Machete-ing, stripping, repairing earthquake damage: new skills added

I gripped the machete tightly and took a swing at a broken palm branch, trying to remember all Gilbert’s instructions so I didn’t lop off a limb. (My own, that is.) Swing at your side. Swing away from you. Flick your wrist. Follow through, like with a golf swing.

It’s tricky at the start, but I got better after an hour of clearing out underbrush just back from the beach. Until I got a blister on my thumb.

“You should have worn work gloves,” advised Bill, who was far more advanced than me in wielding the deadly blade. At one point, Gilbert thought his neighbour José had cleared an area, but it was really Bill. That was high praise indeed!

When you sign up for HelpX, you create a profile that tells about you and includes the practical skills you have to offer any potential host. Bill and I had a pretty good list of skills, including gardening, hard landscaping, tiling, painting, electrical work, plumbing, sewing, cooking, and teaching English as a second language.

We can both now add “proficient with a machete” to our profile plus many other new skills we acquired while staying with Gilbert, our HelpX host. He assigned us many tasks that required learning new skills – and this added to our enjoyment of the HelpX experience as we helped him renovate, build and maintain his western Panama home for a month.

Here are some of our other newly acquired skills:

Planting coconut palms

Coconuts will start growing anywhere they encounter fresh water. They send several roots down and a straight green shoot upwards. Many had started growing in the forest near the beach, but Gilbert wanted them moved into more favourable spots. I learned to choose a coconut that has a smaller shoot, since the roots will also be shorter. You dig around it, wrestle it out, move it to the right spot, dig a new hole and plant. Tip: digging a hole near a land-crab hole makes the digging easier. The crabs don’t like it, but it’s less work!

Planting pineapples

Bill took the top leafy parts of a half dozen pineapples, dug a shallow hole and stuck them in. Things grow here amazingly fast and easily, with no such babying as ‘rooting’ things beforehand. Time to new pineapple is about two years. Indeed, along the road, people make fences by sticking sticks in the ground and stringing barbed wire between them. Before long, the sticks turn into trees!

Stripping, staining and varnishing

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Although I’ve done plenty of painting before, I’d never actually stripped old paint or varnish, stained or varnished. Gilbert is a good teacher. As an experienced sailor, he is well acquainted with varnished wood. His house has varnished wood furniture, window frames, door frames, kitchen counter, staircase and more. He loves it, but admits it’s a lot of work. “If you want to enslave yourself, use varnish.”

Repairing earthquake damage

We experienced two minor earthquakes while staying with Gilbert – both in the night. We woke up briefly as our beds shook, then went back to sleep. But there was a much bigger earthquake last year that cracked some cement on Gilbert’s house. Fortunately, that was all, since his house is built to California earthquake standards. Bill dug out the broken cement and replaced it with a cement-sand mixture. In larger areas, he used a wooden form to make the new cement match the line of the existing.

Working on scaffolding

I was nervous at first. “It’s only about 10 feet off the ground,” said Bill, who watched me edge carefully out onto it from the veranda, so I could scrub the house wall before painting it. “You’re just as dead if you fall on your head from 10 feet as from 25,” I pointed out. However, the scaffold was sturdy and I was comfortable on it after about 15 minutes.

Trimming tropical flowers

We’ve done plenty of gardening in Canada, but somehow it’s different with tropical plants – you’re never quite sure what to do or what the challenges are. Who knew that gracefully arching bougainvillea branches can thwack you in the face, and that they have long thorns! I got a lovely scrape across my chin. Clipping and thinning jasmine, heliconia, ginger and an unidentified green hedge with red flowers were also new experiences. Bill trimmed palm and hardwood trees with a machete.

Cooking without all the required tools

Gilbert’s kitchen had most of the basics, but not everything required to cook with all the bananas, lemons and plantains he had. I did a lot of baking, since he fell in love with my mom’s banana bread recipe, but I had to improvise a lot.

• No double boiler with non-metallic top pan or a whisk. I wanted to make lemon curd to use up just some of the thousands of lemons ripening on the trees outside. So, I put the lemon mixture in a coffee pot carafe and held it over a vegetable steamer basket in a frying plan, while whisking with a fork. No grater, so Bill chopped the lemon peel finely for me.
• No measuring cup. I measured various amounts of water in my Nalgene water bottle, then poured them into a glass cup, and marked them using my Sharpie marker.
• No waxed or parchment paper. I wanted to line the loaf pans that Gilbert bought for me to make banana bread. I soaked a piece of paper towel in cooking oil and spread them in the bottom of the pans. It actually worked better because it’s softer and conforms to corners.

Picking lemons and oranges

You can’t tell by the colour if they’re ripe, or even what fruit they are, for that matter! The lemons we’ve seen come in yellow, green and slightly orange. The oranges are green. The easiest way to tell if they’re ripe is simply to tug on them. If they come off easily, they’re ripe.

Cutting hair

Bill desperately needed a haircut but was scared to go into any of the sketchy-looking barbershops in town. So, I borrowed Gilbert’s clippers to give Bill a Number 6 at the back and sides, followed by a trim around the ears and the top with a tiny pair of travel scissors I had. That was a first for me! (I threatened to use the machete if he didn’t hold still.)

De-husking coconuts

Bill mastered the art of taking a green coconut that had just fallen from a tree and de-husking it. Gilbert had a pointed stick set into the ground. You slam the eye of the coconut onto the stick, being careful not to slam any of your own body parts, then wiggle it around to loosen the husk. Repeat until you have the brown coconut in hand. To get the water out, you insert a small knife into two of the three eyes on the nut. To get at the coconut meat, you give the nut several hard smacks on its equator using a hammer or a patacone smashing board.

Loading huge timbers

Bill may have retired but he’s still putting his engineering skills to new uses. Gilbert wanted to load huge heavy timbers into the back of his pickup truck to take them to the sawmill for cutting into boards. He and Bill rigged up pulleys, levers, and rollers to get the job done.

Practical tips for HelpX travellers:

• Take work clothes that you don’t mind getting sweaty, stinky, dirty and covered with daubs of paint and varnish. I failed to do that. So, I took my pyjamas – an old pair of turquoise shorts and a green T-shirt – and designated them my work clothes. However, the T-shirt was the one I bought after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and I didn’t want it to get ruined so I turned it inside-out when I was painting or varnishing.
• Work out the accommodation and meal conditions at the start, to ensure no misunderstandings. Accommodation is usually free in exchange for a reasonable number of hours of work per day. Food costs are often negotiable, with some HelpX places offering a kitchen where you cook your own, while others cover the costs entirely. Gilbert asked us to chip in for groceries for the first few days – that’s what he does with everyone until he can assess how useful they are. He’s had people who stay for just a week and all they want to do is sweep the floor. I guess we passed, since he began covering all our food costs. However, we did chip in for beer and wine.
• Open, honest and clear communications will usually avoid awkward situations or misunderstandings with your host. When in doubt, ask.