tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8865458579280047212024-02-19T00:51:03.090-08:00From I to WeLarisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-30524029448985970772016-04-17T14:19:00.002-07:002016-04-17T14:19:38.005-07:00Esperanzas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0IrqxEV_LfnpxypBdBkxZiQ4XXV8s90UyV2S-OYC3RzWbboFdQbQYzs5VvpDLUPTg2b9MXz5_hFhCrBOuQGR0b44yyhE1y7lP0tt67NFz8RidGI43FfZSF_pflddJGajefUMduDZen5o/s1600/1451575_10200755491111172_979246949_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0IrqxEV_LfnpxypBdBkxZiQ4XXV8s90UyV2S-OYC3RzWbboFdQbQYzs5VvpDLUPTg2b9MXz5_hFhCrBOuQGR0b44yyhE1y7lP0tt67NFz8RidGI43FfZSF_pflddJGajefUMduDZen5o/s400/1451575_10200755491111172_979246949_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">En el
último mes, en los Montes de María y muchas partes más de Colombia, se ha
experimentado una aparenta paradoja de acontecimientos, aunque en el fondo
tienen toda la lógica del conflicto armado.
Se espera la firma de la paz entre el gobierno y las FARC, y el 30 de
Marzo, las delegaciones del Gobierno nacional y el Ejército de Liberación
Nacional (ELN) anunciaron un proceso de paz paralelo, en algún momento visto
con poca probabilidad. El mismo día del
anuncio, 36 municipios del país se encontraron paralizados por el miedo e
intimidación del paro armado del Clan Úsuga paramilitar, y la semana siguiente
todavía permanecía el zozobra en los municipios del Carmen de Bolívar y
Zambrano. En el territorio, la paz y el posconflicto
están apareciendo por todos lados, sin embargo, al hablar de reparación y daño,
reconciliación y no repetición, se tocan las causas y los poderes obtenidos y ejercidos
por muchos actores a través del
conflicto armado, se revuelven las aguas y surgen amenazas y miedos. En el proceso de la transformación, se draga hasta
el fondo del conflicto, y lo que se halla muchas veces temoriza, sin embargo,
lo que se encuentre se tiene que enfrentar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">En nuestra
última reunión de equipo, meditamos sobre la diferencia entre la palabra
"esperanza" en español y en inglés.
En inglés hay dos palabras- una para expresar un tiempo, la idea de
esperar hasta que pase algo, como esperar una cita médica. La segunda expresa un sentimiento positivo,
es decir se sabe que lo pase en el futuro será bueno. En español, se unan las dos ideas en una sola
palabra, entonces la esperanza debe tener siempre un sentimiento positivo, es
decir la fe que las cosas buscan solución.
Desafortunadamente, aunque la palabra tenga los dos sentimientos, nos reducimos
a sentir más lo temporal. Quedamos
esperando algo, sin esperanza que vaya a salir bien. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">La pregunta
es: cómo podemos esperar la transformación que vendrá con los acuerdos de paz y
el post-conflicto, con esperanza? Cómo
estar activos y tener fe que nuestra expresión y actuar hará posible esta
transformación? No podemos quedarnos
esperando la paz como una eventualidad, porque no tendremos la valentía de
enfrentar lo difícil del proceso de transformación, sino tenemos que estar
viviendo la esperanza todos los días, solamente en eso nos involucramos en
garantizar que se haga de manera positiva. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">Otro caso
de esperar es el de Jorge Montes. El
Coordinador General de la Alta Montaña lleva dos años y siete meses como un
preso político, acusado por ser guerrillero, y perseguido por su persistencia y
falta de miedo en la exigibilidad de derechos de su comunidad, en medio del
conflicto. En las pocas veces que logra
comunicarse con la comunidad, comparte un mensaje de esperanza. Si el pueblo sigue organizado y reclamando
sus derechos, él dice, él está bien. Sin
embargo, qué le puede decir a Jorge para que no pierda la esperanza, luego de
dos años en los cuales ni siquiera tuvo audiencia. Ahora, después de las audiencias en Octubre,
le han cambiado el juez, y el parálisis de las vacaciones de Diciembre y Enero,
y la burocracia del sistema judicial significa que está en una fila larga
esperando una sentencia. Cómo se actúa
para que la esperanza de Jorge no sea solamente de tiempo, sino con fe que la
justicia le dará la libertad?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">Es un reto
fundamental para todos y todas en esta época de tanta promesa y tantos sueños
que aparentan concretarse en realidad.
La paz, y la justicia, no son de espera de tiempo. Serán de esperanza, de hechos y actuaciones
concretas de individuos y colectivos en todas partes: del juez en el caso de
Jorge, de su comunidad en no perder la esperanza de su libertad, de las
delegaciones en las mesas de diálogo que harán verdad los acuerdos que firman,
en el público que vive con miedo de la ira de los grupos armados que permanecen
en sus zonas. Hay que vivir los dos
sentidos de la esperanza: la transformación se hará, con las acciones concretas
y la fe de todos. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">(Gracias a Kristian Sanabria para la foto de Jorge y mi persona.)</span></div>
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<span lang="ES-CO">// </span></div>
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In this last month, in Montes de María and many other parts
of Colombia, we have experienced an apparent paradox of events, although in
their deepest meaning they obey the logic of armed conflict. We are waiting for the peace agreements to be
signed between the government and the FARC, and on the 30th of March, the
national government and ELN (National Liberation Army) delegations announced a
parallel peace process, until that moment something that had seemed very
unlikely. The same day as the
announcement, 36 municipalities all over the country woke up paralyzed by the
fear and intimidation of an armed strike called by the paramilitary group Clan
Usuga, and the next week the municipalities of El Carmen and Zambrano were
still feeling fear and anxiety. Here on
the ground, peace and postconflict are appearing everywhere, nevertheless, when
people start to talk about reparation and damage, reconciliation and
no-repetition, they touch the deep causes and the powers won and exercised by
many actors in the armed conflict. The
waters are stirred up and threats and fears surface. In the process of transformation, the deep
floor of the armed conflict is scraped, and what is pulled up is often
terrifying, nevertheless, what is found has to be confronted.</div>
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In our last team meeting, we meditated about the difference
between the word "hope" in Spanish and in English. In English there are two words- wait, which
expresses the feeling of time, as we wait for something to happen, like a
doctor´s appointment. The second word-
hope- has a positive meaning- when we hope, we trust that the future will be
good. In Spanish, these two words unite
in one, which means that esperanza (wait/hope) should always have a positive
angle, which is to say that we have faith that things will come out well. Unfortunately, even though the word itself
has the two meaning, we often reduce it to the feeling of time. We wait for something, without the hope that
it will come out ok in the end.</div>
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The question is: How do we wait for the transformation that
will come with the peace accords and post-conflict, with hope? How can we be active and have faith that our words
and actions will make the transformation possible? We can´t get stuck waiting for peace as an
eventuality, because we won´t have the courage to face the difficult things
that are dredged up in the transformation process, rather we have to wait with
hope, only then will we get involved with making sure that the transformation
will happen in a good way.</div>
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Another case of waiting/hoping is that of Jorge Montes. The General Coordinator of the Alta Montaña
has been in jail for two years and seven months, as a political prisoner
accused of being a guerrilla, and persecuted for his persistence and lack of
fear as he fights for the rights of his community in the midst of armed conflict. In the few times that he has been able to
communicate with his community, he shares a message of hope. If the people stay organized and keep
demanding their rights, he says, he is fine.
Nevertheless, what can we say to Jorge so that he doesn´t lose hope,
after two years of not even appearing before a judge? Now, after two hearings in October, they have
changed his judge, and the December and January vacation paralysis, combined
with the bureaucracy of the judicial system mean that he is in a long line
waiting for his sentence. How can we act
so that the Jorge´s waiting isn´t just about the wait for the future, but with
hope that justice will give him his liberty?</div>
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It is a fundamental challenge for all of us in this time of
so much promise and so many dreams that seem to be becoming concrete
realities. Peace and justice aren´t
about waiting. They will be about waiting
with hope, with real actions of individuals and collectives everywhere: from
the judge of Jorge´s case, from his community to not lose hope in his liberty,
from the delegations at the negotiating tables who will make truth out of the
agreements they sign, in the public which lives fearful of the rage of armed
groups who still are around in their regions.
We have to live both kinds of esperanza, wait/hope, because the
transformation will be done by the concrete actions and the faith of all of us.</div>
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(Thanks to Kristian Sanabria for the photo of Jorge and I.)</div>
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Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-16112882967925354032014-11-30T07:52:00.002-08:002014-11-30T07:52:43.806-08:00Giving Thanks. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well folks, it's been over a year. I should apologize, I might, but I also may justify. I feel like this year has been the fastest in my life so far. Work and life on Colombia's bold Caribbean Costa have been inspiring, challenging, and just plain FULL. It has been a 2014 full of openings for me, and liberation, as I grow in consciousness of my place here in Colombia, my inner darkness and light, and the complexities of the world around me. I know and feel more, and as the circle expands, so does the outside edge- of what I don't know, what I am uncertain about, and what remains to emerge. I want to write a few reflections on that process to you, in the spirit of a profound thankfulness and a pregnant hope, in keeping with the rituals of november and december. Here are a few things:<br />
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I forgot about Thanksgiving, and made my way to the central office after a tumultuous month of barely sleeping in my own bed, as I traipsed around the mountains working with the youth team that I help facilitate (more on that later). I turned up exhausted, to hear the good news that a US friend had found time in her insane schedule to bake a pumpkin pie (!). We showed our office mates how to squirt whipped cream from an aerosol can into their mouths, and we went to the late showing of the new Hunger Games movie. As we rode home on the moto, we talked about the resistance- what does it mean to rise up, what are the risks, who are the people- not the intellectual or political elite, how do we keep things focused on the people and how do we keep your humanity in all of that. Thank you for a team that cares for each other, where I always feel more like Larisa and rarely like a gringa. Thank you for being part of the resistance, and keeping love as the center of that. Thank you for the pueblo, the people.<br />
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I spent a week hiking on muddy, steep trails through the mountains to co-facilitate encounters with youth in the communities we accompany. It's rainy season, so the only way in and out of many communities is on foot. For a week, we daily walked for about 3 hours, and arrived exhausted and sweaty, only to steel our nerves (I co- facilitate with the youth leaders of the movement who are often facilitating their first meetings) and get ready to lead reflective activities, organize lunch (no small feat where there is no power or stores in the communities), and hike out again. It was the coolest. Thank you for communities that are thrilled to get visitors in the rainy season. Thank you for cool streams to bathe in, for spring water, for massive plates of rice and chicken. Thank you for joining our reflections about stereotypes of mountain people- backward, stupid, uneducated, unable to speak well, dirty- and flipping them positive- full of wonder, extremely competent, reflective, hardworking. Thank you for producing food, farmers of the world. Thank you for taking time out to accompany each other- to hike together. <br />
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Yesterday my housemate moved out, after a tense many months of sharing space. Simply, it wasn't the best situation for either of us, and we are both grateful to have our own space. On Saturday morning, I awoke and felt.. lonely and nervous despite relief. My housemate owned most of the furniture we had used, and the house was literally empty- I feared it would stay that way. I spent the day calling family and friends and getting back in touch after a long time out. In the evening, four friends stopped by and we laughed and teased each other and shared a makeshift late dinner. I woke up and was so profoundly happy to see five plastic chairs around a small table, which we had hurriedly set up the night before. I had talked with someone about loneliness and she asked me to visualize the opposite- I had said, chairs set around a kitchen table. Thank you for sharing space, for showing up. Thank you for accountable relationships and dialogue. Thank you for friends who love to shoot the breeze. <br />
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A friend was reflecting about the Hunger Games the other day- about the brief moment when they are hunting and stop by a stream to rest, and saying that that is how things should be, and we so often forget. I have felt distant from the pain and rage that is crashing in waves across the US right now because of racial and economic violence. I think sometimes that I used to feel more rage, and wonder if I am sleeping more- if I am less sensitive to what is going on around me. I worry that I need to open my eyes, and yesterday I remembered the hundred or so times in the last few weeks that I had the chance to stop by a stream to rest- when I bent over double laughing with the kids I work with, when I jumped and screamed at my favorite futbol team in the local tournament, when I've danced to the serious beats of Caribbean music. I remember when we hosted a delegation and were crossing a lake to travel to the airport, and one by one we launched ourselves off the boat and into the water. Our clothes would dry later. Thank you for kids and for spirit. Thank you for, despite everything, spaces where laughter is the shared purpose. Thank you for daily grounding moments- and for taking steps down from the cloud of darkness circling the world to the streams that run through it. Thank you for a tough and mighty community in the US, that is standing up. Thank you for the words STAY WOKE, and for wakefulness to joy, knowing that it is resistance.<br />
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Mucho amor. Lari</div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-49341429524236524572013-10-01T05:38:00.000-07:002013-10-01T05:38:02.013-07:00Transitional Justice and Damage Control<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">learning curve has been steep this last month in
Colombia. I have shaken the dust off
vocabulary for self-protection, for legal process, for courteous letters to
officials. Once tricky names now roll
off the tongue- for community leaders (former acquaintances, now fast friends),
a host of government agencies and maximum security prisons. I have pulled out countless names and stories
from the two years I spent talking and living with folks in the mountains to piece
together the story we are currently living.
