PANAMA 10/15-11/20
Panama started slowly. I had no real direction and nothing seemed to be really drawing me in. I checked into the super popular gringo hostel in town and started to wait, hoping that something would catch my eye and set me off again. Almost a week passed while I amused myself with distractions like a trip to see the canal, wandering around the colonial ruins outside of town, and a night spent on a little island off the Pacific coast called Taboga. Fun, interesting, but not mind blowing. Then one day I was roaming around the old part of town admiring the buildings when I came across a colorfully dressed woman selling intricate pretty applique squares. She was the first Kuna Indian I met, and the first seed of interest sprouted.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is a sprawling campus in the center of Panama City providing facilities for people who study all sorts of tropical things including Kuna Indians. The research library there is extensive, free to use for anybody, and has access to all the online academic journal databases that we twenty-first century college kids have grown so attached to. Curiosity about these interesting people drove me there one day and I spent a few hours glossing anthropological articles and texts. In the book store I bought James Howe s ethnography of the Kuna focused on their local political structure and tore through it back at the hostel.

A Canadian man whom I met at the hostel noticed my book and mentioned a friend of his, a Chilean sailor, who had a couple of Kuna friends. He introduced us and Pedro, the Chilean, agreed to take me to Centro Carti to meet his buddy.

In a seedy corner of Panama City there is a small house used as a community center by a few Kuna Indians living and working outside the islands, Centro Carti. Pedro s friend was a cheerful man by the name of Evelio. Evelio was quite friendly and was happy to let me stay with his family and him on his island, Carti Sudgup. He was leaving in a few days and told me to show up the night before we planned to leave to get things in order and confirm everything.

I was giddy with excitement as a few days crawled past in Panama. I met an English girl in the hostel and passed the time pleasantly with her, going to see the ruins of colonial Panama city, the canal, and a movie (Motorcycle Diaries, based on the book Che Guevarra wrote before he became a famous revolutionary, a good flick).

The night before I was to leave I went back to Centro Carti as Evelio had asked me to. It was raining that evening and I scurried through the streets of Panama City under my umbrella. It was warm and light inside the community center and abuzz with activity. Evelio explained to me that there was a dance competition coming up and their squad was practicing that night. A number of people just came along to watch. I stayed for a little more than an hour myself, spell bound. A small group of men and women arranged themselves in a circle, the men with reed pan flutes and the women with rattles. At the leaders cue, the men launched into a haunting, pulsating rhythm accented by the womens rattling, everyone hunched over dancing.

The men were dressed like any other young Panamanians but the women were all dressed in the colorful traditional clothes for which the Kuna are famous. They wore blouses decorated with molas (Kuna for "clothes" popularly used to refer specifically to this part of a womans shirt), colorful artistic fabric panels made using what is known as reverse applique layers of various colored cloth cut in places to reveal the colors below. The blouses are tucked into dark blue skirts with yellow or green decoration wrapped around their waists and their calves and forearms are decorated with beads. It felt as though I had entered another world and when I left, walking through the wet streets and reflected neon lights I felt alive.


Half a Kuna mola (it was too big for the scanner) the other half is just like this one but different colors. Some pictures below include women in traditional dress where you can see these artistic pieces in their proper context.

Early the next morning I headed out with Evelio and a few other Kuna guys in the back of a pickup truck to Miramar where we would head off to the islands in a small motor boat.

For a little more than two weeks I stayed with Evelio and his family getting to know the islands of Kuna Yala and the people living there. Carti Sugdup (Carti means more or less "River across which our dead people live" and Sugdup means "Crab Island" what that means together, I am not really sure) is a mid sized island, home to a little less than a thousand people. Its about twice as big as a football field, packed tightly with little thatch houses.

Its dense population is supported by the islands proximity to shore and the river there. There is no fresh water on the island itself and unlike some of the islands, they dont have an aqueduct bringing it in. This means that a couple of times a week people have to paddle to the river to fill a dozen or so five gallon jugs of water to bring back for cooking and bathing, along with fire wood for their cooking. As there is no space on the island, most everyone has a little farm on the mainland as well where they grow such things as coconuts, bannanas, sugar cane, and yucca.

