Vive Panama`!

So its been a quick, but wonderful week in Panama. Starting in Bocas Del Toro which is a group of islands on the caribbean side of Panama just south of Costa Rica. Think brilliant blue green water straight from a commercial and dozens of hardly developed islands covered in jungle. unfortunately i dont think we enjoyed it quite as much as we could have since we had been at the beach on both sides of Central America for 3 weeks at that point. its definitely a place i could come back to--wait! i mean that literally, i probably CAN come back next year when we live in Costa Rica--in fact if anyone wants to come visit, then maybe we can go together! hee hee-

then it was a lonnnggg day on the bus up and up into the mountains of Boquete. this little town made me seriously heartsick for oregon. everywhere you look there are abundantly lush and verdantly green mountains, coffee plantations, and a fast rushing clear river. the fog often would slowly curl over the mountains in that sweet mystical way that fog works.

we totally lucked out and found a a guesthouse that only had two rooms! the owner didnt even live there! we had our own balcony right on the river, a kitchen (which is key for us cheap types), and a living room! hiking there was sweet too although we didnt see the elusive Quetal bird.

it was a 2 hour hike just to the entrance of the trail and on the way back we were a little bit tired so it was great when an old panamanien man stopped in his pick up truck to give us a lift back. he was GREAT!! i guess he lives on a coffee farm up the way. it was kind of funny because we noticed that he wasnt going the same way that we knew of how to get back to town. for some reason its a little harder for me to understand Panamenian Spanish more than the other countries and plus he was real old mumbly type so we couldnt quite figure out why he was taking us out of the way so far. he was obviously not a serial killer though and since it had started one of those famous central american tropical downpours we didnt mind. soon it was obvious that he had simply taken the scenic route--which was SO stunning and definitely something we wouldnt have otherwise been able to experience, plus he was playing a classical music cd all the while which just fit perfectly with it all!

next we went to a little town that resides entirely in the crater of an extinct volcano. we hiked around some waterfalls and even some some cool petroglyphs, but other than that it was a little anticlimatic.... then off to panama city!

SloTh HuntiNg

(these sloths are from the sanctuary)

by far red´s favorite thing to do in the world is sloth hunting and dang! he is so good at it!

currently we are in panama in the mountains and i realize that i have a lot to catch up on, but mostly since i last wrote we have been chillin chillin on idyllic costa rican and panamenian beaches. so picture white sand, and crystal clear sea water crashing against beautiful rocks with jungly forests to hike in just off shore and that will fill in a lot of the blank spaces of the last few weeks!

Cahuita, on the southern caribbean side of costa rica is where we met up with some cool kids that we had met in February in Guatemala! it is also the place where we all got neck aches sloth searching!

first of all some facts on sloths--- you will really not believe how little you knew about these fantastic zen monklike creatures!

1. they sleep for up to 18 hrs a day hanging upside down!!! even when they are awake they are often just gazing out into the sea (thats what we saw anyhow!)

2. they survived the ICE AGE!!!

3. the way they survived the ice age is because they can alter their body temperatures 10 degrees warmer or cooler!

4.they only come out of the tree once a week to go to the bathroom (they have four stomachs and dont drink any water)

5. they switch trees every 2.2 days because they eat leaves which are toxic and so they need to change

6. they give birth HANGING from the trees and the mama catches the newborn with her feet!!!

7. they are only found at 17 degrees latitude above and below the equator

8. they are covered in algae for camoflage and have moths that live in their fur because they are so slow!

8 they wear a permanent smile!

we saw 15 WILD sloths in the national park which holds magnificent beaches and trails. its so hard to spot them. so often its just a ball of fur way up in the branches! we also saw some super cute little armadillos in that park, it was awesome.

on our last day we went to the only sloth reserve in the world where we were able to pet 5 adult sloths who had been injured and unable to return to the wild and we watched the baby sloths get fed. we couldnt touch those because they can catch human colds real easily! i cant even describe how cute these things were, really amazing!

soon i will get the photos up to prove it!

The United Nations University for Peace

(these pictures are from various costa rica hikes)

YAYYYYYY!!!

i just wanted to say that i got accepted to the masters in peace education program at the United Nations Univesity for Peace in Costa Rica.... i am so honored and excited!!!

what the heck is that and what does it mean you may think to yourself! well here is some info from their webpage: www.upeace.org

about the school:
Headquartered in Costa Rica, the United Nations-mandated University for Peace was established in December 1980 as a Treaty Organization by the UN General Assembly. As determined in the Charter of the University, the mission of the University for Peace is: “to provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace with the aim of promoting among all human beings the spirit of understanding, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, to stimulate cooperation among peoples and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress, in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations.”

To ensure academic freedom, the University was established under its own Charter, approved by the General Assembly. UPEACE is not subject to UN regulations and is directed by its own Council of renowned personalities with expertise in peace and security matters. This has allowed the University to move rapidly and to innovate, focusing its new, rigorous academic programme on the fundamental causes of conflict through a multidisciplinary, multicultural-oriented approach.

