Guna Yala

So as I walked through northern Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru in particular, uh, it just became almost comical, because C's and K's are interchangeable.

Once I was up in the Guna Yala, the, the folk head of that community that, of the San Blas Islands is how we know of...

The people are called the Guna people, and they had all come together and voted the letter G out of their alphabet.

So the idea of language as an evolving thing and de-attaching correctness from spelling took me several years and quite a few thousand miles to be able to release my attachment to that and be like, as long as you know what you're talking about, and as long as you can convey that to the person to whom you're speaking, that's what matters, not getting it right.

Um, and you know, we spent a night [clears throat] uh, sleeping in hammocks in the village, and met with a, you know, a medicine man and, uh, and such.

And I found it, uh, similar to but distinct from other, uh, remote regions in Panama that I took my class to, such as Guna Yala.

Uh, so you know, it was, it was not notable in terms of, uh, in terms of what was going on there, but I also, uh, A, didn't get close to the Colombian border, uh, with my students, and B, that was in 2009, um, before the, the immigration that is now...

The, the thing, and I'm gonna read some of what's in this Harper's article, but the thing that I noticed first in it is that she's not pretending that the mass movement of people across the Darien Gap wasn't happening, which so many people were pretending at the point, uh, that you, that you went there.

And so that really drove me to at least try that.

But in the meantime, I'd also worked to have really good relationships with the Gunayala people who are recognized as having sovereignty over the land in the south of Panama to have permission to go through their territory.

And so because of that, I continued and got to see leatherback turtles, which are endangered species, nest and help science teams with putting satellites on them so they can watch what they're up to during the breeding season.

And I have to say that with a science background, it's a real privilege for me to get onto science programs while I've been hiking.