We arrived in the evening so there was little time to see the island that night. Evelio has three houses in a row. A small hut that serves as the kitchen, a bigger one where most every one sleeps, and another smaller one out of which he sells soda, beer, and home made bread. The houses have sand floors, a frame of logs, cane walls, and thatch roofs. In the heat they are rather comfy, allowing the breeze to enter and providing shade. After a dinner of smoked fish and roasted bannanas I climbed into a hammock in the larger hut and went to sleep.

The next day I walked around the island. It is laid out in a simple fashion. There are two main thoroughfares, wider paths that run most of the length of the island, jammed with houses. Between all the houses are paths winding around to the edges of the islands, littered with canoes and little walled off structures hanging out over the water that serve as bathrooms. There are a few cement buildings, mainly the two larger stores, the school, and the catholic mission. Two decent sized cement docks are preiodically visited by Colombian and Kuna cargo boats. The island is very small and it didnt take long to see pretty much all of it.

I was sitting in front of one of these larger stores on a step watching some local guys playing volley ball when a man sat down beside me and introduced himself as Berto who, it turns out, is a good friend of Evelios. We chatted for a minute and he invited me over to see his house and meet his wife. Berto wound up being one of my best friends on the island.


Berto, sitting in the community meeting house.

Unfortunately, my last day on the island, I lost my journal and so I am not going to be able to put my experiences on Carti Sugdup into a nice chronological narrative, instead I will gloss a few topics under general headings, and the reader will have to deal with that.

--THE WOMEN--

Kuna women lead very different lives than Kuna men. Almost all of the time I spent on the island was in the company of men for two reasons. One, because to a great extent, men work and hang out with the men and women work and hang out with the women. Being male, that meant I was expected to do the same. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, most of the women spoke only Kuna. This meant that once I exhaused all the Kuna I had learned, conversations died out (this would happen quickly, my Kuna vocabulary consisting of exactly 38 words). So the rest of the topics I cover about the Kuna will be actually more specifically about the Kuna men.

The thing for which the Kuna, and especially the women are most famous, is the mola, the panels of reverse applique fabric adorning their midsections I mentioned earlier. Most of the womens time is spent making these things, and almost all the women have reams of shirts made with them. A mola shirt is made with two panels that are either very similar or identical, front and back. They are sewn together along two edges making the bulk of the shirt. Puffly sleeves and the collar are affixed to the top.

Molas are also a principal source of income for the women. These very nice artistic panels are quite popular among the tourists who visit the islands and the women are only too happy to sell them. Some Kuna women travel all the way to Panama City just to sell the things there.

In addition to the mola shirt, Kuna women wear a skirt of dark blue material with yellow or green patterns (mostly) and frequently have a black line drawn down the front of their noses. Frequently they wear elaborate necklaces of thin gold. When a woman reaches full adulthood, her hair is cut short and she begins to wear a gold nose ring through the septum and arm and leg beads. The leg beads are a restrictive sleeve serveing the dual purpose of decoration and keeping the leg inside skinny. The Kuna consider very skinny legs to be very attractive. All together, a womans look is striking, beautiful, and colorful.


Kuna woman roasting bannanas

The Kuna are a matrilocal people. Young Kuna live at home at least until they are married at which point the husband moves in with his wifes family. Later, if the pair get their own house, it will normally be in the village or island where the womans family lives.

Matrilocality should not be confused with matriarchy, as many people do. Although the Kuna are a realtively egalitarian people, their women stand on a lower rung on the social ladder than do the men. The govening body of a Kuna village is the general congress, a directly democratic meeting where village business is handled. While the women have some say in this process, it is chiefly a male thing.

--CHICHAS--


Juicing sugar cane

Over the course of a Kuna girls life, two chichas will be thrown for her. A chicha is a village-wide party celebrating a girls entrance into puberty or her full adulthood. The puberty chicha lasts only one day, the second lasts four. While I was staying on the island I had the opportunity to observe and participate in three chichas, all of the puberty variety.

Chichas are so named for the fermented beverage consumed in large quantity at these affairs. Ten days before the celebration the village begins making the booze by juicing gallons and gallons of sugar cane. Every family on the island juices a few gallons which they bring to the chicha house. There, under the supervision of the village "quimicos", the cane juice is boiled up with either coffee or rice for several hours. After boiling, the chicha is cooled and poured into large ceramic pots where it will ferment for ten days producing a wine-like drink.

