10/15/2021
Today is the final day of Latino Heritage Month, though not our hearts, haha! I don't usually post portrait photos, because I much prefer landscape-shaped ones, but I will today. I'll finish off this month with my most known photo. Titled "Naked Pirates", my friend, Peter, and I spotted these kids while walking along the shore of a small island in the Kuna Yala Islands (the Spanish chose to name it the San Blas Islands) of Panama. We had hired a guy with a sailboat in Panama to take us to Colombia (since not a lot of people make it alive going via land).
We visited a lot of islands out there in the middle of the sea. Some only had single families living on them. We had a great time meeting these native people, the Kuna Yala, and learning about how they lived. Once, we even got to sit in a council meeting. A boy had stolen something, so the council had to convene and talk with the boy about what he had done, why it was wrong, and how it affected the community. His punishment was to collect dead corral in buckets and then take them to a specific edge of the island to stack them. This is what keeps the island growing. But, back to the moment of this photo, on this day we happened to see these naked kids having a great time, rowing their own boat.
