The next morning I got to meet the rest of the staff on base. Mancha, who fit the similar characteristics of Marlon and Anselmo (I would find that short stocky build to be a common trend on the islands), and Alexi, who was taller, darker, and more african in colour with a proper moustache. Lexi, as I would learn to call him, had an infectious personality. ‘Pura Vida’ he would always say, seeming to bask in the thrill of every-day life. He had volunteered to take me into town to get supplies for my isolation period and I would come to understand why.

The thing about the weather in the Bocas Archipelago is that it was hyperdynamic, in the same day you might get torrential downpour and blasting sunshine. During my first week, the thundering of mass volumes of water cascading on the roof of my casita would wake me several times throughout the night. That and other things, but we’ll get to that. I say this because on this particular morning, as we loaded up onto the boat with the FD red cross insignia on its bow, the weather decided I needed a shower. As we pulled up off the dock the sky turned a myriad of charred greys. It was a few kilometres boat ride into bocas town and for a large stretch of open water I could see to the left of me a thundering raincloud that bled to meet the surface of the water. I knew from my youth spending the summers in the Argentinean north that this was rain headed straight for the our boat, or us right into the rain, I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. It was in this boat ride, as the misty swell of heavy rain enveloped us on the ride into town, that I began to realise the significance of what I was undertaking over the next six weeks. From a professional standpoint, it represented the first real personal sacrifice I was making to do something that I felt was meaningful; I was spending Christmas away from my family for the first time ever. I was finally doing what I thought I wanted to do with my life – practice medicine for the under-resourced in parts of the world where the cycle of poverty is all consuming. These were all very righteous ruminations, and I was definitely pumping my own tires, but as we approached the mainland and I saw the pointed buildings taking shape from behind darkened silhouettes, I got the idea of writing this blog. If it had been a sunny day perhaps all of you would have been spared. Cheers to bad weather.

When we got into town Lexi came alive. He was excited to show me his people (although he himself not specifically from bocas, he came from one of the neighboring islands). The way he strutted up the streets, you would think he owned the place. Everybody and their mums knew who Lexi was. He would bop up to anyone carrying bagged groceries, painters, policemen, and the line of older fellas outside the bank waiting to pick up the state sponsored Christmas cheque, he knew them all by name and they him. It took us probably half an hour to walk a loop of 800 metres, as he constantly stopped to chat with someone, or engaged in shouting banter at someone across the street. The colours of a beach town were unmistakable; he told me of the celebrations that usually go on in the town square, how during high season the party never stops. It was a shame to see so many empty restaurants and bars, and I wondered how a community like this was destined for misery during a covid shutdown. Things were tough enough in the Occidental west, imagine what they were like here. There was confusion amongst the townfolk regarding a government program to give out Christmas Ham. For some reason everyone thought he would have the answers. ‘I don’t know!’ he’d say. ‘but I will find out’.

He spoke to the locals a spanglish the likes of which I had never imagined existed. It was like a creole of Caribbean english with a completely unpredictable turn of phrases that came out in Spanish. They all seemed to be speaking it amongst one another. He was always quick to introduce me, ‘this is my jefe’ he would say. He seemed to take great pride in that. No matter how much I insisted that I was most certainly not at all the jefe he would brush me off. ‘You give the orders jefe’. He had recently been married, right at the beginning of the month. He had two children with his now wife already, one around three and one a few months old. This did not prevent him from charming every woman we came across on our walk however. And then there was the Chinese he told me. ‘They show up here and build grocery stores, one after another. If there’s one thing those Chinese know how to do’ he said, ‘its make business.’                 We stopped for lunch, a whopping 5 dollars for the both of us. Getting groceries I was surprised to find that you couldn’t get fresh meat. Everything was frozen, Maybe because the heat would make it impossible otherwise? Nonetheless I got the things I needed before I said goodbye to human kind and boated back to base where I would stay for the following two weeks.