On the day of the chicha at noon everyone packs into the chicha house, women on one side and men on the other. The drinking is performed in a ritualized fashion, with dancing and chanting. Ritualized as it is, it goes quickly. Within three or four hours many dozens of gallons of the booze are gone and the island is filled with drunk people, especially the women who invariably get much drunker much faster than the men. No work is expected to get done the day of a chicha or the day after.

--COMMUNITY--

I would call the Kuna system of governace directly democratic fascism. The general congress of a village has effectively unlimited control over the lives of the people living there. Before leaving the islands, a Kuna must obtain written permission from their sayla (chief), community labor is mandatory, and any rule the congress agrees to put in place is immediately binding.

As I mentioned earlier, most everyone has a farm on the mainland and has to paddle there for their water. The mainland by Carti is also home to the local soccer field and airport. The soccer field is a large cleard patch of grass along side the landing strip where teams from various islands play against one another.

When I was there, the landing strip was out of commission because of the poor condition it was in. The community was in the process of restoring it however, and the day I left everyone was going to the river to collect rocks to use for the repaving. The chicha brewing is also mandatory community labor, as are trail maintenance, house building, and many other things.

At some point in the course of the day one of the argars (a high official, immediately below the sayla) will take roll to determine who is present. People not present are subject to a monetary fine, the amount of which depends on the type of job someone is missing. After taking roll, the argar will then read the list of all the names of men who owe money and how much they owe.

This sort of community labor is common and serves several purposes. Obviously, community projects benefit everyone and improve the local standard of living. As well, the fines grow community stock piles of money which can be used in various ways and the fines serve as a sort of tax levied on Kuna people who go leave the islands to make money in mainstream Panamanian society. If someone is out working, they will neccessarily be missing all the community work days and will have to pay a good amount of money to their village upon their return.

--THE CATHOLIC MISSION--

Right next door to Evelios houses, the Catholic Mission is a large brick building staffed by the local padre, a Kuna man named Benecio. My friend Berto frequently cooks for the padre and so I wound up meeting Benecio and talking to him about what he is up to there.

The Kuna are a very culturally defensive people and resent strongly any outside influences that they dont bring in themselves. This puts any sort of mission on tenuous footing, and the Catholics take a surprisingly gentle stance there. Children taught at the mission learn only traditional Kuna ideology until it is determined that they are old enough to think for themselves, when Benecio will begin to introduce Catholicism. Even then, the Catholocism he teaches differes from the standard, carefully not contradicting any Kuna beliefs. This goes to the extent that Jesus is not even considered the central figure, he is secondary to a father and mother figure, as the Kuna believe things to be.

I wish I knew more about Catholocism to discuss these things more with Benecio to get a better picture of exactly what all that means, as it was I had to settle for doing a great deal of mooching off the good father. The mission has more money than most anything on the island and Benecio eats well. As Berto frequently cooks for him, I frequently wound up getting slipped a plate of whatever was beiong prepared. The best coffee on the island is brewed in the padres little coffee pot and there were a number of mornings where I found myself looking for Berto in the kitchen of the mission and graciously accepting the invariably offered cup of coffee.

--FOOD--

The fare avaiable on the islands is simple and very basic. Most everything is made from rice, bannanas, coconuts, seafood, or yucca. Unripe bannanas are roasted or boiled and sometimes find their way into a soup with yucca or fish and invariably coconut juice. Watcho is a watery cocnut rice that is quite tasty albiet nutritionally limited. What really keeps people alive are the abundant and cheap fish. Local fishermen go out each day and pull hundreds of fish out of the sea, bring them back to the island and sell them. Prices varied between 10 to 20 good sized fish for a dollar. Most of the fish are smoked to preserve them. A typical meal normally consists of a bowl of coconut and bannana soup accompanied by a tough smoked fish. The freshily smoked fish are tasty, but after a day or two they are like vaguely fish flavored cardboard with bones.

