A Trip to My Favorite Destination

By: Panorama de las Américas

To get to the Quebrada Loro General Basic Educational Center in the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, Yojan Kevin Rodríguez walks up to six hours a day on dirt paths that turn slippery with mud during the rainy season. His goal is to arrive at school at seven in the morning and spend the next six hours of the day listening to his teachers. He wants to learn everything he can, from the water cycles and factoring to why he lives in an area called a “comarca.” A comarca that faces many difficulties that Yojan, like his schoolmates, could very well change with education, joy, and tenacity.

As Ivette Franco, Senior Director of Legal Counsel at Copa Airlines and the brains behind the Unforgettable Journey (an activity Copa Airlines holds each year to celebrate Christmas with children) says, these children show “the effort they make to get an education, despite the difficulties and challenges they face on a daily basis. They are the epitome of determination, perseverance, and the drive to improve.”

In 2018, for the 25th Unforgettable Journey, the airline wanted to recognize the effort made by the students of the Quebrada Loro School and give them an experience that would inspire them to persevere. Children from the Finca 4 and Finca 5 schools in the banana-growing region of Changuinola, in the province of Bocas del Toro, were also included. Although the distances may be shorter for children in the finca schools, their social conditions present challenges when it comes to completing an education.

That Monday, December 3, 2018, the day of the Unforgettable Journey, Yojan boarded a plane with more than 120 children. Everyone was delighted like never before when they saw from the sky what the teacher had shown them in the classroom: the raised flag on Ancon Hill, the Panama Canal, the city’s skyscrapers, the Bridge of the Americas…. Amid cries of joy and with their eyes wide open, everyone felt the anxiety of “taking off” for the first time, a feeling that very quickly turned into fascination: the spell that is produced when you look at the world from another perspective, with its small trees, its meandering rivers, and the sea, so immense…

Perhaps the capacity for wonder and the desire to reach for the stars that the children showed during the flight, coupled with the determination they display throughout the school year, are their best tools for facing the miles that lie ahead. After all, there is no better destination than the place an education and knowledge can take you.