I have remembered with them, and watched their faces as they wish they
could forget so many things. I have
learned the deep, lasting value of the Colombian two-minute check-in phone
call- the call you give when you get home at night, and to check in to see that
a friend woke up in good spirits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It has been so hard to walk with the community leaders
through this. On Sept. 3<sup>rd</sup>,
written death threats for many of the nonviolent march leaders were distributed
on public roads, in the towns where they live, in communities they trust. Six days later, a dear friend- who we have
called family for at least the past year of intense organization, reflection,
accompaniment, struggle, and triumph, was arrested. He is sleeping tonight on a bare cement floor
in a maximum security prison. I wish I
could say it more gently, but one thing we have all learned is the blank
feeling of helplessness that we often have when we think about him. We can’t fly him a mattress, so we are
reduced to using all the minutes on our phones and hours in our days calling
into the wind, hoping that the competent authorities, wherever they are hiding,
hear something. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The onslaught of meetings, phone calls, negotiations, and
lists haven’t stop. I sat stunned
through a meeting on Friday as I listened to the layers of pain and anger that
this has brought to the surface for my friends, and again yesterday, as they
steadied themselves for six hours of passionate, mature negotiation with
government officials. Too many days, I
have sat down with them at the end of a meeting to update them on the case and
watch them cry for a minute with exhaustion and worry, then set their faces,
pull out their notebooks, and write a list of people to talk to or letters to
send. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The words “human rights defender” no longer invoke long
documents, but faces and a gut-wrenching feeling of pride and outrage. I see our friend’s wife, who had to tell
their four year old daughter that her dad was in prison for the second time in
her short life on false and fabricated charges of pertaining to a guerrilla
group, speaking in righteous anger to over 600 of her own, who shelled out
their own money to gather under rainy skies and remind us that they, as
campesin@s, are not from the guerrilla, that they have been publically and
transparently committed to nonviolence from the start, and that they are, under
no circumstances, going to go home, shut their doors, and stop claiming their
rights and dignity in a just and reasonable way. I see my friend who consistently invites his
enemies to sit down at the table because, as he said yesterday, enough violence
is enough. I see my friend who bent to
wash my muddy foot, who reminded me that dignity is made up of that recognition
of the spirit in one another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We have all learned, for me it has not been many, but for
others as many times as grains of sand, that the armed conflict is simply not
over. As delicately as the news can be
written, it is distorted. I wondered how
hundreds of times in the last two years- how can a community so battered so
little time ago exist so calmly? I heard
echoes of unresolved issues, but the Montes de Maria were completely safe, we
were told. Government officials were
busy implementing the Entity for Attention to Victims, Committees of
Transitional Justice, and reparations for victims of the armed conflict, which
had since been resolved. We are part of
a Consolidated territory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The amazing resilience of the campesin@s with whom I have
the great privilege of working means several things- one, that they can laugh
about just about anything, two, that they saw through the bullshit all along,
and three, that they still have faith that things will get better. They knew that Consolidated was the neat U.S.
government word for “bulldozed with a military offensive” that stews together
legal and illegal armed groups, rips up some illegal armed groups at the
surface, leaves the roots and carries a huge amount of innocents in its
wake. They knew that they were born to
open their mouths to defend their communities and their rights, and that at
some point that meant they were going to face the powers that lurk below the
surface, but hopefully this time with greater inner strength and more friends
standing beside them. They know that
they are innocent, and that, as our jailed friend wrote: in life you often have
to suffer, especially if you are poor like me.
And they keep on. Our friend
says: above all, do not let the process fail.
I have faith in heaven and earth that they won’t stop fighting for their
beloved mountains, for their right to walk and laugh freely, for life over
death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPs0zR0fcTC-6ALf9N-4wvBxsd9SOJSlJR0RgZHUu5Y3TidyIL-sPRlKS9d3-NP5kNZUd9XQ7FyQMScUhiYSwpWkk8_-Bi6sEjfCfFNRqK9X4eoRJH_0DfMrYxkR8bRB40KWWGq6GHOM/s1600/Chocoro+y+Montana+111.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPs0zR0fcTC-6ALf9N-4wvBxsd9SOJSlJR0RgZHUu5Y3TidyIL-sPRlKS9d3-NP5kNZUd9XQ7FyQMScUhiYSwpWkk8_-Bi6sEjfCfFNRqK9X4eoRJH_0DfMrYxkR8bRB40KWWGq6GHOM/s1600/Chocoro+y+Montana+111.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Today they laughed at the idea of transitional justice. They said- we are living in the middle of an
armed conflict. We cannot ignore that,
as we sit down to negotiate with the government, the same is holding our friend
captive. The government Entity for
Attention to Victims has championed this process, and now has to fight to free
one of the leaders. We have had to do too
much damage control in the last month, in a scenario we had hoped was ready for
healing. How do you propose reparations
for victims and then continue to arrest them?
How do you open spaces for
dialogue and truth telling, as people are accused of pertaining to one armed
groups or another based on what they say?
How do you move on when the government’s plan for protection are
bodyguards and bulletproof vests, not challenging impunity? How do you have negotiations, when people
won’t speak because of who is in the room?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We have learned much of what is out there, and we know that
we are not yet in a space of transitional justice. There is still not much breathing room. This is a time for active resistance. It is time to network, love each other, laugh
when we can, cry when we can’t, send care packages and letters, and stare all
this down. It is time to accompany, to
shoulder the load, to steel ourselves against the reality, and to have
faith. We will keep walking,
nonviolently, like my friends have done their whole lives, and we will not let
the great work of justice fall. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-33290896915862766962013-08-31T08:20:00.000-07:002013-08-31T08:20:35.073-07:00Las Americas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I woke up this morning with notes of pots and pans echoing
in my ears… and I’m not even in Colombia
yet. If any of you haven’t been reading
the news, Colombia is rocking with thousands of its population on the streets, marching,
shouting, blocking highways, and pounding on kitchen implements as a nationwide
strike almost reaches two weeks. It is
first and foremost a farmers’ strike, but new groups take to the streets
everyday- truck drivers, university students, potato/onion/rice growers
associations, oil workers, health care workers.
Colombia is continuing (over the last 60 years and counting) to undergo
a massive rural-urban shift, as a lack of rural development policy, violence, multinational
corporate interests and land issues make campesino life increasingly difficult,
and protests like this speak to the seriousness of the issues. Negotiations are underway but on very shaky
ground, and the sense of indignation and injustice is running high. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Colombians are awake and acting courageously. After over 60 years of armed conflict,
centuries of rural oppression, violent reprisals against community organization
and protest, and lack of political options, they are still taking to the streets. They are demanding that their dignified
demands as citizens and lovers of their land be answered. One video of the protests played
Latinoamerica by Calle 13 (if you haven’t heard it, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFJE8ZdeG8">listen!</a>) which has become
an anthem of people power and pride in Latin America, and today, in
Colombia. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The song says, among many profound things, mi tierra no se
vende / my land cannot be sold; quien no quiere a su patria, no quiere a su
madre/ whoever doesn’t love their country, doesn’t love their mother; and ¡qué
vivan las américas! / long live the Americas! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Today, writing from the U.S., I want to say YES. Long live the Americas, but ALL the
Americas. I want to say goodbye to my
country, where I have spent the last two months, in the spirit of another country,
in which I have the joy and privilege to live. I want to stand on the roof and
beat my chest and yell WAKE UP! Let’s
LOVE this place, and treat it like we love it!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These two months have been tragic. I came home to read about Trayvon Martin and
the Zimmerman acquittal; I am leaving as our president- for whom I voted!- is
pursuing a unilateral military strike against Syria. I know that if you are reading this, I don’t
need to yell about GMO crops, irrigation from the Colorado River in the desert,
parking lots, Starbucks and McDonalds, consumption culture, and the free trade
agreements we insist on signing with countries like Colombia, forcing small
farmers worldwide to throw away their seeds, sell out, and move on. I know that you know. But I’m still trying to figure out my
relationship with my country (even calling it that is uncomfortable), and I
want it to be based on love, not tragedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I want to live like I care about this country enough to yell
at the newspaper every morning. I want
to follow the lead of Colombians as they protest positively by buying 770- the
beginning digits of the barcode which show that the good is Colombia made or
grown. I want to sing about the colors
of my flag, cook up the national soup, rabidly cheer our soccer team into the
world cup, and wear clothing that shows my love for this place, like
Colombians. I want to remember that the
soil here is sacred, the water and air, and feel like it is part of my
community, like many Colombians I know.
I want to be able to honestly say, without irony, that I love my country
and my land, not as the superpower police state that can ram its economic
policies through at the expense of everyone else, but as a place that deserves
to receive and needs to show honest love and respect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As Colombia is made up of campesino/as, we are made up of
campesino/as. In these two months I have
seen just how vast and varied this land and its peoples truly are. Urban food growers in Pittsburgh, quiet
progressives in Akron, biking families in Harrisonburg, desert water-savers, border
crossers and protectors in Arizona, safe spaces in San Francisco, alternative
thinkers in DC, prison activists in Baltimore. We are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I want to love my country, and believe in it enough to fight
for it, not just shake it off as the great evil empire that resists change. So that we feel that there really is a place for us here, and we are welcomed. So that our vast diversity and dignity are
expressed as the norm, not the alternative.
So that we begin to live into our whole identity and demand that our
government honors that. So that the
people that live on the margins are recognized as what they really are- the
majority- and begin to exert their power.
So that we recognize that we will gain so much more if we take a few
steps down and collaborate with our neighbors.
So that we, too, take to the streets.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I want to be able to yell, along with Colombia and all of Latin
America, ¡qué vivan las Américas! And
mean up and down the whole continent.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-20638579428365193412013-04-12T15:31:00.000-07:002013-04-12T15:31:26.012-07:00Aquí estamos (después de caminar).<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I still feel stunned.
Six months of planning and analysis, diplomatic conversations with NGOs
and the departmental government, hundreds of phone minutes and hours of
dangerous Jeep rides to communities in the middle of nowhere… and three hard,
bittersweet days that were the March.
