Poverty Project International Stories

My time spent living with the poor and the indigenous people of Mexico and Central America has turned up some interesting correlations. You understand that your life is full of stress in the Western world and I am sure you have been exposed to the idea that people who live simpler lives with less things seem to be happier. But do you know WHY? Is it just a mental thing? Is it because they don't know what they are missing? I believe it is much more than that. I lived in an impoverished community in Panama. Many of the home were square wooden boxes that were partially open to the outside. There was no plumbing, no running water or electricity. There were no beds nor any furniture. Families slept on the ground and cooked over an open fire outside. They had no refrigeration (and neither did I for nine months). They collected rain water in buckets which they used for drinking, cooking and bathing. They often went without shoes. They ate very little meat and instead a lot of th...

There is a park in the middle of town on the island of Colon in Bocas Del Toro, Panama. Streets run around all four sides of it. Fantastically huge trees grow in the park and the peeling-painted benches offer seating to travelers and locals alike. If you walk down the street on the west side of the park and you see Good Times walking down the street on the east side of the park, you better hurry up and decide if you want to buy one of his free newspapers. Yes, buy one. Good Times is my nick name for Sergio because he is always trying to sell me a copy of the little free newspaper called The Good Times. I get it. He needs to eat and he doesn't want to beg. I buy his newspaper occasionally and sometimes I just buy him lunch. But this is not about his financial situation. It's about his intuition. If you walk down the west street and Good Times is walking in the opposite direction down the east street and you just catch a glimpse of him through those great trees, the one...

Maria and her baby brother used to live next door along with the rest of the seven people in their family. They had a little house with running water and electricity, a privilege many do not have in this community. But several days ago all seven of them were asked to leave their home because they could not pay the rent. They stood outside my house, hearts broken, a few simple things in bags, and said they planned to live in the parking lot at the bank. There was a policeman there and a wide over hang on the building, so it was a good place to sleep. This is the house out behind my house in rural Panama. Both homes belong to a lovely older woman named Shirley. She is tall and dark with high cheekbones. She wears her silver hair in a bun and always dresses in skirts and she has the mostly lovely Jamaican yah-mon English. Shirley is a woman acquainted with sadness. She lost her soul-mate, the husband of her youth, when she was in her twenties and became a widow. She lost two mo...

This is Pato. He is deaf and cannot speak. When we first met him, he stood in the background and didn't really connect with people. He spoke some sign language, and read lips, but he didn't interact with many people. I am sure growing up in a poor community did not make many resources available to him.   So we started waving and then buying him M&Ms and acting funny and making him laugh. Soon he was coming over to the house and cutting the yard and fixing the fence. We paid him, which I am sure was a great boost to his self esteem. But the most important part was, he was learning to relax and interact with people.  Well, last week we found Pato a job! There is a little shop around the corner where they build beautiful handmade furniture from local hardwoods. I had them make me a bed and two dressers and they did a beautiful job for a price that made me really happy.  We walk by the place every day on the way to the store, and after being so happy w...

Wanna listen to a story? There is a street bum in Bocas Del Toro, Panama named jack Sparrow. Well, that's what he calls himself anyway. I don't know his real name.  Relax and enjoy this recording of a little story about Jack.  Interested in more? You can get all the short stories put together in one book called  I RAN AWAY TO MEXICO: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey.  Its on Amazon now on KINDLE and in PAPERBACK you can order it here Enjoy! Laura Please check out our FULL WEBSITE at www.PovertyProjectInternational.com Connect with us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/povertyprojectinternational/ If you want to chat, you can email us at povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com Or if you want to help us out and DONATE, you can go to PAYPAL and send your donation to   povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com All donations are tax deductible. Live is an adventure, Live it!

I was thinking of the lovely neighborhood I live in with all its inconveniences and filth and I sat down and wrote this. Hope you enjoy it. Life in  Poor Village Picture this. You walk home from the store carrying two gallons of water, one in each hand. You turn off the main road and head down a dirt one where wooden houses--built on stilts and wearing curtains for doors--sit back from the road and make room for half-dressed children to play. You pass the furniture builder working in his little shop and he waves at you and says hi through the bandanna wrapped around his face to prevent him from inhaling wood dust. A teenager rides by on his bicycle, his hat on backwards, and smiles at you, A momma rides by on a bicycle too. She steers around a puddle in the road and almost loses her balances as she makes sure to wave.  You turn off the dirt road and onto a narrow sidewalk. You can see through the cracks in the walls of some of the brightly colored houses. Lau...

