The Transaction of Travel: From Engineering to Stories

by JL Song (United States of America)

Making a local connection Panama

Mechigo’s host father, José, lays outstretched in a hammock under the house. A loose blue t-shirt and long black pants cover his lean frame. I cannot read the expression on his leathered face when he hears my idea. Is it one of confusion, concern, or apathy? A few minutes pass, and the man leans forward. He begins to speak, waving a thin stick of bamboo in his right hand. I hit the record button on my camera and wonder again what I’m trying to pay forward here. Outside of this rural community, Mechigo is better known as Julianne, a United States Peace Corps Water, Sanitation, and Health (WASH) volunteer in Panama. Her stated job is to support her community of about 300 indigenous people implement and manage a water supply project in northwest Panama. Bordering the warm Caribbean Sea, the region here is known as the Land of Big Water. Here, clouds quickly turn into sudden storms that can raise rivers in minutes The project moves along slowly. Months fill in the gaps between report approvals, land agreements, community meetings, and funding announcements. Between it all is life to be lived. The river highway brings food and supplies with the one boat driver in the community. Morning prayers and light slip in between the wooden floorboards that make up the four walls of a home. And we wait for rain to fall down metal roofs into plastic buckets for drinking, cooking, and bathing. The WASH project Julianne is involved in represents a penny in the budget of the global development sector. The sector is driven by the Sustainable Development Goals, as established by the United Nations. Specifically, the sixth Goal is for universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation & hygiene services by 2030. In 2019, about 785 million people still lacked a basic drinking water service. Julianne and I have spent the last few years traveling to rural communities around the world to work with local people on water projects, drawing from our nascent engineering degrees. We work at following best practices in the sector while maneuvering community relationship dynamics and avoiding pitfalls such as the white savior complex. Ultimately, I know it comes from a position of power, privilege, and fortune for me to be able to do any of this. I have the ability to move in and out of remote communities with ease because I have the money for the $10 boat ride, the $32 bus rides, and the $500 plane ticket into Central America. I’ve always struggled with this imbalance and sense of travel debt. Time and time again, I am offered a perspective into another way of life. But I’ve always wondered what will be my truth of this matter--how to travel ethically and what I can or should do about the phenomenons of poverty and inequality. While in the Land of Big Water, I wanted to try and continue finding my answers to these questions while supporting Julianne and the local community in a way that could bring understanding between this one discrete water project in Central America and the rest of the world. Julianne explains to José what I am doing. I’d like to hear a story. In all honesty, I’m not sure what I’ll do with the story. But every place and person has something to tell. Traveling for yourself is the best way to learn this. Travel humanizes people and provides a glimpse into another, perhaps better, way. And when we cannot travel, we have stories to do the same. The story José shared with me is one of history, war, and peace. It was a brief story, perhaps unremarkable in many ways. But a story is of no great achievement on its own. Instead, it is shaped by the people who tell and listen to it. It is shaped by how its listeners carry the story with them, and if they do so in such a way to better their own lives and the lives of others. This is what I learned from my local connection.