There is no closure. We are, if
anything, reeling after taking a big step forward- not the first nor the last,
but a big and beautiful step.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We are grateful and proud, and honored to know such good
people. If you look through pictures,
know that every face in every picture gave it their all, and each one contributed
so much. To get to the biweekly planning
meetings- from October to March- most leaders paid out of pocket. Many times I would show up to a meeting on a
moto, and realize that many others had walked for two or three hours to get to
the truck that brought them there. At
one point during the march, we had to cut up a cow into pieces to cook, and had
15 volunteers within minutes. People
cleaned bathrooms, ran security in shifts through the night, cooked massive
meals, and carried sacks of food from the trucks to the kitchens over and over. For one of the meals, 22 cans of sardines (on
rice) fed 700 people. I heard no
complaints. For those of you that are
lucky enough to have visited the Montes de Maria, you know what it means for
700 people to mobilize from their homes down the mountain, and for them to
donate over 200 100-lb. sacks of food. This
mobilization means preparation, good communication and leadership, and collaboration
from truck drivers and the people that stayed home. It means faith that every other community is
doing the same, and hope enough to show up.
It means power. I wish you had
been there to watch the trucks come down the mountain, each crowned by twenty
or thirty men and women, ready to take calm, passionate, non-violent action to
make things better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We are calm and ready.
I am glad that the government pushed the dialogues forward, and that
there are clear next steps. The leaders
were able to see that the next level of the movement is not forcing the people
to walk four more days to Cartagena (although people would have, no doubt) but
to take the conversation to the next level.
We will wait until the President comes with his ministers to lead a “Prosperity
Agreement” process for the region in May, and we will prepare ourselves. We have learned that we must have a united
front to negotiate, and we have seen our weaknesses. The communities have almost no experience
negotiating, and we now know that. We
now know that there is no shame in taking time to talk out decisions, and that
the communities will not sit quietly if we do not always speak with- not for-
them. We know that we must see ourselves
as powerful and human enough to stand up to anyone, governor or not, president
or not, about our rights and dignity. We
are ready to don our green and white T-shirts again, and march if we are not
taken seriously. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We are angry and disappointed. The structures of power do not favor the campesino
and less the campesina. They do not
favor the authentic language and experience of the pueblo- that comes from hard
work with bodies and hands, and memories of displacement, loss and violence. We do not yet have the tools to differentiate
between insulting and respectfully disagreeing with people in office. We weren’t able to hold a steady footing in
front of political manipulation, and allowed debate to create rifts in our own
movement. It is unjust how much power a
title, an education, a political rank, a skin color, or a language can give one
person over another. I am confused at my
role and influence as a white North American woman, and anguish over my
interactions and impact through the whole process. It is so hard how best to facilitate, how to
be in the background and not a protagonist, when and how to speak up and when
to not. We are frustrated at the clarity
we have in hindsight. We are
disappointed that we didn’t put our feet down and keep walking when the
national officials didn’t come to the meeting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We are glad to see paint going up on the health clinic in
Macayepo. One of the leaders is in a
meeting about avocado projects today, another in a meeting about the
reparations process, another hopefully finally signing the teaching contracts
for her school. All these are direct
agreements we reached in the dialogue tables on Sunday. We have had an impact! We are angry- of course- that these things,
if they are now so easy, were not done years ago, but we are proud that we
pushed some things forward. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is a step on the long path before and after us to awakening,
to bonds of friendship and hard shared work, to realizing that many people
walking patiently, peacefully and with conviction, can make the government
shake. When the mountain moves, our
hearts move, and the world begins to listen.
¡Que se mueva la montaña!</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-5178004158701696992013-03-11T05:43:00.001-07:002013-03-11T05:43:29.178-07:00So we will march... (this is what I'm working on these days)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">If violence were the solution to all of our problems, say
the leaders of the campesino movement now forming in the Montes de Maria,
Colombia, our problems would have been solved thirty years ago. A coalition of leaders representing almost 30
communities have decided to join together in a nonviolent collective effort to
draw together an effort to rebuild their region. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The Montes de Maria are famous both for the
fertility of the soil and the ferocity of the violence in the last fifteen
years. Unorganized criminal groups, the
guerrilla groups the FARC and ELN, and paramilitary groups fought for territory
in the region, catching the farming communities in the middle. The violence came to a peak in October 2000,
with the well-known massacre of Macayepo leaving 35 victims. To stand up for their rights as victims,
people must publically denounce the guilty groups and makes people targets of these
still-active, still-powerful armed groups.
Furthermore, community organizers work in a context where communities have
been divided and made distrustful by false promises of protection from illegal
armed groups and from the government. The
march has helped the communities begin to break down some of the stigmas
surrounding the region. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The campesino of the region are used to farming its steep
hills by hand, but have sustained themselves for the last 30 years from the
avocado harvests. Not only were the
communities devastated by massive sackings, burnings, murders, and displacement
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but since they have returned to recuperate
their farms, their principal crop has fallen to disease. Almost all of the massive acreage of avocado
farms has died in the last few years. In
the face of such obstacles, they have realized that a unified, dignified and
nonviolent march is the best way to highlight both the generosity of spirit and
hardworking nature of the people in the mountains, and to ask for an integrated
governmental response to their plight as victims of the armed conflict and of
crop disease. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The communities say that the government’s policy on
reparations is not enough to meet their needs.
The Victims’ Law #1448 of 2011, establishes a ten year plan for
reparations, starting in targeted communities like Macayepo, where the violence
is better known. The leaders argue that
their needs are greater than mere targeted collective reparations. They seek integrated, transformative
reparations in the whole region, not just select communities. They also recognize that without the avocado,
there may well be a second displacement, this time because of economic violence. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">They seek two integrated strategies for the
region- a return with dignity and institutional accompaniment that fulfills
their socio-economic rights and develops strategies to recover from the loss of
the avocado, and an integrated, transformative, and regional reparations
strategy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">In October of 2012, several community leaders began voicing
a common idea: a nonviolent collective action.
Made up of practicing Evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists,
Pentecostals, Catholics and secular community members, they are a diverse group
in religious beliefs, ethnicities, and life experiences. In October, they began to plan a march from
their municipal center, El Carmen de Bolivar, to the departmental capital,
Cartagena. On April 6, 2013, over a
thousand campesinos will gather to march for 5 days to a dialogue with local,
departmental, and national members of the government and members of various non-governmental
organizations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">They invite the national and international community to
participate, publicize, and support the communities of the mountain in their
nonviolent, collective effort to reclaim their rights and dignity. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-71159274900598374632013-01-26T10:20:00.003-08:002013-01-26T10:20:41.569-08:00Undermining.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">On Sunday morning, we woke up in Bogota and headed for one
of the city’s best markets, Paloquemao.
I burned my tongue on hot café con leche as we ate almojabanas, cheesy
pastries, on small stools at the entrance.
We browsed the tightly packed stalls for dry fruit, nuts, and whole
wheat flour to take back to the Coast and stared at the tall stacks of fresh
fruit and vegetables. You can buy almost
anything at Paloquemao (bean sprouts, beef tongue, organic coffee, a blend of
herbs to treat any illness), and almost all of it is grown in some region of
Colombia or another. We laughed at the
extremely courteous Bogotano accent, as compared to the brusque, tangled Coastal
one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">We had enough time to walk back, and a block down the road,
came to the security guards and automatic glass doors of a shiny new
monstrosity of a shopping mall. It
seemed dropped from the sky- millions of dollars of panes of glass, colorful
Adidas shoes, North American fast food and the newest releases in the movie
theater. It was clean, uniform, and
perfect. There was not a single piece of
clutter in the spacious hallways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">We stumbled out into the light and kept walking. Soon we started the long walk along a gray
wall that stretches an entire city block.
A friend remembered that it was the outside of Bogota’s largest
mega-church and convinced us to step inside.
There was space in the sanctuary for 10.000, and from the back, over the
swaying hands of several thousand, the worship leaders looked like ants. There was a steak house and a gym, as well as
a radio station and a large scale map of Colombia and all of its new
mega-churches: fruits of recent missions.
As we walked past the streams of Bogotanos heading into the service, we
remembered some of our friends who were meeting in a house church only a half
hour walk away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">That evening, after the plane ride and on the way to
Sincelejo, I watched scenes of the Coast move across the taxi’s windows. Thatch roofs, motorcyclists with no helmets,
broken concrete, stalks of yucca wilting with the lack of rain. It is extraordinary what things co-exist in
this world. On Saturday, we had been
privileged to listen to a professor-activist, one of the leaders against a huge
hydroelectric dam project in the department of Huila, El Quimbo. He described the strategy of development that
is taking root in Colombia and most of Latin America. Massive multinational corporations (in this
case, Italian) propose huge, lucrative projects to the government, based
largely on extracting or exploiting natural resources. The governments jump at the chance to use the
competitive advantage of their regions- the water, gold, lumber, or other
natural resources- and bend to the companies, allowing them extreme amounts of
power in the agreements. The government
effectively steps out from between and lets the corporation interact with the
people in the region, without taking any regulatory measures. Because the corporation acts in its own
interests, it takes almost all the profits, leaving the national government
with little, and the people of the region with nothing except ruined farmland,
few jobs, and a lack of future options.
There is too much to write here, but through rigorous research, the
professor and his team have been able to prove that the damages caused
currently and the projected loss of resources over the fifty years of the dam’s
lifetime are significantly less than the profits accrued by the project, and the
profits do not even stay in the country.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The strategy is maddeningly successful. By turning the world into a neoliberal comparative
advantage model, diverse ecosystems are replaced by huge reservoirs. Electricity produced in Panama can travel to
Argentina, but doesn’t get to rural towns in Panama. The free trade agreements now signed in
Colombia, Peru, Chile, and a number of other countries allow choice export
markets to grow, at the expense of the farmers that have sustained their
countries for millennia. Malls and
supermarkets take the place of the chaotic, diverse networks of local markets
in which money spent stays in the community.
The church is part of the same strategy.
A uniform faith takes the place of geographical communities. Differences are ironed out under the goal of
contributing financially to God’s mission on earth, be it through building new
mega-churches or funding mission trips across the world. If you pay, you receive more blessings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">We become valued not because of our cultural heritage, our
grounding or love of place, our songs and food and literature. Our activities no longer require relationship
of specificity, but shopping, entertainment, church, and travel can all be
accomplished without talking to another human being. We can watch the same TV, eat the same food,
and shop in the same stores in Colombia as in Japan, Sweden or South
Africa. We become flattened, the
subjects of a market instead of a nation or a culture. We are valued for our purchasing power or how
much we produce. It is the model of
efficiency, the model of economic growth, the model of profit. But what do we value? At what cost?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-20823962693615795372012-12-10T09:37:00.005-08:002012-12-10T10:30:32.268-08:00Campesinos y Campesinas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: center;">Here I am in Berruguita, loving it more day
by day.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QbmH7vEnUOMpvMdMN96jZz4QHvxnKa2EkjJF3pjuxHmrXQbrCWjANxp6xlu4yl4fuYQE-6hkDAArTlmvyNmSO3N9JN4lJ5nU57BS8Gr78cBAzKqZRGS7-lrb751C3-PkSevNdhnpsvM/s1600/cortando+arroz!+019.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QbmH7vEnUOMpvMdMN96jZz4QHvxnKa2EkjJF3pjuxHmrXQbrCWjANxp6xlu4yl4fuYQE-6hkDAArTlmvyNmSO3N9JN4lJ5nU57BS8Gr78cBAzKqZRGS7-lrb751C3-PkSevNdhnpsvM/s1600/cortando+arroz!+019.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a> </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirY5F6ECvyHrq2YxlYG9Jl4yt8XrlLeTS__ZT8pCA6-776qCAghxRGgr1Au29sZUigr2LLqWUeCCzc_DrNiQrAYOpZwJWkGioa6rU3JJuLmXY9py915NQVAuBM72AQDWWZ7aRCcd8apeM/s1600/cortando+arroz!+030.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirY5F6ECvyHrq2YxlYG9Jl4yt8XrlLeTS__ZT8pCA6-776qCAghxRGgr1Au29sZUigr2LLqWUeCCzc_DrNiQrAYOpZwJWkGioa6rU3JJuLmXY9py915NQVAuBM72AQDWWZ7aRCcd8apeM/s1600/cortando+arroz!+030.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><span lang="EN-US">
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-60412210199716343932012-09-07T04:49:00.002-07:002012-09-07T04:49:44.450-07:00Vistas de la gente<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeg1uoJPfvK3YGGw5tHW5_0ONGx8U7NOZUMbqfflYI6Hcc6mklv8XbPAR3bv2EyV1KCsTTVbPkmw2oJSPgNoC_Dkh3p8bAHuVLAWyvHeQX7IiMoXi2RI8N0QgsWN7Poib0M7GwzpgnJRQ/s1600/Proyectos+005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeg1uoJPfvK3YGGw5tHW5_0ONGx8U7NOZUMbqfflYI6Hcc6mklv8XbPAR3bv2EyV1KCsTTVbPkmw2oJSPgNoC_Dkh3p8bAHuVLAWyvHeQX7IiMoXi2RI8N0QgsWN7Poib0M7GwzpgnJRQ/s400/Proyectos+005.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washing on the wire.</td></tr>
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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.</div>
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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 <span lang="es-CO">walked
his bare feet up</span> 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.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgufYhwM4wmmuhVI9OjBYciQCzCsTsllS__NqVYqs0Kn_NmfkzimQZjJfvJJE2xUMHQhnMzQnQ0MKfntIp8vtnliMTjpdmzZSp_iehB1SgxUZXevdLjeL7o38jWtGzNRTMqMr_JNXtiOOo/s1600/Proyectos+022.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgufYhwM4wmmuhVI9OjBYciQCzCsTsllS__NqVYqs0Kn_NmfkzimQZjJfvJJE2xUMHQhnMzQnQ0MKfntIp8vtnliMTjpdmzZSp_iehB1SgxUZXevdLjeL7o38jWtGzNRTMqMr_JNXtiOOo/s400/Proyectos+022.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Family photo (Neguith and 5 sons: Neiver, Gleider, Gleiner, Leiver, Eider).</td></tr>
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She's
ten, but there's no way to know that from the palms of her hands.
