comarca Ngöbe-Bugle agriculture is the main economic engine.

In El Bale, most individuals work in some sort of agricultural production. The most commonly farmed products are yuca, rice, beans, and corn. However, unlike other regions in the Comarca Ngöbe-Bugle, El Bale lacks a suitable climate for the production of cash crops such as coffee or chocolate. Poor soil, primitive transportation infrastructure, and a lack of bridges over large water crossings also hinder the potential for extensive income generation from agriculture. The regional cooperative does buy crops from producers (primarily beans and corn in El Bale) but several cooperative members are unable to get their crops into the stores to be sold. Transportation of crops is especially bad during the rainy season when many routes are impassible with crops. Even if crop transportation were more feasible, several producers are unable to grow enough to feed their own families, let alone have any excess to sell.

Economic development activities in El Bale revolve around improving roads and bridges and creating value-added products (such as honey or processing yuca into yuca flour) that can be created in the greater El Bale region and then distributed to cities.

In our new community in Los Santos, basic economic infrastructure is in relatively good shape which allows community members to more easily profit from their labor.  For cattle farmers (which is pretty much everybody in this neck of the woods), the primary sources of income are selling their cattle for meat and milk production. Unlike El Bale, community members are able to sell their products quite easily.  National and international companies, such as Nestle and Estrella Azul, travel to the community to buy the raw milk and transform it into products including cheese, powdered milk products and straight up old fashion milk. While these companies provide producers with easy access to market, they are not always available, especially during the dry season when lower milk production does not justify that travel entailed for these companies to buy the milk.

Additionally, several families in the community have taken measures into their own hands by creating their own cheese production facility. Nearby producers bring their milk to the facility and queso blanco (white cheese) is made seven days a week, 365 days a year by a handful of employees who live in the community. In addition to being sold in the community, the cheese is also transported via refrigerated truck to neighborhood stores and supermarkets throughout the province and even as far as Panamá City. Though they are not the largest producer by far, the cheese facility in our community is able to ensure a consistent buyer for a local product. A major drawback however is that the group is no longer able to travel to pick up milk from producers farther away from the facility (they had a truck but it no longer works). This limits their ability to increase production.

Members of our new community have been able to increase local economic opportunities by creating a value-added product (cheese) within the community instead of sending their raw material (milk) outside of the community for further processing. Not only does this provide local jobs, but it also provides a sense of community pride and ownership.  This example provides a model that can be replicated in other parts of the country and shows how to increase quality of life in rural Panamá sustainably.

Introducing FREEHOP

Warning: Potential Nerd Alert! Against Kate’s better judgement I am starting this series even though she thinks no one will read it…prove her wrong people!!

One of the tools Peace Corps uses for community analysis is called FREEHOP (for more on what community analysis is click here). FREEHOP is a nifty little acronym we use to make sure we examine the myriad aspects of our community to help ensure that our projects meet community needs/desires and increase their potential of being sustainable after we leave or, in other words, helping make sure that the round peg fits and stays in the round hole. This is also the part of our Peace Corps service where our anthropology classes come in handy.

In addition to using this tool for community analysis, I thought we should also use the FREEHOP to teach you all more about life in rural Panamá. Over the next several weeks, we will do a series of blog entries that examine these facets in both communities we have lived in as well as Panamanian culture in general. We hope  you will find these posts informative and provide you the opportunity to learn more about Panamá. Check back tomorrow for our first installment on Economics.

Here is a brief breakdown of the acronym plus expamples of the questions we are looking to answer in each category.

Family: average family size, gender roles in household responsibilities, gender expectations within families, which family members live together, who inherits what when family members die, family migration to larger cities

Religion: type and number of organized religions in the community, potential religious prejudices, role of religion in personal lives and community activities, religious holidays/festivals, what influence do religious leaders and practices have on community affairs

Education: educational opportunities available in the community, who attends the schools, what importance is placed on education in the community, where are the teachers from, what educational opportunities outside of the community do community members utilize, who doesn´t go to school

Economics: what does the community produce, who has control over economic resources and decision-making, how are products transported, who makes purchasing decisions within the community, what materials are purchased inside and outside the community, what circumstances can positively/negatively impact the local economy

Health: what medical facilities are located in the community, is traditional or modern medicine (or both) practiced in the community, what are the water sources, what does the community diet consist of, what sanitation measures are used (hand washing, latrines, etc.), where do people go when they are sick or have medical emergencies

Organizations: what are the active and in-active  organizations in the community, what services are provided to the community through these organizations, what level of agency and NGO (non-government organization) support do community organizations receive, what organized sports are played in the community, who attends meetings and how do they participate

Politics: who are the official and unofficial community leaders, what influence do these leaders have over community decisions, how do people express and resolve grievances, which political parties are represented in the community, how does party affiliation of community leaders affect availability to government resources