Lookin for some strange

In the summer before I came to Panama, I drove down to Santa Fe for a family wedding. From there my brothers and I drove across Texas and up through Mississippi to Washington D.C. A friend met me in the capital for the 4^th of July, and we drove back across the country to Spokane. A big ole loop, a grand ole time, and it roughly doubled the number of states I can say I’ve visited. Two years on though, what sticks out most in my memory is how much sameness we came across. Downtown Chicago reminded me of Seattle, North Carolina felt like northern California, and Houston was a fatter, uglier Los Angeles. Everywhere seemed a lot like everywhere else. Except Mississippi. The Delta really felt like somewhere else, somewhere different. The food, the formalities, the rhythm of life, it didn’t seem rooted in the homogeneous froth of the Disney Channel, Wal-Mart, and Applebee’s. Granted, we spent less than a full day in Mississippi, and our stays were equally brief in Houston and Chicago, but this was the impression I got.

That distinct feeling of unfamiliarity is in large part what I hoped to find when I signed away two years of my life to the Peace Corps. Exotic foods. Extraordinary customs. Exotic and extraordinary women. However, due to a hundred years of direct U.S. presence, Panamanian culture is fairly bland. Reading about adventures in Sub-Saharan Africa or Central Asia makes me yearn for something stranger, even as I sit in my hammock inside a bamboo house with mud floors and no electricity. The Panamanian diet ranges between beans and rice, chicken and rice, and rice and rice. Nearly everyone is Christian in a way not much different from the States. Men wear Yankees hats and shake hands to greet each other. I’ve felt this way for a while now, even though I know it is in part because I’m just used to life here.

Around noon today I was sitting around waiting for our ten o’clock meeting to start, watching an eight year-old casually and absentmindedly flick the tip of his machete against the ground. The blade edge gleamed silver, meaning it had recently been filed razor sharp. In the States, I thought of machetes as used by Crocodile Dundee to hack through brush or brandished by African tribes to wage low-tech warfare. The hint of Ghangis Khan savagery I always associated with machetes is pure masculine exoticism. Here though, nothing, nothing, could be more banal. In the States, the thought of a lone man walking towards you carrying nothing but a three-foot sword is terrifying and rarely happens. In rural Panama, the machete is the hammer, the sickle, and the kitchen knife all rolled into one. Even the poorest have their own machete; even the most disabled know how to wield one. I realized I should give Panamanian exoticism another look to see what else I might have missed.

Style. Nearly every woman here sews and probably half of all the clothes worn in Cerro Iglesias are handmade. All the women wear ridiculously bright and intricately designed dresses called ngwaes (nog-was) that they made themselves. The fabric is cotton cloth they buy down the hill, but the dresses are purely original in design, cuffed by sharp triangles and patterns. Men and women alike use chakras (chalk-ras), a hand woven shoulder-strap bag, to haul everything from cell phones to hundreds of pounds of firewood. These range in size, color, and material depending on their purpose. Chakras the size of a notebook might be intricately detailed with bright colors similar to a ngwae and used as a briefcase to carry important documents, while much larger chakras are almost entirely functional and incredibly strong. Each chakra is the product of dozens of hours of effort, working plant fibers into string before weaving them.

Work. Almost no one here has a regular job in the way we have them in the States. Most people have work they have to do or ought to do everyday, but most days are different from every other. The sharp distinction that we have between home and work absolutely does not exist here not just because work isn’t consistent but also because most work directly involves the home. Some families have stores, which might be like a regular job, but the store is literally part of the house and becomes like another newborn – cared for by different members of the family and asleep at random hours of the day. In Cerro Iglesias, there are practically no permanent jobs that pay cash. Jobs that pay, like construction or coffee-harvesting, are temporary or a long ways away or both. Even families with cash coming in from a son in the City or from some other source have cyclical agricultural chores, firewood to gather, clothes to wash. ‘Work,’ in the Office Space sense, never really ends. It never really begins either.

Communication. I love words, written and spoken, and I love a well-crafted argument or a delicately expressed thought. Communication here is different, far less literal. Words are still important, but what is said matters less than how. An opinionated declaration is often punctuated with ‘sí o no?’ (yes or no?), which is not an invitation to ponder what has been said but a flourish urging the listener to nod. The seemingly innate ability to turn a one sentence argument into a twenty-minute impassioned speech fascinates me. Ngäbes rarely discuss their feelings towards each other though, especially men, but it is clear to me how they feel by how they shake hands, where they sit and stand, and how they’ll sometimes lean on each other when watching soccer. The culture is far more physically oriented – everyone has been doing physical labor since they could walk, humor is mostly physical, falling down makes kids laugh instead of cry – and so is communication. When I’m sitting by myself on a bench, rare is the new arrival who doesn’t sit right next to me.

Photos: Of the school on a beautiful afternoon, some neighbor girls in their school uniforms, women crowded around the store window to cash in their food stamps, Vincente after a hard day of carrying 2 x 4s, soccer on that same beautiful afternoon