<span lang="es-CO">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 </span>scratches first a knife, then <span lang="es-CO">rubs
handfuls of sand back and forth over the soot-encrusted pot. </span>The
pots are decades old, but there's no way to know that from the way
they shine when she finishes.</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7bJXfRYxoYcErd6-H9w2O668oXAPOAwpEo8MvBTqKNiVVhcHCOO6gIAF4lAWRcaENyWfCLbb36lS56a5S8iMn-WntmRqWviaORSV1rn3pFKxigjksGDUWNkIJLr3WGEkKxdcGXKU4eM/s1600/Proyectos+033.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7bJXfRYxoYcErd6-H9w2O668oXAPOAwpEo8MvBTqKNiVVhcHCOO6gIAF4lAWRcaENyWfCLbb36lS56a5S8iMn-WntmRqWviaORSV1rn3pFKxigjksGDUWNkIJLr3WGEkKxdcGXKU4eM/s400/Proyectos+033.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Afternoon futbol practice (Juancho, Anyi, Indris, Yeiris, Merkin)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrP-DDXBIz8SIbq7362_xX1g8vJgEOKRzj8X8aHRheUsFA8R52OZch4iQw_onA5uEbXALDqNvtQIWZJxoOIb0IoSK9jR_c2IPdwZx4mkiEqvvjr3bEbLtWM-eZIssts4vWS5usmWT7epc/s1600/futbol+061.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrP-DDXBIz8SIbq7362_xX1g8vJgEOKRzj8X8aHRheUsFA8R52OZch4iQw_onA5uEbXALDqNvtQIWZJxoOIb0IoSK9jR_c2IPdwZx4mkiEqvvjr3bEbLtWM-eZIssts4vWS5usmWT7epc/s400/futbol+061.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watching futbol (Cesar, Mañe, Moyses, 2 from the next town).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfLRE5lIjdR8V4v1JMxOgUopE9v4-7FTnR-zvcOISHrroEdqjX0pvHjjNPtMou-GzG1jxXBsnq3bY6vsVzVypaqA5co5k2YLDkmLmOO4sODP2vmtehu38BqtiXnB6kvbTccy7PqbuEr6Q/s1600/Proyectos+014.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfLRE5lIjdR8V4v1JMxOgUopE9v4-7FTnR-zvcOISHrroEdqjX0pvHjjNPtMou-GzG1jxXBsnq3bY6vsVzVypaqA5co5k2YLDkmLmOO4sODP2vmtehu38BqtiXnB6kvbTccy7PqbuEr6Q/s400/Proyectos+014.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New rice (Luis)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqR7jL8hY887EY4XLU7_NLntRgFgNfD-pIMUvQxzTxrWrBCNTX3LWHD9lmxTGxDnVrqtUK0C9KY_gM8PSUBFHAP5L8Il8wHrfcs6TDnUsG8zbeEh5NbiVHWFGOktsUKHSc1w3lMoZaXpA/s1600/Proyectos+010.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqR7jL8hY887EY4XLU7_NLntRgFgNfD-pIMUvQxzTxrWrBCNTX3LWHD9lmxTGxDnVrqtUK0C9KY_gM8PSUBFHAP5L8Il8wHrfcs6TDnUsG8zbeEh5NbiVHWFGOktsUKHSc1w3lMoZaXpA/s400/Proyectos+010.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Husking corn for seed (Jorge)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-41517537468211626902012-08-19T19:18:00.003-07:002012-08-19T19:27:02.324-07:00Woman <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
are worth dying my hands black.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">Just
as I dug my heels into the sand as the creek rushed by,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">willing
myself not to be swept away and to listen with every gram of my being</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">-to
feel the word feathers-</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I
will dig my light fingers into your black hair, </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">tinting
it deeper, to match your height and bearing on horseback.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
laugh and ask if I want to be black- because it would be a step down-</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
I laugh and say why not- because at least I wouldn't feel like an
alien.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I
am spectating pain.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">The
girls strip to their shorts and lay in the water to listen.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I
gingerly step into the sand. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">(I
have just started to bathe in the river)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
sit, with your huge breasts tipping down toward the washing board</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">as
you pour water of ashes over the ripped clothes,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">scrubbing
and beating and rinsing and bleaching </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">until
they are cleaner than mine will ever be </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">(I
have just started to wash in the river)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
tell me of the day when your brother was taken</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">Pulled
from his wife's hands in front of his two small children</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">And
found with a bullet wound that split his skull in two</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">Your
sister speaks up</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">they
were never the same.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">We
saw him, but kept the coffin closed.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">No
one is ever the same.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
tell me of the day that you heard he had returned,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">rode
out proclaiming,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
came back to hear that he was dead.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">That
</span><span lang="es-CO">when his father lifted his broken body,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="es-CO">his
head fell to the dirt.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="es-CO">His
father works to the bone now.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
came back to see his wife's house taken apart</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
stacked at the side of the road, </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">as
your people lost the light in their eyes and began to leave their
land.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I
remember that my jaw dropped when I heard your womb had never held a
child.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">You
are a mother.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I
know from your seven daughters who look nothing like each other,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
I know from your long arms and Sabbath greetings</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
I know because you told me that you've never been able to stop
cooking huge meals</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">just
in case.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">And
I know, because you smoothed my back </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
grated onion with sugar, and tied the poultice on,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
with your strident prayer, you took the hands and voice</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">that
have been shaped by great pain,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">and
used them to heal a small pain,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">but
pain nonetheless.</span></div>
</div>
Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-65979849480412663302012-07-24T11:20:00.000-07:002012-07-24T11:21:09.402-07:00Fragility<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-66072839478183285272012-07-08T14:10:00.001-07:002012-07-08T14:11:39.311-07:00Fourth of July, a few days later<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My brother was just here
visiting <span lang="en-US">from the same U.S.A. </span>for a few
days, and besides the early morning cow-butchering and horseback trek
to visit someone<span lang="en-US">'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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US"><br /></span></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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? </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-40606716996856963552012-06-06T04:37:00.002-07:002012-06-06T04:37:14.829-07:00Things are happening..<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here are a few of those details that
bring hope to my work:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And finally, the last two details that are signs of hope...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My fridge was fixed. (Although, after
six months of room temperature water, I just can't drink it cold.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">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.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1e-pMc12g7IFjbA4TICzDWs4RBvgZRhXiYYNd_aBEoNHWqM0FGIzOTBz5OAUvN6Qy2yuaMpjLOn3edvq6N95Dmxtu2_cAMOYwS3W8krGaZsha2CnUiHVAqE2YWPr_q-dnPe6D0VC0M6U/s1600/sacha!.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1e-pMc12g7IFjbA4TICzDWs4RBvgZRhXiYYNd_aBEoNHWqM0FGIzOTBz5OAUvN6Qy2yuaMpjLOn3edvq6N95Dmxtu2_cAMOYwS3W8krGaZsha2CnUiHVAqE2YWPr_q-dnPe6D0VC0M6U/s320/sacha!.jpg" width="239" /></a><br />
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</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-73407812647106182182012-04-24T08:49:00.000-07:002012-04-24T08:49:12.619-07:00Free Food!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I think I<span lang="en-US">'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.)</span></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">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 </span>ñame
the day before, and the garden is producing all the vegetables
necessary <span lang="en-US">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.</span></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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...</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
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?</div>
</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-27498696362884139862012-04-24T08:45:00.000-07:002012-04-24T08:45:50.855-07:00Reflections after intense days of travel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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 Choc<span lang="es-CO">ó, </span><span lang="en-US">and
the Carribbean Coast in a space of two weeks. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US"></span></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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, <span lang="es-CO">connecting</span>
the work of the church <span lang="es-CO">with</span> 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?</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">Then we went to
Choc</span><span lang="es-CO">ó, </span><span lang="en-US">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.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US"></span></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en-US">I grappled with the
new information as we saw more of Choc</span><span lang="es-CO">ó
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. </span>
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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. </div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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.</div>
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</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-21286861562380822322012-02-20T10:04:00.000-08:002012-02-20T10:04:10.411-08:00Stiiiill camping!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Reasons why I <span lang="en-US">am on a two year camping trip:</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <br />
</div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">Bug bites. Unbelievable in their variation and constancy.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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. </span></span></span></span> </div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">I walk up and down the road looking for cell phone service.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">I cook on a gas-powered hot plate. </span></span></span></span> </div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">I am never fully clean, especially my feet.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">I wake up before the sunrise.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">Bats fly through my house at night, and lizards crawl on the walls during the day.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I still brush my teeth outside with a cup of water. </span></span></span> </div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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 o</span>ccasionally<span lang="en-US"> include</span>s<span lang="en-US"> four pounds of oatmeal).</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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 t</span>ossing your shoes when you get to the beach only to be attacked by<span lang="en-US"> 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.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <br />
</div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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. </span></span></span></span> </div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">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.</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div lang="es-CO" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">(PS. My fridge broke again. Peace out, folks.)</span></span></span></span></div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-77766785361248801722012-02-09T05:39:00.000-08:002012-02-09T05:39:16.517-08:00One big sigh.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-12200989338316945332011-12-15T09:44:00.000-08:002011-12-15T09:44:07.346-08:00three days of madness and inspiration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I have to write this down before the details slowly slip from my brain. So, on the morning after the craziest four days so far in Colombia (in my life?!), I'm going to give you all a rough sketch of what we were doing, and what actually happened:<br />
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One of my fellow SEEDers, Anna Vogt, is accompanying the community of Mampujan in their process of return to the land they were displaced from 12 years ago. Six years ago, Mampujan became the first and, to date, only, community in Colombia to receive a sentence under the Law of Justice and Peace. The sentence delineated specific reparations that the community would receive- like the establishment of basic services (electricity, a health clinic) in their now deserted town. There has been no follow-through, and the community is losing patience with the government's reluctance to admit wrong and give them what is rightfully theirs. So, they decided to march non-violently from the community to Cartagena (the capital of the department and the seat of the governor) to demand their complete reparation- not just bags of flour or a new house- but a dignified return to their land. <br />
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I came to participate and support Anna, and also to help out with the logistics, as the complexity of helping over 400 men, women, and children walk 72 kilometers (and feeding them for three days) was huge, and also handled by a team of about 10 people, mostly from SembrandoPaz, my partner organization. Here is where the craziness started, and here is where I begin listing things, because it's too much for details.<br />
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Pre-march day:<br />
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wake up afraid that I won't be able to leave the community because of the massive rainstorm the day before and the deteriorating road, but a truck and two buses later, I arrive in Mampujan<br />
realization that most of the logistics were finally organized THAT MORNING<br />
two hour search for firewood and pots for cooking<br />
