Campesinos y Campesinas

Here I am in Berruguita, loving it more day by day.

Yesterday, I woke up at 5:30 to cut rice.  I am tired of living in a farming community and getting blisters because my hands are “computer soft,” as a friend from Jubilee Partners told me one time, when I visited after going back to college.  I’m going to work. 

 

We got to the field at 6:30ish, and cut stalk after stalk until 1:30, pausing to wipe sweat from our faces and drink from a shaded spring nearby.  My friends sang vallenato and Mexican rancheros as they worked, and they railed me with questions about Madonna (recently gave a concert in Colombia) and what giraffes were really like (after they found out I’d seen one alive) and if you could cross breed giraffes and donkeys (like true farmers).  We laughed at how red my face got and they complemented by rice-cutting speed. 

I jumped in the river afterward to cool down and visited with my neighbor friend, who was sitting in the water, washing cooking pots, and then headed up town to sit with some friends for the cool-afternoon-chat-time.  On the way there, I passed twenty or so young men walk-running down the road, some carrying a hammock on their shoulders, others waiting for their turn.  A pale older woman lay in the hammock, her son running beside her, stroking her hand.  They were carrying her out until they reached a car that could take her to the hospital.  Later, I ran into a friend who commented that his trip to the city had reached no conclusions, as his child’s health insurance was still not sorted out.  His son was born with heart and intestinal problems and has had two operations and needs another, but bureaucracy has kept his insurance tied up.  They are waiting.

As the sun set, I sat with some dear friends, talking about rice cutting techniques and natural remedies for stomach sickness (the señora prides herself in having had cured about everyone in the community at one time or another).  They recommended that I blend some green bananas, peel and all, when I have an upset stomach.  At one point, the señora turned to me and said, “How great is God.  Look at our lime tree.  Everyone picks from it, and there are still dozens of limes ripe and ready, all year round.  And right next to the kitchen.  God takes good care of us.”  As I left, they showed me the sacks of rice that they’ll store to eat this year.  The sunset was beautiful.

How blessed I am to get the chance to live here and experience how life smells, feels, hurts, and thrives in this village.  I’m reading the book about Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, right now.  I had resisted picking it up for several years, not knowing what I would think about his outlook on the answer to the problem of unequal distribution of wealth, resources, and especially medicine between the rich and poor.  His answer is Robin Hood- take what you can, when you can, and always prefer the poor.  He is bold and angry.

I don’t know how I would stand up in a conversation with Farmer.  I feel boldly angry, but in my work I often find myself following MCC’s cautious approach, pushing for accompaniment and sustainability.  I’m not creating a pilot project out of nothing, run on my persistence and will, but trying to help create a healthy community that responds to its own needs.  Sometimes it feels almost futile.

Farmer hates the “they are poor but they are happy” thought, seeing it as an excuse for writing off the deep and intentional inequalities in the world and excusing inaction.  After yesterday, I find myself agreeing.  My heart hurts to see my sharp, honest, joyful friends manually picking rice for extremely low prices, with few other options for work.  I was brought to tears as my friend called out to me as he ran past, waiting for his turn to carry the hammock, with joy to be helping someone, but such bitterness that the road is so bad that shoulders are the only way to get sick people out.  I lament with my friends as they reminisce about the houses full of rice they used to have, before the displacement and before people left and didn’t come back. 

My community finds joy in their days.  But it is joy in spite of, not because.  It is joy in spite of years of trampling and being pushed down.  It is the love that emerges for each other, for the land, and for good work, in spite of the grinding reality of poverty.  There is no “poor but happy” excuse to not fight for better roads, a doctor in the health clinic, better wages.  I want so badly for some relief in the struggle that people live here.  There will always be difficulties, but I want there to be fewer.  I want them to enjoy their lime trees and be proud of their rice, not in spite of, but because.  Because farming is good work, because they love each other, because they are skilled and intelligent and proud and deserving.  I want the world to see them with dignity, not as poor people who are stuck in the mountains, but as the fabric that holds us all together.

Vistas de la gente

Washing on the wire.

There is a place where the road tracks through an valley opening, with flat land, empty of houses, making a change from dense tree cover and river crossings. Fifty or so cows bellowed through one of the pastures, threading through shrubs and mudholes to a gap in the fence. A mustached man atop a gray horse reined it in and ceased his herding for a moment. He dropped the reins and stood in his stirrups to bend the thick branch of a guava tree and snatch a ripe yellow guava. In between bites, he bellowed the cows to the road, chasing the white calves behind their huge-eyed, solemn mothers.

The skinny boy who stays home unless his mother sends his long legs up the road to buy rice appeared at the neighbor's one day. Within minutes, he was smiling shyly at Abuela, conversing fluidly about ant-killing pesticide. Within more minutes, he had walked his bare feet up the nearest palm tree and was kicking down coconuts, but only the dry brown ones. Within a few more, he had dusted himself off and passed me walking up the road, not even quietly saying hello.

Family photo (Neguith and 5 sons: Neiver, Gleider, Gleiner, Leiver, Eider).

She's ten, but there's no way to know that from the palms of her hands. She is wiry, perhaps because sometimes there is only clean yucca for lunch, that is to say, yucca with nothing. She crouches in the dirt and scratches first a knife, then rubs handfuls of sand back and forth over the soot-encrusted pot. The pots are decades old, but there's no way to know that from the way they shine when she finishes.

