Modernity clouds a timeless horizon.

• Author: Ambrus, Steven
• Position: Choco region of Colombia

The women of Jurubida are furious. A small group has gathered at a local fish and vegetables shop to enumerate an angry list of misconduct against their neighbors. Jacinta, Libertina, Yulema, and Fidelia are horrible, the women say. They are old and ugly, with crooked faces and wandering eyes. But what are they doing with men half their age? "Have you seen Fidelia's new catch?" asks one woman. "A thirty-year-old fisherman, strong and handsome, traipsing behind the old lady like a mule."

As clients enter and leave, carrying away fish, plantains, and rice, the women ratchet it up, speculating angrily on their neighbors' potions of seduction. Over the years, their brews of hair, herbs, flowers, and bodily fluids have worked miracles for the women of Jurubida. They administer one potion to check husbands' lascivious, wandering eyes. Another concoction sends potential rivals fleeing from the village, after phantasmagorical bouts with headaches and spasms. And there are the traditional birthing rites. How many infants, now grown men, had had their navels anointed by these women with lynx, monkey, or armadillo extracts, they ask. These are things to be commended, recognized. But clearly, they say, the women have gone too far with the handsome young men of the village.

Such rumor and superstition is part of the immutable character of isolated towns like Jurubida, an island village in the Pacific state of Choco, Colombia. An hour's boat ride from the nearest village, Jurubida is populated by 524 descendants of slaves and still seems part of nineteenth-century West Africa. Scrawny chickens peck everywhere for scattered meal. Fishermen gather at the edge of shimmering water in ninety-degree heat to compare their catches, and reed-thin canoes lap indolently on their moorings. Jurubida is a refuge from the modern world. People here mark days by the rhythms of the sea; years by festivities of Afro-Colombian music, native faith, and Christianity. Nature's mythology is magical, like the tides, part of a timeless and incomprehensible world.

An hour away by boat similar ancient forces are at work. The trip to the closest village of 120 Embera Indians passes through mangrove swamps and jungle thick with towering rain-forest trees. It is a trip to a world of deep religious belief, where life exists on three different spiritual planes and each inanimate object and animal belongs to a spirit owner.

Leonel Charampia, a local nurse, recalls an uncle who held the position of jaibana, or "true man" in the cosmic vision of the tribe. Charampia's uncle communicated with the monsters that guarded the rivers and beaches. He could find one's soul back in its body, when it accidentally "got lost" and could cure the sick. He was the most important man in the tribe, and Charampia remembers him down by the river covered in body paint...