Panama Week #9/10/11: Nathaniel's POV

It's a scorching 35 degrees, the sun at its full glory is beating down on my back, my bare feet are pock-marked with blisters the size of ping pong balls from running on the concrete of the court, me and my brothers are glistening with sweat from running and bumping so much, but above all... we were having the time of our lives.

(One hour earlier) Jonah, Elias and I tentatively pulled up to a local soccer court (a mix of basketball and soccer) in our natives and tank tops, just hoping for some time to shoot around and get some practice in, but as we get there, we see a big soccer match going on. "Awww mannnn...now we gotta go back" says Elias sadly. I was pretty bummed too but our parents, being the parents they are, made us sit down and watch for a bit. Soon, our parents started nagging us to play! "Come on boys! Just go and start playing!" they say oblivious to the unwritten rule of pickup sports that you ask the people playing if you can play before just inserting yourself into a game. Anyways, we tentatively asked a boy sitting on the lower bleachers if we could play (of course I was the spokesperson for us boys because I ALWAYS am). He looked up at us quizzically before calling over his friend who spoke "un pocito" English. We asked if we could play and he started shouting to the other boys who stopped and starting screaming "YOOO ESTA GRINGOOOOS!!!" which is slang for : "Yooo, it's white people!" And then they waved us onto the court and they all just started playing with no instructions.

We had no clue who we were playing for until the kid who spoke a bit of english (we eventually learned that his nickname was "Gordo" which somehow in Spanish is an endearing term for "fatso") pointed us to a net. And just like that we started playing. The game was SO much fun because anything went, you could bodycheck, score off of throw-ins and have in-game brawls. Most of the kids had their shoes off because of how slippery the concrete was, so I decided to do it as well! And I instantly regretted it. I got four huge blisters about the size of ping pong balls (I won’t show a picture because they were super gross) which followed me around for TWO WEEKS before they started... (I think I’ll stop now while I’m ahead). Anyhow, when it was time to go, the whole crew of kids who played with us just followed us back to where we were staying! One of them started pointing out things and talking at lighting fast speed while the others were captivated by my mom's pictures of igloos at our cabin back home, huge, snowy mountains and more because none of them had EVER seen snow! It was such a cool experience because when we got back to our place they started playing even more soccer with us until it got pitch-black! This was just a taste of the people we met in Panama!

Let me give you some context.

So, the town is a little, off the grid place in southern Panama called Yaviza. It is home to two basketball courts, three gas stations and a big market. The place we were staying at was a discipleship centre that had three buildings for the students, a place for the family that ran it and a guest house where we stayed in, and a basketball court. Even though I make the place sound very nice (not saying it wasn't, it was really great) but the weather was not all sunshine and lollipops.

Well, there was sunshine, but not lollipops. Lots of sunshine.

Our first evening setting up shop in the guest house took some adjusting. The sun (when it was up) beat down on us constantly and there was virtually no escape from the heat. On top of that, our family was not used to the critters we met! We observed a little commune for any creatures with four to a hundred legs, including lizards, ants, stick bugs, cockroaches and yes, centipedes. I know one of my little cousins would be very interested in this wide array of weird animals in our place. After a pretty fitful sleep we woke up in high spirits, the sun was being blocked by the clouds and we had a slow day with plenty of school work completed. Einer and Girleza, the couple who run the mission station, told us that we could start helping out the next day and just to relax. So we took their advice, and just chilled. The next few days we helped out around the place, cleaning up the garbage people constantly throw on the boulevard, making mosquito nets and just helping out with the little things that were needed. Einer and Girlesa were having a short vacation between their jungle visits and they wanted to just spend relaxing time with us.

One of the most memorable experiences was when we went with Einer to a local Embera village to drop of some food, a few tools, and just visit to see how they were doing. When we arrived after a fun drive in the bed of Einer's trusty Toyota, we unloaded the supplies and walked down to the canoe. Yes, you have to canoe to get to this extremely remote village.

As we walked through the village, I was filled with mixed emotions - Amazement, at how the Embera people can still maintain the village using the bare minimum; Sadness, when I saw the inside of their houses and saw how some of them had to sleep but most of all, I felt so happy! It was contagious. Everyone in the village would stare at us in amazement (most likely because a lot of them had not seen a white person in over 10 years) and then break into 50-watt smiles! It was so nice how the village leader's wife welcomed us right into their home. She sat us down in the best chairs they had and then went to cook us a meal as we visited with other locals. She came back half an hour later and gave us the option of chicken, or beef.

Ok, quick tip, If you ever go to a foreign country and you are offered a choice of meat, ALWAYS get chicken. It is easily the safest option and is pretty hard to screw up too badly. Anyways, me and my parents ordered chicken but Jonah and Elias, who are used to my dad's tasty steaks, ordered the beef. When the leader's wife brought the food, Jonah and Elias's faces fell. While my chicken on rice actually looked pretty good, Jonah and Elias's beef looked, questionable. It was a knuckle of bone with chunks of gray, lucid meat and fat stuck together, but, they took it like champs and ate it all. The Embera people, who had crowded into this tiny house, looked on with pride as the Fast family dug into their local meal and finished it. We were all pretty proud at the fact that we had finished, but that pride slowly turned into boredom for me and my brothers as the conversation between the local leaders, Einer and my parents hit the two hour mark. As we left though, we all felt a little more grateful for how blessed we are to have a warm, sealed house to live in and a bed to sleep on. We also experienced such genuine hospitality and joy from these people who live happy and simple lives.

