lifestyle

Embera community that has been hit by floods

Heavy November rains have brought flooding and landslides to several parts of Panama, including to some communities in the Panama Canal Watershed. The down side of having Gatun Lake full before the start of what is expected to be a long El Niño dry season has been devastation for farmers and communities up the Gatun River in Colon's corregimiento of Limon.

(For you folks who have a certain stereotypical image of what the city of Colon is supposed to be like, understand that everything you see on this page is within Colon city limits.)

The Embera village of Ella Drua is a young community, largely established by people who were displaced by the Bayano Dam in the 1970s, and largely populated by kids. Compared to the United States Panama is a demographically young country, and compared to the rest of Panama Ella Drua's population is young.

The people of Ella Drua cling to their identity, language and culture, but with the coming of environmental protection laws and regulations to protect the canal watershed, certain parts of the Embera way of life have become more difficult to maintain. The Embera traditional economy is based upon small-scale agriculture, which is supplemented by hunting, gathering and fishing. Hunting isn't allowed anymore, so the community depends on the chickens it raises, the fish it catches and the meat it buys for protein. The gathering of wood and other forest plant materials is restricted, and this affects both cooking and construction customs.

To make up for the losses to their traditional economy, the people of Ella Drua have gone into the tourism business. With some help from some visiting US Navy Seabees, they built a dock to better accommodate visitors. Trails, to the community's waterfall and other attractions, were improved with handrails, steps and gravel to make them more passable for guests. With a lot of community sweat equity and assistance again from the visiting crew of the USNS Comfort and also USAID (which has played a major role in many aspects of setting up the tourism program), the village put in an aqueduct that gave its homes and tourism facilities running water for the first time.

And just as the first wave of tourists for this season arrived, the heavy rains were beginning.

The "green wall" of plantains, fruit trees, tubers, sugar cane and herb gardens that lined the community as visitors approached and provided most of Ella Drua's food was washed away. So was the new boat landing. Falling trees and slipping hillsides broke the new aqueduct in several places. The community meeting house where tourists are greeted was flooded but not seriously damage. The communal kitchen, which is closer to the river, was left standing but was damaged. Three families lost their homes.

With the Chucunaque overflowing its banks in Darien, the losses along the Gatun River are some of the smaller-scale catastrophes afflicting Panama and vying for the attention of the First Lady's Office, which traditionally takes charge of collecting public donations for disaster relief. But Ella Drua has a relationship with USAID, and also a business tie with the Panama Blue bottled water company. The latter brought in cases of bottled water to help tide the community over until the aqueduct is fixed. The American Embassy, USAID and its subcontractor company IRG, and individuals associated with these pitched in with cans of baby formula, cooking oil, disposable diapers, sundry other food and sanitary items, and the turkey, ham and cranberry sauce for a gringo-style holiday dinner.

Except not, of course, gringo style. The ladies of Ella Drua took charge of the ham and turkey, chopped and ground their special mix of mild jungle herbs, and roasted the meat Embera-style.

Thanksgiving is not a Panamanian holiday, and while the women elders ran the kitchen, the mothers with babies had other things to do --- the Ministry of Health was in town this day, with a group from the policlinica in Buena Vista giving kids their shots, water quality advisors looking at the damaged water system and giving their counsel on subjects related to it, and an inspector from the malaria control office (which devotes more time to dengue fever these days) taking a look at whether the flooding has created new mosquito breeding conditions.

As the sun moved from straight overhead toward the west, the health crew finished its work and left and the meat was done.

Blessings were given in Embera and Spanish, and a distressed community ate well on this Thanksgiving Day.