The best therapy is not always found in the hallowed walls of Punta Pacifica hospital but on the red brick road of the Cinta Costera. The hour and half it takes to traverse the newly laid pathway that has brought Panama into the 21st century, provides the cost effective avenue for basic survival and freedom.

The Cinta Costera is not just a new bike path for all the young children of Punta Paitilla, but a new way for nannies to survive the long days that the senora is soaking her toes and chatting on her Blackberry at Luis Alberto.

The Cinta Costera is not just a new basketball court for those residents of Chorillo, but a chance for moments of freedom from their imprisonment in the scuander and poverty of this destitute area.

The Cinta Costa is not just a new opportunity for exercise in the form of blading, running, walking, skateboarding, but a chance for the overweight and unmotivated to choose a way to possibly overcome the weight and the excuses, a chance for those teenagers previously held captive to Facebook to find freedom on the top of a skateboard.

The Cinta Costera is not just a place that you can smell the aroma of a chorizo wafting from a makeshift grill, down a cold bottle of water and hear the clinging of the bell of the 'Paleta Man'. It is a place of new opportunity to make a buck or two that just might give a woman who makes $200 a month as maid, enough to buy the new shiny pair of shoes for her daughter's First Communion. A chance for the downtrodden to actually make rent this month.

And finally....the women of Cinta Costera. We are the women of Cinta Costera. Our survival depends not on the actual benefit of beautiful legs we might form and the few pounds we might drop to fit into our 'skinny' jeans but survival and freedom. Survival in the form of talking, sharing, complaining and crying to the dear friend next to us about motherhood, wifehood, lifehood. Freedom for an hour and a half from motherhood, wifehood, lifehood.

We enter the Cinta Costera often broken and bruised and return great warriors, ready to go back into battle again.

The hour and a half it takes to traverse the red brick road of the Cinta Costera is our walk of survival and freedom. For many of us, it is the walk of survival and freedom.

We are the women of the Cinta Costera.

When the hour and a half recess from motherhood, wifehood and lifehood is not possible because of motherhood, wifehood and lifehood, join us here on the Cinta Costera.