I lost my headphones.
I remembered this last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, tossing to find a comfortable position in the heat. Today I am heading to Panama City for a few days of medical appointments, which means two four-hour bus rides through the countryside, over the canal, and into the city, where I will be transported to what feels like another world.
Maybe they slipped from my bag on the chiva? I had them coming back from the parades in Guararé last week. Did I leave them under the hammock outside? Maybe someone stole them; a lot of people walked in and out of my house this week…
I rose from my bed, put on my glasses, and in the hot, dark of night, rummaged frantically through my bags, under chairs, across the kitchen floor.
Nothing.
I went back to bed.
This morning in the Chitre terminal on the way to the city, I stopped at a technology kiosk where I bought data for my phone last week. “Vende audífonos?”
“A ver su celular?”
I offered up my iPhone, placing it on the fingerprinted glass counter. “Un poco penosa” (shameful, embarrassed), as always, to show my Apple gadget, which are even more ridiculously overpriced in Panama as they are in the states. I proceeded to see the options, unpacking a set of headphones, priced at $13, to be sure they worked. They had some sort of Bluetooth function; “más segura,” (more secure) the vendor told me.
$13. That’s a lot. That’s half my stipend’s monthly communications allotment.
I remembered back to my community’s patron saint celebration in August, when my Maestra generously gave each niño in the escuela $1 to “cooperar,” or participate, in the church’s fundraiser to cover the costs of arranging the patron saint with flowers, paying the priest for nine masses, and the nightly fireworks displays. I remember smiling as I watched the niños line up at the church’s side window, offering a sweaty Martinelli (equivalent to 1 USD) in exchange for fresh-fried “hojaldres” and fruit punch. I also remember how my sister Yessibeth’s eyes bulged in amazement as she did the mental math for her 13-student school, exclaiming to her mom, “Maestra Eusebia has thirteeeeen dollars??”
My world is full of contradictions. I live on a monthly budget of about $400, wear the same five items of clothing 90% of the time, and pinch pennies when grocery shopping or deciding which snack to buy when I’m waiting for my bus at the terminal. I couldn’t possibly buy peanut m&ms, priced at $1.19, I reason. That’d be excessive. In the SuperExtra, I pass by Nutella, granola bars, almond butter—brought to my province by globalization but (by the same culprit?) financially out of reach. So I reason.
But today in the city, I dropped $11 on a Pad Thai lunch with my fellow volunteers, and will drop that, and likely more, again tonight when we go to drink and dance in Casco Viejo, Panama’s gentrified tourist district; historic neighborhoods turned to breweries, gelaterias, and night clubs.
I am here in Panama City for a medical appointment. Because I work for an agency of the US government, my unbelievable healthcare gives me access, without cost to me, to every specialist I could possibly desire. Meanwhile, my community members spend much of their time trying to navigate the public health system to get basic tests, medicines that aren’t available. My gente are always “resfriada,” or with a cold, citing the “change of seasons,” as the culprit–year-round. One of my students misses class for a strange re-curring rash, another for her anemia, which causes her to faint and drains her of her usual spunk. There is talk of bus rides to appointments, “injections” (a common practice here), and “pastillas,” (pills), but the problems never seem to go away, much less their causes be revealed. This week, the grandfather of one of my students finally has an appointment for surgery on his prostate. As he has for the past eight months I’ve lived in El Guásimo; every week he goes to the hospital for a scheduled surgery, and after waiting a few days, returns home, un-operated. A few weeks ago, I went to a specialist in Panama for a foot problem, the diagnosis of which could be summarized as: “you stubbed your toe and are allergic to your sandals.” Despite my case’s lack of urgency (and my own hypochondria), at the drop of the hat, I received the care I needed.
I remember what a friend once told me about a mutual friend’s sister, who did Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) in Belize. The Jesuit Volunteer reflected that, as someone who had also done many immersion trips and service programs, having supposedly walked in solidarity alongside those who have so few social and political resources at their disposal, she had “only ever pretended to be poor.” That is to say, at the end of each trip, study abroad, or “experience,” there was always a return flight. She got to go home.
The first time I heard that, I thought the volunteer’s words were harsh. Now, I understand. We live simply, but somewhere else, excess awaits us. Pretending to be poor. Is that what I’m doing?
