Looking Back on ¡Panamá Presente!
September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month. And all month I’ve been thinking about a very special Sunday in March 2025. For three hours, a kitchen in Oakland filled with Panamanian food, music, kids, and people who showed up for my dad. The event was called ¡Panamá Presente! Our motto was simple: come for la cultura, stay for the cause.
Why we gathered
In late 2023, my Panamanian dad, Lou Berrío, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His best hope for a cure is a matching blood stem cell donor. We’ve been working with NMDP (formerly Be the Match) to find that match. But patients of color — including those of Black and Latino descent, like my dad — are less likely to find a match than white patients. The registry simply doesn't have enough diversity. I wanted to raise awareness about this gap. But how? Then I met Dani.
Dani and Chiricana
When I learned about Chef Dani Solis and her business Chiricana Cocina Panameña, not only could I not believe that there was a Panamanian food business right in my home town that I didn't know about... but that it had the name "chiricana" which is the Panamanian word for a woman from the Panamanian province of Chiriquí... which describes my own mother! (Turned out Chiricana is named for her grandmother Benedicta who is also from Chiriquí!)
I reached out right away and, over a delicious plate of her traditional Panamanian home cooking, we became instant friends.
With the help of community, a plan comes together
When I told Dani about my family’s situation she immediately leapt at the chance to support my dad. “How about we bring the community together over Panamanian food and spread the word about your dad and NMDP?” she asked. And, just like that, ¡Panamá Presente! was born.
After that, I reached out to my friends at the Bay Area Chapter of the Mamahood Collective, a holistic support group for women entrepreneurs that I’m a member of. Within minutes, its founder, Heather Anderson, was on board with marketing and promotion support. And within weeks, other Mamahood Collective members agreed to provide photography (Loren Hansen Photography), live music (DJ Jessie Ray), and childcare for any families in attendance (Quality Care Childcare Service).
Mamahood Collective member Ella Holton-McCoy of Illuminated Executive Function Coaching even offered to educate people about the importance of joining the registry by sharing her personal story at the event: she joined hoping to match her multiethnic partner, Jordan, during his fight with leukemia, and ended up matching with a stranger and donating her stem cells to save their life. My brother-in-law at Laguna Graphic Arts printed up the gorgeous flyers and menus that Dani designed, along with a number of cardboard cutouts of my dad. And Dani’s friends at Open Test Kitchen provided a bartender so we could pair her food with hand-crafted drinks. And guests brought the love!
Who showed up: family, friends, and familiar faces
On the day of the event, over 100 dear friends and beloved family from every area of my life showed up. We also made lots of new friends! Prominent Panamanian community figure Sussette Regis (AKA DJ PanaSu) came, wearing a Pollera Congo, a vibrant, historically significant variation of Panama's traditional national dress, deeply rooted in Afro-Panamanian culture. Raka Dun, half of the Grammy-nominated bilingual music duo Los Rakas based in Oakland, California, came, thrilling fans of their unique "Panabay" sound that bridges their Panamanian heritage with San Francisco Bay Area culture. Children of all ages filled the space with their joy and laughter. All afternoon, guests lined up for Dani’s Panamanian dishes and paired them with hand-crafted drinks. For many of our non-Panamanian friends, it was their first taste of Panamanian food. For the Panamanians in the room, it was a taste of home.
Between bites, people learned about the blood stem cell donor gap, which makes it far more difficult for patients of Black and Latino descent to find matching donors. Everyone learned how they could help, whether by joining or encouraging friends between 18 and 35 to join the registry, donating money to NMDP, or spreading the word.
Then, at the end of the event, the remaining guests gathered around a life-sized cutout of Lou and celebrated the success of ¡Panamá Presente!
How you can help this September
Today, thanks to the tremendous care of the City of Hope, my dad is doing well. But he still hasn’t found a donor.
This Blood Cancer Awareness Month, here’s how you can help him and patients like him:
Join the registry. If you’re between 18 and 35, you could be the match someone is waiting for. All it takes is a quick cheek swab. To start the process, Text LOU4LIFE to 61474 or click here. Donors of Black and Latino descent are especially needed, but whatever your background, you could be someone’s match.
Spread the word. Share this post or my dad’s story. A single share can ripple out in ways you may never imagine. It might reach the one person who joins the registry and ends up being someone’s match. Maybe even my dad’s.
Fundraise or donate. Whether you want to honor a loved one, run a race, rally your coworkers, or host your own party, NMDP can help you find an approach that suits you.
You can learn even more about my dad and ways to help at linktr.ee/lou4life.
(Except for the selfie of Dani and me below, all photos in this article are by Loren Hansen.)
What’s next for Dani and me
Selfie of me and Dani
Panamanian food brought Dani and me together. It was the heart of ¡Panamá Presente! And now it’s guiding us to our next project together.
For me, this project started with my own childhood memories of cooking with my mom. When she made my favorite dish, arroz con coco, I would watch in fear and awe as she would raise my father’s hammer high above her head and bring it down on the coconut again and again until a crack appeared in its shell. She would pour the coconut water through that crack into a measuring cup. Then she would pull the halves of the shell apart, scrape out and grate its white flesh, and, with hands both tender and strong, squeeze every drop of milk from the pulp. These days, every time I take an opener to a can of coconut milk, I remember her hands… and dream of this project.
Then I met Dani, whose cooking reminded me so much of my childhood. She had spent years preserving her family’s food history, including an oral history project in which she recorded her grandmother’s memories of growing up off the land in Chiriquí. Before I could even bring up my idea, she described the very project I’d been dreaming of. Then, just this week, KQED featured Chiricana as one of the only Panamanian food businesses in the Bay Area, noting that Panamanian food is still largely unknown outside its own borders. That’s the gap we’ve been wanting our project to fill.
So, what is this project we’ve both been dreaming of? A Panamanian American cookbook, gathering the recipes our families carried to this country and sharing them with the world. We’re now working on it itogether — cooking, writing, and testing as we go — and we’ll keep you posted. When the book is ready, we’ll celebrate the way we know best: with a room full of Panamanian food, music, and the people we love. My biggest hope is that my dad will be there, celebrating that he’s finally found his match. Maybe you’ll be the one who makes that possible.