Good Morning Provenir AND our phone number in Panama

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Wed 20 Mar 2013 13:37
First of all, our phone number in Panama is +507 678 400 73 It is a local cellular phone.
Wifi is non existent here in San Blas.
 
So here we wake up by the island of Provenir, a lovely little island that has a few buildings, it is here you can check in for Panama with the Kunas instead of running around in Colon.
Yesterday we went ashore on the island of Wichubhuata , it is an island inhabited from shore to shore. There is no room for any nature. A lot of buildings are even built on poles above the water. The facilities where people go and get rid of bodily fluids are definetely built on stilts above the water.
The village is an interesting mix of traditional houses built with bamboo walls and roofs made of some palm leafs, but also houses made of concrete and wood. The village has no vehicles what so ever so the streets are just narrow bands for walking. School buildings are open in the air so we could just watch the uniformed children working very seriously in school. The feeling when we walk in this village is that this was probably what a medevil village would feel like. People doing thing in a very small area and we guess privacy looks different than what we would consider it. Women are dressed in traditional clothes and wear a lot of gold on their fingers and some even in their nose. Traditional clothes are very very colorful. The men are just simple with a T skirt and pants. But in all this you will find details that are modern, for instance an elderly woman really looking like a Kuna indian talking on a cellular phone. Or there are some TV antennas in the village. And at night when Bill from Sunrise and I went there we could hear and see some TV sets in the bamboo houses. This village has power wich we did not encounter before coming to the Lemon keys. It is amazing, but when you have been to islands without electricity for a while you suddenly  can hear the transformers and the power when you get close to them. Real silence is not there when you have power.
In the village we met a true artist, a Kuna that had made jewellery that was really art. He has travelled a lot in South and Central America, could speak very god english. Erika loved some dolphins he had made ut of a seed and he just gave them to her. And he told us all about how he mixes different materials.  He also told us that Molas where traditionally dreamcatchers, women that made them always made abstract motifs, so you could interpret what you saw from your dream. Nowadays a lot of molas are made for visitors and they obvioulsy like figurative better and the Kunas have adapted.
Another thing the Kunas have to be adapted to is that the Caribean sea ends at these shores so all their islands are full of plastic trash.
It is awful to see their village for instance on the side facing out in the ocean full of trash, everything from thousands of plastic bottles to refrigerators.... It is all washed ashore for them and they do not know what to do with it.
Thank you civilisation! I know we are part of this and we all use the cheap plastic containers when we buy food etc, but it is terrible to see it trashed among people that have a nice and clean village on other parts of the island.