Afternoon futbol practice (Juancho, Anyi, Indris, Yeiris, Merkin)

They holler a greeting, the same every Monday, as their animals wallow through the mud to the next village, where they collect payment for the fresh, bright clothes they sold the last Monday. The tall sister, crowned with comb-defying black hair, rides by on her tall, thin palomino mount. The short sister, with smoother hair and wider hips, perches on her squat, sturdy donkey. The donkey scrambles less for footing as they round the curve and disappear, hello shouts washing back on the breeze.

Watching futbol (Cesar, Mañe, Moyses, 2 from the next town).

New rice (Luis)

Husking corn for seed (Jorge)

Woman

You are worth dying my hands black.

Just as I dug my heels into the sand as the creek rushed by,

willing myself not to be swept away and to listen with every gram of my being

-to feel the word feathers-

I will dig my light fingers into your black hair,

tinting it deeper, to match your height and bearing on horseback.

You laugh and ask if I want to be black- because it would be a step down-

and I laugh and say why not- because at least I wouldn't feel like an alien.

I am spectating pain.

The girls strip to their shorts and lay in the water to listen.

I gingerly step into the sand.

(I have just started to bathe in the river)

You sit, with your huge breasts tipping down toward the washing board

as you pour water of ashes over the ripped clothes,

scrubbing and beating and rinsing and bleaching

until they are cleaner than mine will ever be

(I have just started to wash in the river)

You tell me of the day when your brother was taken

Pulled from his wife's hands in front of his two small children

And found with a bullet wound that split his skull in two

Your sister speaks up

they were never the same.

We saw him, but kept the coffin closed.

No one is ever the same.

You tell me of the day that you heard he had returned,

rode out proclaiming,

and came back to hear that he was dead.

That when his father lifted his broken body,

his head fell to the dirt.

His father works to the bone now.

You came back to see his wife's house taken apart

and stacked at the side of the road,

as your people lost the light in their eyes and began to leave their land.

I remember that my jaw dropped when I heard your womb had never held a child.

You are a mother.

I know from your seven daughters who look nothing like each other,

and I know from your long arms and Sabbath greetings

and I know because you told me that you've never been able to stop cooking huge meals

just in case.

And I know, because you smoothed my back

and grated onion with sugar, and tied the poultice on,

and with your strident prayer, you took the hands and voice

that have been shaped by great pain,

and used them to heal a small pain,

but pain nonetheless.

Fragility

This weekend, I was reminded of the scary fragility of my body, and of being far away from the people I love. Before I say anything more, I want to say that I'm shaken up but ok, and taking time to heal. The story seems so extreme, and although I really am recovering well, I got really close to not being here at all. I was swimming with friends (Emma and Jess) on vacation, a little out from a beach that is just for swimmers, and was hit by a motorboat (it's all right if you need to laugh, I've laughed a lot about how absurd it is). It swept over me and hit my lower back/ tailbone, which bounced me down away from the propeller. I came up kicking and yelling for help, and within seconds, several people had heard me and were heading to help. I sustained an impact to the lower back and a short cut on my elbow. After an afternoon in various hospitals, we got results that I am not fractured, but need lots of rest to heal.

Accidents are terrifying. There is no warning, no chance to plan ahead, and they can go both ways, toward a miracle or toward so much pain. The same night, I called my Mom and realized that it was the anniversary of my grandpa Joe Shenk's death, which came on the heels of my uncle Reuben's death. Joe was hit by a truck while running in Nyabange, Tanzania, and died several days later from complications that went undiagnosed and unoperated, in some ways because of the unavailability of medical care that might have saved him. On Saturday, we explained that MCC will pay our bills. We called an ambulance, and although it was poor quality and unequipped for real emergencies, it still got us quickly and safely to the clinic. In the first clinic, they wheeled us past lines of waiting Colombians, many of whom were thinking about their bills, how and when and who was going to pay them. The security guard looked at me as we were heading out and said something like- “look at how well they treat the blond girl.” We went to a second clinic, a private clinic, and paid for another consult, saw a specialist, were attended relatively quickly, and paid the bills.

I am not skimping on my care. MCC is good about saying that we need to take care of ourselves, whatever it takes, because a sick worker can't do nearly as much as a well one. We must heal ourselves. Guilt is powerful though. Accidents are equalizers- everyone hurts, and everyone deserves what they need. I went to the emergency room in the US with a friend a year ago and was horrified. In other wings of the hospital, you hear mostly English. In the ER, I heard many languages- there were so many immigrants, undocumented or documented, without health insurance, with many more hoops to jump through.

Through talking about priviledge with the other Seeders, I think we've come to think about things in terms of basic rights. If I have access to clean water, it's not smart to give that up to be in solidarity with those that don't have clean water. I should fight all the harder for everyone to have clean water. I had potentially life-threatening injury and I needed urgent care. I want that to be true for everyone. It isn't, and that breaks my heart, but it should be.

