The Story of Panama Jones (Part 2)

When my senior year of high school began Amigos announced that they were considering opening a program in Brazil. For some reason that really struck me, and suddenly I was fascinated with Brazil, even taking time during a free period to try and learn Portuguese.

I was also fortunate enough to be accepted into the Honors English class. I enjoyed the discussions with the other students and appreciated the latitude Mr. Wood, our teacher, gave us to be creative. So when he assigned an essay on wisdom, I knew I wanted to do something more.

I decided that instead of writing an essay I would instead write a short story to illustrate the topic. The Adventures of Panamá Jones was born! What started out as a short story soon blossomed into a full-blown 40+ page novella! I still think of submitting it to a publisher some day, although lengthened and with quite a bit of revision.

The title makes it sound like an Indiana Jones knock-off, but that's really the only similarity. The story is about an American teenager (pretty much me, and written in first-person) who decides to travel up the Amazon River, starting at Belém (Portuguese for Bethlehem) at the mouth, then visiting the gold mines at Serra Pelada ("Naked Mountain") and onward, finally finishing high in the Andes Mountains. As I wrote, the symbolism of the names of these real places stood out to me. For example, I used Serra Pelada as a metaphor of the depravity man is capable of. I also (very) loosely based the novella on Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) as Panamá journeys on. In the course of the story Panamá learns wisdom and comes to understand his place in the world and beyond.

The night before I was supposed to turn in the first draft (really only the first two chapters) I managed to click on the wrong command and successfully deleted my entire story. I stared at the screen in utter disbelief. But it was indeed gone. So, the next day I did something I had never done before--I cut school! (Oh, the horror!) I spent all day re-writing it, finishing barely in time to turn it in and feeling that the first draft now forever lost to mankind had been better.

In the end I got an "A" but Mr. Wood felt I had taken too many liberties, including having Panamá visit a city of over a million people on the banks of the Amazon River. He felt that was too much to be believed. But Manaus is a real place, founded during the rubber boom of the late 19th century, and today the cultural and economic center of the Amazon Basin. Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction!

Amigos ended up not going to Brazil that summer, but in the end I wasn't able to do Amigos a third summer since my family was moving to Oregon. But I never lost my fascination with Brazil, and eventually I spent two months there during college doing a study abroad. But that's another story.

And now you know the true story of Panamá Jones.

The Story of Panamá Jones (Part One)

There I sat in my sophomore Spanish class. It was 1985. The teacher announced that we had some guests: Jeff and Karen, seniors who had spent the previous summer in Latin America with a program called Amigos de las Americas. They explained that they had spent several weeks in Peru and the Dominican Republic working on health projects like latrine construction, distributing eyeglasses and giving vaccinations. The pictures and stories they shared were amazing and their enthusiasm was contagious. By the time the sign up sheet came around I decided that I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines. I put my name on the paper and passed it on.

Over the next six months I attended weekly meetings with other volunteers to prepare. Among the highlights was learning how to mix concrete to make latrine floors (in case we were assigned latrine construction) and giving each other saline shots (vaccinations). I loved the thought of making a difference. After a few months I received my assignment: Ecuador, a small country in southwest South America. I would be living for six weeks with another volunteer helping the townspeople to build latrines. Not the most glamorous assignment, but I was thrilled. (Later my six-year-old sister told her friends that I was helping to build trains, which sounded much cooler.)

When June finally arrived I was filled with excitement and apprehension. We landed in Quito, the capital, located in the breathtakingly beautiful Andes Mountains. For the first several days we received additional training, and then left for the towns where we would be staying for the next five weeks.

I was assigned the village of Suquibí Viejo (Soo-Kee-BEE Vee-AY-Hoe), located in the central lowlands maybe eight hours from Quito, along with a Vassar student named Kristin. Ecuador prides itself of being “La Mitad del Mundo,” the middle of the world, but this was definitely the middle of nowhere. There may have been twenty-five families in the entire hamlet. And no latrines. OK, that’s not true. The elementary school had two latrines, but I’m not sure they ever got used, including by me, since they involved a 5-10 minute walk. Our job was to help each family build their own. Diedre, our “route leader,” introduced us to several people, including Carlos, the head of the family I would be staying with, and then left to take other volunteers to the next town down the road.

Culture shock naturally set in. Of course no one spoke English and our Spanish was hardly adequate. We floundered, frequently embarrassing ourselves, but survived. Each day I ate with a different family, which helped me get to know everyone, and also led to some occasional awkward situations due to my poor Spanish. (Hint, if someone speaks rapidly and then stops, looking at you expectantly, the correct response may not be “sí.”)

By the end of the time there I made some great friends both among the Ecuadorians and fellow volunteers. It opened a whole new world for me. Before Spanish was just a class in school but now it was the language of all these new experiences. Not surprisingly, my grades in Spanish the next year improved dramatically.

So what does this have to do with my name? Well, the following year I did Amigos again, this time volunteering in . . . Panamá.