más para allá

i met josé torres in the back of a pick up on the interamericana.

he was headed home and i was returning from visiting a local school garden. i had been liberated from the office where i spent a tedious week reviewing documents and not even the approaching menacing clouds could dampen my high.

he smiled curiously as if to say, “girl, who hit you with the happy stick?”, and i shrugged back knowing any explanation i tried formulating would just end up sounding silly. josé, turns out, is the director of a local school. his stooped posture that seemed to be accustomed to ducking through low doorways, only served to accentuate his tall agile frame. he smiled easily and without hesitation. a few stray hairs marked his upper lip, a paltry attempt of a mustache making him look even younger than his 27 years. he pointed to a distant mountain top lined with pines.

that’s Cañazas.

Cañazas. i repeated it in my head as i tend to do any new word trying my best to commit it to memory letting it ruminate like a stew in a crockpot. he told me about the communities struggles and they sounded all too familiar: isolated. poor. no work.

i nodded knowingly and felt my heart sink hearing a song that for me never got old and always had the same effect.

“i would like to visit your community.” josé smiled, but tentatively and gave me a sideways glance.

“¿Le gusta caminar?"... do you like to walk?

my response would best translate as the following: “oh my god! are you kidding me?! i love walking! walking is my favorite!!!”

this is no joke. walking for me is the most natural thing, and in a sense sometimes courageous thing to do. often that simple action of putting one foot in front of the other is the only thing to be done to mitigate feelings of resignation. for me, walking is exploring and it implies moving toward something, some sort of destination.

finishing francis moore lappé’s book, hope’s edge, i found myself dogearing a page for its simple yet poignant words spoken by a member of the Green Belt Movement, an organization jump starting reforestation efforts in kenya.

“The most important thing is that I know where I want to go - and that I just keep walking.”

the quote conjured feelings of both envy, and accord. i knew it was true even though my life looked more like a distressing game of chutes and ladders than steady footprints marking one’s path.

my effervescent response seemed to mitigate any hesitation and we made plans: i would meet him monday morning at 5:00 am at the bus terminal. come sunday morning, however, the glow of approaching adventure had started to wane and i called up my counterpart, bonilla, at the organization i was working with...

every peace corps volunteer is assigned a counterpart, a person to be a guide and help them in work and often in community life as well. for the most part, i was getting along okay interpreting what others were saying in the panamanian accent, but bonilla’s words seemed to run into each other. he could be a bit obtuse and teetered somewhere on a pinnacle leering from side to side between endearing and irritating. he spent most meetings admiring ceiling tiles and i watched him from across the room marveling at how he bumped along, his good humor often compensating for a lack of professional savvy. still, he was my go to man and gave me the go ahead informing me that bolivar, an instructor from the organization, would be headed to the community as well.

we took a bus, a chiva, until the road seemed to trail off and so did the rest of the passengers. we hopped off and found ourselves facing a path painted the familiar red tone that seems ubiquitous in the region: great for making clay pots, but shit for planting.

turns out we would not be walking, but riding horses out to the community.

“¿sabe montar caballo?”... do you know how to ride a horse?

well, let’s see... i quickly racked my brain trying to remember if i ever had really ridden a horse before, but the only thing that came to mind was a photo of me on a carousel with pigtails cerca ’87.

“what’s the horse’s name?” i figured that if we were on a first name basis than maybe we would have a better chance of getting along.

“cholera.”

“cholera?”, i questioned. “like the sickness?”

“sí”, josé responded without the slightest hint of irony.

i waited for what i thought would be some sort of explanation, but all i got was a shrug. i shrugged back and hopped on what i decided would be my noble steed. the ride was nothing short of gorgeous. we spent three hours winding through open fields dotted with cows, fording rivers à la oregon trail, and galloping down mountainsides.

“do you know how to saloom?”, josé questioned.

before i could respond, he let out a cry resembling something like the yelp of a chucho getting nailed in the backside by a bus. the wail came back in what i took to be an echo, but was actually a response from the next mountaintop over.

so here i was 2 weeks in country horseback riding through the hills of panama, screaming like a banshee, and loving every minute of it. as soon as josé let out his cry i would let out a residual wallop of a hoot answered by an unknown stranger somewhere in the distance.

eventually my enthusiasm became less punctuated as battle cries gave way to a sore behind. for the first time in my life, i found myself wishing for some extra cushioning to help dull the throbbing pain that got worse with every rock cholera stumbled upon. luckily before long, the school came into view marking our arrival.

the communities i worked with in guatemala were decidedly rural and markedly more isolated than anything i had experienced in the states. still, they seemed to always have access to soda and junk food that left local children with smiles of rotting pegs, and rust colored hair. their crumbling teeth and small stature were often a disheartening reminder of malnutrition plaguing the community. i assumed that in panama i would find similar circumstances in the campo, but was surprised to see little chiclets of white shyly greeting me upon my arrival. turns out Cañazas is so isolated that there is no junk food. there is also no electricity aside from inside the school building which operates on a solar panel. Cañazas is by far the most isolated community i have ever set foot in and over the next few days i got to see how this unveiled itself in daily life.

for better or worse.

