Taking Life as it Comes

Coming home in the darkness the other night was a wonderful experience for

me that most people in the Northern Hemisphere will never experience. If and when residents of the “developed” countries must go somewhere in pitch dark, without the incandescent lighting they completely expect and rely on, they are confused and frightened.

Here in Paso Ancho, even when there’s electricity, there are long stretches of the calles that after the sun has set are unlit by any artificial light – neither streetlamps nor houses with electricity are nearby, for these parts of town are mostly inhabited by Ngobe Bugle people. But, when the electricity goes out, as often happens, then the entire town is completely black. The only exceptions are the houses off in the gringo part of town; there the big gringo generators are fired up, generating an alien effulgence that seems to be from another world; you have to be careful not to look their way or you lose your night vision.

These nights, as I find my way home after having dinner and a pleasant evening with friends, are for me a fine adventure indeed. I don’t have a flashlight as I negotiate the calles (what pass for streets in this village, basically dirt paths), and I don’t need one. I let the darkness teach me: it is a Grandfather, a wise master who reminds me to slow down and become acutely aware of my surroundings through the senses, other than sight, yet available to me. This wisdom I am learning to invoke as well during the day.

On either side of the road are deep ditches, and often there are dangerous

deep ragged ruts right down the middle of it, erosion from the runoff from the heavy downpours of Rainy Season. There are, besides, large rocks here and there that can upset the unwary. And I never know if another section of the road has been washed away since the last time I came this way. So, if I’m not extremely careful, I could break an ankle or leg, or even fall and hit my head. And nobody would know about me until sometime the following day. So I must carefully use my senses of touch and hearing and what information sight does afford me.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Tortillas of Love

Now I realize what a severely limited diet people are forced to eat in North America and Europe. Thanks to the megafarms and food marketers, the only grain is wheat, and it is so common that many people develop allergies to it. Much more grain is grown to fatten beef cattle to be flipped over into fast-food hamburgers. Fruits rarely go beyond apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes, maybe the occasional peach or apricot. And the staple vegetables are just corn, carrot, and potato. Salads – when North Americans even eat them – comprise mostly varieties of lettuce and tomato out of which all food value has been genetically engineered. Corn syrup, indigestible fats, and unpronounceable chemicals are inside all that pretty packaging. They are grown in polluting fertilizers and weed- and insect-killers that will also kill human beings. They are picked before they are ripe because of the vast distances they must travel to your supermarket, stuffed with artificial preservatives and flavor enhancers, wrapped in tons of plastic that winds up in landfills, trundled in dank trucks over thousands of miles, consuming fuel and producing roadway pollution.

Here in Panamá the variety of fruits and vegetables is astounding. I have been discovering an endless number of new flavors and textures, and half the time I don’t even know the name for what I’m enjoying. Only hours before I pick up some interesting tuber or gourd or fruit at the grocery it was still basking under sun and rain, in rich fields no more than a few miles away.

I’m crazy, for instance, about otoë. It is a tuber with a shaggy

dark-brown skin. Once I wash and peel it, I have its lovely lavender flesh, which can be eaten raw, or baked, boiled, or fried. When you first bite into it, especially raw, it has a “snap” to it slightly reminiscent of ginger, but as you continue to chew it provides a wonderful velvety flavor. It is flabbergastingly good cooked soft in a stew. Then there is yuca – not to be confused with its friend related only homonymically, yucca. Yuca, again, is wonderful raw or cooked, with a yellow flesh that tastes like well-buttered potato. Both of these, I’m told, are rich in vitamins and minerals.

Chayote is plentiful; one can buy it at the grocery, but I find it for free growing wild here and there. Think of it as shaped like a large knobbly green pear, but with a flesh reminiscent of zucchini. And also ullama, which I discovered when it fell off a farmer’s truck; superficially resembling a melon in size and shape, its flesh is like that of a hearty squash. Onion is grown plentifully here, spreading its redolent aroma through the countryside from each household's little field.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Artifacts: Art and Facts

In North America and in Panamá, and probably everywhere else in this hemisphere, students are taught in school only about history after the arrival of the Europeans – a clear ethnocentrism in which the subliminal message is not just that pre-Columbian Native American history is not worth mentioning, but that Native Americans are themselves not equal to those Europeans.

This double standard, I think, is especially devastating for Native

American students throughout the Americas. Here in Paso Ancho, where I live, the student body at the local primary school is eighty-five percent Ngobe Bugle. Yet the staff, which is entirely composed of Panamanians (people of Latino culture and claimed Latino descent), teaches only Spanish and not Ngobe Bugle, teaches history only since the “arrival” (i.e., bloody religious and political conquest) of the Conquistadores, teaches only Panamanian dance and music. These Native American children are educated into Panamanians in Ngobe Bugle bodies, never hearing a word about their culture or heritage, like it doesn’t exist. And I believe even the fifteen percent who are Panamanian students suffer too, from never being exposed to the joy of learning about this great civilization that once flourished here, and is still struggling to survive.

The signs are everywhere of the great Native American presence. I

went to what is called an Archæological Institute, situated on a working farm, and was stunned by the beautiful works of ancient art dug up right there. An institute it isn’t – my companions and I were given a tour by the farmer’s son

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

In Diós

Sometimes I feel like if you lifted North America up, all the loose parts would fall down through Mexico and get stuck at the narrow point that suddenly bends from west to east – Panama. This land is the crossroads of the world, the juncture of North and South America, the meeting-point of the Pacific and the Atlantic, a place where you find all races, all terrains, and every climate from northern temperate to tropical.

