On Life in the Mountains of Panama: The radio blasting the local Baha'i "evangelical" music

"Panama," Uploaded on March 24, 2006 by ChuckHolton on flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

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Michael of Michael Frank photography fame brought to my attention a series of posts with mentions of the Baha'i Faith on a blog called true life planet, one woman’s journey traveling/volunteering around the world. The blogger travels to Panama to live with the Ngobe people. Michael writes: "I had to chuckle over the evangelical Baha'is comment! I don't think she has met any in person yet, kind of lumping folks together....." - gw

... Church here is really big-generally the first question many people asked me here is if I believed in God. Atheism is not a concept understood here-so even people who visit who don´t believe in anything in particular, tell people they are Christian. There are many different churches: The Manatata, which is the traditional church of the Ngobe, and has a woman phophet; The Catholic church; The Bahai church; the Jehovahs Witnesses; and countless Born Again sects. ...

... In a community where everyone lives 10 to 20 feet from one another, and much of life takes place outside(since the homes are so tiny), it is rare not to hear all the goings on of your neighbors-and, at all times of the day and the night. You hear everything from the radio blasting the local Bahai´evangelical music (the Bahai´own the only radio station here), to domestic violence to a pig getting butchered. ...

... He told me that they had three kinds of markers they used as headstones-one, a Christian cross(this being the most popular, as most people said they were Evangelical); a piece of wood cut into a star, for those people who were of the Bahai faith...; and for people who either believed in nothing or nothing was known about them, a tree was planted. ...

http://blogs.bootsnall.com/gigirtw/?s=Bahai