Day 2 of Quarantine

Being the Teacher
School is not going very well. We are going on 2 weeks of having to enforce school work assigned by the school. I believe he is all caught up, but with 12 classes and everyone having different methods...it was touch and go for awhile. 

As we are all caught up (hoping that is actually true) and I have put in for hazard pay (still waitin on that) I decided we would attempt Zumba class together for P.E. today. For those that remember that I am still recovering from an Achilles tendon injury, my zumba was a little modified and embarrassingly very clunky. We made it a total of 12 minutes before he convinced me that getting his "steps" in would be healthier for both of our sanities. I will keep you updated on our progress.

Total Quarantine
Panama is on day 2 of total lock-down. We have had different versions, each getting stricter than the last, until they finally locked it down. (The different versions were something like this....they all kind of ran together and I might get a few of the older rules out of order.)

1st version: Drinking alcohol was banned and people were told to stay at home. Schools, churches, large gatherings were all closed off. 

2nd version: All stores were told to close except for necessities. Restaurants, grocery, pharmacy and food chain supplies could stay open.

3rd version: A 9pm curfew was ordered, no groups over 10 and borders to the country were closed. Some roads to different parts of the country were closed off.

4th version: Curfew was changed to 5pm and they became more strict on restaurants and other stores.

The next day...it was 5th version: Total lock-down. 1 person in your house is allowed to leave for 1 hour a day to get necessities at the pharmacy or grocery store. The time you are allowed to leave depends on the last digit of your ID, So, I can leave at 8am to get necessities and Rick can leave at 2pm. Not that we plan to go use our time allotment until we need milk or something....There is no end date assigned yet, so we will just have to see how long this lasts.

Getting Prepared for the Lock-down
We all knew that a total quarantine was coming. So, we arranged to start some projects on the farm to keep us busy.

While still social distancing, we ordered trucks of sand, gravel, blocks. plumbing stuff....

As an agricultural farm we were (and technically can) stay open with limited employees. We just cannot offer coffee tours, ship coffee or meet up with people to deliver coffee, but we are suppose to continue growing the coffee. However, for the safety and well-being of our employees we did close completely by the time the lock-down was in place. 

So, Rick is working alone on the construction of the new bathroom for tours, while I get to do the less labor intensive jobs. Yay me!

Coffee Trees
The coffee trees are doing great. I think this might be our biggest year yet. Below is a picture of a tree from a neighboring farm and a picture of a few of our trees. A lot of work has gone into our farm and I am just hoping we keep enough of our customers after things stabilize to continue improving.

A New Concern
Yes, we have the regular concerns about covid-19, income, water coming to the house, will we have electricity today, will the internet be on all day, but we have had to deal with a fire-bug on the hill too. Which by the way made us lose electricity for a day.....so not cool!

This is land a little lower on the hill from our farm. No one lives there and we are not sure if the owner set it on fire to clear the debris or if someone does not like the owner of that land, but whatever the case may be, they have lit this land on fire twice now.

The local fire truck is unable to get up our hill and when the firefighters were brought up for the 1st fire, there was no water in the line to put the fire out. One neighbor has a well and I guess they did the best they could filling up little backpack tanks or something with the well water and sprinkling it on the ground. However, the next morning, the ground was still smoking and the power poles were still burning. A few days later they lit the land on fire again. We are hoping things are a little quieter for awhile around here.

A Couple more Pictures
Here are a few more pictures from this last week:

1. Blooms from a coffee tree.
2. Sacks of parchment coffee in storage that will be need to be hulled and roasted when we can ship out coffee again.
3. and 4.  Mangoes and my mango cobbler that I am now making lots of.
5. 6. and 7. All of the flowers and plants around here are flourishing and reminds me how not everything in the world has changed. There is still beauty and wonders to appreciate.

Connecting with People
My friends Chris and Kelly, from my long ago past in college-prep boarding school, started getting people from our school together last night on a video chat. I was up until 2am connecting with people that I have not seen in many, many years. 

Chris reminded me of the time that he helped me dye my hair brown in the darkroom during photography class. If he actually finds the picture, I might post it in a future blog. Having blond hair and brown eyebrows, I was always asked if I dyed my hair. I had decided that maybe I should have been born a brunette like my parents had been. How I got Chris to assist me, I do not remember, but I remember that I looked very bad as a brunette and tried to wash it out as fast as I could. My hair turned orange for weeks and I eventually cut it off and had very short hair for awhile.

Totally made my night! Was nice connecting with people from my past, just what any doctor would have ordered.

​Staying up late meant I woke up late and missed my allotted time to get supplies today. Thankfully, I did not have anything that I needed!

Back to Work
As the dogs are now in time-out for agitating our neighbor's dog (my dogs miss people on our farm,) my son is in restricted to using electronics in his room (okay....that is totally a reward to him,) Rick is working on the bathroom.....I guess I should go do something productive now too.