When it comes down to women
02 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Community outreach, Stories from the world and me Tags: cancer prevention, Kalu Yala, San Miguel Outreach Team, Veronika Jemelikova, Virginia Campo, women health
Important aspect of community outreach in San Miguel is work with the women. I was lucky to participate on women leadership class dedicated to the women health, which was part of series of classes organized by Virginia Campo. Around 25 women assembled in local library to learn about prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases, which affect women.
The discussion starts with statistics: cervical cancer causes 75% deaths of women in Panama. Shocking number is followed by even more shocking confessions. Almost half of the women sitting in the room confess that they suffered from some kind of cancer in the past or are being treated.
For me cancer was always a very scary word; word connected to images of hospitals, suffering, pain and death. And here I see all these women, who conquered cancer and came here to learn more about their health and things they can do for themselves. I was astonished. Probably as a result of how cancer is presented in society and how people who survived are presented as heroes, I saw a hero in every one of these women.
Creation of a Community: Bienvenidos a San Miguel
01 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Stories from the world and me Tags: Community, Kalu Yala, Outreach, San Miguel, Veronika Jemelikova
I will have to get back to Peruvian adventures later, because five days ago we arrived to this beautiful village San Miguel, Panama and I am so excited to share my story about it.
Creation of community
„Bienvenidos a San Miguel“ says a big stone welcoming us to little town where San Miguel Outreach Team is about to spend the next two months. It is pouring rain when we arrive to our new home, big yellow house, or casa llena, how we call it, because almost 20 people will be living here. We all head out to explore La fonda – local restaurant – where we taste the delicious pollo asado. Little children running around are curiously peeking in eager to find out what is this huge group of gringos doing here. It only take couple minutes of hesitation and then they just run up to us, hug us and introduce themselves.
We keep exploring the town to see what projects and ideas we came here with could be implemented. Our house stands on a back of gorgeous river, which is also popular getaway destination for Panamanians to go on weekends, but after all the „tourists“ are gone there are piles of garbage surrounding the river. It doesn’t take long to identify garbage management as one of the most important issues to address, because the beauty of this place is spoiled by ever present garbage on the streets. Another issues are the children, the cutest creatures you can imagine, running around wanting to make friends with us, coming to our house to hang out, going for us for a walk or going to swim in the river with us. Because they don’t have any afterschool activities they are using every opportunity to be around and play with us. Another member of our team decided to create youth enrichment classes for these children, so she could address the important issues in this community such as alcohol, drugs and STDs, which are present here but because of the traditional nature of this society stay hidden. The whole SMOT team got together with the most amazing ideas how to contribute to this community, great topics for research and how to put our hands on the ground and get dirty with creating community garden for local school and teach children English.
Talking with the locals I realized how interesting the history of San Miguel is. Not only this community didn’t exist 50 years ago, but it was founded by people coming from distant areas of Panama. Miriam, school librarian, told me story about her father and grandfather, who had to ride horses for three weeks to get to San Miguel from their original town. The entire district of San Martin, where San Miguel is located, was just an inhabited jungle only 50 or 60 years ago. During the time first settlers came here Panama was suffering economic crisis and people could get food only if they had coupons. Poverty and hunger stroke many of the towns and so at this time founders of San Miguel decided to abandon their homes in search of a better place to start a new life.
When you look around San Miguel, you can see the reasons why these people decided to start new community here. Cristal clear river is surrounded by always green mango trees, palm trees and vegetation ful of life, singing birds and flowers of all colors you could imagine. But the new inhabitants of San Miguel had to overcome many challenges in order to create whole new community even in such an amazing climate.
So many people all around the world are suffering from hunger and poverty, living in unlivable conditions. Some of them have the courage to abandon their homes and go elsewhere, but too many either don’t have any place to go or are too attached to their homes. Founders of San Miguel took the bold decision and abandoned the known suffering for unknown future. I found this fact fascinating and decided to research further on poverty driven migration and creation of communities. I would like to find motivation of the original founders of San Miguel and how they managed to face the challenges their decision created. At the same time I would like to find out what are the factors preventing other people elsewhere to take such a brave decision and if migration is or can be response to some cases of extreme poverty as it was here in Panama. The story of San Miguel is also bringing me back to the purpose of Kalu Yala, which is not only to help develop San Miguel, but also create whole new community from scrap. History of San Miguel, creation of a community, can serve as an example, Kalu Yala will be a social experiment, new village created on common values of its inhabitants, but San Miguel is a vivid experiment and we can learn from its successes and failures.
Recent Comments