Conversations over Fruit Plates (Darién - Part 6)

Bet you've never wondered how bananas grow. You probably even thought no one would ask you. Here's an esoteric fun fact - bananas grow out of the bulb. The flower petal falls off when the bananas inside reach size, and new bananas grow in the subsequent petals.

Another fun fact - coffee is actually a fruit. The seed is extracted and roasted, which becomes our coffee.

I became infatuated with guanabana (soursop), which tastes like a delicious combination of strawberry, pineapple and citrus. The internet describes it as "an oversized strawberry that crossbred with an apple and grew thorns". Everything in the jungle has thorns - the critters, the trees, and even the fruit.

With a little bit of self sufficiency, every Embera family meets their basic needs just by living off the land, fishing, and raising chickens and pigs. Water is plentiful and the soil is rich, so food grows everywhere. It's not a bad arrangement at all, if you can stand the mosquitoes and everything else that wants to either kill your or eat you. Likely both.

Hungry? Pick your plate - plantains, bananas, coconuts, guanabana, passionfruit, oranges, corn, rice, beans, coffee. Broccoli haters rejoice - there was not a single vegetable to be had. It turns out vegetables can't stand 6 months of constant rain and much like my beloved pothos, perished by drowning.

I'm used to seeing farming in neat little rows, evidence of humans shaping their environment. Here it is chaos - no rows, no wires, no carefully cultivated fields. When a new plantain palm grows back to full size in 4 months year round, not much reason to carefully plan ahead.

My conversations with Rotalio and Solante, my indigenous hosts, were insightful. They taught me about the Embera culture, and I answered a few questions about things at home.

What do Embera kids dream of being when they grow up? For the boys, fishermen. For the girls, well... no one seems to ask about their dreams. To the adults they are simply expected to become the next generation of housewives.

But later when I asked the same question directly to the daughters in the family, their answers were different. English teacher. Biologist. Fisherman.

Is there a school in the village? Yes, there's two teachers teaching elementary school. Past 6th grade the family must move out of the village to the "big city" to continue education. Big city meaning La Palma - where I crossed from one side to the other in 7 minutes on foot.

Marriages at 16 are common, the kids choose who they marry, as long as they are part of the tribe. Marry an outsider and you can't come back - in an effort to preserve the few thousand left of the Embera, the government doesn’t want blood mixing. Many of the indigenous move back to this village once they are older - for those without much education money is hard and unemployment is high. In the jungle, shelter and food is easy. And if you feel ill? Pay a visit to the local shaman.

Solante asks me if our indigenous live like they do. I pause. Aside from the casinos, I admit don't know much about how Native Americans live. I recall my conversation with a Navajo guide years ago - similar problems of employment, many go to the army. Significantly more difficulty in living off the land and a much bleaker outlook on the reservations.

They ask me: “Why did you come here?”. I start responding by talking about how I found their website, but then I stop. The question "how did you find us" smells like marketing research. But “why are you here" is more human, based in curiosity about what drives someone. And yet when someone asks why, why do we answer as if they asked how? I’ve been asked that so often and I still don’t know how to answer that question well. Curiosity I suppose.

Rotalio asks me if I will Whats App his family - his kids need to practice English and we all agree my Spanish can use a lot of work. He asks me if I will come back and visit in 3 years? 5 years? It's a funny question to ask a stranger - and it makes me realize how sometimes your presence means a lot more to others than you imagine.