Musings at Hammock Time: San Blas III
he could say was "bad, bad, bad."
But the children I met and watched today seem happy here. They were not afraid of me, simply curious. A calm curiosity -- a demeanor hard to describe - seems to characterize these youngsters. On Grass Island, a teenage girl helped "sell" one of her mother's molas to me. A young boy, most likely her little brother, wore a backpack that was also a stuffed-animal cow. When the boy turned around the black and white cow looked as if it were hanging off his back. But the neatest thing about this cow was what happened when you pressed the hoof (which the children did frequently to show me).
A strange paradox: Here on a tiny island surrounded by glistening blue Caribbean, with no running water or electricity, digital notes pierced the soft wind. Like an unavoidable shower, however, a paradox was coming from this child's backpack. Digital notes bounced off the thin walls of the three thatch huts, the only manmade structures on the island.
The song? "It's a Small World After All."
Readers: Check back in 2 weeks as I move from the islands to the highlands of the Panamanian isthmus. For five glorious days, the cool misty valleys on either side of Panama's highest point, dormant Baru Volcano, were my home.
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