Trip to San Soledad Part 1

Buglere Trip


I told myself as I hiked the trails that the Buglere people have hiked for centuries that I would write down the account of my experience. Now, weeks later, I will try and recount the things that made an impact on me.

I started to write and kept on writing, so I am going to divide this story up into readable sections.

There is a village of the Buglere people group that I have been meaning to visit now for about two years. It is in one of the most remote places of Panama. The village of San Soledad is located halfway between Panama City and the Costa Rican border, nestled up in a mountain valley overlooking a treacherous portion of the Caribbean coast.

The reason I have wanted to visit is to make contact with the family and friends of some of the students enrolled in our Hogar Jucum (secondary boarding school for indigenous). I had hoped to be able to do a song-writing workshop and encourage them to use their God given culture to worship God and share Him with others.

The reason I have waited so long to visit is the accessibility. There are three ways to arrive at this village: air, land, and sea. Air is next to impossible because the small grassy lawn that they told me was an airstrip is, these days, only used in emergencies or to fly old and out-of-shape special speakers in 4-person prop planes to the New Tribes Mission headquarters on the coast.

Land, well we went by land, but you can only go during certain months because during rainy season (most of the year in Panama) the multiple rivers you have to ford, rise and become deadly to cross. Many foreigners and natives have died trying to cross them when rains in the mountains convert the ordinarily small rivers into class V rapids. Also, the trails through the mountains that take the Bugleres themselves 3 days to hike through are so worn down that they have dug into the land sometimes 6 feet deep (because of soft soil and thick jungle all around making it hard to start a new trail). These trenches, I mean trails, turn into mudslides and mud-waterfalls down the mountain bringing debris and small animals into the path.

Sea, is also dependent on weather patterns, the Caribbean, at least in this area is not what I had imagined the Caribbean to be. I usually imagine crystal blue, calm waters. Not here, it is nothing but open coast with no islands or reef to protect it. The trip by boat is usually a 12-hour boat ride that starts at around midnight and arrives at noon. It is a dugout canoe with an outboard motor on the back. The canoe, in order to be safe in the sometimes 10 foot seas, is carved out of a huge tree. Not just an ordinary huge tree but one whole, hollowed-out jungle tree that floats well on the water. The sides of the boat, I’m told, are so high that when standing up, one cannot see out.

So besides traveling in the middle of the night and then under the broiling sun with no shade, you get no bathroom breaks, and therefore, force yourself to not drink or eat anything during that time. The other route is a fiberglass skiff they call a “penca” that has a huge outboard motor on it. It will make the trip in 4 hours but the spine-crushing shaking for that 4 hours makes the 3 day hike seem attractive (more on that later). Also, there is almost never a seat available to buy on a penca. They are mainly private. You can contract one but it will put you out upwards of $250 one-way.

Now, besides all the above reasons why it is difficult to get to this village, add on needing a guide who knows how to get there and one who will be willing to take you during the months that it is possible to go. That’s what makes my recent trip in and out of there so amazing.

This trip that I finally made to visit them last month came out of nowhere. Like I said, I have been meaning to make this trip for almost two years. Others who have visited planned months and months in advance to prepare for their trip. I found out that I would be going one day before I had to leave! Nothing was prepared. Nothing was planned. I just had to pack and hope everything would fall into place. The purpose of this particular trip was to meet with the parents of a student in the Hogar Jucum program about a sensitive matter. My Wounaan indigenous friend, Alex and I accompanied the small group of Buglere students with a few of their parents, back to their home village of San Soledad.

Friday, day 1: We leave our YWAM center in central Panama, just outside of Panama City for the bus terminal downtown. We then board our bus which looks like it used to be a second class tour bus, and now years later is a very used and poorly treated second class tour bus. We then wait over an hour and a half parked in the parking lot of the terminal sitting in 95-plus degree heat. Once we finally take off, the air conditioning kicks on to a chilly 45 degrees, in true Latin-American cross-country bus form.

Four and a half hours later we find ourselves in Santiago, the capital city of the central province of Veraguas. Here we meet up with a missionary family from Northern Ireland who has a long history working with the Buglere people. They take us in and feed us dinner as we prepare for the long voyage that lies ahead of us early tomorrow morning.

To be continued…