After a couple of weeks I headed back to Panama City from where I planned to resume my progress north up into Costa Rica. I went back to the same hostel where I had been staying before I went out to visit the Kuna and it was there that I met The Hippy and Alex. They were planning on going down to Colombia and were tying to work out their plan for how to get down there. Lots of travellers in Panama City are facing that issue and it was one I found interesting. Mostly people take one of the easy routes, either going on a sailing boat with a load of other tourists or they fly. These two wanted to stay on the surface of the planet but dodge the cost and unoriginality of one of the toursit sail boats. After talking to them a little, I decided that the challenge of that little trip would be far more satisfying that going directly up to Costa Rica where I would probably just be going though the uninspired motions of the usual tourist spots. Besides, Ive always wanted to go try to go visit the indigenous people living in the jungle of southern Venezuela. So what the hell, I decided to join them.

Travelling between Panama and Colombia is not particularly easy. The Panamerican Highway is broken only once between Alaska and the southern tip of South America, and that break is right along where Central America meets South America. This is because that area, popularly known as the Darien Gap, is packed with FARC terrorists, Colombian guerrilla operations, and cocaine smugglers. The last thing you want to do is try to go directly through it. Some parts are very dangerous, some less so.

They had a general idea of how they wanted to go but not much in the way of a solid plan, it wasnt clear where busses did and didnt go, whether the rainy season would make some roads unpassable, whether some roads existed at all. Guide books dont help much with this sort of thing. The key seemed to be to take a boat because time spent on solid ground passing through most of the area is time spent trying to get kidnapped.

I thought this would be a nice opportunity to go visit my people in Carti again so I suggested that we head to Miramar, the farthest towards Colombia you get go on the Carribean coast and from there take a boat out to my island for a couple of days from where we could find passage on a Kuna or Colombian cargo boat the rest of the way.

Our time on the island was nice, pleasant, and relaxing (and cheap for me, I neglected to mention to the Hippy and Alex that unlike the two of them, Evelio wasnt charging me to stay with him). The islands own cargo boat, the M/N Sugdup was heading out shortly and could take us as far as the island of Tubuala, close to the border town of Puerto Obaldia. So one morning, just before dawn, we headed out to the local dock and the M/N Sugdup, piled our things aboard, strung up our hammocks, and settled in for four days at sea.


The Moto Nave Sugdup realxing at home, in port at Carti Sugdup.

The first day was calm, the sea was flat and easy when we steamed out at dawn and stayed that way all day. It was nice to be moving again and it things were tranquil, almost boring. The food on board was rice with either canned pork and beans (pretty much just beans) or tuna fish. The Hippy was a vegan and Alex was a vegetarian. This worried me a little bit, they hadnt been eating well at all so far, on the road or the island, especially The Hippy. We had brought some beanut butter along though, and I gave them each a mutivitamin, figuring that they would be ok for a few days of pretty much just rice.

We made several stops each day, to sell things imported from Panama and deliver mail and at night the boat would "sleep" at one island or another. The first night brought us to an island called Corazon de Jesus, the most acculturated island in the archipelago. The women there did not wear the traditional clothes and everyone spoke chiefly Spanish rather than Kuna. It felt like any other small Panamanian town. The best part of that islad though, was the pool hall where we had a few beers and I whooped The Hippy and Alex in a few games.

The sea got a little fiesty the next day, tossing the Sugdup around like a toy. It made me a little queasy although on the whole I thought it was quite fun. My feelings were not shared by all however, out of maybe ten or twelve people aboard, including the crew, three people got sick.


View from the boat during this storm. It was really much worse than this looks.

It rained all night that night and the little roof over our hammocks on the top deck of the boat leaked horribly. We all slept poorly until a few hours before dawn when the rain changed into a violent electrical storm with deafening thunder claps, at which point, cold and wet, we could no longer sleep at all.

The storm continued all day. At one point visibility was reduced to the point where the captain no longer felt safe making any more forward progress and for an hour or two only used the motor to direct the boat into the waves to prevent our capsizing while we got chucked around and drenched by sheets of rain blowing in all over. Several times waves hit the boat so hard and leaned us to such an angle that it seemed impossible that we wouldnt tip right over. At one point The Hippy lost his lunch over the side where a flapping piece of canvas caught it and whipped it back in his face. He was quite unhappy about that and I felt badly about the fact that I was unable to stop laughing for several minutes after it happened.

Finally we arrive in Tubuala where we got a ride in a small motor boat the rest of the way to Puerto Obalida on the border. There we found another little boat to take us across the border, back to South America again into:

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