The other week, I had a long conversation with Ann and Jim Hershberger, who turned out to be the MCC reps in Nicaragua who had received the body of my mother's cousin, Dan Wenger, who was an MCC worker there in the late 80s. He died in a car accident during his term. As we talked about Dan, and now, as I reflect on my accident and that of my grandpa, I'm shaken. I never want to live scared. I believe in what I do, and I want to continue to travel, to work in service, even though the roads might be worse, the water might be contaminated, and the levels of crime or urban violence might be higher. Accidents happen everywhere, and we have to be smart and safe. The hardest thing is that an accident far from home is more traumatic. My family can't see me or know that I'm well. I feel so far from them right now, and am all the more aware of what could happen. I'm not leaving though, far from it.

A day later, my sister's best friend was killed in a car accident. She was sixteen, blooming, growing, full of light. It is such an enormous loss, and so arbitrary. I am healing, she is not. We both were in accidents. Horrible things happen all the time to people who never deserve them, and we are left with no way of dealing with them. There is no motive, no justification. How does my sister lose her friend? How do we say goodbye when we can't prepare or reason? When I ask people in my community about their losses in the massacre of 2000, they all tell me that there is no why. They were left with no way of understanding why their family members were targeted, for what motive they were taken away. How do you heal that?

The only thing I can think of right now is presence. I am so profoundly grateful that I haven't been alone in this. Emma and Jess made sure that the nurses stopped fiddling with my elbow and let me lay down to ease my back pain. They fed me sardine and mustard crackers in the clinic and cracked jokes about the ridiculousness of the succesive injuries in the Seed group (and how I have now one-upped everyone). The other Seeders and MCCers have been calling everyday. My family lovingly posted alarming messages on my facebook wall. My mom, who is confronted by several tragedies at once, is strong enough to keep calling, to keep talking about all of it. We were talking about what to do about my sister's friend, and she said that Thandi's mother had just asked her to sit down with her and eat food- there was so much food, and nothing else to do. I remember that during the horrible weeks of my uncle and grandpa's death and funeral, my aunt Rose had so much food to eat, and through the fog of dealing with unimaginable loss, we sat and ate. These things are terrible, but Anna and I will sit in Sincelejo and make chocolate cake and eat vegetables. Gilly and Mom with go to Thandi's house and eat with her family. I will keep sitting with people in my community, telling stories and cooking and taking one step forward at a time.

Fourth of July, a few days later

Once more, living outside of the U.S. has meant that the fourth of July has snuck up on me, unheralded by department-store sales and recipes for red, white, and blue desserts. In my small town, there will be no fireworks. All the men will go to work in the morning, hiking into the hills to check on the corn, and will come back sweaty and hungry to their wives, who will have worked all morning to clean the house and put sancocho (the Costeño stew) on the table.

My brother was just here visiting from the same U.S.A. for a few days, and besides the early morning cow-butchering and horseback trek to visit someone's fields, we spent a lot of time chewing on the stark differences between our current lives. I think, for my part, this translates into me venting about various aspects of my job. Perhaps venting isn't quite right, but I remember that I would repeatedly have a conversation with a community member about some aspect of our work, then as I translated to Dylan, I would explain why this part of my work was frustrating. The word I use most often is “try,” as in, “we're trying to involve the younger men in our projects” or “we're trying to promote democratic participation” or “we're trying to creates channels of communication between leaders.” Once more, I feel like the beautiful conflict analysis diagrams and development project plans from EMU are bare guidelines, and the real work is just years of slugging away, piece by piece building process.

I asked Dylan once if he thought I was being overly negative about my work, and his reply put to voice something I'd been thinking for a while. He said no- rather the context was wrapped in negativity. The people here are extraordinarily brave and loving, but they wrestle constantly with a host of things that try to cut them down. I think living here is most importantly an experience of structural violence in almost every form, and I'm not exaggerating. This is a community of poor peasant-farmers, living on rich land, but without the tools to profit from it. They are recovering from a massacre and mass displacement, which caused unimaginable material losses, tears in family structure, fear and distrust in others from the community, and on and on. The government is unresponsive to their pleas for better roads and schools, and folks here are too busy, without resources, and underprepared to organize well. The worst part is that most of the influences around appear to be working against them. The Colombian and international vision of development doesn't have a place in it for the preservation of the small-scale farmer. Reparations and aid for displaced people tend to be monetary hand-outs, which negatively affects the pride and resilience of independent farmers, now reduced to spending days filling out paperwork in Colombia's bureaucratic behemoth. Even the weather seems to be conspiring against them. An unscientific understanding sees climate change warping the rainy season patterns, meaning that every year, many of the farmers simply bet wrong. As we speak, there is rice turning yellow in most of my friends' fields, thanks to the lack of rain all June.

Over and over, I get this feeling that this village is at the algae end of the food chain. A rural agrarian community in a country hell-bent on reinventing itself as an economic power... globally, it is not a promising story. Another village of campesinos is expendible, especially if there is something valuable under the soil. The passion that people have for their yuca crops, the knowledge of exactly which tree has the best mangoes, the lengthy arguments over the price of cows, and the fierce bonds of family and community... these things are not worth developing or preserving from the standpoint of progress. I should say, from the disassociated plans for progress. If we educate, if we rethink, if we rehumanize, if we listen to the campesinos themselves, these things can be understood for their true values. How strange, that something can be worthless from one angle and priceless from another.

And so we keep on trying. I keep on trying to express to my community my vast appreciation and wonder at this way of life, and we keep thinking of ways to strengthen it.

