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An unlikely champion awakens his neighbors to the nature around them.
By Tristram Korten
Photographs by Hal Brindley
For all but a few months of Luis Sánchez Samudio’s 31 years, the mountains of Panama’s Talamanca range that surround the farming town of Cerro Punta have been his saw-toothed horizon. Mist-shrouded cloud forests have been his backyard, a dormant volcano the defining landmark, and vividly colored birds—glow-throated hummingbirds, flame-colored tanagers and resplendent quetzals—his neighbors.
Sánchez did live for six months in the sweltering sea-level metropolis of Panama City a few years ago. “For the people in the city, there is a lot of stress,” Sánchez says quietly one morning over a tea at the Yadira restaurant, which sits by a lonely cross street in the Cerro Punta neighborhood of Guadalupe. “I missed nature.”
Behind him, farm workers stomp in wearing frayed baseball caps and shin-high black rubber boots caked with mud. All of the men in the restaurant wear baseball caps and boots, and all have mustaches—all, that is, except Sánchez, who sports clean khakis and a checked shirt. In a town of stocky farmers with shoulders squared from labor, Sánchez is tall and lean. “Hola, como estan?” he says quietly, with a formal bow of his head to the restaurant’s matron, the words seemingly absorbed into the background noise before they fully escape his mouth. In a land of hearty and garrulous talkers, he speaks with a soft, melodic consistency.
“OK,” he says, sipping the last of his tea and shouldering a backpack. “Let’s go.”
It’s early on a cold March morning when Sánchez corrals a few of the local teenagers, loads a pickup truck with boxes and drives to the edge of town. There, in an elementary school laid out like a military barracks—a long, low-slung cement-block building with glassless windows—40 first-graders pile into a room, bundled in coats and sweaters against the morning chill.
Sánchez and his team—David, 16; Demetrio, 23; Indira, 19; and Willy, 19—have set up a wooden stage for a hand-puppet show. Indira and Demetrio kneel behind the stage and don the puppets while a tape recording plays. On stage, a quetzal appears and comes upon a farmer in a straw hat coughing furiously.
“My land, my water, everything is contaminated [cough, cough],” laments the farmer. “It’s from the chemicals we used to produce our crops.”
The quetzal turns to the audience of rapt kids. “This land is our pride,” it squawks.
Next, Sánchez softly pitches questions to the audience: “Where does the quetzal live?” Little hands shoot in the air. “The forest!” the kids shriek. But this is just the preamble, and everyone knows it. When Sánchez finally mentions the big bird’s name, the children erupt.
“Quelly! Quelly!”
In a utility closet nearby, Willy has donned the costume of Quelly the Quetzal. He struts into the room wearing red tights with yellow foam feet, aqua chest and a blue head.
It’s as if Mickey Mouse has helicoptered in amid fireworks. Children rush out of their chairs, forcing Sánchez and Indira to spread their arms and hold them back. Quelly lifts oversize feet and dances to folk music. Moments later, when Sánchez turns his attention to the boom box, he inadvertently leaves Quelly unguarded. The children rush in and knock a stunned Willy back into the puppet stage.
Sánchez frantically starts thrusting handfuls of hard candies at the children and backing the big bird toward the door. “It’s the emergency plan,” he explains later. “Throw candy and run.”
“Luis is patient and humble,” says David Samudio, a colleague at the local environmental group Fundación para el Desarrollo Integral del Corregimiento de Cerro Punta (FUNDICCEP), where Sánchez has worked for the past three years.
FUNDICCEP, The Nature Conservancy and the conservation group Rare together selected Sánchez to run what is known as a Rare Pride campaign—an 18-month-long outreach and social marketing crusade intended to kindle his hometown’s appreciation for the natural wonders around it.
Nature picture credits: All Photos © HalBrindley.com
