Visit to the Darien

 Visit to the Darien

July 21, 2015

Small waves lap the hull of the lancha and make a rhythmic popping sound. In a futile attempt to become comfortable, I am wrapped around a gas tank, one of about two-dozen or so on the small fishing boat. I use my lifejacket to blanket me from the wind while I listen to my friend, Aaron, breathing the breath of the blissfully unconscious. The captain has retired behind the mound of gas tanks and uses his umbrella to shield him from the wind. The popping sound and unfortunate shape of my blanket keep me awake and cold so I admire the perfect line of the Pacific Ocean meeting the starlit sky on the horizon. I stand up and take a cautiously balanced pee off the side of the rocking lancha, imagining how ridiculous it would be to fall of the side of the boat, headfirst into the sea. I would create an illumined splash in my now salty and diluted pee, the bio-luminescent bacteria welcoming me into the dark ocean with a burst dull green light. The captain would explode out from behind his umbrella and yell at me in fast and indecipherable Spanish to get my ass back onto the lancha as he would crawl over the mound of gas tanks until he reached the front of the boat and would pull me back onboard. Instead, I keep my balance, zip up, and resume my normal position wrapped around a gas tank in the bow of a fiberglass fishing boat, in the middle of the night, with an afro-Latino captain and cargo of empty gas tanks and two gringos; off the coast of a nearly deserted jungle in Panama’s notorious Darien region. Silent lightning and glowing splashes of jumping fish periodically ignite the darkness and I try and sleep, glad to not have pushed the absurdity of my circumstance overboard.  

My friend and fellow aspirante (PCV in training) Aaron and I were making our way back from our volunteer visits. We had both gone to remote sites, which required hours of bus and boat travel to access.  The site I visited, which was the portal to the site Aaron visited, is called Taimati. It is beachfront property 12 hours out of each day. During high tide, the Pacific Ocean breaks gently upon the towns sandy shore. However, during low tide, the ocean drops to reveal kilometers of mud between Taimati’s beach and the lower level of the ocean. You therefore cannot arrive or depart at low tide, unless you want to hike through knee-deep mud to or from the town. Given the tides on the night we departed and irregularity of the boat schedule, we had been forced to board a boat in the middle of the night at high tide, put an anchor in past the low tide mud fields, and wait until the sun rose. It was my first night spent on the ocean, and hopefully my least comfortable night ever.

Departure aside, the previous week had been memorable and informative. I visited a current volunteer named Austin Dill in Panama’s Darien province. The Darien is the Wild West of Panama with low population density, vast regions of untapped wilderness and the origin of the fables of drug cartels that pass through and the horrors the leave in their wake. In general, towns are small and Taimati is composed of a few hundred people. It is a sleepy fishing town organized around a grid of concrete sidewalks. There are no cars and the generator for the town doesn’t function so the power lines are a reminder of a brighter past. Running water is spotty at best. The people fish for their food and gather shellfish and crabs that they share with the community.

I spent the days pasearing with Austin, getting to know his neighbors and asking him endless questions about the life of a volunteer and his site. He told me stories, made me food by headlamp or sunlight, served me filtered my water, and tried to give me an honest taste of what it is like to be a PCV. We received gifts of food as we paseared, went for walks, sat around the house, looked at some of the initiatives he was hoping to implement in the community, and played soccer with the kids. The people hauled boat motors to and from their boats, filled buckets full with seafood, and they would extend a long “Buueeeennnaas” to us from their sun-baked lips as we wondered through the town. The days passed quickly, with rain in the afternoon and hot sun during the day with a western horizon of either mud or ocean. This was the life in Taimati and the moons position in the sky determined how the day would be spent just as much as the sun.

We also visited another volunteer named Matteo at an indigenous Woonan site, who Aaron was staying with. Austin and I walked 30 minutes through the jungle to the community of Semico. Matt’s house was surrounded by the wall-less and thatched roof structures that composed the town. The people were known for being funny and happy. They called Matt “white penis” in Woonan, and would warn him of the potentially uplifting risks of eating too much shellfish. A few kids from the town accompanied us on a tour of the town’s aqueduct, and one of them shot an iguana down on the way. We bathed in the river after the tour with what seemed like a disproportional amount of 3-7 year olds for the size of the town. Matteo told us of his hopes to bury the exposed aqueduct system, but also the difficulty in motivating his community. A few members of his community washed their cloths in the calm river in the background with a basket of recently picked fruit on the shore and joked with each other in a fast mix of Spanish and Woonan. I understood their lack of motivation and his dilemma.

The week was full of many other small stories and experiences which now compose my impression of a PCV’s life in Panama. The culture seems authentic and thus isolating for a foreigner. Free time seems to be a common theme as one must wait on unpredictable transportation or for the community to mobilize. Building capacity in one’s community seems to be just as important as implementing tangible projects. Across the board there seems to be poignant highs and lows. However, at the end of the day it appears that a PCV can rest feeling proud of the small victories of the day as they sleep under a thatched roof or sheets of zinc; or occasionally, a blanket of bright stars with silent lightning on the horizon.