As we approach July fourth, I find myself in a different place than last year. Last year, I thought long and hard about the things I loved about the U.S.- especially the brilliant, vibrant people who resist the push for global dominance, by living and loving each other in their own communities. This year, I'm trying to understand a helpless fury drected at the top of the food chain. I could qualify this fury for pages- I know that the American Dream isn't true for so many within the U.S., and I know that it isn't the only factor that plays in Colombia's (or many other developing nations') path to economic and political success- and it isn't helpful to flatly blame anyone, especially not a nation as huge and diverse as the U.S. I do know that something is deeply wrong, and I think it's perhaps the myth of the American Dream. Maybe it's still the blessed myth of the bootstraps that stalks us, as we desperately try to believe that the problems in a Colombian village are centered around lack of organization, not the demoralization of centuries of having everything held just out of their reach. Maybe it's the fact that people in my village ask me over and over about the U.S. as if it's the promised land, not the land that has stolen that promise at some point from every country in Latin America.

I don't know where to direct my anger. I don't know how to understand the incredible gap of opportunity and possibility for myself and the average 23-year-old in my town. I don't know how we can start to value community, sustainable planning for the future, resilient economic systems, and transformative relationships. I don't know how not to feel guilty about everything (although I cope, and I ignore, and I don't). I don't know how to talk about development- what is essential? What is a right?

The only thing I can think recently is that we have to learn that not everyone has bootstraps, and maybe a better model is talking about hands. Maybe we need to reach out our hands more often, and help pull each other up.  

Things are happening..

For the last two months, if you've noticed, I've been mostly absent from the interwebs. Unlike every month since I moved to Berruguita (nine months ago!) except October, I spent April and May almost completely in my community. This is the plan, but the other months have been patterns of 2-3 weeks in the community, then a workshop, meeting, or trip that pulls me out for a while. Constancy has a very different rhythm than changing spaces.

For one, it's meant dealing with a huge lack of communication with the outside world. Also, the power has been going out almost daily, for a number of hours each time. It's started raining, so sometimes we are “mudded in” (like snowed in, only not as charming). The hardest part has been getting up every morning to the same old process. Movement feels like action, and staying still can feel like floundering. Traveling is an easy way of working, and hanging out in the community often feels like waiting for something to happen.

Nevertheless, these two months have given me the chance to watch some things unfold before me, instead of bouncing in and out of the action. Community building (the current words that feel like they apply to my job) is slow, and made up of hundreds of details that over time create a strong and flexible network of connection. Living here lets me participate in some of those details.

I hesitate to say that these things mean progress. After reading James Loewen's Lies my Teacher Told Me, I hesitate to use the word progress at all. He describes the U.S.ian myth that we are climbing a constant upward slope to perfection, and every change is positive and leads us out of the darkness of the past. I believe in working for just social change, true, but I don't believe that we are moving in a straight line toward perfect equality, reconciliation, peace, justice or anything. I believe that these things have existed in the past and continue to exist, and we must work to bring them into the light. We can work at change and transformation by reinforcing relationships and actions that help us to act in just and peaceful ways. So progress... hm. I prefer to say hopeful things that are happening.

Here are a few of those details that bring hope to my work:

In September, we started the long process of organizing a chicken project with some young women. Now, they've had both their first and second “sacrifices” (as they call them here), and I hear people all over the community exclaiming how healthy and delicious the chickens are. We've agreed that although we would rather people not eat chicken-house chicken, if they will anyway we want them to eat this, because it is raised here with good air and water, is fed no antibiotics, is kept clean and uncrowded, and eats only the processed feed, with no additional chemicals.

THERE ARE FINALLY FISH IN THE FISH POND. I will leave it at that because this process has been unbelievably slow and difficult, and that is enough of an accomplishment to be a huge triumph.

Our fifth community meeting since my arrival was the most well-attended yet, and many young men who had steered clear before came, mainly because of their interest in the collective land process we are working on. In Colombia, an Afro-descendent community has the affirmative right to organize into a Community Council (we have) and to own collective land. This is a small way the government has thought of to help compensate for centuries of abuse and discrimination. The community is finally becoming conscious of the enormous possibility of this right, and while older married couples have traditionally been those most involved in our work in this community, many young men are starting to pay attention, mainly because this could provide them work off rented or inherited or shared land.
Ricardo, the director of SembrandoPaz, successfully facilitated a negotiation about a piece of disputed land in a nearby community. In a situation where there could have easily been violent actions from both sides, people met, talked, and came out as neighbors with an agreement to split the land. This is a big deal, and is made up of a few treks into the mountains, a chance encounter at a car repair shop, many conversations as we waited for the trucks to pick up the avocadoes, plenty of battery-dying in the middle of important phone calls, and one nerve-racking 4 hour meeting.

As a result, I have had many more complex conversations about possible reconciliation or negotiation meetings with other people in seemingly-hopeless tangles over land. None is for certain, but the community is aware and excited about the possibility to talk in person and perhaps avoid years of legal battling.

