The Boys Are Back In Town

Seminario de Negocios

The business seminar in Chorrera went well and I was pleased I was able to work with the same individual I had worked with at the previous seminar. Although Generoso had changed his idea for a business, he had already made the necessary changes to the work we had done previously, so we didn’t get too far behind. Generoso is only about 19 or 20, but he seems to be pretty intelligent and hard working. He lives in the Comarca Ngobe Bugle (if you’ve read my previous posts you already know the Comarca is an autonomous region of Panama where the majority of indigenous people live) where there is no electricity, but he wants to start an internet café with the use of solar panels. Right now people have to travel an hour and a half to Tole to use the internet, make copies, print things off and things like that. He must come from a family of hard working entrepreneurs because his dad, uncle and other members of the family have a furniture shop and tree farm. He’s the only Ngobe I know who owns a laptop.

Generoso and me at the Business Seminar

After the seminar I spent a couple of days in the city just hanging out, spending WAY too much money on food and enjoying all the amenities the city has to offer. Monday night we went to a great bar/restaurant that had flat screen televisions and watched Monday Night Football. Redskins vs. Cowboys. It was great! But the skins lost….not so great.

 San Miguel Centro

I had only planned to spend a couple of days in the city, but a friend of mine, Victor, was changing sites and asked me if I would help him move some things. We traveled to his old site, San Miguel Centro, which is about a two hour chiva ride north of Penonome. (Remember, a chiva is just a pick-up truck with a metal cage on the back where they cram in as many people as possible) It was a pretty rough ride, but the scenery was nice. We were only supposed to be there for a night, but we wound up staying for two because Victor’s girlfriend and her cousin came up as well.

Victor's house in San Miguel Centro

I was fortunate enough to be in town on the night of the founding celebration. It seemed like the whole town was there. Everyone got a candle as we left the church, lighting it from the others around us. We basically did a circle around town ending where we started at the Catholic Church on top of the hill. No one spoke during the procession and you could see the small flames of a thousand candles throughout town. It was really quite moving and reminded me of all those Christmas Eve services back home that I’ve been going to since I was a child.

Founding Celebration in San Miguel Centro

The next day we hiked for an hour and a half to a waterfall in town. The swimming area wasn’t very big, but it was deep enough to jump off a large boulder in the middle of the river without getting hurt. Of course climbing up the boulder seemed pretty risky to me, but the kids climbed up like it was nothing, making me look like a complete nerd when I needed someone to help pull me up. I swear they must have sticky stuff on their feet. One kid amazed me when he climbed half way up the side of a cliff using a jungle vine. I decided not to try that one. We splashed around, did some swimming and headed back to town.

Look paw, I climbed a rock!

I woke Victor and the rest of the gang up around 5:30am the next morning so we could catch the chiva at 6:00. If we didn’t catch that one it could be 9, 10, or even 11 before the next one came along and I had a long way to go to get back home. The chiva finally came around 6:30 and we loaded up most of Victor’s belongings in great big garbage bags. Not very pretty, but it didn’t take us long to pack up all his stuff. From Penonome we took another bus to Capira and then took another bus to his new site, Monte Obscuro or “Dark Mountain”. We made small talk with his new host family and his new host mom showed us the house he would be moving into after a month or so. I really had to start making my way back to David (it’s a 7 hour trip from where I was) but when I mentioned that we had to get going, his host mom said the next bus wouldn’t be for another hour. So…we waited an hour and when the bus came it was full and the driver wouldn’t let us on. After that we tried to find a taxi, but no one seemed to know the number for one. There was nothing we could do but wait yet another hour for the next bus. 

I jumped off the rock and lived! Yay life!

We took the bus from Monte Obscuro to Capira, then another bus from Capira to Penonome (where we both had to stand, staring at the floor because Victor and I are both over six feet tall and the ceiling of the bus is only five feet tall – yes, it was very comfortable…. Victor stayed in Penonome and I hopped another bus to Santiago. From Santiago I caught another bus to David. I wasn’t able to get a big bus in Santiago, which is definitely more comfortable, because they were all full. I was extremely lucky though because one guy told me he had been waiting for three hours and couldn’t find a ride to David. As soon as I stepped off the bus in Santiago, some guy yelled at me “Hey, you going to David?” I was a little leery about following him to a small van parked at the side of a store, but after talking to the rest of the people inside I knew it would be fine. Actually, we didn’t make any stops and the driver flew like hell so we made it into David in record time. It was about 9pm when we pulled into David and I had been traveling since 6am. I grabbed some cheap fonda food (a fonda’s just a cheap dive restaurant) and headed to the hotel T for a good night’s rest.