Here in Panama one sees a lot of young backpackers traveling on their parents’ credit cards – tall, lanky guys in baggy khaki pants, adorned with blond halos of long hair and not-yet-full beards, their arms around short attractive young ladies without bras, out to see the world from the road. By and large these are a pleasant sort to chat with. They seem to have some respect for the local cultures, are unafraid of a stiff hike in the back country, and more likely than not speak a reasonably serviceable high-school Spanish. With their height they seem to float above the general population as they stride on long legs through the shopping districts and up the mountainsides.

Tourists older than they generally stay close to coastal resorts or mountain-country spa hotels where they feel safe from the rather frightening local population. But many middle-aged foreigners are are here to put their vast sums of money into mega-mansions that would have cost them a lot more back home, or else to escape bad debts or legal trouble. Still, some of the gringos I meet are quite nice people. In a visit to Boquete I chatted in German with a visiting Swiss couple, Bruno and Renate, in French with a delightful young man from Haiti, and finally in French and Spanish with a quite interesting man who had lived for many years in Montréal.

Gringos who settle here, however, often cannot be bothered to learn to speak Spanish.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

Woo-Woo Religion and Silent Spirituality

In the center of nearby Volcán there is what appears to be a Roman Catholic

church – but when you look closely, you see that behind the façade is only an empty cement floor. The interior of the church was destroyed a few years ago by a tornado – a rare phenomenon in this land.

For me, this outside without an inside depicts the nature of Roman Catholicism here. It is supposedly the dominant religious expression of Panama, but it is basically a front, with little of substance behind it. Parishioners may attend church on the major holidays, such as Easter and Christmas; they will turn out for the big parades down the main streets on certain saints’ days, and they may seek the services of the local priest for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. But otherwise, they have little real involvement with this denomination. For the Ngobe Bugle people in particular it is at best a veneer – a reflection only on the surface of the waters, and their ancient traditions continue to persist beneath this seemingness put on, no doubt, just to satisfy these invaders of their ancient land now, for a time, their vaunted overlords.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

The Eye of the Beholder

People are very self-conscious of their appearance in the so-called developed countries. Men and women cannot walk by a mirror, it seems, without at least checking their faces and hair – or just to admire themselves. They consider with great care photographs of themselves before deciding which one they will allow others to see. Many choose to alter their natural appearance with props or even surgery, or employ subterfuges to cover up those qualities they consider to be less than fully appealing.

In Panamá, this self-consciousness is increasingly less apparent the farther down one is on the social scale. Gringo women here, as in the Northern Hemisphere, wouldn’t even think of going out into public without being perfectly dressed, coiffed, and made up. Panamanian women (that is those who claim Spanish ancestry) are far less concerned about these matters, though they generally choose outfits that they think make them look more attractive; they at least put on at least lipstick and often pluck their eyebrows. The Ngobe Bugle women, while their bodies are always washed and their hair carefully combed, while they invariably wear immaculately clean traditional dresses, never wear makeup nor in any way do they try to “improve” their appearance – and yet I have never seen a people with women (and men) so frequently beautiful as they.

This lack of self-consciousness is never so obvious as when these Native Americans see a photograph of themselves. They do show surprise, pleasure, and even pride when I present them with pictures of their children. But they are typically nonplussed or even merely uninterested in their own images. I am sure that in part it is because they rarely encounter themselves as an object – their homes don’t include mirrors, and when they wash their clothes in a stream they show about as much interest in their reflection as a cat.

The faces they see are the faces of nature: the ever-changing faces of the mountains that benignly look down on them, the faces of fields and forests in the

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.

A Testament of Testicles

Up in the pre-dawn darkness, fumbling into clothes, joining friends outside. Within moments we are walking through a cold and silent Paso Ancho – groping our way, actually, since the night renders these dirt roads invisible – to the home of our friend Inéz. There, sweet lady that she is, we are treated to delicious cups of coffee; it is ubiquitous here, and far more superb than even the most “gourmet” brands available in the United States or France, since clearly travel and time quickly degrade the quality of the beans. As we sip the aromatic beverage, the sun outside Inéz’s windows gradually weaves his beams into the atmosphere from behind Barú. We see a field of yellow flowers, something like Keats’s daffodils, on the other side of which is the local Roman Catholic church. Soon we will be on our way to the top of the Florentina.

I was up this mountain once before to see the farm high on the Florentina run by Inéz’s estranged husband.

On the way, however, we took the wrong trail at one fork and wound up in territory new to us both. During the climb we encountered two very friendly Ngobe Bugle men, in heavy rain, hacking up a fallen tree with only their machetes. As we reached the top, all around us were wild steep slopes, nothing horizontal, and the constant, intense sound of the rain.

* * *

As they come to me to be written, new chapters will be added to this blog, so stay tuned! But the blogs up to a certain point are now chapters are now in a book.

So, to read more, you need the book A WRITER IN PANAMÁ.

The book is available in three formats:

HARDCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (large-size edition, photographs on nearly every page)
SOFTCOVER (smaller size edition, no interior photographs)
E-BOOK (all versions available, including Kindle and Nook, no photographs)

To browse or order, CLICK HERE!


The book is also available through Amazon (USA, Great Britain, and continental Europe) and other major book retailers.