In the aforementioned community meeting (which had been going so well), one of the community leaders accused another of intentionally cutting the power cables so that he, the only one with a generator, could steal the party from the rest of the town. This led to a fight, many people left the meeting in disgust, and the next day there were threats and accusations of all sorts being thrown around. Just to be clear, this was not positive, but the response of the same Commuity Council was, simply, awesome. Two days later, I sat amazed, listening as other community leaders worked their way through a reconciliation meeting with their two fellow leaders. Many have mediation training but had never put it into action before, and it was inspiring to watch them successfully mediate a situation that was on its way to the municipal police station. It would be a lie to say that I hadn't been instrumental in getting people to the table, but once there I honestly did nothing, just sat back and listened to the wise words shared. It was heartwarming and also a bit silly to watch the two community leaders apologize and give each other a “brotherly hug.”

With four different farmers, I've donned my boots to hike up into the hills to visit their fields and to check out the possibility of giving them a small loan to improve or make possible a certain planting. Many farmers have available land (often even seeds) but not quite enough capital to make a big investment. We look carefully at their ideas for a loan, visit the fields, eat mangoes with them, talk about percentages and payments, and eventually help plant as well. This is one of my favorite parts of my job. People light up when I make the time to visit their work, and talking about possibilities is so refreshing after over and over discussing, feeling, and living the obstacles.

And finally, the last two details that are signs of hope...

My fridge was fixed. (Although, after six months of room temperature water, I just can't drink it cold.)

And I got a puppy. Her name is Sacha and she loves to bite my toes, hard. And she is ridiculously cute, especially when she fights with my chickens.

Free Food!

I think I'm the cheapest MCCer on the Colombia budget this year. If we're only talking about the food budget, I'm sure. Last week I think I spent three to four dollars on food, and part of that was because I had visitors and I had to buy real things to eat. If it's up to me, more often than not I just eat an entire avocado and that's that. (It's avocado season, and there are thousands, literally, on trees and kitchen tables and the ground, in sacks and trucks and everywhere. The average size is four times the puny black ones you find in the States.)

The reason I spend no money, according to some of my male fellow seeders, is because I eat unfathomably small meals. The real reason, according to me, is the incredible generosity of my community members. I know that most folks who live with host families overseas have stories about the ridiculous amounts of food that are placed in front of them, and the moral dilemma of appreciating the gift but really not wanting to explode and/or gain absurd amounts of weight. I have enough of these stories, from Spain (paella!), Palestine (pita and labneh!), Sudan (posho!), and now, Colombia. One of my friends never, never fails to feed me lunch, no matter if I visit at 11am or 3pm. If there is food nearly ready, ready, or on the stove, I'll be handed a plate. Many evenings, I'll be cooking in my house and open the door to find the small neighbor boy with a Tupperware and a cup of juice. I hate it sometimes, because of my ruthless independent streak and need for control, but I love it too. If I don't eat all the rice, after all, I can just feed it to the chickens and eat the eggs later- win win! The best part is that this is not just true for me, as an outsider (although it might be a bit excessive), but is true in every house, for everyone. If food is served, it is served to everyone who is there, the second-cousins, the neighbor kids, the truck drivers, even if everyone knows that they are on their way to another meal in their own house. Two of my older women friends are used to cooking for a ton of kids and have just kept on cooking large pots of food, just in case someone shows up. I just love that.

This weekend I helped facilitate the first MCC delegation visit of my time here in the community, and once again, I helped coordinate the food. The cooks and I decided that we wanted to cook almost completely with food grown here, so the day before, I went looking for fresh yucca, ripe avocadoes, milk and eggs. A friend had already brought ñame the day before, and the garden is producing all the vegetables necessary except tomatoes, so we were doing well. I had some money and receipts in my bag. Two hours later, I staggered home with 15 pounds of yucca, ten platanos, about 15 almost-ripe avocadoes, a bag of fresh-picked cherries for juice, and all the money I'd left with. I just popped my head in doors, asking after ripe avocadoes, and people loaded me up. When I indirectly mentioned money, they brushed me off. Of course not.

That evening, four more avocadoes showed up. The next morning, people brought 10 more. I was so proud to tell the folks on the delegation that almost all the food they were eating was gifted, and even prouder to see friends of mine, two days after the delegation, walking home from church with a bunch of platanos. It's normal- everyday, with everyone- to gift food. We live in that abundance, and it's beautiful.

I think a lot about the strange nature of community here. As those of you who've been following my few-and-far-between blog posts know already, most of my job is fighting tooth and nail to get people to come to meetings, to work together, to put effort into a group initiative, and to swallow their pride for a minute and collaborate, admit that someone else may have a point, and try to reach agreement. I wonder if I just have the wrong framework in my brain for community- maybe meeting attendance actually doesn't matter, but we can measure community through something else...

What I see is that people here are magnificent. Powerful, surviving, proud, industrious, intelligent, and individualistic. Surviving in the past necessitated people like this- when the farms were miles apart and the market was farther, so families had to settle difficult land, grow all their own food, and haul their goods to market, all alone. And they thrived. They knew and know the land and are damn proud of it, and understand their wealth in terms of land and the food they grow. They survived, and they enjoyed the abundance together, but they managed and manage their lives fiercely and independently. This is what I feel when Dorka hands me a bowl of rice, chicken, and green beans- one of the million meals she's cooked with her feet squarely planted on this ground.

