A Week With Las Kunas

A group of students in the program ended up spending a whole week on a remote island with indigenous Panamanians: the Kunas. It was an incredible experience. Here are a few thoughts right afterward...

They sit alone under thatched roofs, the sound of waves colliding with the shore, and do biology homework in compact notebooks. The Spanish rolls across the pages, the letters written slowly and perfectly, telling about meiosis and mitosis and Watson and Crick. And it doesn’t seem to fit, these white-coated, beaker-wielding chemists, in a land where the telephone is a new contraption, where sahilas (chiefs) doze in lazy hammocks and sing of Babdumad (God) and a living moon.

An eclipse isn’t an eclipse here. It’s a giant, ferocious beast that summoned up the audacity to eat the moon. They have to bring the very sons of God – those strange and beautiful, sunburned albinos in their midst – to draw a bow and aim at that beast. They let an arrow loose; it darts across an eerie sky and somehow, in the great beyond, it pierces that villainous fiend and it chokes out the round, glowing sphere. In an instant, all is well again, and the people leave the shelter of their huts to laud their unassuming savior.

But here, the young ones learn the cold, calculated formulas of cell reproduction. The moon has lost its mystery. The cycles are predictable, their calculus can draw its orbit. And nobody believes in the beast anymore because Hubbel said no.

I watch them from the window as my plane lifts from the ground. In the distance, on a placid, turquoise bay, the graceful arc of a canoe dents the water. The silhouette of two Kuna men, slowly and rhythmically rowing, shifts in slow motion. I wonder if all the chemistry and electricity and jet fuel has really made life any better for us, or if it’s just drawn a jagged scar through our hearts and torn us away from the good and the beautiful. Our plane conquers gravity like a foe. They let gravity make waterfalls and rain. We burn the darkness with our lamps. They let darkness bring them rest and the dawn bring them newness.