hugs for the highly stressed Anna and Jes, who have been working on this for weeks already<br />
hugs for the incredible community leaders, who are handling a thousand details<br />
distributing of food for 400 between 12 cooks for dinner the next day<br />
discovery that we don't have nearly enough water for everyone<br />
search for hammock (which I had forgotten to bring)<br />
sleep at 11<br />
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Day 1:<br />
up at 3:15 to load the cargo trucks that will come with us- with food, cooking pots, firewood, water and the bags/mattresses/hammocks of the marchers<br />
distribution of signs and wristbands<br />
marchers depart at 4am, walking on one side of the road, accompanied by police traffic control in front and behind<br />
we depart at 5, after tying a thousand last minute loose ends<br />
catch up with the marchers, walk until breakfast at nine, trying to keep people walking at the same pace so they don't spread out along a long stretch of road (impossible)<br />
are joined by the Guardia Indigena de la Pista (an indigenous group that provides an alternative to the traditional police force in non-violent crowd control, organization, and security for the march for the next few days. seriously the most amazing group I've ever worked with- ceaselessly calm, uncomplaining, hardworking, motivated, and fiercely proud of their identity)<br />
arrive for breakfast (packed and carried by the marchers) in the parking lot of a gas station, joined by members of other communities also affected by the sentence<br />
joined by several hippie NGO workers<br />
sun comes out- HOT! not enough water!<br />
people start to lose patience and either walk way faster or slower than their counterparts- we get super spread out, try to reunite, basically impossible<br />
it starts to rain, rains for an hour while we walk<br />
(I'm marching but in the meantime, the other SEEDers (3 of them) and Jes are running around like crazy people getting dinner set up and organizing the break stop)<br />
1:30: break stop under a bridge, passing out scalding plastic cups of coffee and bread to 400 people who do not want to make a line<br />
more walking<br />
3:00: finally arrive, way behind schedule although we have been walking quickly, at lunch stop, exhausted after 11 hours of walking<br />
decide to bus folks to the night rest stop (after realizing that it would be another 5 hours of walking)<br />
arrive to see 12 cooks spread out in courtyard, cooking massive amounts of food over wood fires, applaud them<br />
frantically run to buy more water (water in school not potable)<br />
don't sit down for the next five hours running errands<br />
usher people to the nurse for Band-aids and pain reliever pills<br />
Guardia has a mediation session with the bus driver after he tells them that he won't let them sleep in the bus like he said he would- he relents<br />
I eat two bites of dinner and then the donation from the mayor of Cartagena arrives- a THOUSAND small but heavy bags of food (tuna, spaghetti, flour, cornmeal...)<br />
move all the bags from one truck to another<br />
run frantically to buy more water, buy the store out<br />
brush my teeth and wash my face<br />
hang hammocks at 11, eaten by bugs for the next 3.5 hours while we try to sleep<br />
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Day 2:<br />
2:30: up to wake up cooks to start breakfast at 3<br />
divide breakfast supplies<br />
unload and unpack 350 of the bags of food received yesterday, repack some of the food into portions for lunch and dinner the next day<br />
manage 30 children who are helping (and doing a tremendous job)<br />
finish at 6, load heavy bags back in truck<br />
frantically look for more water for the cooks<br />
drink a very deserved and delicious cafe con leche<br />
cooks wash all of their enormous cooking pots (seriously, these ladies are impressive)<br />
simultaneously load bags, cooking pots, and bricks used to hold pots over fire (still hot!) onto trucks, usher people into the road to start marching, pick up huge amounts of trash / sweep (one of the community leaders single-handedly cleans the over-used bathrooms), load a huge amount of bags of water into another truck, run up and down line of people giving out water, help cooks onto another bus that will take them to the next site to cook lunch...<br />
MOVE OUT! to march on Cartagena<br />
wave to news crews<br />
cooks revolt, decide to stay with march instead of going to cook early- we are excited that they want to march but worried about lunch timing- decide to march with them for an hour<br />
singing! chanting! provoking huge traffic jams!<br />
buses of passing people curiously read our signs and give us the thumbs up<br />
hop on bus to take cooks to lunch site- sure enough, we barely get lunch done on time<br />
500-600 people arrive exhausted, eat lunch, then re-mobilize to march to the center city<br />
we turn around lunch cleanup to dinner prep in an hour, find replacements for two cooks who have decided not to cook anymore<br />
run to center city to catch up with marchers<br />
cry upon seeing the long lines of farmers, laborers, victims, rural folks, Afro-Colombians with aching feet... entering rich Cartagena with its white tourists and designer stores<br />
cry upon seeing Afro-Colombians still demanding rights and liberation as they walk past the site where the slave trade used to take place, where their ancestors were sold centuries ago<br />
shout with triumph and exhaustion- quienes somos? desplazados! que exigimos? reparacion! ("who are we?" "displaced people!" "what do we demand?" "reparation!") as we walk along the sea walls to the central plaza<br />
stand yelling in central plaza until they come out to talk<br />
governor addresses crowd on balcony, calls meeting with 10 community leaders<br />
we wait until the end of the meeting, in which they establish that there will be a public panel dialogue the next morning to talk about demands<br />
bus people back to rest site, eat two bites of dinner while running errands (try to ignore blisters and swollen feet)<br />
realize that the bread and milk tentatively promised from one NGO will not arrive for breakfast<br />
run to store to buy milk, refuse to pay too much to a taxi to take us back, carry milk, drop milk, another taxi driver is compassionate and takes us for less money<br />
11pm: nowhere to hang hammock, sleep on cement floor until...<br />
<br />
Day 3!<br />
4am: up for breakfast organizing<br />
5am: leave to try to buy a thousand rolls/pieces of bread from nearby bakeries. they are surprised, we buy about 300 and head back while others keep searching<br />
6:30am: breakfast- mad rush for bread, no lines, nowhere near enough<br />
7:30: more bread arrives, no lines, not quite enough because some people took way more than they should have, some people are very angry about not getting bread, we secretly buy more and pass it to them individually. we eat one egg and three bites of bread each for breakfast.<br />
folks leave on buses for plaza<br />
we figure out lunch supplies (also what to do because three cooks are now missing, but the other wonderful ladies decide to chip in and cook their portions)<br />
run to central plaza to join march<br />
pay way too much for a very necessary coffee<br />
realize that the governor is now both reluctant to have a public meeting and to show his face to the waiting people<br />
waiting people become angry after governor only offers to let 100 people into the meeting, refuses to go<br />
we plan a potential storming of the offices, idea is nixed by our boss because it isn't legal/non-violent<br />
finally, they agree to let the whole community in<br />
meeting begins, but we are all so exhausted that the community leaders have some trouble finding focus, many are waiting outside, and Anna and I cry frequently<br />
in the first statement of the meeting, one of the community leaders starts crying at the enormity of what they have accomplished and the enormity of their need for justice, and the whole crowd follows him into tears and encourages him to keep going<br />
Governor shows up really late, but agrees to the community demand of establishing a working group to nail down a detailed plan to address the specific demands of the reparation- first meeting is planned in Mampujan for next Friday. meeting adjourned<br />
3:00pm: utterly exhausted, we wait for the last bus, while the other folks go ahead of us to organize lunch and transport back- by the time we arrive, there is scarcely any lunch left, so I do damage control with the frustrated folks and find them enough to eat<br />
three hours of madness- packing, cleaning, carrying food, finding band-aids, trying to organize the extra buses that the governor has agreed to pay for, passing out the packs of food donated by the mayor's office, people wait on the buses (voluntarily), getting hotter and more frustrated by the half-hour<br />
some of the funding hasn't been transferred through bank accounts yet so we all empty all of our accounts (it still isn't enough to completely pay the bus drivers)<br />
buses finally arrive<br />
6:30pm: finally leave as it starts to rain (have not planned dinner)<br />
8:30pm: arrive in Mampujan, unload the mountain of leftover food and all the bags, congratulate all the folks that are so relieved to be home and proud of their work....head out!<br />
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BUT, that isn't the end. Half an hour down the road, we hit a donkey, crack the radiator, are stranded on the side of the road for two hours (with some nice policemen), literally so tired that we are falling down, find a car, are towed to the next town, sleep for three hours in a hotel, I find out that I am unable to get back to my village today, and thus end up in Sincelejo at 8:30 in the morning. I shower, and am finally able to relax. I'll head to my real house at 4 tomorrow morning. Wow.<br />
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That's the story. I hope that you can understand some of the madness and all of the beauty that made it all worth it- blisters, dehydration, stress and exhaustion. Learning about organization. Walking for rights with the displaced community of Mampujan. Demanding to been seen, listened to, treated with dignity. What an incredible experience. I hope you are as inspired as I am, and not nearly as exhausted.<br />
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</div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-53137271280239182822011-11-30T11:16:00.000-08:002011-11-30T11:16:52.540-08:00'bout time I told you about my job...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I suppose it's time to write about my work, actually. I've been introducing you to my community (although the lack of cell phone/Internet capabilities there makes my descriptions few and far between), but haven't explained anything about what I actually live there to <i>do</i>. As I'm leaving Internet land again tomorrow and I have a million things on my to-do list, I'm going to make you a list. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Basically, I work with a group called SembrandoPaz (Sowing Peace) that has been a peace and social justice resource for communities affected by the armed conflict on the Carribbean Coast. Most of the communities they work with are displaced- either in the process of return of to their former land or post-return and trying to rebuild their former security and stability. This basically adds up to a focus on human dignity: attempting to rebuild the fractured social fabric through processes focused on dignity. Here's a list of some large and small things that make up that wide vision.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Productive projects: these are agricultural projects that focus on supporting people to work the land again. Because of the Free Trade Agreement and climate change and a zillion other factors that make this region vulnerable, a lot of my current focus is on food security. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Example: The community is frequently left isolated by the rain, meaning that basic food/supplies can't get in. I'm working with several projects that intend to produce things normally imported. One job: I've been sitting around, laughing, teasing and planning a chicken raising project with four young women from the community. It'll incorporate both mass market chickens because they generate capital faster and local, strurdy Criollo chickens, with the hope to eventually phase toward the local chickens. They are about to sign the loan and get started!</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Securing farming as a lifestyle: this is part of my job, no big deal. Seriously though, the world over small-scale farming is becoming more and more insecure (working on an article about the role of the FTA in all this, stay tuned). We're trying to support and validate small-scale efforts, attempting to make small-scale more viable as the temptation is to sell out, look for work in the city, or shift to cash crops instead of food production. One of the related strategies is funding/encouraging seed saving- to build up the ability of farmers to continue to produce food, year by year, without needing to use their few resources to purchase new seed. I've been hiking up and down steep hills of <span lang="es-CO">ñame plants </span><span lang="en-US">(described in the last post), checking in on the farmers, making sure they are saving seed, encouraging them, etc. I love this part of my job, especially because it means that I know almost everyone in my community and can stop them in the street to ask about their crops. We have great early morning conversations about rain, market prices, and the quality of </span><span lang="es-CO">ñame. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Women's empowerment: I just wrote an article for the SEED publication about my community and it has a lot in it about gender roles- I'll post that soon, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice it to say that the community is very machista- women always have the second say, and have no choice or way to look for change in their work. It's their place to hand wash laundry, supposedly, and that's the way it'll stay. This is where I have to be the most clever. In a male-dominated community, if I start talking about liberation and mujerismo (womanism), I will likely alienate the men and make enemies fast, for both me and the women in the community. We have to look for ways to reinforce empowering ideas/skills/attitudes in culturally-appropriate spaces. As I work with the women on the chicken project, their husbands are also occasionally present. It's a small thing, but I always direct my attention, questions, and ideas to the women, never to the men. Chicken raising is a gender-appropriate job for women, but they have rarely been in control of the planning, finances, and organization. Having a women-only project is a way of giving them some decision-making power that they desperately need. Also, when I get back, I'm planning a bread-baking workshop for women in the community, as a space for us to get together and start building community outside of kids/husbands. We're going to make naan bread over wood fires.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Hanging out: Literally, hanging in my hammock or hanging around drinking cups of sweet coffee with the neighbors. One of the things that we're finding in our communities is that people are acting on such a level of necessity that there is little time or energy to reflect. Mouths need to be fed, which means early to the fields, hard days, lots of household labor: energy spent on the basics. It's a very reactive pattern- people are so occupied by basic necessities that there is little space to reflect and plan for long term action. I see a lot of my job as hanging out and talking with people, giving them the chance to reflect on their experiences and daily life and wonder about the future. I ask people how they feel about living close to their families, having children so young, not having gardens anymore, gender roles... I ask, paraphrase, process, reflect, encourage.