Death and Hope in Golondrina: A Displaced Family in Bocas Del Toro, Panama

Maria and her baby brother used to live next door along with the rest of the seven people in their family. They had a little house with running water and electricity, a privilege many do not have in this community. But several days ago all seven of them were asked to leave their home because they could not pay the rent.

They stood outside my house, hearts broken, a few simple things in bags, and said they planned to live in the parking lot at the bank. There was a policeman there and a wide over hang on the building, so it was a good place to sleep.

This is the house out behind my house in rural Panama. Both homes belong to a lovely older woman named Shirley. She is tall and dark with high cheekbones. She wears her silver hair in a bun and always dresses in skirts and she has the mostly lovely Jamaican yah-mon English. Shirley is a woman acquainted with sadness. She lost her soul-mate, the husband of her youth, when she was in her twenties and became a widow. She lost two more husbands after that. She has a son who lives in the states and the house we live in belongs to him. This house, the one I call the house out back, is in tragic disrepair. It once belonged to Shirley's daughter who was swept away in a river along with her young son and drowned.

Shirley has kept the home as a memorial to her daughter and grandson.

It has been ransacked by vandals and is currently no more than a shell with floor boards missing and wall boards missing. It is an open room with the wind blowing through and is difficult and dangerous to enter because the wood stairs are mostly rotten or missing.

Shirley would love to restore the house, but she has no funds. So every few weeks she simply comes to gaze at the home and dream of the past and light and laughter.

This is Lee with Maria, another of her brothers and two cousins. Lee has been my partner for five years. Together we have committed to not just working with the poor, but to loving them, to living in their community, to being part of their lives. Lee is a builder by trade. When he saw Maria and her family standing out front with no place to go but a parking lot, he came up with a plan. He called Shirley and asked if the displaced family of seven could live in her daughter's house. In exchange he would restore the little home. 

Shirley's heart was torn. 

But in the end she agreed to push her pain aside and allow life to reside in the home of her daughter again. 

Together Lee and Maria's father started nailing old pieces of wood that were strewn in the grass back onto the floors and walls. They hung a curtain in the center of the little house to separate a living space from a sleeping space. They cleared the long grass around the home and built a fire pit so Maria's mother and older sister could cook rice.

So much still needs to be done. There is no bathroom. No running water, much less electricity.

But there is life again.

Please help us help this family. Help us raise the funds we need to make this home safe and clean for them. Help us make good on our promise to Shirley to restore the home of her lost daughter and grandson.

Sometimes, in the midst of pain, it is still possible for joy to come.

Much Love and with a Full heart,
Laura

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