I’m not really sure how to begin this. Nor am I really sure what I am trying to achieve, and if anything at the very least this well help me to solidify my thoughts and engrain some of these experiences into memory more profoundly. I have decided to keep most of this out of my travel journal, mainly because that travel journal contains parts of me that are young, and I don’t want to clog up the entire second half of the book with one trip. I would like that travel journal to hold my ruminations of a young man into old age and for that reason I think the details of this six week journey is better suited to the old personal computer. Should I ever decide to make something of these reflections having it encoded digitally will also help.
To begin with the fundamentals. I am here on a medical elective. Dr Ben LaBrot, the founder of floating doctors, is an RCSI graduate. He started this organisation a decade ago after his own very personal and interesting journey that you can read the details of here. A year ago the college put me in touch with him as I attempted to navigate a career path in humanitarian medicine. When the world collapsed around us this year and all of my electives evaporated, I reached out to him about the chance to work with his team. After a decent amount of administrative hoop-jumping, I got it cleared by the college and recognized as part of my clinical training. Thus here I was, stepping off a boat onto the base to begin my two week isolation through Christmas before my one month elective in January.
A few things that struck me when I first arrived on base – it is a lot bigger than I anticipated it would be. Maybe it just feels really big because I am the only person here but it is quite an impressive achievement—On a side note I keep having to pause writing to lather myself up in coconut oil for the damn chitras (sandflies), I definitely prefer them to mosquitos but dear lord they are annoying. Its impressive to me that bugs so small can render a giant like me unable to go about my life as usual. I am now caked in coconut oil and it is greasing up my computer. I am not sure how I feel about that—The base can house 60 volunteers and ten medical staff. There are 4 staff casitas on the water and bunkhouse for the volunteers. Communal bathrooms and showers are fuelled by a water system that is fed by raincatch into massive silos of water. Solar panels provide the power, with a backup diesel generator when needed, and the internet is surprisingly solid and covers the whole of three acres. This, all on an island that is mainly swamp, and a 20 minute boat ride from the nearest proper town. It is a true base of operations. I can only imagine the vigor and life that booms out of this place when it is running at full capacity. Maybe someday I will get a chance to see it.
Covid suspended most of their operations here by July, which is why there is nobody here. I don’t think any of us expected this degree of fallout when it all began in March. I remember Johnnie Cox asking me bluntly in March how long I thought this would go on for. For some reason my opinion was valuable to him. I told him that we were probably looking at a good two months of serious lockdown. Try closer to a year (and counting…). What a nightmare.
My understanding is that the local populations here in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago have suffered greatly. Dr LaBrot told me verbatim that many of the elders of the indigenous have died, and since many of their traditions are passed via word of mouth, and not by written text, this means the death of many of their practices. I can’t imagine a greater tragedy. Imagine then entirety of your culture dying in one generation just like that. A friend of mine in Dublin and I chatted once about the concept of suffering ‘two deaths’ as she put it. Your first death is when you die, when your blood stops pumping like any mortal man. Your second death is when the last person who knew you dies themselves, thus making your life and any imprint of it forgotten. I remember as a child contemplating a similar notion, and it terrified me. Men like to talk a lot about their legacies, and this notion of fading into the blackness of the universe didn’t sit well with me. I remember I asked my Dad about it, he told me that it is a fact of life we all have to accept. Imagine that death, the second death, but it is not the death of any person, but of a culture. An entire people and their ethos slipped away into the void. I suppose in the end it’s bound to happen sooner or later, but to contemplate that for these people of the islands breaks my heart.
Flying into Bocas was easy enough. The flight was meant to leave at 1 and we left around 140. The guy on the plane next to me took off his shoes and put his feet up against the seat in-front of me. It didn’t really bother me at all but I found it noteworthy, what kind of confidence or ignorance must a grown man have to perform an act like that in a glorified tin can with wings. Sam, the captain of operations at the Floating Doctors came to fetch me from the airport. She was taller than I thought, but just as blonde. She was perky, and tremendously American in her presentation. Americans are so easy to spot aren’t they. I have always gone out of my way when traveling to not look American, and when I say that I mean the general gringo. Despite my Canadian identity, I am forced to admit that functionally we are the same as those who hail from the land of red white and blue. We dress the same and talk the same. We made chitchat on our way to the boat that would bring me to base. In the short amount of time we covered a fair amount. She lived not on base but on a nearby island. She had been with Floating Doctors in several capacities over the course of a few years. She was a psychology major, just like me, but unlike me after graduation she decided to take some time off and get a position with an NGO like floating doctors right away before going back to school—Update, the chitras stopped going after my limbs and now I can feel them at my scalp, which is impressive because of my thick hair. I am now wearing my Australian hat. That didn’t seem to do much. The spray that Sam gave me is legitimately doing nothing, and I am not actually sure that the coconut oil is either. I set up the fan on the desk to blow directly into me in the hopes that that turbulence of air will be too much for the little bastards to overcome. All this coconut oil on my computer for nothing, what a shame—Sam told me how excited everyone on base was to get to know me, operations having been suspended for so long. The staff at the base was going mad for human contact and I was the lucky soul to provide it to them. At the boat we were greeted by one of the other captains, by now I was made to understand that there were three in total as well as Sam. I introduced myself to Marlon, a younger man, likely in his thirties, he was short and stocky, almost samoan in his build yet creole in his complexion.