As the week in Yaviza winded down, we started getting pretty comfortable with the heat and were having a blast. Elias and I spent countless hours playing one-on-one on the basketball court, we all played plenty of games with Brianna (the three year old daughter of the Wounaan family who were caretakers at the mission station) and every evening we would eat dinner together and chat for hours with our new friends... sometimes late into the night. On one particular day, my dad and I were walking into the town center of Yaviza (if you could can call it a town centre) when we passed by one of the basketball courts in town. Remember earlier in this post when I said our soccer game morphed into a basketball game and tons of kids started joining? Well some of those kids were playing there! They yelled at me to join them so I just ran over and started playing with them. It was a great game and the coach running it asked me if I wanted to play with the grade 11 and 12's. I said sure, but man, when I saw those guys I was having second thoughts. The shortest guy was literally 6"1 and two guys were around 6"8 !!! It was really fun though. I played pretty well and this was the first time I played in a game with people who can dunk.

During dinner times, Einer would make this AMAZING lemongrass tea while Girlesa would make an equally amazing rice pudding. The day Einer made empanadas he said something that will stick in my mind forever..."You can only have empanadas with coke... only with coke. They were the best empanadas I have ever had!

So, the week in Yaviza ended and after saying goodbye, we set sail for a whole new adventure in the capital, Panama city.

When we arrived at a center for Indigenous people of Panama, we were greeted by none other than Canadians! You see, at this center there was an indigenous women's retreat going on and a church from Saskatchewan had sent a ladies group to join! It was a really pleasant surprise and we immediately settled in.

We helped out with all the work during our week long stay which included painting (the place was literally PEELING and after it looked real snazzy!), chopping down the forest in their backyard and making a little garden where they could grow veggies. At the center our family experienced so much hospitality, it was amazing. All the Saskatchewan ladies lathered us in greatly coveted Canadian granola bars while everyone else showed us everything about one of the coolest city in the world.

Why is it so cool? You ask.

Well, "chuckle," let me show you.

Alright, first of all, Panama is home to the Panama Canal (plenty of backstory there, you should wiki it) which is a huge canal that creates a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific so ships don't have to go all the way around South america (just look at a map if you don't get me). This means that pretty much all the big freighters pass right through Panama. Panama city is also used to shipping things through because of "cough" their lax shipping tax laws "cough." But, Panama City is honestly really cool. We have an amazing picture of an enormous, fancy high-rise RIGHT BESIDE some city slums! It looks super bizarre because normally the rich people would rather keep the poor people at a distance by using big walls or putting the poor in a certain zone like in Mexico and Guatemala. Here, they treat the poor more equally (wait can you say that?). Panama City also has some super cool art, they have tons of murals and graffiti and these crazy huge moving ads that make it look like its 3-D! Einer gave us an amazing city tour including the canal, the zoo, the trendy hip part of the city, Obdulio's indigenous craft store and the Granville island of Panama City!

In Yaviza my parents were kinda stressing about what we were going to do in Panama City for Jonah's birthday, but man, they had NOTHING to worry about. We started at the mall... Jonah has this strange obsession with malls and every time he sees one he starts drooling and his eyes grow really... just kidding... but, he really likes malls. Anywho, (Elias's favorite way to say anyways) we started by just walking around as my parents had some coffee. We hit up the apple store (we always play the apple skateboard game and the people working their think its super funny), the music store (Jonah was dying to play some piano and looked like he was seeing his long-lost dog for the first time in 10 years!, he played his jams while Elias and I held up the beat on the percussion) and then finally, Carl's Junior. Yep, for Jonah's birthday lunch we went to Carl's Junior.

After the mall we rented this super sketch-lookin' 5 person bike and rode down this suspiciously picturesque peninsula (wow I sound like a thesaurus) before nearly dying when Elias took the wheel.

After dinner and some b-day calls we went to another mall to watch... wait for it...

The Super Mario Bros. Movie! It was WAY better than I thought even though my dad fell asleep during the intro song. EVERYONE ELSE was having plenty of fun calling out every scene that was in the O.G. Nintendo game.

I think that if I had to put out a theme for this Panama lag of our trip, it would be people.

Panama really is not the most beautiful country we have seen, but we experienced some of the kindest hearts on this trip! From Yaviza to Panama City, we experienced so much hospitality that it really stirred all of us to try to spread that welcoming feeling to everyone we would meet on our trip. Another crazy thing about Panama was the anticipation of switching continents! Panama was the last stop before we would be heading to Colombia, which gave us plenty of anticipation.

On our last night at the center, we got to sleep in one of the rooms in our own beds (which was, in Elias's words, a big dub) because we had already sent our camper on a boat heading to Cartagena. We had nowhere to sleep so the coordinator of the center told us to just stay in one of their guest rooms for the night. The next morning, we woke up ready to fly. Ready to switch up the continents.

-Nathaniel Fast