Unlike most of the members of Few for Change, I never had the opportunity to visit the Ngobe-Bugle comarca. Shortly after my group arrived in Panama, there was an outbreak of swine flu in the comarca and our trip had to be canceled. My experience in other areas of Panama, however, showed me how important education is in helping children succeed and achieve their dreams. As a BioIogy and Spanish major, I thought it would be great to have my final project fulfill my senior seminar requirement. I set out to find a project that would be, according to my advisor, “biological enough” to do so. After weeks of trying to come up with something, I realized that my passion lay in another area entirely: education and children. I threw out the whole Biology project idea and ended up studying children, their plans and dreams for the future, and what had impacted these dreams. I did my research in a small, poor, rural community called Loma Bonita, where everyone was extremely friendly and willing to talk to me. The principal let me sit in one of the classrooms and interview most of the kids in the school during the school day. I realized that, the older the children, the more their ideas for the future were tied to the reality of their impoverished situation. While the younger ones might say that they wanted to be an artist or a professional soccer player, the responses I got from older children were more along the lines of “I would love to be a doctor, but I know that there’s no way my family would ever be able to pay for the training required, so I’ll probably just keep working on the family farm and helping out around the house.”
I wanted to be able to help these children, to hand them money and tell them to go to medical school, but I had no idea how that would be possible. At the end of the semester, when I heard about Few for Change, I realized that it was the perfect way to help give kids in Panama the opportunity to achieve their dreams through education. In the future, I would love to see Few for Change expand to some of the areas I actually had a chance to visit in Panama. I would also love to visit the Comarca and have the opportunity to meet the kids who currently have scholarships as well as get to know their communities in the way I was able to get to know people in Loma Bonita. Although it is a small group, I think Few for Change is doing great things and has the potential to help many children throughout Panama achieve their hopes and dreams.
