Good Morning Provenir AND our phone number in Panama
Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Wed 20 Mar 2013 13:37
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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.
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