But I am still left with questions- today, we are seeing that the forces of change are too great for the good people to be islands. Today there are mining companies, highway construction, erosion, armed conflict, poor schools, free trade agreements, global warming.. We have to look for solutions together; we have to lock arms and hold each other up. Stubborn independence is lonely when everyone else has to sell out because the prices are dropping. How can we learn from the beautiful way that people share the abundance of food to build the abundance of community? How can we strengthen what is already here, and stand on it to face the future?

Reflections after intense days of travel

We are all connected. That's the painful and powerful reality that keeps resounding in my head after the week of Seed workshops and travel to visit the placements in both the city of Medellin and the department of Choco. As Seeders, we are members of a team, and although we spend most of our time working within our individual jobs and communities, we also are necessarily linked with our fellow Seeders. This means that, as a team, we somehow have to figure out how to handle vast differences in living style, work requirements, and contexts. We have to negotiate the differences in a way that doesn't make us resentful, and allows us to confront our own choices. It's a challenge in dialogue- can we talk our way through circumstances that try to separate us?

Colombia's vast geographic diversity manifests itself in incredible regional differences. At the start of the Seed program, our facilitators told us that each region was almost its own country, because of its particular accent, culture, industry, level of poverty, climate, etc. I didn't fully realize just how different the regions were until seeing three- Medellin (Antioquia), el Chocó, and the Carribbean Coast in a space of two weeks.  

I have spent the last seven months adjusting to life on the coast. I live in an extremely rural, isolated context, in a community where everyone farms, even the teachers and shopowners. There is no industry, and everyone, although rich in food resources, is very poor. Many are illiterate. The schools opened two months late, there is no health clinic or even nurse for two hours in every direction, and in the rainy season, the road becomes completely impassable. Also, the community is rebuilding their former strength after being violently displaced by paramilitary and guerrilla forces twelve years ago, then returning slowly over the last ten years. The community is made up of fiercely independent Afro-descendent and indigenous Colombians, who have organized into a community council that struggles to unite the community in its search for economic development and social healing. My work is often difficult, and made up of thinking about how to address high levels of material needs and the complete lack of services or economic opportunities, alongside the distrust and reluctance to collaborate among the wider community.

As I boarded the plane to Medellin, my stomach sank with worry. I didn't know how I was going to react to being in one of Colombia's beautiful cities, especially visiting the work and apartment of my dear friend and fellow Seeder, Jessica Sarriot. I have become quite defensive about the difficulties of the coast, both in the work and in the lifestyle, and being in Medellin was just going to make things worse. I spent the first few days amazed at just how opposite our lives were, as we took taxis, drank the tap water, and visited with some of her professional, well-studied collegues and friends. One of the evenings, we went downtown to the largest sports complex in Latin America to play beach volleyball. I became more and more confused. How could we enjoy this, I thought, when most of the coast doesn't have adequate roads? Of course, there was a huge group of police searching the grounds outside the stadium for knives, hidden while people attended the soccer game, reminding us that Medellin has one of the highest levels of urban violence and narco-traffiking in the world. How can we relate our work- on one side almost completely defined by the poverty of the region, and on the other, connecting the work of the church with the context of urban violence? How do I keep from resenting her internet access, metro system, and botanical gardens, and how does she keep from resenting my I've-got-it-the-worst attitude? Above all, how do we understand and work in a country where one region has world-class social and cultural institutions, prolific industry, and strong public services, and another isn't even able to open its schools on time?

Then we went to Chocó, and things got more complicated. The heat as the plane door opened reminded me of the coast, but disembarking, I realized that it was completely different. Just forty-five minutes away by plane from Medellin, we were in the middle of dense, humid forest, where almost all transportation is by river. However, I was amazed as we arrived at Istmina, the town where the Seeders Carolina Perez and Cellia Maria Vasquez live, at just how developed it actually was. I was expecting something similar from the isolated, poor, small-scale farming towns of my region, and was completely unprepared to find a bustling city.

Choco's industry is mainly gold mining or coca cultivation, both of which yield much more money than standard crop farming. Perhaps there is more money moving, but the region is startlingly precarious. Because many farmers have switched to grow coca, food is imported from the same Medellin, at sky-high prices. Environmentally, gold mining threatens the richness of the soil and the entire water supply, especially the massive river systems. The presence of the federal government is laughable, made up mostly of army fumigation campaigns and corrupt police stations. As we walked through gold mines where mercury is used for extraction then discarded in the water supply, talked with coca farmers, and quietly discussed the obvious presence of guerrilla and paramilitary groups in the towns, we began to realize just how huge the threats to stability and peace actually are.

I grappled with the new information as we saw more of Chocó and returned to Medellin. The puzzle of Colombia was becoming more complicated with each new piece that we added. The Seeders gathered for a discussion about how to understand differences in context, especially relating to vacation and days of rest. This conversation and various others that took place that week weren't easy, but I found myself profoundly grateful for the perspective offered by the other Seeders. We discovered that, now matter how good our intentions, we still compare and feel jealous or guilty about the difficulties of our placements. Some of us can see fellow Seeders more often; others are more in touch with their families. Some of us have the anonymous freedom of cities, while others are in small communities where everything they do is known. Although we naturally compare, we have to recognize that every place has its difficulties and strengths, and each of us must be allowed to feel freely, without guilt or resentment.