In other words, I can deny myself all the new clothes, all the peanut m&ms in the world, but I still sleep sound at night. I attempted to find a way to complete that sentence with “because,” but it’s hard to say. Because of my family’s socio-economic status? Because of my world-class education? Because I’m a U.S. citizen? Because my skin is white? This is a question that I want to think more about. Whatever the reason–and it feels crass to admit this so blatantly–I can pretty much guarantee that I will always have food to eat, a safe place to rest my head.
It was the lost headphones that kept me up at night, after all, not a rumbling tummy or echoes of a gunshot fired.
Today, from the city, I called a friend from home, and she was kind enough to help me unpack some of these tensions. Her take was that having access to Panama City as a Peace Corps volunteer could ultimately be a “good” thing because it forces us as volunteers to actively engage with our privilege and become more aware of the contradictions and inequalities present in our globalized world (and, I might add, our experiences as PCVs). In other words, while an authentic lived experience of the Panamanian “campo” is worthwhile, there is no point in pretending that Panama City,* or the “other world,” isn’t there, because it is. Furthermore, it is increasingly shaping the way of life in the campo. Like a magnet in the center of the isthmus, the city exerts a subtle force that seems to pull on even the furthest fringes of the country.
More broadly speaking, there are very few parts of the world that remain untouched by free-market capitalism–its delights and its horrors–so, why, then, try to distance myself from that reality? To create some sort of contrived experience of isolation because it seems more “difficult,” or “authentic?” Whether I want to admit it or not, I will not live in El Guásimo de Los Santos forever. And when I am back in the states,** I will be faced with $11 lunches and travel opportunities and friends who want to go out. I will be forced to make choices, of the same sort that I’m forced to make while I’m in Panama City. Whether to buy the m&ms, what to do with my paycheck, how to spend my free time, what kind of person I want to be.
Sometimes going between the “two worlds” is dizzying, if not mildly traumatizing. “Whiplash” is how as volunteers we have come to name the sensation of going between highly-social and often highly-comfortable PCV gatherings and in-country “tourism,” (for lack of a better word) and the sweaty, mundane daily life of our rural host communities. I am usually hit with a wave of dull sadness, and at times a mild dread or anxiety, on the bus ride home. I always need a day or two on the other end of a trip to the city to get back in the swing of things in my community. To remember and re-tell myself the story of my life right now. My name is Maria Teresa, I live here. I spend my time playing BINGO, chopping vegetables and going to rosaries. I walk, backpack swinging, sandals flopping, I say “buenassss.” I eat lentils and rice. I play with the niños. This is good, this is good.
And it is. It is a life that holds a sense of security, beauty, and intimacy that I’ve yet to encounter in Panama City’s rooftop bars and Wi-Fi spots. It is a life that I have grown to appreciate. It is a life I now belong to.
It is also a life that, once you leave, can feel ridiculous, suffocating, or lacking, even.
For this reason, I wish the world was not so divided. That there was a happy in-between. That we could all have our needs met, but not in a way that breeds excess, disconnect, and ingratitude. That my students could have more than they do. That they could have the lives they deserve, the lives they are owed, but not lose the beauty of their culture or the gift of community. The intimate knowledge they have of a world that knows so little about them, it seems.
I don’t mean to demonize development nor romanticize poverty. I yearn not so much for a middleground between the two as for something beyond them both; for my gente, but also for myself. My frantic need to buy new headphones, it seems, was prompted by the sheer possibility of wanting for something. Of doing without–something many of my gente know too well, something that I am learning, still. Perhaps my anxiety was sparked by the sheer possibility of spending the four hour bus ride without music or distraction, but rather, with my own thoughts, and the discomfort they can breed.
Today I found my other headphones. They were stashed in a cross-body bag, along with a wad of cash and a melted chai-flavored chapstick.
The pair I bought at the terminal? I leant them to a fellow volunteer while I was in the city. He lost his, too, and wanted them for the bus ride home.
“These things suck, broke right away,” he tells me, dangling the white cords between his fingers. “$13 and they lasted how long?”
“Capitalism,” I quipped, only half-jokingly.
Pretending to be poor.
What to do? How to live in and between these worlds?
*Note: I don’t want to paint Panama City as a homogenous paradise–while much of the country’s wealth and resources are concentrated in the city, its districts reflect the diversity present in Panama’s provinces, and accordingly, it is also somewhere where violence, poverty, and insecurity can be found.
**TBD if I will come back…:)
onepointfivedegrees 
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