Panama - Thinking Out Loud

One year One World is an initiative to raise awareness of people and communities living in some of the world's most fascinating but under-reported regions through an independent multimedia production. The mission is to provide lesser-known communitites with an opportunity to share their stories wth the world, to educate and inspire youth and adults to think about the global community, to help bridge the “communications gap” in media coverage and to promote peace and understanding around the world.

The idea to do this project came to Padlewska when she was filming a medical mission to a remote indigenous community in Panama. As she explains on this next video, during her trip, she realized that she didn't want to just report what the medical community was doing, she wanted to go beyond that

Her pilot project took place with the Embera communities in Panama. The Embera are one of the few traditional pre- Columbian tribes remaining in Central America, and recently, their ancestral lands, mostly forests and jungles were declared a National Park. This meant that they weren't able to hunt anymore, which meant they had lost food security and needed to buy food from outside their community. They had turned to cultural tourism as a way to earn income, and this intrigued Padlewska:

Were the Embera peoples forced to embrace tourism as a means of survival after being prohibited from hunting? What implications has this had on the tribe's traditional lifestyle and cultural survival? Is the tribe being exploited? These are some of the questions that I asked the Embera Drua and Embera Quera, two indigenous communities currently living on government land.