My Dad's Harrier Jet

I’m not sure why, but talking about money with people here doesn’t bother me. As I’m sure I would if I had a really rich friend, Ngäbes, especially kids, ask me what everything I own costs. Everything. This makes most volunteers very uncomfortable; they feel that sharing the information that their hiking boots cost more than most people here earn in a month only further isolates them. An intricate system of white lies and half truths assuages guilt.

For example, my closest neighboring volunteer went to visit her friend who was volunteering in Kenya at the time, and she didn’t want her community to know that she had the money to swing over to the other side of the planet when she felt like it. So she devised an elaborate story involving an imaginary global Peace Corps conference held in Africa at which she would be representing Panama. This, I believe, is ridiculous for at least three reasons. First, in this deception she is still going to Africa. If people here knew how much the flight cost or how far away Africa is, these facts alone would shock them and differentiate her regardless of who paid. Americans have all the money in the world, and this is only further proof. Second though, most people here don´t know how far it is to Africa and have even less idea what it would cost. Being on a plane, whether it’s bound for Honduras, Bangladesh, or the center of the Earth, is essentially the same thing: having the money to board a flying machine makes her as eccentric as someone in Colfax, Washington with a tank. Hank the tank-owner isn’t a local novelty because of what he does with the tank, where he goes, it’s because he has a tank. In terms of how long the journey is, visiting Africa is more likely to shock another volunteer than someone from Cerro Iglesias; to most people here, Africa is just somewhere else. I was talking to a high school kid and when I asked him where he lived, he pointed with his lips and said ‘over there.’ When, in the same conversation, the location of Europe came up, he pointed his lips in the same direction and told me it was ‘over there.’ Apparently, to get to his house, you make like you’re going to Europe and you can’t miss it. If you hit Lisbon, you’ve gone too far. Europe, like Africa, is just not here. Third, it was a complicated lie that she wanted me to maintain if anyone asked me about her. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own b.s.

This is an extreme example, but most volunteers I know go out of their way to avoid talking about how much they paid for what. They reply that they don’t know the price because it was a gift, or they lie and quote a much lower, more reasonable price, or they exaggerate to the point of hyperbole and humor. I don’t mind telling people what things cost, but of these three I like the last option because it stems from the saying ‘you can’t get a little bit pregnant.’ The reason volunteers don’t want to talk about money is they feel it isolates them from the people in their community, makes them strange. I agree to some extent, and I do want to assimilate while I’m here, but I could spend ten years in Cerro Iglesias and still be pregnant. I’m the only white person in town, the only one who lives alone, the only one who eats peanut butter, the only one who can type without looking at his hands, the only one who can’t throw a machete with speed and skill, the only one who can’t speak Ngäbe. I am strange. In a binary system, I am 0 and everyone else is 1, and how much my headlamp costs isn’t going to make me a 1. That’s why I tell the truth about what things cost and how much I’ll be earning when I go back to the States. I’m already an alien, and whether I’ll be making $15,000 a year or $60,000 isn’t going to make me more or less so. If I told someone back home that a) I have a radio (ipod) that contains thousands of songs and I can listen to any of them whenever I want, and b) that my dad has a Harrier jet, they would probably call me on b), and rightly (and unfortunately) so. Here though, I am an extraterrestrial, a gypsy; I am Marco Polo. The same slow nod that follows a) would follow b), even though it is obvious to the reader it is a lie. But if a Ngäbe was living in Colfax and told his neighbors that a) Ngäbe men often file their teeth to points for style and b) bestiality with a horse is perfectly socially acceptable, which would you believe?

Note: I don't have any pictures of me making money transactions, so these pictures are from a hike I did with some other volunteers to an abandoned copper mine.