The wider mission of the University should be seen in the context of the worldwide peace and security objectives of the United Nations. The central importance of education, training and research in all their aspects to build the foundations of peace and progress and to reduce the prejudice and hatred on which violence, conflict and terrorism are based is increasingly recognized. The Charter of the University calls for UPEACE “to contribute to the great universal task of educating for peace by engaging in teaching, research, post-graduate training and dissemination of knowledge fundamental to the full development of the human person and societies through the interdisciplinary study of all matters related to peace”.

Funding of UPEACE programmes comes from the support of a number of donor governments, foundations and institutions who believe in the mission of the University. Fundraising for an endowment fund is in progress.

The vision of UPEACE is to become a network of collaborating UPEACE centres and activities in different regions, guided from its headquarters in Costa Rica and cooperating with a large number of universities, NGOs and other partners on education and research for peace.


ABOUT PEACE ED:
Peace Education

Description

In recent years, there has been a growing, world-wide recognition of the central role played by education in meeting the complex demands of peacemaking and peace building. Often lacking, however, are individuals prepared with the knowledge and skills to act as leaders for educational reform to support sustainable peace processes.

The UPEACE Master's Degree Programme in Peace Education is designed to train such individuals. The programme will build the capacity of educators from around the world to contribute to educational, social, and cultural change through peace education. It is designed to enable participants to effectively engage in peace education at all levels, from the design of educational policy to the development of effective and culturally relevant peace education programmes, to the actual skills of teaching for peace both in and out of the classroom.

The programme assumes that a peace educator must have a broad knowledge of the basic concepts and skills within the multidisciplinary areas that converge in contemporary peace studies. Graduates of the programme will also be specialists in the application of the insights of peace studies within the broader social and cultural environments within which formal and non-formal education take place.
The centerpiece of the programme is the project development process. While participating in the UPEACE Peace Education Programme, peace education students will work on the development of an educational project that can be immediately applicable in an educational setting of the student's choosing.

Objectives
The MA in Peace Education Programme designates two main interdependent learning outcomes to be pursued:

To prepare leaders and specialists committed to the building of a culture of peace and non-violence by educational means (formal, non formal and informal settings);
To support students in developing competence in analyzing, developing, and reforming curricula, didactic methods, pedagogies, and educational resources for a comprehensive view of peace education.

(its my dream school!)

sOmeWhere OVER the RaInbOw

mmm... so far costa rica is delicious! last monday we hopped on a bus or three and made
our way over to Monteverde>home of some of the most amazing cloud forest ever. we have stayed here the whole week waiting out the holiday since the next place we want to go to is beachy and probably covered with at least 6 meeeeelion people on vacation right now.

thats ok this little place is awful pretty and we have a nice little hostel with a kitchen to use so we can spend a little money on long walks through the jungle and extreme sports. oh yeah we gotta add a couple new animals to our list like the family of Kinkajous we saw and humming birds and morpho butterflies... muy bonita.

did i say extreme sports? oh man did i ever! so sheesh here i go jumpin out of my comfort zone again petting a sting ray in belize, jumping down a freaky waterfall in a cave in guatemala, standing on hells hot lava in antigua, and noW----

ZIPLINING THROUGH AND OVER THE CLOUD FOREST!!!

red didnt think i had the balls er... ovaries to do the eXtReMo companies ziplines. they were definitely the most intense with 18 lines 4 of which were 1000 feet in the air going 4000 feet across this mountainous valley... wHoa it was soo cool! the closest thing to flying i have ever done and unless i go parachuting some day probably the closest i will get! we were so high up we could see the ocean and cows were just specks and there were rainbows that we were OVER! the rainbow was a complete circle from our view point! on some we went together and some alone and some were shorter and went straight through the canopy over and under mossy branches of old growth cloud forest beauteousness...

actually it was more relaxing than scary for me ... that is until we got to the Tarzan swing! the tarzan swing was hooked up to your harness from 2 or 3 floors up on a platform. thankfully you didnt have much time to think before they pushed you right off! then it was a several second free fall before flying out on the 90 foot long rope between trees like... welll like tarzan!

now red and i can add flying through the sky to our list along with swimmin with the fishies in three different oceans standing on mountains and volcanoes rivers and ponds.

wife=handcuffs and ketchup part 2

Nicaragua----was a really unique experience. its definitely a very dramatic place that i could see would be easy to fall in love with. there are so many volcanoes there, its hard not to be humbled by the presence of such majestic giants. then there are the sea like lakes and the undomesticated pacific coast.

the cities of Leon and Granada were neat in terms of the massive and artistic colonial architecture with these lakes and volcanoes looming in the distance. nice to see but they are like many places that i wish i could visit via someone who lives there because as a road weary traveler its sometimes hard to scratch the true surface of places like that. i could feel the energy of those places but i didnt know what rock to lift to find the beating heart. do you know what i mean? we kind of got stuck on the gringo trail there and were ready pretty quickly to escape the higher prices.

