Culture Week (Darien, Panama)
(panamatim.wordpress.com) This past week Team Darien went to live with a current Team Darien volunteer to experience the culture of the region and get a little more insight into where we´re going to be spending our next two years. Turns out the place is very cool. It´s a frontier region that only began being settled (apart from local indigenous groups) about 40 years ago. There have been a lot of changes since, like the introduction of roads and paving, but it still has a cool frontier-y feel to it, especially the more removed you are from the interamerican highway.
The other cool thing is that almost all of the people living there now emigrated from other areas of Panama to work to build a better life for themselves, so people are quite motivated to work together. The downside is that there´s a bit of a stigma against it in Panamanian culture as a very backwards and dangerous place, much like rural West Virginia, for example. This seems to be partly undeserved, and like most rumors, to spring from that fact that virtually all Panamanians have never been there.
Another fun fact is that it is a very male dominated region, just in terms of the overwhelming percentage of people who are male. There just aren´t a whole lot of girls, and those that do grow up there tend to move away, so there´s a lot of competition amongst the men when they come of marrying age. One community specifically requested a female peace corps volunteer so that they could marry her. They got a guy instead.
Now we´re off to the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle for a week of learning how to build aqueducts and composting latrines and then back to training.
My main takeaway from Culture Week apart from the fact that the Darien has beautiful landscape (and that it´s one of the only places in Panama that still has primary rainforest) is that rural campesino culture in Panama is pretty similar to campesino culture in Nicaragua, except that they have cooler traditional dances here.