During a late night discussion in Chocó, Carolina and I talked about the word “solidarity.” Even as we seek to be in solidarity with our communities, we have to remember that Seed is also our community. If the way we live doesn't allow us to be in solidarity with the other Seeders, we have to question ourselves. If my lifestyle means that I close my heart to empathy with Jessica in Medellin, I need to make some changes. If my defensiveness about the hardship on the coast means that I can't see the justice issues in Chocó and talk about them honestly with Carolina and Cellia, I need to take a look at myself.   

Perhaps it is a big jump, but I believe that these conversations are the same ones we must have about the various strange puzzle pieces of Colombia. The regions are so different, but we can see uniting threads of economic hardship, violence from illegal armed groups, the enticement of illegal crops, government abandonment, and many more. The challenge is to refuse to divide and separate, but to see every problem as interconnected, and to likewise build an interconnected movement for peace and justice. In the same way, perhaps, we Seeders strive to look at a wide field of experience and difficulty, and construct a community vision of solidarity and hope.

As I dig deeper into the Seed program, I am finding a richness that challenges me in ways I did not expect. Through community, through dialogue, through walking with each other and talking things out, we are challenged to wake up to difficult realities, and not just shrug at difference, but try to actually wrestle with it. I am so grateful to those who are walking with me through these days.

  

   

Stiiiill camping!

Reasons why I am on a two year camping trip:

Bug bites. Unbelievable in their variation and constancy.

Well, after the first 4 months, I no longer shower out of a bucket, but I still wash my dishes in one. And my laundry. With the rain water from outside tanks, note, because the only tap that works is the shower.

My fridge broke, and for the two months that it took to fix it (yes, it takes forever to figure out how to fix anything because there's certainly no one in the town that can), I figured out about how much time I could leave specific types of food on the counter until they went bad.

I walk up and down the road looking for cell phone service.

I cook on a gas-powered hot plate.

I am never fully clean, especially my feet.

I wake up before the sunrise.

Bats fly through my house at night, and lizards crawl on the walls during the day.

Rain radically changes the possibilities for the day. It's kind of like planning a hike- if it rains, you stay in the tent and play cards. If it rains here, you could tramp through mud just to find yourself stuck on the wrong side of the river, soaking wet. So you stay in the tent.

I never know where my next meal will come from, or what it will be. The neighbors are constantly placing a bowl of soup or an ear of corn in my hands, which I must eat, hungry or no. There is no place to buy fruit and no one will hear of me paying them, so I have to wait to see if someone will gift me some (they usually do). Sometimes there are no vegetables. For three months, there was no milk. It's hard to plan how it will all work out, so I just make sure I have a lot of oatmeal.

I still brush my teeth outside with a cup of water.

I always leave with a backpack of things to fix, books to return to our communal bookshelf, lists of errands to run... and return with a backpack full of food that you just can't find in the mountains (which occasionally includes four pounds of oatmeal).

You know (Emma, Jess, Hannah, Sara, Tyler, Lucas) how when you are camping, something unexpected will always find you, and it might be a disaster or a blessing, but the crisis moment is inevitable. Like when your car breaks down in a rainstorm, but you meet a few cute Wisconsin-ite mechanics, or when you drive for hours to find a camping site, but when you get there and set up, the moment is all that much sweeter because of the struggle. Or when you get stuck on an island during a massive storm, but it means that you have the whole beautiful thing to yourself, or when you haul 21 plastic milk jugs down half the east coast and end up with too much fresh water after all. Or tossing your shoes when you get to the beach only to be attacked by prickly grass bushes. Or when you almost leave Virginia for Florida with no oil in your car. Or when you drive for four hours through a blizzard up mountains with faulty windshield wipers and your dear friends try to keep you from going too crazy (and also somehow figure out how to feed you bean soup from a Nalgene as you drive...)- but you get to the house in the mountains, and wake up to a stunning sunrise.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that my days here are all like that. I never know how they will turn out- maybe I'll hear about a community conflict that's recently hit the fan, or negotiate a failed crop in one of our food security projects, or be invited to a church revival meeting. Maybe I will play soccer with the girls, or the meeting will be canceled, or someone will get in a huge argument about one of the projects, storm out, and then show up five minutes later wondering what all the fuss is about. The electricity will die. I'll drink a cup of juice that turns my stomach. Everyone will be two hours late. I'll have an encouraging, honest, completely unplanned conversation about religion on the back porch. I'll be invited to go wild-honey-hunting. People will agree to contribute to the community fund, without objecting. My phone will completely stop working.

I told Jess once that I constantly feel like I'm surfing- catching my balance minute by minute as the waves appear. I'm trying to learn how to take the unexpected for what it is- crisis or epiphany- and calm it down, make it real, and deal with it. Reacting to the excitement of the wrenches that are thrown in your work doesn't actually help your work, but trying to understand from where and why the wrenches were thrown does. My mom helped remind me the other day that we who work with people work with ecosystems. We work with living beings, who are never predictable and never relate to each other or to us in predictable ways. It's hard, and it requires damn good balance, flexibility, willingness to get your hands dirty, and relentless hope, but at least it's not boring. Kind of like a good camping trip.

(PS. My fridge broke again.  Peace out, folks.)

One big sigh.

