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.