i have read anthropological accounts of communities in far flung places like bhutan struggling with establishing equilibrium between tradition and so-called “modernity”, and this is as close as i have ever gotten to seeing this manifested in real form. my stay was brief, a mere few days. feigning any sort of in-depth understanding would be in poor form, but certain things about the diurnal reality of Cañazas became apparent through observations and conversations i had.

the population fluctuates somewhere between 60 and 70 depending on the season. men often go to work on fincas near the coast to make cash for their families, but for the most part Cañazas is an island unto itself surviving, struggling, and in many ways thriving in accordance to elements beyond their control.

namely, nature.

that brute of a thing that many of us have spent the last few hundred years trying to tame as opposed to establishing a reciprocal relationship with. nature: our attempt to emulate god and control the uncontrollable. it wasn’t as though the people in Cañazas had made a conscious decision to work with the elements, but their circumstances made it a necessity.

through the school’s front gate strode a woman, her face delicately framed with purple rimmed glasses, professionally dressed despite her decidedly modest surroundings. this was elisabeth, the other teacher working in the local school. like most teachers in panama, she was not from the community, but had been assigned to work there by the department of education. she and josé occupied a small mud house on the school’s grounds separated into two separate rooms by a thin and unconvincing wall. i had spent 5 minutes in Cañazas and had been diminished to a pool of sweat while elisabeth had been there for the last two years and was a breath of fresh air. easily careening from one conversation and person to the next, she was an ebullient presence managing to uphold much of latin american’s reverence for dressing to the nines, a cultural affirmation of personal dignity that i had never really quite picked up on.

bolivar, an instructor for my host country agency who had been working with Cañazas to establish an agricultural group, was there as well. i had met him once before and felt i had found a fast friend. he was ambitious, intuitive, and spoke with passion and a sense of purpose about local agriculture.

not only were teachers there, but parents, too. mothers were busy in the kitchen preparing lunch and parents were working out in the school garden harvesting a local variety of bean called barbachoa. this was less of a school and more of a community gathering point. as students finished lunch i expected them to head home, but instead found that neighbors seemed to fluctuate in and out of the school grounds into the wee hours of the night. the fence surrounding the property seemed less for keeping people out, and more of a relic that someone had built on a whim, the gate wavering in the wind like a surrender flag at the end of a particularly harsh battle.

as the sun set, about 30 people of all ages settled into a classroom with a television mounted on the rear wall. both adults and children enjoyed an animated feature about a polar bear named berni as he went head to head with a bow tie adorned penguin in sports including tae kwon do, tennis, golf, and paragliding. i wondered as i laid sprawled out on the floor in the tropical heat at the novelty of the situation. i, a young woman from the united states, was watching something that was at least somewhat familiar to me by virtue of the place i grew up in. granted, i had never actually seen a polar bear ice skating or a penguin for that matter, but the context wasn’t completely lost on me. i wondered what it would be like to see something for the first time; to see something with fresh eyes that hadn’t been inundated with so many things that even a 3D imax blockbuster produced little more than a ho hum yawn. i contemplated the appeal of it: the colors, the images, the laughter it conjured and understood what it was like to be enraptured by the stark outlandishness of material display.

to be blunt, the polar bear was cool. probably cooler and sexier than any garden could ever be. but such is my toil: making vegetables sexy.

i made my best attempt giving a couple of nutrition talks to both parents and students. all of their questions seemed to point toward the fact that they, too, were struggling with figuring out how encroaching globalization could be processed. the palpable changes were like dandelions spreading through a garden patch. like these surly flowers/weeds, it is hard to decide if you should let them do their thing, or take a machete and lop their heads off. they are not intrinsically bad, and in fact can be quite useful. it’s just that left to their own devices, they tend to choke out some of the more feeble, yet noble plants.

what about food in cans? is that food good for us?

when we travel to the city, we see lots of “propaganda” for mcdonalds. is this healthy food?

the government has been sending us dehydrated rice and beans from brazil to feed our children. many of them do not like it. why are we getting food all the way from brazil? is food from there better for us?

i chatted with parents about daily life and found much to admire. it was a community in the sense of a physical place, but also as a living breathing entity. when there was rice to be harvested, or a home to be built, everyone helped. they depended on each other. the value of human life was upheld over the value of the market, because for them the market was something peripheral that they only entered occasionally and when need be.

elisabeth had formerly worked as a teacher in a private school in panama city, but found herself despite no electricity, despite the isolation, happier in Cañazas. maybe in fact it wasn’t despite all these things, but because of them and the sense of community they have fostered. the niños, she said, were cooperadores. they were “cooperators”.

there was no doubt that Cañazas was a humble place and one that i could see my mother visiting and describing as, gulp, an “experience”... sort of akin to reading russian literature. it may do us some good, but it would be much preferable to be seated in our climate controlled fluffy homes flipping through people magazine.

as people in Cañazas struggle with globalization, so de we all. determining daily through the products we buy, the technologies we use, and the homes we live in, where we fall on the spectrum of humanity that ranges from the most modest homes built from earth to lavish palaces that are less functional and more a display of personal accumulation. the difference is that Cañazas does not have much say in the matter, but most of us have a bit more poetic license to design our lives filtering in and out what we choose.

so cheers to the good life, and all its implicit responsibilities. we've earned it.