</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And the last part of my job- animando, or encouraging: Most of my friends/neighbors/community members are just tired out. They've endured the horrible trauma of displacement and return to empty land and the incredible task of rebuilding. Often, their attitude is a sort of an “it is what it is” feeling. Corruption, violence, individualism, rich robbing from the poor, flooding... these things happen, and there isn't very much you can do about it. So why try? I'll explain more as I explore this feeling in the community in the coming months. For now, one of my jobs is working with a group of young men (I call them The Dude Men in English because they are really into their fashion, hair styles, and being cool) to start a fish farming project. Most of them work a small amount of land or hire out for other farmers, but are frustrated at their dependence on the “old people,” as they call their parents, and lack of options. Our first meeting, I sat with them and asked them a few questions about what their goals were, then struggled to keep up as they threw out ideas, work plans, and started to organize their project. I cheer them on (and remind them of the importance of organization and follow-through). </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">These are my jobs! I'm working on a framework of values/principles so I can feel more centered in my work, but for now, this is what I understand. Of course, my job is so dependent on the community's goals, desires, styles, processes....that I often find myself in balance-and-adapt mode. We'll see how it changes in the coming months.</div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-54753335047795155502011-11-09T12:58:00.000-08:002011-11-09T12:58:44.810-08:00I have rain boot tan lines (late October post)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Rain has been my constant, frustrating companion and patient teacher these last four weeks. Yesterday we had the blessed break of a sunny afternoon, but most days have been the gray of thick clouds and the brown of muddy paths. Winter here means rain and lots of it, but I can't help but attribute some of the excessive downpours to the chaos of climate change. I think about all of the rich farming regions of the world and how they are bewilderingly trying to adapt to less or more rain, like this village of farmers who dig their living out of the mud. I have been both despairing of and thankful for the rain these days, but I have been constantly reminded how important and defining the rain is for this region. I'm going to share a few stories of the reality of life here, on the rainy days.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Yesterday, I accompanied six campesinos to, literally, dig their living out of the mud. We were pulling out <span lang="es-CO">ñame, a giant white root that is probably in the yam family </span><span lang="en-US">and the most common food here. The organization with which I'm working, SembrandoPaz, started a seed-saving project last year, in which they give out a sack of seed in agreement that the farmer will demonstrate that they have saved at least the same amount of seed at the end of the season. My job is to check in on the farmers to make sure they are “capando,” or pulling out the root to eat or sell but leaving the vine to grow seed. Because </span><span lang="es-CO">ñame </span><span lang="en-US">grows best at high altitudes, this collective of farmers (12 in total) pooled their seeds to plant high up in the mountains. In other words, we set out early for a two hour trek, crossing the river twice and walking through a stream for at least half the time. We all rode, some mules, some donkeys. This was the only day in the last two weeks that the journey was possible, because of the mud and the swollen river. After a dry day and night, the river had decreased some, but it was still hip-deep where we crossed. We had to dismount for the last mile or so of the trip, to let the animals struggle up and down steep, muddy hill faces. We finally arrived to do the same steep, sliding work on the </span><span lang="es-CO">ñame </span><span lang="en-US">fields. They are almost vertical faces, planted with vines. The work is to find where the vines enter the ground, cut off the vine, and dig/lever/haul out the root (average size was 10 pounds) with a pointed stick. After four hours of standing on the steep banks bent over digging and hauling out roots, the men (with my small contribution) had accumulated about 16 50-kilo sacks of </span><span lang="es-CO">ñame, </span><span lang="en-US">about 1900 pounds in total. The animals hauled out 12 of those sacks and we walked out in our rain boots. Imagine, a donkey fighting for purchase on a muddy, vertical path, loaded with an additional 240 pounds of </span><span lang="es-CO">ñame, </span><span lang="en-US">with us following them, urging them on. The work is downright hard, made even harder by the constant rains. </span> </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The day before, I had enjoyed my morning coffee watching out the front window at the road. The week before had been vacations for the schools, so many of the teenagers studying in Sincelejo had come home to visit. Because of near constant rain for three days, the river was neck deep in places and running fast. No trucks had been able to cross it, so the only way to get in or out was walking or riding. That morning, I watched about a hundred donkeys and horses, laden with sacks of yucca or ripe avocadoes, walking out. The crops had been ready to ship out but sat slowly spoiling as they waited for the trucks. I also watched the teenagers, after missing two days of classes, riding out with their backpacks. </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Shipping things in is equally difficult. When the trucks can't get in, the local stores, who depend on the same few trucks for everything, slowly run out- of meat first, then cheese and sugar, even rice. A few folks went on donkeys to fetch their orders, which had gotten stuck downriver, returning with wet sacks of cigarettes and limp vegetables. </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">School was out for an extra week as well, since the teachers have to cross the river three times to reach the school. We scheduled a community meeting, but the rain came exactly ten minutes before and stayed for two hours. No one came, logically, because the road had turned into a swamp. Today was election day, and solid rain for four hours in the morning must have been discouraging for the politicians. I watched several people going to vote, walking with towels or plastic bags on their heads, carrying their shoes. Most rode, but many stayed home. (The ironic part was that the road was so bad that the government had to helicopter the vote-collectors in. You think they would realize that the road condition really is dire.) The rain is also discouraging or encouraging for the crops, depending on what is growing. It's impossible to predict how much it will rain a given rainy season (last year, for example, it rained for 10 months straight), so most farmers guess for the best. Right now, those who planted rice are delighted, while others with corn, sesame and </span><span lang="es-CO">ñ</span><span lang="en-US">ame are worried. The crops are drowning, they say. </span> </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's a tricky game- guessing when the rain will or won't come. When to do laundry, when to travel, when to order more rice, when to pick avocadoes. The other game that comes hand in hand is guessing when the electricity will go out. Usually it goes along with the rain, although sometimes on a sunny day it will blink out surprisingly. Today, I woke to rain for the next four hours, and had a hankering to do some rainy-day things- finish writing this blog post, for example, and bake bread. Unfortunately, both require electricity-for the computer and my toaster oven. I wondered for the first few hours if the power would go out, playing with the idea of putting bread to rise (if the power went out, I couldn't have even put it in the fridge to wait, since the fridge also turns off). When it didn't, I went ahead. I'm still crossing my fingers as it rises. </div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As I've said, I'm learning a lot. I'm learning not to try to get something done even though it looks like rain, because you might get stuck across the river overnight. I'm learning to ask people if they think it will keep raining. To take advantage of electricity when I have it. To give thanks that I bought a gas-not electric- stove. To understand why people miss meetings. To consider learning to cook bread over an open fire. To appreciate when the power goes out and the neighbors can't crank their soundsystem. To sit around and simply talk as the rain pounds on the tin or palm roof. To slow down, a little, although I'm not sure I'll ever learn that quite like the folks here. </div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-22767908675883425032011-10-02T14:41:00.001-07:002011-10-02T14:41:31.180-07:00Bienvenida a la comunidad!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Well. This is the town I'm going to live in for the next almost two years. I've been grappeling with this realization for the last week, which has been full of many strange and beautiful encounters with Ca<span lang="es-CO">ño Berruguita. </span><span lang="en-US">I feel inept at presenting an in-depth view with my few observations, but I do think I can sketch some things out. I think I'll just make a list- bear with the disjointedness, please.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">Most of you probably picked up on my frustration as my arrival here was delayed a week. There are a few obvious truths about this place- one is that the road is simply terrible. As it was raining everyday the week I tried to leave, I waited and waited but couldn't leave. I finally put my foot down and picked a date to leave. Although it didn't rain the day before, on the way up the trucks in front of us repeatedly got stuck and had to haul each other out of the river/mud/road ruts. My truck didn't get stuck, because my driver is awesome at lurching around on this track. Luckily, we arrived, although I couldn't move any of my things. I have been sleeping in a hammock, living out of a backpack, and eating at the neighbors' this last week. Rain willing, I will move the rest of my things (think kitchen, bed, fan, books) next week.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">I live in a small, comfortable house with a tin roof and lizards crawling on the walls. I have a bathroom with running water that isn't connected yet, so I've been hauling water. Moving in has been a small view of how different time and schedules are here. People are excellent at saying that things have to be done (for those of you who speak Spanish, that means a lot of “hay que...” and “claro”), and less good at follow-through. For instance, people kept agreeing that we had to move out the stove, washing machine, bags of compost, and various other things stored in my house, but five days after coming, they were still there. I enlisted the various children around (who are my new and dear friends) to help me move stuff out, after which we threw buckets of soapy water around my house to clean it, using the mop handles as microphones to sing the bits we could remember of Coste</span><span lang="es-CO">ñan </span><span lang="en-US">(from the coast of Colombia) love songs. So many people stopped by and apologetically said that they had meant to do this for me, but ran out of time. I shrugged and made a mental note that it might be hard to get things done quickly here.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">My house is built on the land of an excellent family- the matriarch is Dorca, son is Ivan, grandson is Merkin, and nephew is Tingito. What I should really say is that I live in the town of an excellent family- Dorca is one of 12 or so siblings and has 12 children herself, as do most of her siblings. One of her brothers has nineteen kids. As such, EVERYONE is related to Dorca. Most everyone addresses her as Aunt Dorca, which could be understood as a nickname, except that it's 99% true. Anyway, they and Anyi, an 11-year-old neighbor girl, have been my guides, family, conversation partners, and explainers of how things work here. Anyi hung her hammock in my house so I didn't have to sleep alone the first week, and loves to hear me read out loud in English. Merkin likes telling ghost stories and today fetched water on a donkey. Ivan eats more at dinner than I thought was humanly possible, but then again he spends all day pulling up </span><span lang="es-CO">ñ</span><span lang="en-US">ame (more on this later) or sowing corn in the hot sun. Dorca is totally in control of the family (often this means the community, as before noted), and spends all day cooking, explaining how life works, and generally being a steady and stalwert lady. Tingito is also a most interesting character. He lost his left arm and part of his left foot about 6 years ago, but still continues to farm. Incidentally, the coast calls its own variation of Spanish </span><span lang="es-CO">Costeño, </span><span lang="en-US">and it's generally much faster- and people don't pronouce many of the letters. Tingito is the hardest to understand of anyone I've met so far, and by the way, the person who has taken it upon himself to show me around the whole town! After a week of hanging out, I understand about 65% of what he says. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">Another wonderful part of this week has been eating with the aforementioned family. Wonderful because I get to spend very comfortable, natural time with them. Tricky because they somehow think I should eat as much as Ivan, who, as I said before, works all day farming. I work all day visiting. I do not need to eat a mixing bowl of rice. Also, the most common foods are </span><span lang="es-CO">ñ</span><span lang="en-US">ame, yuca, and plantains, all slightly different types of white starch- the first two are giant white roots. Breakfast is a plate of one of these things, usually with a chunk of cheese and some sweet, sweet coffee. Lunch is a plate of a different one, probably with meat. Dinner is rice with a salad of vegetables or more meat. It's been an overwhelming amount of the same thing, but now that I'm in Sincelejo cooking vegetarian with my fellow SEEDers, I actually miss my plates of boiled white roots.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">As most of you are probably wondering why I'm fooling around having adventures and not working, I'll fill you in on that a bit too. My main work will be working with the Consejo Comunitario (community council) on projects that empower and reinforce community and help work to overcome the devastation of the desplacement. This will probably mean various agricultural projects related to accessing materials, technology, and knowledge and organizing growing cooperatives and collective projects like vegetable gardens. It may also mean things as wide-ranged as seed saving, a women's group, computer lessons, and documenting stories. For now, the critical work is getting to know the community. I can't work with them or advocate for them until I know them. This has meant chopping plantains, sowing sesame seeds, hiking through steep fields and talking about diseases that attack the avocado, swimming in the river, hearing stories about the displacement, calling two meetings of the Consejo, and taking care of babies. It's varied and exciting, but difficult also to wrap my head around the fact that my job is to accompany this community in the process of empowerment and resilience. What on earth will that look like for the next two years?