How do I even begin to write about this? My son came to me this morning and told me that the word ineffable means, without expression, or without words. This is how I feel. The people in this video are real people. Their lives are simple. The girl and baby you see on the thumbnail here are my neighbors. What do you do when you take on the challenge of living in a poor village and it kicks your butt, not because you cant handle the lack of hot (or running) water or because you don't like drying your clothes on the line, But because you were unprepared for the beauty. Love so very, very much, laura Please check out our FULL WEBSITE at www.PovertyProjectInternational.com Connect with us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/povertyprojectinternational/ If you want to chat, you can email us at povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com Or if you want to help us out and DONATE, you can go to PAYPAL and send your donation to   povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com All d...

Sometimes things are encouraging, sometimes they are sad. Recently we have lost a lot of people in our town. We moved to Almirante, a small poor village. We wanted to really live among the locals. I wanted to be their neighbor and really get to know them. Now we have Noile who lives across the way. She is in her 60's and speaks Creole English and Spanish. She brings me limes from her garden and I give her star apples from mine. The kids come and play American football in the yard and they say "Hi!" in English to us when they ride by on their bicycles.They are excited to try out a new language. We started putting in a garden and some of the boys came and helped up pick stones out of the dirt. But a couple of weeks ago one of the little boys died. He went into the hospital with a headache and they said he died from complications with his liver. And then the man we rent our little house from died. And the man who lived next door died too, And so did the man jus...

It felt like I was entering the Amazon. Not a soul was to be seen. Great swaths of bamboo fell into the water at the river's edge and wild mangoes towered overhead. But for the hum of our motor, the world was silent. There are many places the tourists visit in Bocas, this is not one of them. I did hear there is a mna they call Santa who lives along the river's edge in a home built by his own hands. I hear he has a long beard. I watched as we rounded corners of dark water until his house finally came into view. I saw his hollowed out canoes, but I did not see him sitting in the lawn chair sitting among the coconut palms down by the water. I know there are crocodiles, very big ones, in some of the rivers that run from the mountains down into the sea. I wondered if one might be lurking beneath me. A middle aged man and his aging mother came into view. He paddled their cayuko. She held an umbrella in her wrinkled hand. They said nothing as they passed. He smiled, but did not ...

We lost a young man. His name was Ubaldino and he was 20. He was an orhpan who was left on the streets when he was about 12 with a 2 year old brother to care for. And he had a terrible skin disease. It is so hard to understand why some are born into this world to undergo such suffering. Ubaldino could not work because his condition. He knew he could not have a girl friend, which is heartbreaking to me, to think that you could never know that basic kind of love. We bought zinc for the roof of his house. before that, the rain poured in. We bought blankets and pillows for his bed because he had none. We bought clothing for him and for his little brother and food for their table. But it wasn't enough. This is difficult for me. I cared for a young man that no one would hug because of the way he looked. He came running across the street to me yelling, Mommy! everytime he was me. Sometimes I was frustrated with him because he wanted money to out minutes on his cell phone and I ...

Walking the back streets can seem a little daunting. I know, I do it all the time. You find yourself in places that are a little uncomfortable, out of your comfort zone. In fact, it can be quite a culture shock. Usually when people travel they go to the tourist spots and focus on carefully pre-planned stuff to do. For example, on the main island of Bocas Del Toro, you walk down the strip, go to a nice restaurant, and buy a ticket for a boat tour that will take you to a nice beach. That's fine, and you should do it because it is part of the experience. But to get a little deeper into the culture, all you have to do is walk a few streets back into the neighborhood and you will see a different world. Yes, it is dirty, yes, it may not smell very good. But if you stop looking at the poor conditions and look at the people, your perspective will start to change. You will see grandmothers sitting on porches watching the world go by. And if you smile and wave, they will wave back ...

This is the cacao market. The white bags are full of cacao just picked from chocolate forests in the wild. These people are Ngobe farmers. They are bringing cacao to market to sell it for almost nothing to make a few dollars to buy the things they need. I want to talk about a few things here. First, the value of the cacao. It is coming to the attention of many that chocolate, in its purest form, is actually good for you. That is so true, in fact more than true. I spent some time in Costa Rica with the Bribri. A woman there who was in her late 70's told me she never puts any chemicals into or on her body. She eats only things that are natural and she drinks 5 or 6 cups of raw cacao a day. Its unsweetened and boiled in water and tastes nothing like what your mother made. The native people in Costa Rica are some of the longest lived people on earth. In fact, the little old lady climbed a noni tree right in front of me to pick some noni leaves and show me how to make tea. Bu...

