isla grande

This weekend was my first out-of-town adventure.

As part of our program, we took a tour of the Colón area of Panamá, on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus, directly north of Panama City. We ended up visiting Fort Lorenzo (an old Spanish fort from like the 1600's), the Gatún locks of the Panama Canal, and the city (well, town... village, almost) of Portobelo. It was fun, but we spent a LOT of time waiting for the ships to pass at the Canal. Definitely got a feel of what it's like to live near the world's largest multimodal intersection.

At the end of our trip, I decided to go on to Isla Grande, an island further east from Portobelo. I stayed at "El Rey Jackson," a combination hotel-and-mini-mart. It was the cheapest place on the island ($30 for a private room with fan and air conditioning), but I did not feel 100% confident about the cleanliness of the bed or shower. Still, it was private, which was nice, as it meant I could store my stuff safely without a problem. If I stayed again, I would have stayed at the "El Hostal y Pastelería," or something like that, just to the left of the dock I arrived at; it's a little more pricey ($35 for a dorm bed) but seemed a little livelier, with employees who were willing to talk and hang out, and breakfast was included. Ah well.

One person I met was the proprieter of the "Hotel Isla Grande," a large, comparatively luxurious establishment with private lawn and beach of its own. He made a point of helping me get oriented on the island, and let me rent a snorkel mask for only five bucks. A coral garden sat ten meters off the shore (spanning both the public and private half of the beach), with beautifully colored fish darting among the brain and fan coral structures. It was beautiful!

While everything turned out alright, my initial impressions of the island were not great. (I decided the island was much more "Lago de Atitlan" than "Glover's Reef Atoll.") The island is pretty heavily forested on the interior, with several rows of concrete housing at the shore. Most of the paths are more like alleys, with stray dogs wandering every corner. And there was a lot of trash along the shore; at times I passed residents sweeping trash directly into the ocean. The beach itself (a narrow stretch of sand near the Hotel Isla Grande) was clean and pretty, but the "regular" shoreline near people's houses was lightly peppered with garbage. After I got in my morning snorkel, I decided to make my way back to Panama City, and leave Isla Grande behind.

Going home, I was forced to recognize the garbage is not just an Isla Grande problem. All through the ride home I passed various piles of garbage or thin blankets of it along the side of the road, sometimes burning, other times simply persisting. I think to myself, "I want to fix it! I want to change something so that this beautiful country does not suffer from so much trash!" But litter and waste management is such a diffuse problem. Neither public action events (big clean-ups), anti-litter campaigns, or massive infrastructure developments can make a significant difference on their own. If people don't litter, where will they put their trash? And where will it go from there? And why is there so much single-use and disposable materials anyway in this country if there's nowhere to put it?

Which brings me back home to the states, where we still face litter, and problems with waste management, or even more dramatically with waste water and nuclear waste. Waste management is such a crazy problem, and I don't even know where to begin to change it. But I don't believe it is "just cultural"--this is a combination of major human challenges that we will need to face over the coming years. How can we generate less waste? What will we do with the waste we produce? And who will make these decisions?

With these questions weighing heavy on my mind, I returned home by way of Albrook mall, where I ordered a pizza (in a box that was thrown away) breadsticks (on a paper plate, wrapped in foil, with a plastic cup full of sauce), and a cinna-bon (on a paper plate, with a plastic fork) (and also a pack of individually-wrapped granola bars). Such  a stark contrast, reminding me that I, myself, am part of the problem. By weight I still generated more waste than the glass coke bottle I brought home with me to recycle. So for now, at least, I resign myself to continue as a cog in the machine, disupting none of waste-machine whose wheels I turn.