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span lang="en-US">I'll leave you with that. Sorry this is so rushed, but I am trying to take advantage of the internet in myriad ways this weekend, so I still have a lot to do. For those of you who don't know, I have an internet device that works only with cell signal- and the only place in the community with signal is on top of a high hill behind the neighbor's house. It's beautiful but not exactly convenient, so I'm likely going to be out of contact for the next month. I hope to catch up with those of you I can for now, but also ask for patience as I sort this out. I am so grateful for the support from home in this crazy time of adjustment, and hope I can keep you all updated as much as possible. </span> </div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-23304271487610445622011-09-14T09:57:00.000-07:002011-09-14T09:59:24.439-07:00Contrastes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm writing this at 8 am, because I couldn't sleep anymore. It's hot already and the motos have been driving loudly past my open window since 6ish. Right now is also about the only time that it's comfortable to drink a cup of coffee also, seeing as it will be about 90 degrees by nine or ten. Ah, life on the coast has begun. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's astounding how different the basics are here. I've been thinking a lot about contrasts recently. As much as I enjoyed the orientation time in Bogota- for the amount of information from incredible sources and the time exploring the city with my fellow Seeders- I found myself feeling frustrated and purposeless the weeks ticked on. Why we were sitting in an office and spending money in coffeeshops if our eventual purpose is living and working with communities, all of which live at a much lower standard of living than we were? Why were we listening to one lecture after another when the best lecturers will be our neighbors in our communities? How do I adjust personally from living in the largest city I've ever lived in- to living in the smallest town? I think the most pertinent question was- why can't I just get going, get to the community, and start doing what I prepared to do?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">(Momentary break to run downstairs and buy bananas from the man pushing his cart of fruits and vegetables up the street. This place is fantastic.)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course, there is a logical counterweight to all of these frustrations, which was something I could articulate when I felt purposeful. It was indisputably important that we get the big picture of what is happening in Colombia and how our work as Seeders is all connected. I would also be floundering if I hadn't been supported in work and friendship by the rest of our team for those months, and I'm ceaselessly grateful for that. But overall, I think the clearest result of our time in Bogota was a vision of the contrasts that exist in Colombia, in lifestyle, in peace work, in ourselves... Living in Bogota, as frustrating as it was, was an enduring lesson in the importance of contrast.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of them- Bogota has sections that look like the upscale section of any major city in the US. You can buy a full lunch (soup, rice, plantain, salad, meat, and juice) for 2-4 dollars, but there were whole sections that I, as an upper middle class US citizen, could never afford. The public transportation was like a metro in an large city, packed with young businesspeople in their black powersuits, heading to work at the multinational banks or businesses downtown. However, there are vast neighborhoods within and on the borders of the town where people don't have consistent electricity or running water. There are powerful contrasts within the city, for sure, but there are also slap-in-the-face contrasts with where we are now. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Sincelejo, the capital of Sucre, a department on the coast, has no natural industry. There is no factory network and few large businesses, and one of the largest employers for young men (many displaced from farming communities in the region) is moto-taxi driving, where many are trapped paying rent for their motos that they can barely make up in a day of driving around the city. Most of the streets fade to dirt or are full of potholes. It's poor, in short, and there simply aren't options for work for young people- university? Think again. Taking a step further out- my community, Ca<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">ñ</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">o Berrugita (which is a community within Macayepo, a region) lies at the end of 2 hours of terrible road. When it rains, only massive trucks can get up the road because all of the ruts fill with water and churn into a muddy mess. There's electricity, but no cell phone service. No hospital, or clinic, or nurses. A fellow Seeder, Leonel, lives in a town unaccessible by more than boat or moto because the roads are also horrible. The government has promised electricity, but has been beyond slow in following through. An hour from Cartagena, the tourist base camp and recently much-publicized new face of Colombia, is Mampujan, where Anna will be living, a community of desplaced people than lives crammed into a tiny piece of land on the side of the main road. I could give example after example of the contrasts within Bogota and between Bogota and the coast, but I'll settle for just one more. There are no funky coffeeshops in Sincelejo, and there is only one store in Macayepo. How can Colombia be considering a newly booming economy if 47% of its population lives below the poverty line? Contrast.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another contrast we've been struck with over and over: It's gorgeous on the coast. We've tried a different fruit juice everyday, most I've never heard of, and most of which grow in my backyard in Macayepo, which incidentally produces almost all of the avocadoes eaten in Colombia (and exported). On Sunday, we went to an isolated strench of beach and swam in the Carribbean ocean, drank fresh coconut water and rested under stately palm trees. From the roof of the office, we can see the sun set in orange, purple and yellow splendor every evening, with thunderclouds in the distance turning red around the edges. Anywhere we drive, we see rolling green hills with stately trees and healthy cattle herds. The soil is so rich they say that you just have to throw a seed on the ground and it'll grow. We have to remember why we are here, though. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Beauty means desirability. Just ten years ago, the region was devasted by a series of massacres in the rural communities, largely carried out by paramilitary groups. Why here? Beaches mean ports and the Carribbean means access to the powerful drug routes through Mexico to the consumers in the US. You can trace a line from massacre to massacre and see that the targeted communities lie right along a prime drug traffiking route through the mountains to the port. Many of the communities displaced, meaning that even as I watch the sunset over Sincelejo, I can see the neighborhoods on the margins- 30% of Sincelejo is made up of displaced people, which makes so many things difficult- unemployment, petty crime, available services. Rich soil also means perfect grazing land for many hugely wealthy landowning families who have snapped up the land left by displaced people for their massive plantations. In many cases, paramilitary groups were formed as private security groups for these families or used by large corporations and the local government to intentionally displace people to make way for palm oil or sugar cane plantations. Constrast: beauty doesn't only mean perfect Carribbean paradise, but it also holds hands with devastation.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The way I'm feeling about finally being on the coast is also quite a few contrasting emotions. There are four of us here working: Larisa, Will, Anna, and Leonel, and Jes, one of our leaders, who will be living in Sincelejo. We're all camping out at Jes' now and doing a second phase of orientation with our partner group, SembrandoPaz. We are living in communities fairly far from each other, but will reunite here once a month for team meetings and collaboration. Our orientation ends this Friday and I'll pack up my newly acquired kitchen supplies, mattress, and backpack and move (provided it doesn't rain) out to Macayepo. From the little time we've been here, I can say a few things for sure. Above all, I'm delighted to be out of the city and into the hot, green, growing, open coast. So many cloudy days in Bogota were disheartening for me, and I've been drinking in the changes here- from hammocks to enjoying cold showers to borojo/zapote/guayaba/corozo juice. Macayepo also reminds me (almost alarmingly) of Nimule, South Sudan, where I spent a summer a few years ago. At the least, the lifestyle is very similar, which means I'll be living with the necessary and working hard. I'm quite excited to try to live in that way again. I know no matter what I do, I am talking from a place of comparably infinite privilege, but I'm excited to cook over a wood fire, walk (or ride a donkey) miles to surrounding farms, wash my clothes in the river, and learn about growing yuca. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The contrast- it's all scary and overwhelming. The town is small and so, so isolated. The living is hard, and the social fabric is fractured into many pieces. The community has resettled only its original land, but it's barely ten years after the massacre and displacement and so much was lost. I can get excited about living and being there, but I haven't the slightest clue how to step into community processes of seeking reparation, mediating disputes between churches/paramilitary allies and victims/leaders in the community/youth and their families, establishing land rights, or even pushing for a new road to get the avocadoes to market. It's a lot right now.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I suppose overall I'm hoping that I can remember how much contrast can teach us. It would be easy to say how excited I am to be here, or how beautiful the beach is, or how destroyed Colombia is by the drug trade, but it's much more real to talk about the contrasts: the wealth and lack of options, the beauty and destruction, and the excitement and fear. There is much more life in the middle space between the poles, and I just hope I can hold onto both ends, and the reality that reality, en la Costa, is quite complex.</span></div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-91753854516085426832011-08-21T14:35:00.000-07:002011-08-21T14:35:24.195-07:00Mama God<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This morning, I decided to do church on my own. I've had an interesting relationship with church over the last few years. I have been blessed to find inspiration and support in various communities outside of church, especially at EMU. Over and over, I found myself seeing and talking about God in conversations over dinner with my housemates, as we read poetry for our prayers, or in classes as we talked about love and vulnerability, or on the porches of our neighbors, as we shared healing stories of grace and the sacred feminine, in response to the terrible truths we also encounters together. Church, then, has been an additional space, but far from the only space where I find God. More often than not, I also feel like a spectator, rather than a contributor in churches. I enjoy spectating, but when I take time to intentionally think about and interact with God on my own or with others outside of an organized space, I find myself much more moved and connected with God. And so, this morning I took a break from spectating and thought.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A dear woman-friend shared this poem with a small group of women several months ago:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><br />
</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Bakerwoman God</b><br />
Bakerwoman God,<br />
I am your living bread.<br />
Strong, brown, Bakerwoman God,<br />
I am your low, soft and<br />
being-shaped loaf.<br />
I am your rising bread, well kneaded<br />
by some divine<br />
and knotty pair of knuckles,<br />
by your warm, earth hands.<br />
I am bread well kneaded.<br />
<br />
Put me in your fire,<br />
Bakerwoman God,<br />
put me in your warm, bright fire.<br />
I am warm, warm as you from fire.<br />
I am white and gold,<br />
soft and hard,<br />
brown and round.<br />
I am so warm from fire.<br />
<br />
Break me, Bakerwoman God.<br />
I am broken under your caring Word.<br />
Bakerwoman God,<br />
remake me.<br />
- Alla Bozarth Campbell</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This morning, I baked bread, and prayed to Bakerwoman God. I've been thinking about women so much recently- about the impact that countless women have had on my life, and about both the suffering many quietly endure and the endless fountains of strength they find. And yesterday, another dear woman-friend asked me how I had encountered Mama God's "untamed edgelessness" here in Colombia. And so- here is a prayer, for women.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mama God,</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thank you for the baker women in my life.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for my mother, and grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, who have been baking bread for all of us. thank you for making my mom's bread always turn out better than mine, because it reminds me that there is wisdom in her years of hard work. thank you for my favorite childhood memory- warm oatmeal bread and homemade strawberry jam. thank you for a home, and thank you that this year, you watered the grain my mom planted. thank you for gardens.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for my sister, and the constant reminder that we grow from difference, especially when we reach across and share.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for Mama Carolina, Jua and Agnes, who knew that they could transform their gender-decided place in the kitchen into a powerful cooking pot of female strength. thank you for the simple combination of yeast, flour, water, and salt. thank you that kneading can be done in any language. thank you that women pass wisdom through their strong shoulders that carry the water, and their palms that knead, and their rhythmic steps in the Sudanese dust. thank you for blanketing us in the same stars. thank you for crossing borders.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for Arundati Roy, Anais Mitchell, and Andrea Gibson, who remind me to speak.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for Marvat, and the radical hospitality she shows to the enemy. thank you for the simple resistance of sharing warm pita together in an occupied land.