Panama Day 3: Harsh reality

First off, on a totally unrelated note, the 'Canes are officially 1-0 in games that I watch in Spanish after taking out Virginia Tech 16-14 last night. I guess I'll have to start making more frequent use of the SAP button on my remote control.

Now to the real stuff - today's work...

The day started off with a 6 a.m. wake up call to hitch a ride to a nearby village said to be without running water. Natalia and I hitched a ride to the scene - arranged by our fixer Luis - with a photographer and journalist from La Estrella who were also covering the story.

The approximately 30-minute drive from Panama City to the secluded village, and what I would come to see and feel in that village, exposed me to a part of Panama that I had not yet seen in my two days in the country. In fact, it exposed me to a harsh reality that I had not yet experienced at all in my life.

The poverty and hardship I witnessed just 20 miles outside the sultry skyline of Panama’s thriving cosmopolitan capital of Panama City borders on unimaginable. And to experience it is incredibly powerful.

Forget the internet, cell phones and television. These people aren’t worried about obtaining these luxuries (and, yes, that’s what they are – luxuries). Rather, the people I would come to meet – the subjects of my story – are forced to worry about something much more basic; something that most of us take for granted – water (and where and how they’ll get it).

The people of this village, which is tucked away in the rolling hills of the Panama countryside, are without running water. When they turn their faucets, nothing comes out. Their only source of fresh water comes from the rain that they collect in buckets. They are forced to wash their clothes in the streams of the nearby forest.

And in what seems to be the cruelest of all irony, this close-knit village is known as Tierra Prometida (translated: The Promise Land) when it is truly anything but that.

Rotting wood and rusty scrap metal make up the small, dirt-floor shacks that line the rocky and windy dirt roads of the waterless shantytown.

Even without being able to communicate directly with the people of Tierra Prometida due to the language barrier between us (Natalia did all of the interviewing in Spanish), I could still see the pain of the people simply by watching them and feeling their emotion.

According to them, their pleas to IDAAN – the government agency responsible for water distribution in the region – have gone unanswered and no end to their waterless woes seems to be in sight.

After spending a couple of hours with these people and taking hundreds of pictures, Natalia and I returned back to Panama City where we met up with our classmates Alcione and Ligia, our professor and Luis, and made the five-minute drive over to IDAAN in search of answers to what we had just witnessed in Tierra Prometida.

The two IDAAN officials with whom we met (again Natalia conducted our part of the interview in Spanish) said – almost too casually – that they didn’t have a solution to the problem, offering no hope that the people of the village would receive water anytime soon.

Leaving the IDAAN, I found myself feeling quite angry at the response of the officials and their apparent lack of care for the situation. It is their job to distribute clean, quality water to the people in and around Panama City, and they are clearly not doing their job in the case of Tierra Prometida. And for what reason? What have these people done to deserve such neglect?

I know that as a reporter, it is my job to stay neutral and not to bring my own feelings into a story. However, I’m finding it quite hard to do that in this situation. Seeing the conditions that these people are forced to live in, and then on top of it they are without clean water due to the incompetence of a government agency, it is hard not to sympathize with them.

Reflecting back on today, I think this experience has allowed me to see the true power we can have as journalists. We have the power to bring issues to light that would otherwise go unnoticed and ignored.

Hopefully that is what I can do through this story. Hopefully someone, somewhere, with the authority to do so, will take notice and make this injustice right.