Rama Cay

On Sunday David and I went along with Colette, the linguist and mother of blueEnergy who has been working with the Rama people on documenting and revitalizing their language since the 1980s, to Rama Cay.

The island is a fascinating place. There are over 1200 people on this tiny island, which was once actually two very tiny islands that were eventually connected as people dumped oyster shells between them over many years during the times of the British colonization. There are not many Rama speakers left on the island at all, despite the dense population of Rama people. Colette is hoping to get a new generation of teachers on the island interested in teaching the Rama language to the school children.

We watched Colette's slideshow homage to Miss Nora, a Rama woman who was one of the main speakers that worked with her in the 80s, played with the children, enjoyed the breeze on the north side of the island, and watched a bit of softball on the most beautiful softball field I've ever seen! I also learned quite a bit about the tragedy of the Rama, so similar to what has been happening to indigenous people all over the planet for centuries. Like every rainforest and every culture, the Rama territory has been plundered since colonization, and is now threatened by corporations involved in timber extraction, agribusiness, oil pipelines and dry canals. Yes, dry canals! There is currently a lot of talk about a huge project to build a dry canal from Monkey Point (where I'll be living, located in Rama territory), with railroad tracks, a highway, and an oil pipeline connecting it to the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. Crazy, huh? The Rama and Creole populations of the Rama territory are currently working on an extremely important demarcation project where they are going to be making an official map of their territory which will give them greater leverage against the government, corporations, and development projects that are funding things like the dry canal. Its an interesting time to be here, to say the least. I'll be learning a lot more while I'm in Monkey Point and Punta de Aguila.