First things first… HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!! I hope you’re doing awesome, fun, spooky stuff with people that you love :)
Aaaaaaand, here’s today’s post:
In my current home-away-from-home, a little hostel on the south coast of Panama, the gardens are looked after by an early-thirties Colombian woman named Sofia (name changed for privacy reasons).
She’s very quiet, keeps to herself as she landscapes and waters the plants. Her beige shadow is a dog named Reina, a jumpy little thing who was abused before Sofia adopted her. They range up and down the beach playing fetch when she’s not working on the garden, Sofia absentmindedly pounding out rhythms on her drum between throws.
They sleep in a tent staked in the garden by the pool, with the flap open, because Reina will run out and bark at anyone who walks on the beach at night.
Truth be told, I barely noticed Sofia the first few days I stayed here. Then I started getting more and more curious. One of the staff told me that she walked here from Colombia. Another told me that she was there to guard the turtles. Whispered legends surrounded her.
Now, Sofia speaks no English. She has no reason to, coming from one Spanish-speaking country to another. My Spanish is getting better, but it’s still not great, and I barely got past “good morning, how are you?” each time I saw her.
One day I saw her sitting in front of her tent, clearly not busy, so I decided it was time to explore my curiosity. I grabbed my phone, pulled up Google translate, and spent a fascinating hour getting to know this enigma.
Sofia, it turns out, is a protector of turtles. Turtle eggs, to be specific. She’s trained Reina to run and chase after people on the beach because it’s a laying beach for sea turtles. Unfortunately, that also means it’s a target for egg thieves.
Some people in Panama city are willing to pay for turtle eggs because they believe that eating them provides a host of benefits, ranging from medicinal to aphrodisiacal. So poachers, under cover of night, will walk the beach and dig up the eggs they’ve seen the mothers lay.
But not on our beach. When Reina runs out of the tent, Sofia gets up and follows her. In Panama, stealing turtle eggs is illegal and can result in jail time. so if they find an egg thief up to their nefarious nonsense, Reina will growl and Sofia will call the cops.
Here’s the crazy thing: no one is paying her to do this. Sofia is a volunteer. She gets food and a place to pitch her tent for tending the garden at the hostel and chases miscreants in the night as a hobby.
She’s been living like this for three years. She goes from beach to beach, asking what she can do in return for food and shelter. Her possessions, her tent, and her drum all fit in her backpack. When the thieves stop showing up, or she gets tired of the view, she moves to a different hatching beach.
After learning all of this, completely mesmerized, I asked the inevitable question that someone who grew up with a western mindset has been brainwashed to ask from a young age:
“Why?”
She looked out at the ocean, shrugged, and said simply:
“Me gustan tortugas.”
I like turtles. That’s all she said. To explain three years of ranging around Central America on foot, sleeping in a tent, letting her dog chase potentially dangerous strangers in the night, and being a complete badass, she said “I like turtles.”
There’s a quote I love from Cheryl Strayed’s collection Tiny Beautiful Things that I feel ties in with Sofia’s story:
“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.
You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
As a sidebar, Sofia doesn’t even have to pay an electric bill… But I digress.
If you are aligning yourself with your passions and following where they take you, you do not owe the world an explanation (unless of course your passion is murder, please find a new passion).
The next time you find yourself justifying your existence or your love for something in a pointless conversation, remember Sofia. Stop ranting, look off in the distance, and just say “I like turtles.”
If you’re enjoying The Well-Lived Life, why not subscribe? You’d be helping fund various charities, building a small community, and supporting the author’s freewheeling bohemian lifestyle :)
Or you could share, that would help as well!
What I Learned When I Met a True Nomad