It is a small islet off the coast of Panama. Its inhabitants, a little over a thousand Kuna natives, are crowded there at the water’s edge in very precarious conditions. The inexorable rise in sea level convinced them to settle on dry land.
Seen from the sky, it is a tangle of red, blue and gray roofs between which you can make out dirt alleys and, here and there, a few rare trees. All around, the sea.
Carti Sugdupu is one of the 365 islands of the archipelago of the indigenous comarca Guna Yala, in the northwest of Panama. About fifty, all between 50 cm and one meter above sea level, are inhabited.
Some are tiny, like Carti Sugdupu, the size of five football fields.
Its inhabitants live there from fishing, tourism and the production, on the mainland, of cassava and bananas. Living conditions there are very precarious: there is no drinking water, no sanitation facilities and electricity is intermittent.
Water is fetched on the mainland directly from rivers or purchased from stores. Electricity comes from a public generator which only works for a few hours at night. Few have a private generator or solar panels. Simple cabins placed at the end of a pontoon serve as toilets.
The floor of the dwellings is beaten earth, the walls and roofs of wood or sheet metal. And to top it off, the sea keeps rising.
“We have noticed that the tide is rising,” Magdalena Martinez, a 73-year-old retired teacher, told AFP while weaving a traditional garment in the family home.
“We think we’re going to sink, we know it’s going to happen, in many years to come, but we think of our children, we have to find something (…) where they can live in peace,” he explains. -She.
The government and the indigenous community have been working for over a decade on a project to relocate 300 families to the mainland.
– “With liquor”-
The problem of “rising water” is added to that of “overpopulation”, underlines Marcos Suira, an official of the Panamanian Ministry of Housing.
“With rising sea levels, a direct consequence of climate change, almost all islands will be abandoned by the end of the century,” says Steven Paton, a scientist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI, based in Panama).
“Some of the lower islands (…) are flooded at high tide every month,” he notes. According to the government, Carti Sugdupu will be gone no later than 2050.
The rainy season further aggravates the situation. “The island almost floats at that time, there are floods, it affects us,” complains Braulio Navarro, a teacher at the islet’s primary school.
The 62-year-old is preparing to move with his family to the mainland. “I would like to leave quickly because I know that there we will have electricity 24 hours a day, there will be fans, air conditioning, it will be a great benefit for my family”, he adds.
A recent report by the NGO Human Rights Watch denounces the lack of space “to enlarge housing or for children to play”. “The floods and storms have made life on the island even more difficult, affecting housing, water, health and education,” it added.
The 300 families will be relocated by early 2024, not far from their former island, on 22 hectares of land taken from the forest.
Each family will have a plot of 300 m2, a house of 49 m2 with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a dining room and a kitchen, as well as drinking water and electricity. They will be able to enlarge their house and have a vegetable garden. A school will be built.
“We are happy,” says Nelson Morgan, the community’s highest indigenous authority.
Magdalena Martinez dreams of a house where she can “live with dignity”, although she knows that she will miss her island. “I’m happy, but also nostalgic because I learned to live on the island and I leave a lot of dreams and tears there”.
06/09/2023 05:17:32 – carti sugdupu (Panama) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