Naranjiots Its called a naranjito (pronounced nar an hee toe). It's a wild fruit that was growing in Anthony's back yard. You split it in half and squeeze the juice into a cup of cold water, strain and drink it. Everyone loves it and it has a lovely orange taste. We met Anthony--Roldolfo Anthony--on a walk out of town and up the hill that over looks all the islands. He called us into his yard after explaining to us about the very dangerous sleeping snakes that live in the area. He said they love to sleep all curled up and if you walk by too loud and wake them oooo, they will chase you and bite you and you will die. But if you carry a machete and use it to poke at the grass and the ground in front of you, the snakes will know the sound of the machete and will run away. He said they are very smart and he didn't know but he figured God made them that way. We vowed to always carry a machete when walking in the grass and then we followed him into his yard (minus a mach...

I spent some time talking with an old man on the corner in a small Jamacian flavored town in Panama. Before I tell you what he said, I want to describe the town for you. It used to big a bustling port for Chiquita Banana. The best bananas in all of Central America are grown here. But due to modern machinery and a drop in the banana market, the town was all but deserted of its high rollers and the 1000 plus jobs at the port were reduced to just a couple hundred. Now tall wooden houses stand, ravaged by time and subdivided into small apartments. Some are leaning a little too much and some have literally fallen into the sea. A few newer concrete homes have sprung up and heavy gates and bars guard their windows. To walk the streets, one would think the place poor. More than poor. The people who live in the more touristy nearby islands speak of this town using words like "unhealthy," "poor," and "dirty." So when I came to spend a few days here, I ...

She sits in the park and watches the world go by. He races by She lives in a community that is not her own...and makes it her own She explores new territory thinking she is alone He munches on breakfast from a brown paper bag,  no worries,   in the simplicity of the morning. This is the park. Watching,  laura Please check out our FULL WEBSITE at www.PovertyProjectInternational.com Connect with us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/povertyprojectinternational/ If you want to chat, you can email us at povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com Or if you want to help us out and DONATE, you can go to PAYPAL and send your donation to   povertyprojectinternational@gmail.com All donations are tax deductible. Live is an adventure, Live it!

This is where we ended up--on the beach. Our guide Sam brought us here. We met him just by chance when we were walking through the Ngobe village on Solarte. Its set on a hillside and smells of fresh cut grass. Small houses, simply built, stand between banana trees and towering mangoes. All now in full fruit. Sam knew us from town and when he saw us he waved and said hi! It was only  moment before he was running out of his house and offering to show us around, I am so happy he did. The view from up on the hill was amazing. We could see the mountains on the mainland across the bay. And when we left the village and entered the jungle, we found a hobo (ceiba) tree--very important to the native people here and considered sacred. We found these huge spiked fruits which were not quite ready. Sam didn't remember their name, but I think it might be jackfruit, a soft white and very sweet fleshy fruit that we tasted when our friend William brought from the Dark Land for ...

Yesterday we braved the waves and slowly took our time to navigate around the reef and eventually found ourselves setting foot on Isla San Cristobal (named after Christpoher Columbus who landed here). San Crisotbal is largely peopled by the Ngobe Tribe. We met a couple kids on the dock and handed out lolli-pops. We walked up the path to a little store (and by little I mean it looks like a drive through window--well a walk through--where you can buy a few things you see behind the counter) They didn't have any water so we bought a cold coke. Kids followed us. The village is poor. Very poor. Most of the houses don't have complete walls. But bananas and chocolate grow everywhere. We walked to the soccer field and Lee played with the kids. Its his favorite thing to do. We saw this tiny girl carrying a heavy water bottle. And then we saw a familiar face. An older Ngobe man we'd met in town on the main island. He invited us in. We sat in re...

We walked the paths of Bastimentos today. We climbed the hill to the top and spoke with a 76 year old woman who walks it everyday. I had a hard time jut getting up there. I am impressed with her stamina to say the least. We played basketball with the teenagers at the end of the path, on a real basketball court next to the beach. We laughed at the kids showing off their diving skills at the end of the dock. We had lunch in a tiny restaurant out on a dock. I had creole chicken and lentils and rice. It was 5 bucks.  But the most important thing we did all day was talk.  It is impossible to connect with people if you don't talk. Working with the poor is not just about putting roofs on people's houses Its not just about feeding people or buying school clothes. (although those things do come into play) How can we affect people's lives if we don't get to know them? How can they share their troubles with us if we don't talk to them? So why are ...