Poverty Project International Stories

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 ...

It isnt about doing elaborate projects. It isnt about throwing money everywhere. It isnt about working with groups of volunteers It is a lifestyle experiment What on earth does that mean? I left the States for Mexico 5 years ago after the death of my husband. We had been there previously and fell in love with a little Mexican village. We planned to retire there, but unfortunately, it became his final resting place. I sat on every park bench in the park in that little village. My Spanish was terrible, but I attempted to talk to the locals as much as I could. I started to build some friendships. I ate a lot of street food. And I cried a lot. Eventually, I met Lee. He had been traveling for almost a year and had been to the most unlikely, off the grid places you can imagine. He took me to the "other" side of town. He was not afraid to swing in a hammock in a home the size of a closet watching old westerns in Spanish with a Mayan mechanic. He was not afraid to g...

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 ...

CHOCOLATE! real, raw, organic, as close to nature as you can get chocolate! Fully ripe cacao pods are picked from the chocolate trees (called theobroma cacao) that grow wild everywhere in these islands. They are split open and the seeds are washed. If you like, you can suck the white, licorice tasting cotton candy covering from the seeds yourself. It tastes fantastic! After the seeds are washed, they are laid on flat beds in the sun to dry.  At this point the dried cacao seeds are great to nibble one. We like to cover them in chocolate and eat them that way. They are not sweet, but slightly bitter, almost like a coffee bean. The locals here then pound the seeds into smaller pieces called nibs. The nibs, like the whole seeds, are great to just munch on. They also make a fantastic tea! Just steep in hot water and add a little honey to taste. You can mix it with peppermint for a chocolaty mint tea or, if you come visit me, I will pick ginger flowers from the rain fores...

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 ...

I don't write about myself very often, but this time I just want to share a little bit. I want to tell you why I am here. I have been in Central America for five years now. I came on vacation and never went home. Something happened to me that is hard to explain. I walked streets I wasn't sure were safe. I went places I wasn't sure I would come back from. I got really far out of my comfort zone. And in the most unlikely places, I found life. Now I understand why Jesus ate with the prostitutes and drunkards. Why he went to the lost and the broken. They are actually cool people! You cannot imagine how amazing it was to hear their stories, to feel their pain and share their joy, to meet their families and get to know their names. I wish I could explain to you the beauty I see. I wish I could take the feeling that swells inside me and put it in your heart. I am without words, and so I try to convey in pictures the depth I see in their eyes the joy in the e...

I asked Jerry where he lives. His face brightened. "On the street" he beamed, "or on the beach" Lets go back a bit.... I have seen Jerry cleaning in the park. I have seen him sweeping and picking up trash. And I have seen him taking a little nap on a park bench. I thought he worked for the town. He doesn't. He just likes things to be clean. I met him in the street today. He was pushing a shopping cart filled with an old broom and dust pan, an old lamp, a fan, and a back pack. He was carrying a small package in his hand and I was surprised when he showed me what was inside. A new wheel for his shopping cart. It cost $3.50. He didn't ask for any money. But he did tell me how he was going to fix the lamp and fix the fan. And then there was the Bible in his pocket. When I asked him about it, his eyes lit up. Just like they did when I asked him where he lived. Odd thing. Did you know Jesus was homeless? He said, "Foxes have dens and bird...