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News
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Volume
14, Number 18 |
Also
in this section:  Lizzie Leigh, as most of us remember her Photo from Padre Mickey's Dance Party Elizabeth Murray Hodgson Leigh February 11, 1943 - September 13, 2008 by Eric Jackson The
Balboa Union Church was packed on the morning of September 19, with a
most unusual crowd. Musicians from Panama's classical, opera and sacred
music scenes were out in force. So were the Episcopalian
faithful. There were a lot of people from the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute (STRI). There was a strong West Indian contingent.
Indigenous people were represented there. Jews and many varieties
of Gentiles were in attendance. All for Lizzie Leigh.
Presiding over the funeral was the Right Reverend Julio Murray, the Anglican bishop of Panama, assisted by the Balboa Union Church's Reverend Luis Veagra and, at least so it seemed, the entire Anglican clergy from the metro Panama City area. The sermon was by Reverend Michael Dresbach, the Episcopalian priest at St. Christopher's in Rio Abajo who, along with his wife Mona has hosted the Thanksgiving dinners at which both this reporter and the Leighs have been regulars. Elizabeth Murray Hodgson was born in Pennsylvania, raised there as a Presbyterian and educated as a botanist at Swarthmore. After college she worked as a botanist and a third grade teacher, became an Episcopalian and met and married biologist Egbert Leigh, Jr., who now runs the Smithsonian's Barro Colorado Laboratory. In 1969 the Leighs first visited Panama in the course of an exploration of many of the world's tropical forests. They came here to live in 1972. There were two children born of their marriage, John and Mary. Lizzie Leigh had a beautiful tenor voice and played the viola, and sang in various church choirs and played with various chamber music ensembles. She was a great promoter and organizer of the classical and sacred music scenes, the human interface between those cultural worlds and the scientific one at STRI. In Gamboa Lizzie ran the British Aid Society book exchange, which operated out of a room under her house. Gamboa is home to a number of Smithsonian scientists, who tend to be voracious readers. The British Aid Society was created in the days of the Canal Zone's infamous gold roll and silver roll system, in which white American canal employees were paid in gold and had substantial retirement benefits and all others --- mainly West Indians from what were then British colonies --- were paid in silver and had no retirement plan. Thus the need for a charity to help destitute elderly former canal workers, but after Presidents Eisenhower and Remon negotiated some reforms the urgency of this need gradually diminished and the society broadened its mission to help anyone who is spending his or her old age in poverty. Lizzie not only collected money for the cause through the book exchange, but distributed money and food in areas where most gringas don't go. In her work with the British Aid Society she often joined forces with other groups doing similar things, which is why the Salvation Army was well represented at her funeral. Lizzie was not "political" in the ward heeler sense of the concept but she had some very definite ideas about what's just and what's not, and what are proper and what are improper ways to see justice done. In times when some Americans like the idea of a holy war between Christianity and Islam, or would encourage Israel to fight the Arabs for Jerusalem to the very last Jew, the New Covenant in which Lizzie believed had no place for jihads of any sort. Hers was an ecumenical spirit that took sides in certain religious disputes but placed a high value on tolerance and keeping the peace. So many times she believed in the goals of the angry students or union members blocking the streets of Panama to assert this or that demand, but she always deplored the wearing of masks and the throwing of stones. She was always civil, but when she thought that someone was being unjust or intemperate she'd let it be known in her own quiet way. Her manner was not one to provoke fear or wrath in those whose injustices she opposed, but one may well have to count that as a weakness on their part. She didn't run for office or publish strident polemics, but she was what political scientists call an opinion leader and a remarkably effective one at that. Maybe the best demonstration of that ability --- at least the very best that this reporter ever witnessed --- was Lizzie's defense of the Wounaan community of Isla San Antonio, in Gamboa next to Herman Bern's Gamboa Rainforest Resort. Although he may deny it now, at one point Bern tried to oust his neighbors. He wouldn't let buses take their customary route through what became his resort to take Isla San Antonio's kids to and from school. Government types swooped down on the Wounaan community, prohibiting the collection of plants, palm fronds and other basic materials of their way of life with expulsion of a community rather than conservation of resources the clear intent. Bern's employees argued that the Wounaan had come at the behest of the Americans to train people in forest living skills, and ought to have to move like all the Zonians had to move as the Torrijos - Carter Treaties were being implemented. Lizzie disapproved of all this and would tell anyone who asked. This became a problem for Bern because among the original business assumptions for the Gamboa Rainforest Resort was that proximity to the places where Smithsonian scientists lived and where one gets on the boat for Barro Colorado Island would mean that there would be scientists staying at some of the renovated wooden duplexes that are part of his resort and that the STRI would be holding a lot of events at the hotel. But Bern's development got a bad reputation in Smithsonian circles and Lizzie Leigh's moral judgment was one of the major causes of this. So what exactly did she do? She walked no picket line and wrote no scathing manifesto. Mainly she just stepped up her efforts to help the people of Isla San Antonio to expand and diversify their economic activities --- by members of that Wounaan community giving nature tours to visitors, offering basket weaving classes under Lizzie's house, marketing their artwork in a more sophisticated fashion and so on --- and thus giving the implicit but unmistakable message that the community had no intention of going anywhere. Bern had to back down, and come to a new set of understandings with his neighbors. Yep. Lizzie was a "peace and justice" woman, and those on the right-hand side of the divided American community who would choose to dismiss her as one of those hated "liberals" had best hope and pray that some of the American citizens among the crowd that filled the Balboa Union Church for her funeral don't bother to request and cast their absentee ballots. This was a progressive, principled, intelligent, tolerant, rainbow crowd. The peace and justice people lost a great one in Lizzie, but gave her a sendoff that she would have liked, uttering not an overtly political word but making the point that an awful lot of people had high regard for both her and the ideas for which she stood.  Some of the musicians who played at Elizabeth Leigh's funeral. Photo by Eric Jackson Also
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