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for Maria, and her graceful stubborn belief in the power of children, dirt and plants, mixed well and watered. thank you for Amanda, who heals us all with her gentleness and listening wisdom. thank you for Meg, and the way she sees brokenness and wholeness at the same time. thank you for Emma, and her sense of ecosystem and wild beauty. thank you for Hannah, who reminds me to love myself even from far away, by putting a painting of naked dancing women on her wall. thank you for Jess and her boundless, encompassing, comforting joy. thank you for Greta and her sense of self. thank you for Chrissy and her honest, unflinching search for connection. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for the many, many women of EMU. thank you for giving them the wisdom to challenge even the definition of woman. thank you for the conversations behind the counter at the coffeeshop and the library. thank you for the tattoos and the poems. thank you for the fierce denial of other definitions. thank you for spirit-chasing.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for the baker women I have met here in Colombia. thank you for the women who believe in bringing peace through determined solidarity and know that that often means just sitting together. thank you for good food, and laughter over the table.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for the Senora, who reminds me that bread is what Jesus chose to give us life, to prove the universal truth of abundance and enough.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for incredible generosity, of giving your gifts to all humans, men and women. thank you for not having eyes that define through gender, even though we are so determined with our boxes. thank you for men.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for the wide arms of the ocean.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you for my body, my soul, and my heart. thank you for waking me up every morning, and giving me the strength to carry on.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you, Shenandoah, river and mountains. I know your reckless daughters make you proud.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and Mama God, I have so many questions.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">why, Mama, have I heard so many stories of women, especially here in Colombia, being beaten by their husbands? why here? how do we stand up and say no? why do we still blame women- for being unfaithful, for being provocative, for being anything less than virginal perfection? </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">why, Mama, are women's bodies the battlefields for so many wars of power? why is there a logic of rape? when did it become a weapon? when will we learn that our bodies are gifts, not property to be exploited by others? </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">why is it that we watch each other through eyes of objectification? why do we judge? why do we see ourselves as accessories for the men around us? why are we secondary? helpers? sacrificial? where do our standards of beauty come from? how do we find the intrinsic worthiness you have given each of us?</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mama, what is patriarchy? how do we step back far enough to see it? how do we find the dances and poetry and fearless love to break through? how do we find the words? how do we talk over boundaries of gender?</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">and another thing, Mama. what is a better word than warrior, to talk about your power? what does a powerful peace sound like? how do we not become passive and sacrificial in our striving for peace? how do we keep our fierce love?</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">this is too big, Mama. help us see the world through different eyes. help us find ourselves. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">thank you, Mama God. thank you for bread, brokenness, an</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">d hope.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-67131641991049246332011-08-07T14:53:00.000-07:002011-08-07T14:53:31.086-07:00Opening the doors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I'm in a field <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of work. That's a strange thing to say. While I would argue that peacebuilding is something that everyone can do everyday, everywhere, I think there's still a very different angle to actually having the job-title of peacebuilder. A lot of the mental work that I've been doing this last month is trying to wrap my head around what this actually looks like or feels like for me, and trying to integrate so much from my experiences and study- philosophy, tools, theology, memories of conflict, interpersonal relationships, theories of why conflict happens, traumas- into a lived, daily practice of peacebuilding here. I can't quite put my finger on the difference between studying in the States and working here, but it's something along the lines of involvement- perhaps a shift from mostly taking in to giving my energy out. Anyway, I want to reflect a little on something one of our presenters said last week about academics and presence.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We were working over some analysis tools with a presenter- the nested model, for example, which breaks the conflict down into four different levels (situation, relationship, sub-system, and system) and different time periods to help strategically understand the stages of conflict. I made a comment about horizontal networking- essentially, building relationships with other academics/peace workers all over the world, in order to share information with them. It's a key part of acknowledging globalization's benefits in fighting globalization's harm: building a web of folks that can collaborate against the huge world systems that inhibit alternative and resistance movements. The presenter responded with a powerful cautionary tale that I really, really needed to hear. She spoke against our analysis tools, our academic understanding, and our mid-level collaboration. Or rather, she didn't condemn them, but challenged us to keep them to ourselves. She shared about working with Colombian women who had suffered severe, specific sexual violence, and her horror at her instinctual response to their stories. She began to analytically compare them to women that she had worked with elsewhere- this degree of pain, that specific experience, this similar memory, this benefit, that detriment. Her analysis was her distance.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One thing that has been consistently irking me as we learn more and more about Colombia is the ease with which I am analyzing the conflict. Hearing about the armed conflict is always exciting- terrible, but exciting. It's another piece of the puzzle- what was the motivation of that paramilitary group in that massacre? How did the displaced person tell their story in that setting? What does that reveal about their needs? How does the US money influence the governing political elite? International corporations? Let's take notes, draw a diagram, have another conversation where we compare and contrast our experiences with agribusiness, arms trafficking, cultural epidemics of fear, chosen trauma, protests... it can get really unemotional. Callous. It can get really scientific, diagnostic, strategic. I worry myself.</span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I worry myself because I feel like we peacebuilders/workers can tend to respond to conflict in the same style as military officials. We strategize, and it feels good. It is a kind of triumph to map it all out, to have long, well-informed conversations about the state of the world. To track the connections between evil corporations and governments and the education system and poverty and the military and terrorism... and to feel like we are doing a good service by figuring it all out, then strategically analyzing where our peace work can fit it. And then I wonder what the hell I'm doing. I'm standing over a map, moving troops in tactical formation. Where is the grace, the love, the beauty? Where is the artistic force, the hugs and hymns, the helplessness, the ranting and the middle of the night sleeplessness? Where are the emotions of our lucha (fight)? </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'm scared. I'm scared that we are closing our eyes just as much as we say the other side is. I'm worried about my callousness. I've been trying to work against this, intentionally, and I'm thinking that trying to open up my heart and remember what I'm fighting for (and against) is the most important work that I've done here so far. Recognizing that if we stop at understanding and analyzing, we lose our reasons why. I forget that the reason I'm here is because sometimes the truth of the world breaks me inside. Because my family is full of unspoken stories of trauma. Because Mama Carolina from Sudan escaped from a refugee camp as a child and walked dozens of miles to find her mother, and because she cried with me as she told the story. Because I feel a little jolt of triumph when I see a new plant sending out leaves. Because yesterday I was talking in English on my cell phone and a man who was picking through the trash for recycling to sell asked me for a few pesos, and I didn't give him any. Because I shared a meal with displaced folks on Wednesday, and talked about the joy and necessity of having God in your life. Because I've seen so many people cry about their loneliness. Because baking bread always feels like an act of resistance, and a reason to dance. Because yesterday, someone laughed because they listened to me laugh. Because I pass so many homeless men when I go running in the morning. Because someone I know is going off to war. Because there are so, so many stories of shame and pain and loss here and everywhere, and also because each one is precious and worth listening to. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These are some of the stories, some of the emotions, some of the pictures that lie underneath our diagrams and maps and strategies. We need to remember the little pieces, beyond our cynicism and analysis. So much of my work is and will be trying to keep the doors open and letting the reality in, in its unique and painful ugliness and truth. I'm trying, and praying for help.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886545857928004721.post-35684610448218324222011-08-01T20:37:00.000-07:002011-08-01T20:37:32.629-07:00Gratitudes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I love looking at things from a slightly different angle, and one way of shedding new light on old habits is... translation! I want to say first off that language is culture is language- I don't want to simplify the fact that every sentence/phrase/grammatical structure can illuminate something about the people that use them. For example, there is a lovely structure of phrase in Spanish, "se me rompio," which literally means "the ___broke on me" and neatly places the blame on the object, not the actor. In other words, you didn't break the glass/chair/window, it broke on you. I'm not sure what this illuminates about cultures that speak Spanish, but it's certainly different than the English version of "I broke the glass." <div><br />
</div><div>Anyway, to take a turn for the serious, where I've been noticing linguistic differences the most have been in when and where and how I talk about God. I've never been one to feel particularly comfortable talking about God or Jesus- I can talk about theology til the cows come home, but I don't often refer to God in daily conversations. It might have been because I didn't grow up doing it, or because I'm not actually that comfortable, or because I don't actually include God very often in my daily thoughts. I think it's a combination of the three.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Here, I've been thinking about God's place in the language a lot more. One of the most common phrases of the senora who is hosting Daniela and I is "que Dios le bendiga"- may God bless you. Another very common one "gracias a Dios"- thanks to God- or "por la gracia de Dios"- by God's grace. "Ojala" is actually derived from the Arabic "inshallah," which refers to a future event, something like- may God grant that ___ happens. Prayers often include a lot more repetition of God's various names. This might not been too different from our many, many different slang uses of God's name in English, but I'm inclined to think that it's more serious here. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I've been thinking a lot about this shift in language and how this affects my conception of God in daily life. In every church I've been to so far, there has been a time for sharing of testimonies, or giving thanks for God's presence in our lives. Most of the time, I probably wouldn't have said what people share. I've been amazed at several older women especially, who describe everything in their days as an act from God's hand- from getting up in the morning to the food on the table for lunch to a trip going smoothly to a visit from a friend to praying for another... As I type this, I realize that I have heard people give thanks for similar things in many other churches, but I want to emphasize that this sounds quite different to me. </div><div><br />
</div><div>To me, a lot of what I've given thanks to God for, or prayed for, I've believed God was linked or related to. I've given thanks so many time for the beautiful, complex, created world we live in, and the people that inhabit it, but I think I've been more likely to see it as a world with a separate God than to see it as God. I think this might be the difference- I've mostly acknowledged God as a presence in the world, but here I keep hearing about God as an actor in the world. It's almost as if I'm saying- thanks God, for giving us this beautiful world- and the older women are saying- God, without you, nothing would happen. Thanks.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I know I'm making quite a few cultural leaps here, but I wonder what this could say about entitlement. I'll bring this down to the interpersonal level to make more sense. I have always had enough to eat. Period. My prayer- "thank you, God, for the food" acknowledges God, but it's not very serious. The universe has always treated me well, and will continue to treat me well. Thanks, in that sense, means that God plays a supporting role. I don't really need her help. The Senora (who is hosting me) has gone hungry many, many nights. She has told me that often the worst pain wasn't her own hunger, it was watching someone else suffer and not being able to help. Several times, the Senora has invited me for a cafecito (cup of milky coffee) and piece of bread- saying that no one should ever go to bed hungry. When the Senora thanks God for her cafecito and bread, she means it, just as she means it when she prays for her son's safe journey, or for our work in Colombia, or for her daughter's work situation. God is directly involved- without God's presence, none of these things would happen well. The Senora, and every Colombian I have met so far, have lived through enough insecurity that I'm beginning to hear this- we have to be grateful. It's not guaranteed- and God is within it, around it, behind it, creating it. God is the goodness. God is what sustains us, our everyday.</div><div><br />
</div><div>By the grace of God, today: yucca for dinner, warmth, a view of the mountains, ridiculous teasing between friends, safe arrivals, long distance communication technology wonders, people that work for peace, a world where everyone knows everyone, a capable body, good shoes, early morning coffee, the ability to get around, green leaves....</div><div><br />
</div><div>When you think about it, the list goes on and on. Thanks, God, for your creating, sustaining presence in our lives.</div><div><br />
</div></div>Larisahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05074572066145388405noreply@blogger.com2