the towns were also a good place to learn more about the peasant revolutions that took place there. i could go on and on about how intense this trip has been for learning about each of these countries wars of the people versus murderous governments either indirectly or directly paid for by the united states. i think had an idea of it all. but really what a false honeyed idea. it makes me absolutely sick to know where americans tax money goes. and although i am a peace enthusiast to the grave i am more and more able to see the reason behind armed civilian resistance.

we also visited a nonprofit on the coast of Nica that was started by a great guy my age from... money he earned teaching English in Taiwan... ahhhh... i guess giving midterm exams to three yr. olds is making dreams come true everywhere! it was really wonderful what he has done though. he made like an eco hostel in a tiny fishing village that really sincerely blended tourism with community service. he has an afterschool club for kids to come and play sports or do art and also he sponsors kids to go to school as well as many other projects. it was great to see how the village had truly accepted him.

one of the things i really liked about Nicaragua was that they had such a unique contemporary culture, something that i had not sensed in my (brief to be sure)time in El Salvador and Honduras. Nicas are obsessed with poetry. that was a really cool and unexpected thing to find out! in all of the towns there are statues of poets and things named after them. i have still to get my hands on some but i am working on it. that obsession has trickled down into a hip hop and graffiti subculture as well. in so many of the chicken buses that we rode there was hip hop blasting in spanish and sometimes even rap videos on pulldown tvs.

i would definitely like to come back someday.

Now however we are in Costa rrrRica and super excited to check out the cloud forest this week and hopefully see some sloth action...er inaction. the direct translation of the spanish word for sloth (perezoso) is lazy. sweet. oh and to quell your curiousity.. the direct translation for handcuffs in spanish is wife. awesome.

KeTcHup

(the pictures are all from the after school kids club/ eco hostel in jiquillo)

first of all i would just like to point out some new nicknames that red has acquired from various central americans because of his beard---osama bin laden is still most often but believe it or not Bob Marley is a close runner up--what? i mean really, what?! trailing behind that are Fidel Castro and Santa Claus. hmmm.... that i can see.

as for me, red swears he heard someone call me Janet Jackson. i would be flattered if i believed him.

ok so quite a bit has passed without much from us. i think i already described our impression of El Salvador... as for Honduras our impression was rather mixed for reasons that some of you might know. i kind of think that in all three countries El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua our experiences were often tainted by being caught in the ´wrong´(thats too strong of a word) place at the wrong time. in all three countries we rarely stayed put for more than two days and many times just one.

i think that part of that was in comparison to guatemala that we just fell in love with and had such a wonderful time in. between the landscape, the intensity of the culture and the prices, guatemala is an all time favorite.

also we didnt make it to much of the national parques that make those three (el sal, hond, nica) countries amazing too, we arent really city people despite the absolute quaintness of some of these colonial towns.

The Copan Mayan Ruins in Honduras was something that really touched us though. while Tikal ruins are spectacular for the height of their structures, Copan matches that magnificence with their exceptionally artistic carvings of various warriors and kings
and their hieroglyphics everywhere. including an entire staircase leading up... two or three stories tall that was completely and intricately formed from carvings, telling stories of various leaders rising to power.

also there were underground temples too.. really amazing. in the museum they had a skeleton of what they thought was a mayan shaman from maybe 300 a.d. in a glass case. that was really wild to see, especially since all of his teeth had holes that had been drilled in them and then filled with gems like obsidian and jade!

We visited the caribbean coast again while we were in honduras which was crystal clear and lazy smooth (minus some unfortunate circumstances) and then hauled our bums over to Nicaragua.....

petroglyphs, blue parrots, and fresh water sharks

these are things that you can find nestled between two volcanoes amidst a giant lake in southern nicaragua. isla de ometepe was one of the places that i had been looking forward to seeing for months and months. the lake itself is huge like lake michigan and apparently it used to be connected to the ocean, then it was slowly closed off but the sharks evolved and now are the only of their kind in the world. unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) we didnt see any. what we did see was more trees and flowers and butterflies than we have seen since we left guatemala. and the blue parrots, which probably arent at all parrots, were really neat too. they make all kinds of funky calls.

they say that when the mayan city of teotihican (or something close) was overcome in mexico way back in the day that the mayan priests told them that they should walk until they find a lake between two volcanoes and this is what they found. the most obvious signs that people lived there so very long ago are the thousands of petroglyphs scattered across the island. we were able to see some on a walk from an organic coffee farm that we stayed at.

we thought we might stay and work at a farm there because starting next week is Semana Santa a hugungous catholic holiday and apparently everything is all kinds of busy because EVERYONE has the week off. but the farms werent what we thought they might be and so now we are on a lovely beach in the very south of nica wondering what the heck we might do.

red wants to pet a sloth so i think we will head to costa rica tomorrow.