‘Bienvenido al Paraiso amigo.’ He said
That word would get thrown around a lot at me for the next few days. The boat ride was swell. My hat nearly flew off of my head, at which point I was proud of myself for having selected a hat with a chinstrap to prevent that very outcome. Arriving at the base I was met by the head of security Anselmo. Anselmo was much older, probably in his fifties, he was shockingly similar in size and build to Marlon, with a just a little bit more rounding him off. He was the only other staff member that would be living on the base with me during my isolation. He right away came to shake my hand.
‘No, no’ I said ‘All I can give you is an elbow’
I was happy that the base staff were native Spanish speakers, that was one of the things Sam had told me on our walk to the boat. She was the only American staff member on base, the rest were all locals from the indigenous populations of the archipelago or Panamanian. I seldom get the chance to speak Spanish in Ireland, and I didn’t want to come to Panama just to be isolated with more gringos, so this fell on welcome ears. Sam told me at the base how it was difficult for her sometimes to communicate effectively with some of the staff.
Sam gave me the tour, and it was obvious that people were excited about my return. I put it down to my arrival being some positive sign that things were returning to their state of normality. I was to be the first volunteer on the base since before March. All of the things I would need to use during my two week isolation were already labelled by the team, I had my own sink, my own stovetop, my own fridge, shower and toilet out of the communal ones. After getting the tour I saw Sam and Marlon off on their boat. This left just me and Anselmo sitting on the docks. I didn’t really know what to talk about. So I opened with the only thing I knew about him.
‘So I heard you like to fish?’ I said. I was a fishermen myself, not an enthusiast by any means, but back home in the Canadian summers I had taken a liking to going out a few times a summer just to relax.
He laughed ‘I don’t know why she tells everyone that I like to fish’ he said. ‘Everytime I meet anyone on this base that’s what she’s told them and that’s what people say to me.’
I wasn’t sure whether to feel like I’d been rude or not. I backtracked.
‘I ask because I actually like to fish myself, I do it back home and I’d love if you could show me how you get on here’
‘Oh ya? You eat fish?’ He asked
‘Yeah, I love it’. That was a lie. I don’t mind fish, I’ll eat anything for that matter, but there are things that I really love to eat and fish generally isn’t one of them.
He then proceeded to tell me all about the local fish that are good fishing. I had never heard of most of them, and I echoed to him that I hardly knew how to prepare or fish any of these species. The only ones I recognised him name were Mackerel and Lobster. I could certainly eat both of those.
The conversation drifted, and then we fell silent. I had perceived him to be a shy man, or at the least quiet, which is why I was surprised when he spoke again unprompted.
‘8 years I’ve been with floating Doctors’ he told me. ‘I have been here since the beginning. There was nothing here before we started, and now we have built this whole base.’
The base really was impressive
‘For 20 years I have been working with the white man’ he said. I didn’t really find his phrasing unusual, it was only later upon reflection that I felt the significance of what he was saying. ‘I got my education in English and that made me suitable. I spent years working in Bocas town and in Almirante.’
‘Always in security?’ I asked
‘Always in security’ he said. ‘You see, Sam doesn’t speak good Spanish’ he went on. ‘Often times it is difficult for the staff, she tries to talk to them and they don’t understand. Sometimes she comes to me because she needs a translator to get her point across to the staff that don’t speak english’
Perhaps this is a projection, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for someone older like Anselmo to take orders from someone like Sam. In Latin America where our relationship with gender dynamics remains tumultuous (like just about everywhere else in the world, whether we wish to believe it or not) in this case you have the double whammy of taking orders from not just a woman but a gringo. In retrospect I think he was just making conversation, but I have my own history of grappling with white guilt and it becomes hard for me to encode information without it first passing through my baggage riddled filter. I remember being a 17 year old kid with my family visiting in Africa, and at one point we were asked if we wanted to visit the Masai peoples in their native village. I think my parents took this to mean a real visit, just a chance to get a glimpse of another way of life. I remember showing up to tourist fanfare, we were not the only visitors. The Masai warriors came out and did their ceremonious jumping. They jumped up and down for us, clapping, before a makeshift tour of the village and a chance to buy homemade crafts. Knowing the immense pride that lived within these people, it was really hard for me to enjoy any of it. I felt a profound sense of shame. I think anyone with a brain can understand that I have done nothing to them personally, but here they were, dancing for the white man. I thought to myself what it might be like for them. They see me, a product of privilege, arriving just for a look around and to take pictures of the black man in his mud huts. Their entire way of life destroyed by the colonialists, massive plains of Africa chopped up by the Europeans and divided amongst themselves, they now had to cross borders to chase their sacred wildebeasts around the Serengeti, those borders written by European pens. I thought to myself how much they must hate having to dance for me. I remember after we left I told my parents I didn’t want to see another village again, not like that.
My conversation with Anselmo was short but rich. I asked him if it was true, that the islands had suffered greatly from the effects of covid. He told me it was. I didn’t ask the details, but he told me many had suffered and were still suffering greatly. He asked about my own history, I told him of my upbringing in Canada, my Argentinean roots and my new life in Ireland. I didn’t ask if he had ever been to Ireland. It seemed like a stupid question to me.
Not before long, I excused myself. I am going to make a sandwich I said, and I offered him my help I anything he needed. I told him that I wanted to stay busy, that the peace of paradise would do for only a few days before the solitude tempted me to go insane.
‘You’re telling me?’ He said.
