(My solar phone charger)
For better or worse, the culture of the Comarca is rapidly changing. Government initiatives to push infrastructure in the form of roads, housing projects, and food stamp programs in exchange for vaccinating children and sending them to school have been more influential to social and economic development here than Peace Corps could ever hope to be. Thanks to a stable government that generates sufficient income from the canal, Panama is able to provide some social investments, although many would argue that it’s not enough: about 90% of Ngöbe people living in the Comarca live below the poverty line.
Just two years ago one had to hike in from an hour away to get to Cerro Iglesias because the road was nothing more than a muddy trail that trucks could not reliably navigate. In that time, local stores had the barebones necessities and few people could work or study outside of the community. For the most part, they were confined to these beautiful mountains. Now, however, we have a road that is three-quarters of the way paved to the top (the government ran out of money to pave the whole thing). Community members can now hold steady jobs in the nearby Latino town, San Felix, and more kids are able to attend high school there as well. The road allows many more material goods to come to us, such as the beloved vegetable truck, the egg truck and even the fish truck! Having access to a road certainly changes one’s quality of life and it is evident that Cerro Iglesias has grown substantially over the past 2 years. Is their natural next step towards assimilation into the modern world to have access to electricity? It appears so.
A few months back, I wrote a formal letter to solicit support for my latrine project from the Honorable Representante (similar to a mayor). He responded that he could be of no service to me because all of the money within his jurisdiction for community projects was going to be used to bring the electric lines to town. These lines, of course, would only be installed along the main road, where people live in more permanent houses (most built for free by the government or by relatives working in the capital). Typically, these road-dwellers have more steady incomes and are therefore more likely to be able to pay utility fees. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population that live scattered in the mountains are drastically poorer and do not even have basic necessities such as running water or sanitary facilities! So why would our mayor want to put the cart before the horse?
A friend who recently finished her Peace Corps service questioned my logic, “Don’t you want your community to have electricity? Isn’t that a good thing?” I thought about it. Was my reaction illogical? Don’t roads and electricity represent development? Aren’t I a community development worker? Shouldn’t I be excited about electricity coming and the new opportunities that they community will have to… develop?
Perhaps I had idealistic hopes that Cerro Iglesias would leapfrog traditional electricity grids and progress to more sustainable systems such as solar or bio-digester power. While some have solar panels (thanks to the Spanish and Taiwanese governments), more of the well-to-do (that’s a relative term) families somehow have purchased gas-powered generators, which are terrible noise polluters and I’d imagine are incredibly inefficient. Generators also have a disadvantage because they require that someone leave the community and spend half a day to fill up gas containers to then haul back into the community.
But my main problem here isn’t the source of the electricity, but rather, the use of the electricity. Electricity will not just bring lights to road-dwellers, but also the number one culture-killer: the television.
I conducted an informal survey recently to prove my suspicions about what sort of changes electricity would actually have in Cerro Iglesias. Not to my surprise, nearly everyone excitedly explained that they would buy, after light bulbs, a television. If you thought that daytime television and reality TV shows in the US were a waste, I promise the telenovela is 100x less intellectually engaging. Author Jerry Mander once wrote, “TV has even worse impacts on indigenous people, causing them to lose their traditional cultural practices, making them adopt a Western lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, and severing their connection with nature and the sacred.” Hence, I fear that electricity will change the landscape of my adopted home.
So call it development or evolution or assimilation, but its undeniably inevitable: the lights are coming. If they are lucky they will find a way, perhaps through promoting eco-ethnic-tourism, to preserve their unique culture. My beloved Church Hill will sure look different when I visit within the next 5 or 10 years. I just hope that they still speak their native Ngöbere, wear those bright zig-zag dresses and cherish the tranquilo life style that makes this place so special.
(breaker box in our new municipal building)
(Traditional Ngobe lady next to a shiny new car)
