Stephan Schwab

In between all the adventure stuff about river crossings, horses, etc. there is another topic that should not be forgotten here on this blog. The farm is not in a country or an area of milk and honey. There is poverty around. People don’t go to the movies after working the land or enjoy some other expensive past time activities. Life in rural Panama is quite different from the brightly lit areas of modern Panama City.

We are paying our neighbor Didimo to look after our horses and store our gear in his old house where he used to live for some 15 years. I’m not really sure when he actually this house, when he came to the Canitas region and about other details so please don’t understand the following as some kind of scientific study about Panamanian economics in rural area. I just want to show you how it looks like today, imagine a bit how it was in the past and potentially draw your own conclusions.

So here is the old house from the outside:

This is the entrance and terrace area which doubles as kitchen:

One of the rooms. As you can see most furniture looks like homemade.

This is one of the bedrooms. Notice the gaps between the boards the wall is made of. These boards are simply put on top of each other. That’s not the work of a carpenter but simply of someone who had some wood and needed a home. Everywhere in Panama there are snakes, scorpions and spiders. There are enough opportunities to come it for these creatures. Personally I would not feel comfortable living in such a place. How about you?

Another bedroom with some paint on the walls:

A better look at the sitting area and kitchen. You can see a sink at the right in the background.

This is where Didimo lives today. This is in Buenos Aires. There are several buildings on this lot. One is the house in the picture and then there is another house further in the background. I suppose this is where one of his sons lives. The others work in Panama City and live there. There are further a little stable and some storage shed on the property.

The patio on the backside of the house. There is a TV to the right. You can see three doors leading to bedroom, bath (shower) and kitchen.

Again this is not very scientific but I find it a bit astonishing how someone lives who has been in the area the better part of his adult life and owns a significant amount of land. So I’m starting to think about why things are the way they are. Of course seeing this makes me think as well about our project of cattle farming. Maybe there are some things we don’t know that make it difficult to be successful. Don’t know yet … Needs more research I think.

A few days back I updated my Mac Pro to Snow Leopard. I did a clean install and then restored my data from Time Machine. Somehow the restore encountered permission problems and restored only a small amount of data. I don’t know what caused it but after copying the data over on the command line everything works fine.

Now a few days later I can say that Snow Leopard (10.6) feels faster than Leopard (10.5). Except for the different desktop background and the different menus in the dock it doesn’t look different or new. As far as I remember 10.6 wasn’t meant as a feature release but some kind of overall improvement.

Java lives in two places. One for 1.5 and the other for 1.6 but it’s the same binary:

sol-2:bin sns$ pwd
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home/bin
sol-2:bin sns$ ./java -version
java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)

sol-2:bin sns$ pwd
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin
sol-2:bin sns$ ./java -version
java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)

From eclipse.org I downloaded the latest 64 bit Cocoa based build. It is not available as bundled Eclipse, such as “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers”, but instead one has to choose “Eclipse Classic”. I downloaded from this URL: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.5-200906111540/eclipse-SDK-3.5-macosx-cocoa-x86_64.tar.gz and then added

EPP Packages Repository - http://download.eclipse.org/technology/epp/packages/galileo

to the package manager. From there on it was an easy select, wait a little and restart Eclipse to get a functional – and fast – IDE for Java development. After adding Subversion and M2Eclipse (Maven plugin) I was back in business.

As I mentioned before our neighbor Didimo offered to take care of our horses and store our gear in his old home. Let me show you the place. It’s a very simply wooden structure with a tin roof. It has no windows but some kind of a shutter in place of a window.

For lunch we come back to this place to light a fire for a nice barbeque. These “light a bag” things are great. We’ve stored a few there and I can confirm that this is the easiest and cleanest way you can find.

In the background you can see Pedron (white) and Luzero (brown). There are a few mango trees and all the horses like the fruits. If we don’t tie them to a tree, they will roam the place and you can hear the sound of them squashing the fruits with their teath. They have an interesting technique for eating fruits and even manage to take a good part of the juice in.

We use a marinated Panamanian version of Rib Eye. It has a good flavor and we don’t really need any kind of side. After all we don’t have any table but we do eat from plates and with fork and knife. Not as on the other day when we could not cross the second river. That day we simply used a stick. See next picture :-)

Here it is. Of course I was posing but I take it you will believe me that I was really, really hungry that day. I guess it depends on the place and the situation :-) It was fun and good for a nice story.