I'm not sure when the honeymoon stage ended, but it's definitely been done for a while. I'm sure you've all noticed that my last blog post is about two months ago, and I can only explain (other than the usual lack of internet excuses) that I have been too muddled to write. I commend my dear friend Jess Sarriot (if you are also reading her blog) for her January entry, for putting uncertainty, doubt, and confusion down on the page. I couldn't. I'm still dreading this post, because it means trying to articulate some of the mind tangles that I've been in recently, but bear with me.

One of the basic difficulties of living in another culture is that you do not understand the cultural cues. I live with folks who have never left their hometown, which is profoundly isolated, which means that they have mental encyclopedias of information that I will never know. To an extent, I can learn the Spanish dialect on the coast, make family trees to remember who is who's cousin, hike around to get to know the farmland, etc., but I'm mostly lost. The most frustrating thing about this is that I will never understand- I might think I'm grasping something, but the rich fabric of really knowing because it makes up part of my life experience- I will only have that about my two years in Colombia, not about the past. I spend hours a day listening to stories: who sold what land to who when, what happened when the community tried to petition the govt. for a better road the last time, why this neighbor refuses to talk to this neighbor, what went wrong in the last project SembrandoPaz worked on there... and I am still lost. I don't know how to make informed decisions, other than to just make decisions with what I know and hope that the repercussions aren't that huge. This is true about half the time.

I have made some really faulty decisions because I don't have all the information. I've traveled on a dangerous road. I've spent time with people who are considered untrustworthy. I've implied that I'm friends with a certain group of people, and not with others. I've misinterpreted the parameters of who I work with and who I don't in the community. I've mixed up names and dates and meeting times. I've confused (or offended) people countless times because of my ignorance of what it means to me to be: polite, a woman, a member of the church, friendly, honest, a good communicator, a rep. of SembrandoPaz... I just don't know and can't know so much. I remember back to doing community organizing at EMU, where I still made plenty of mistakes, and sigh to remember the ease of culturally knowing who to talk to, how, when, and what to say. I knew the paths.

Another trap that has me completely at a loss is the level of distrust and gossip that happens in Berruguita. I remind myself daily that it's a community that was literally torn apart from within- same families, same siblings, same neighbors- by armed groups, and that it was mostly arbitrary who was killed and why (at least the victims and their families were never told why). Also, the authorities who were supposed to help them betrayed them. The army, police, and politicians are notorious in the region for at best turning a blind eye to the violence, and at worse, actively collaborating. To illustrate, the same paramilitaries who had killed community members were incorporated into the army group that welcomed back the displaced people of Macayepo after their seven years of flight. It makes you sick. Because of what I know of trauma, I forgive the distrust, again and again. 

It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt- me personally and generally for the pain that it generates in the community. Most days, I listen to someone describe their land struggles- how they were unjustly treated by their neighbors or how the legitimately posess the land, but don't have their papers in order, or why they deserve this land- and I'll empathize, and then later in the day I'll talk to someone who will tell me that the other is lying and can't be trusted. I feel really yanked around between alliances and individuals, and I keep wondering if my policy of transparency and honesty is helpful or just making it worse. I try to speak up when something someone says or does is hurtful or unhelpful to the process, but in so doing, I've created enemies. I try to empathize all around, but people tell me then that I'm letting myself be fooled. I trust universally, and people tell me I'm naïve. Then I stop trusting someone, and someone else becomes offended. Sigh, again. I mentioned before that my strategy has become on of honest disclosure and reliance on the process. I try to keep my personal feelings out of things, and use the language of work to respond to people's actions, even if they just piss me off. For example, recently a huge weed of conflict has been growing (can't get the VeggieTales “Rumor Weed” episode out of my head, sorry folks) around the money that is currently still out on loan from the Community Council. Certain people refuse to pay because certain others haven't paid yet, or they don't approve of our work strategy, or they don't like me personally... etc. I try to respond with the truth of any organization- that if your budget isn't in order, no one will collaborate with you or trust your work- instead of my personal feelings of frustration that people refuse to pay, and my own hurt that people don't trust me.

And while I'm venting, let me say that it's a LOT HARDER to keep your head about values and principles while working in the field than while hanging out in a classroom. I think back to my neat conversations about sustainability and community process, about restorative justice and participatory democracy and human rights and empowerment, that I had at EMU, and I wonder how on earth to pull all that along. When I am working with an already-established organization (with fabulous vision, but occasionally sketchy followthrough), in a community of folks with very different views of how the world works (I attend a legalistic, conservative Adventist church where dancing/alcohol/worldly music/working on Saturday and some of my closest friends were in the army), trying to deal with problems of root poverty (income generation projects are hard to keep sustainable) and violence (we really need the army presence sometimes... or do we?), in a culture that I don't understand... how the hell do I make decisions based on my values, or our values of good work? The factors and considerations are huge, and compounded by the fact that I live mostly without internet and cell service and touch base with my organization every month or so, which means that I make a ton of decisions on the fly, with the people they affect standing right in front of me. It's hard to keep things straight. I trust my local community leaders immensely, but wonder how to strike a balance in between letting their style and beliefs influence me, and sticking to my values and trying to influence change.

These are some of the things that keep me up at night. We have some great momentum, and good projects going, and I'm excited about where things can go. I get exhausted, though. Most days I sort of shrug and say my Colombian mantra- well, something happened, and it was probably good. I'm just trying to take one step at a time, but I'm hoping the fog clears out a bit more so I can see where I'm going.