A piece of Panamá

Okay, where to start. It has been quite a while since we´ve written anything, and thus lots has happened. For starters, we have come back to Costa Rica after spending a total of about 3.5 weeks in Panamá. Panamá is a great country with friendly people and beautiful landscapes. In many ways very similar to Costa Rica but in other ways very different. After our wonderful respite in Volcán for about a week, we met a friend of mine, Panama Jack, who lived in an indian village on the Caribbean for two years with Peace Corps. After returning to AR, Jack then returned to Panamá where we met him, and then traveled, first by mini-bus and then by small boat, out to the village where we spent the following 6 days. The boat rides there and back were some of the most memorable parts of the trip. They are small boats with basic outboard motor at the back and terribly unconfortable bench seats in the middle and front. As we left the dock, we were driving out through the main bay, where there are a few oil tankers waiting to collect or drop off oil that is pumped accross the country from one ocean to the other. The bay is huge and we were unable to see all sides at any given moment. The further we went out, the bigger the waves became, until, by the time we get to the end of the bay (Cusapin is around a peninsula and faces the Caribbean Sea) and are actually in the sea, the waves become great swells much bigger than the boat. Fortunately they never broke onto us though. It really is stunning out there. Although it rained or threatened rain 3/4 of our time spent there, it was a rich experience.


There are currently two girls living in the area with Peace Corps, about 30 minute walk away from each other. The main village is Cusapin, located in the Bocas del Toro region and is only accessible by boat, which is where we stayed while cooking dinner every night with the present Peace Corps volunteer, Joanna, or wandering throughout the village. The next village over, named Guacamayo, and yes named after the presence of parrots (which we did not see), is a beautiful 30 minute walk through jungle and picturesque beaches, and is the current home for Jaime, the other volunteer. This village is significantly smaller and more rustic. If Cusapin, a village of about 500 people, feels like the city to the people who live in the surrounding villages, imagine how small Guacamayo is. The buildings are very basic wooden structures, there is running water that is piped from a small aquaduct somewhere in the hill above the village and the toilet is either a wooden community structure built over the small stream that flows into the ocean, or it's the stream itself, where you just go plop your ass over the water. Nutrients for the fish, right?


The beaches at Guacamayo and the next village down the coast are stunning. It is on these beaches where I spent three days trying to learn how to surf. The waves were big, much too big to effectively do any surfing as a beginner in three days, but it was good fun paddling on a long board, occasionally drinking salt water and being bashed around by waves that frightened me when I looked up them. And I even stood up for about 1.5 seconds maybe three times.


The people themselves in this area have lived here since well before any contact with the European world. They are part of the Ngobe tribe, one of the largest in Panamá. The tribe covers much of the western part of the country, including the northern coast and the inland mountains. In the villages where we stayed, the first language of most of the people is Ngobe, although in Cusapin, everybody speaks Spanish. There are even some of the older men in the village who speak the caribbean English patois, which is essentially very basic English, but I found it harder to try to speak it than Spanish. The people are definitely poor in terms of standard equations, but they rarely go without food and everyone who grew up in the villages in the area (and there are many more that we did not visit) knows how to survive off the land from the jungle. Education is also a problem, and yet, like everywhere with great cultural diversity, the answers are never simple. But the high school in Cusapin is decent, and it is the only one for all the villages. The Panamanian government has a system where it assigns teachers to random places throughout the country, and Cusapin is one of these places. In theory it seems like a good system. The problems arise, according to Jack and the other volunteers, because many of the Latino teachers either don't respect the indian kids enough or don't care to provide real education.

Although our stay in Cusapin and Guacamayo was brief, it was rewarding. We received a taste of the culture in a way that few outsiders really ever find, especially as tourists. And we gained insight into what Peace Corps could be like, which in many ways is just as valuable.