The official currency of the Central American nation of Panama is the U.S. Dollar. If you buy a house, a book, or a stalk of bananas, you use the dollar. George Washington’s body may have been laid to rest in 1799 in Mount Vernon, but his image lives on in countless nooks and crannies of the world – including in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where this photo was taken.
One of the most powerful aspects of travel is that it introduces people from one socio-economic level to those of another—something that, unfortunately, doesn’t happen often enough back home. Through these interactions people sometimes even become friends. But what does deep friendship look like between people who inhabit starkly different socio-economic worlds? Friendship can seem easy and uncomplicated on a surface level, but when a person with little access to money has to decide which of his children to put through elementary school (while all of yours will go to graduate school), has to watch his spouse suffer from an ailment that you would not because your insurance would cover the thousand-dollar medication, or can only imagine through your photographs and stories what a week-long holiday in another country would look like, what is friendship? How does friendship navigate the economic chasm between two people?
Though this is just a playful photo, I thought it symbolic of how money can separate people, even people who wish to be friends and in many ways are. And it reminded me of a quote I read many years ago in an obscure book entitled Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem, by Jonathan Bonk:
It is humanly almost impossible for a wealthy family to share a deeply fraternal relationship with a family whose material and economic resources are a pathetic fraction of their own….