What a bunch of nerds.

Who needs a land line when there's a pay phone right in town? This is also a very important historical site. It's the very first pay phone in Latin America that Clark Kent used to change into his Superman spandex outfit. Seriously, you can google it.

The Boys Are Back in Town

The next morning I got to the terminal and because of the time, I didn’t know if the bus I was boarding was getting ready to leave or had just pulled. It was weird when he answered “We’re leaving as soon as we’re full.” The busses in Panama are generally one of the few things you can depend on to have a regular schedule. As the bus filled up with indigenous Ngobe I quickly realized that coffee harvest season had begun. Every year starting around mid September, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Ngobe leave the Comarca and head to coffee farms all over Panama, including the Chiriquí highlands and Costa Rica. The harvest season lasts through mid January and for many of them it’s the only source of income they see all year. It is hard, difficult, manual labor that pays exactly diddly squat. They get two dollars for every bag they fill with coffee beans and the bags are about five feet tall. It would probably take me two days to fill one of them. But if they got paid a decent wage, I’m guessing the world would stop drinking coffee because it would be too expensive. (Yes, I realize that last statement seems like a direct jab at capitalism from someone who is a firm believer in a fair market system)

The upside to a bus made for 20 people that now has 40, is that we made it home in record time. No one got on and we didn’t stop to let anyone off. Two hours fifteen minutes when it usually takes three. The downside is that you have a completely jam-packed bus full of people who haven’t had a decent shower in days, one kid to the right of me who threw up within thirty minutes, the indigenous girl next to me (who was probably 16 at best) was breast feeding a baby on her left knee while the two year old girl on her right knee was balling her eyes out for most of the trip and one of them, or some kid close by, had obviously shit himself. (Side note – it is not uncommon for teenage girls in the Comarca to have multiple children) Of course her kid is not the only one crying. There’s a baby that I would have sworn someone was trying to squeeze the life out of the way it screamed THE WHOLE WAY HOME – OVER TWO HOURS. Other kids were snotting and sneezing, hacking and coughing. The bus was blaring Panamanian tipico music, which is just accordion music with some guy screaming along like he’s being murdered, but they call it singing, no air-conditioning and all the windows, except mine, were closed because it was raining. And then of course there’s the kid in front of me who started puking his holy guts out with about an hour left in the trip. Yes indeed it was a holly jolly ride. I believe every American should experience riding a bus in Panama to appreciate the divine wonder of owning your own vehicle in the United States.

I also noticed probably a dozen landslides on the way home. Most of them I thought to myself “Oh cool, a landslide. It looks like a waterslide at Water Country USA, only its mud. Neat.” But then there were two where I thought “HOLY CRAP!!! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED HERE!!??” Seriously, major landslides where it looked like the whole side of a mountain had been bulldozed. Thank goodness it had happened while I was gone. Apparently one of the teachers got stuck on a bus going to David for 7 hours just to wind up back in town because of the landslides. Good grief.

I had been gone a little over a week and coming back to town was almost surreal. In a town of about 4,000 people it now looked like there were 10,000 Ngobe. One of them was passed out drunk outside of Jorge and Rosa’s store and another one was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck with dried blood stains streaming down his face. Unfortunately two of the most popular sports for the Ngobe are drinking and fighting. Not casual drinking per se, but drinking so much you pass out in the parking lot of a convenience store and piss yourself kind of drinking. And fighting is just part of their past time. Like baseball for Americans. There’s not a whole lot to do in the Comarca. No bowling alleys, shopping malls, movie theatres, restaurants, tennis courts, basketball courts, pool halls, swimming pools, TV, or anything close. It’s not like they could afford a basketball even if there was a court to play on. Most live in dirt floor homes with no electricity or running water. So, to entertain themselves, they fight. It’s not like an “I’m going to kill you” kind of fight. Most of the time there are rules they follow. They only punch each other in the face and if a man goes down, you back off until he’s back up again. Most Ngobe men I have seen are short, stocky, and muscular. I guess it comes from a lifetime of hard labor and walking everywhere you go instead of driving. I wouldn’t want to get into a fight with a Ngobe who was a foot shorter than me for anything. And after riding all the way home with a bus crammed with way too many people, (let’s not forget the teenage girl breastfeeding beside me, or the crying, snotting, coughing, hacking, vomiting, pooping kids on board) finding one guy passed out drunk in the street, another one with a bloodied head wound, it was good to know….the Ngobes were back in town.