community

Ambassador Watt is a career diplomat who works a crowd like a seasoned wardheeler. On January 31 she and the American Society hosted an American Fair on the ambassador's residence gounds on La Cresta. They ran out of the 600 tickets they printed, and ended up with maybe 800 people in attendance. Some three dozen organizations composed of Americans or in some other way identified with the US participated with tables or booths. And the ambassador schmoozed.

Nobody knows for sure how many US citizens we have here in Panama. The commonly spoken of range is from a low of about 15,000 based on those registered with the consulate or embassy to a high of about three times that number. (The gringos in turn comprise a minority of Panama's English-speaking community, which includes many Panamanians of West Indian descent, people from Canada, the UK and countries other than the US where English is spoken, and a large group of Panamanians and third country nationals who have been educated in English.) By absolute numbers, the American Fair attracted just a small percentage of the gringos on the isthmus. However, the event was a much more representative sampling of the community than an ambassador usually gets and Linda Ellen Watt took the opportunity to get to know and be known --- as did other embassy people and the community in general.

A subtext of this story is the fact that it took place with substantial publicity at a time when the United States is engaged in several distinct wars and the US State Department issues constant warnings for Americans living abroad to be on the lookout for attacks by Osama bin Laden and his supporters. This reporter did run into Americans who did not attend the fair specifically because they feared that a public gathering of Americans would present a tempting terrorist target. Nevertheless a broad sampling of the American community and its organizations, despite any and all differences within or among them, implicitly said first that they feel good about identifying themselves as Americans, and second that they will not allow the terror that has been unleashed in the world to intimidate them from associating with other Americans here.

Also in this section:
The American Fair
Girl Scouts' raffle

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