It’s not even been three weeks, but already my life of dinner parties and salsa dancing in Bogota seems a lifetime ago. Even our first FOR training and retreat, where we went over the work plan and had a chance to hear a bit of the oral historical memory from former volunteers, seems a blurry dream of the past. Images of Isaac painting watercolors, the bustling city streets of Medellin, and all of us dancing in the kitchen after long work days full of computers and meetings are so far removed from my current reality it is hard to believe they could possibly have taken place so recently.
The greater place referred to as the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado is not easily defined geographically. It is defined by its some 800 members and it exists wherever they exist. They live spread out, within the greater region of Uraba, between several individual peace community clusters in small villages. We live in one such village. It is called La Union. It is nestled up in a tropical place where clouds hang on the horizon over the green hills and the sun shines as strong as the rain falls. There are two streets: Main Street and Second Street, which are lined by some twenty or so homes.
And it takes a bit of travel to arrive here.
The travel starts with a jeep ride, which starts at the terminal in the town of Apartado. While winding through the paved and side-walked city streets there our first day, carrying all of our lives in bags on our backs and fronts and sides, Jon began to advise Emily and I about communication restraint in the city and particularly around the terminal:
Do not tell anyone where you live.
Do not tell anyone where you are going.
Don’t talk to strangers.
This information would be further debriefed at a later time, but was essential to get us home and thus we were learning about it as we sweated our way to our first public transport hub in Uraba. The jeep was about to leave, but we still hadn’t purchased food, something we thought would come in handy. We quickly ditched our bags and ran through the terminal market, Jon leading the way, as we purchased this and that. Then a man tapped me on the back, “You are the girl going to San Jose, right?” I stood there, debriefed not five minutes before on NOT conversing with strangers, and stared blankly. “You three live in San Jose, right?” He repeated his question louder and I shrugged my shoulders. He sighed and said, “Well, IF you are going to San Jose, the jeep already left and you should meet it, now, at the corner over there.” I felt like an idiot. It was the jeep driver’s assistant. We went running and caught our jeep on its’ way out of town.
Thus we started our bumpy hour ride in the back of the jeep with children on our laps and men hanging off the back and as more and more people were picked up, more and more of them climbed on top of the jeep until it looked like it might cave in on top of us. We drove out of town and up an even bumpier road, along a river, past military checkpoints, climbing further into the hills and further disappearing into the lush green of the jungle. When nearly everyone had been dropped off, the driver stopped the car and turned back to Emily and I. “Do you want to get down?” (Jon was on top of the car.) “Maybe,” I said, “I don’t know.” “You do,” he said, “you live here. Get down.” While we were being kicked out of the jeep by an exasperated driver (who thought we were maybe the dumbest people alive by this point), Jon’s legs flopped over the top of the jeep. We had arrived in San Josecito, the first peace village outside of Apartado, and where, apparently, our time of riding in transport ended.
San Josecito is a community of almost all peace community members. It was created by them and for them, after numerous displacements. It is located just down the road from the highly militarized end-of-the-drivable-road town of San Jose. The village is accompanied by an Italian accompaniment organization, and we met some of our first colleagues outside of FOR. The village has a library and a community dining hall and is nestled in a valley, surrounded by mountains and is the second to last jeep stop before the road ends and gives way to footpaths through the mountains. We met a woman who acts as a historical memory artist for the community. She paints. She paints the painful history and the happy history and all important events that happen in and to the community. Her home is full of these paintings. We were pressed for time (something I have since taken to be a given in all of our activities) to hike to La Union and so we booted up (my boots were too big) and found out who was going to take our lives off of our backs and put them on a mule to get us up the hill. We and another accompaniment organization headed to our village that day and between all of us had too many bags for the horse and mule we were given. While the man began to work out this conundrum, I helped by packing and repacking satchels at his behest to make the weight even out. Every once in a while he would hold up a bag and say, “Can you carry this?” and every once in a while I would say, “Yes.” Then it dawned on me that I should probably clarify that I could only carry one of the bags I had said I could carry, and not all of them at once. When I did so he looked up with a look that said, “Well that isn’t very helpful, then, is it?”
Our first walk up was on a sunny day. The jungle is beautiful and looks like a really fun playground for Ginas. It looks like a perfect place to make rope swings over a river. It looks like a nice place to explore and find colorful things growing against layering greens. We, however, are on strict orders not to leave the path. Land mines are a real risk in this war zone, and often planted just off a path where someone would go to the bathroom or sit to smoke a cigarette or rest a moment. If we have to poo, then we poo on the path. If we want a better look at the waterfall, then we buy a camera with a zoom feature. We criss-crossed over a river, which apparently swells so high that we get stuck in La Union on occasion. We walked through mud and over rocks, and met various campesinos walking down to town. We were briefed on multiple names that belong to places on the path and various events that have happened on it so that later, if we have to reference where we were, we have the vocabulary to do so. We walked (I stumbled and was stuck in the mud in my clown shoes) passed fields and scattered country houses, in the general direction of up, for two hours. And then Jon said, “Welcome to the peace community.”
We walked up Main Street, passing the kiosk and school and a few houses and then collapsed on the front porch of our wooden house. We had arrived on a day that the community had designated to celebrate the children, and thus kiddies had come from various other peace villages to participate in the festivities. While some of our neighbors came over to introduce themselves, we could hear the kids yelling from the central kiosk:
Teacher: Do we talk to armed actors?
Kids: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
(Side note: In this war zone there are various “armed actors”: multiple illegal groups as well as the Colombian state’s police and military. The Peace Community is committed to being neutral and refuses to aid, directly (ex: taking up arms or providing food/housing) or indirectly (ex: passing intelligence about one to the other), any of these armed actors.)
Teacher: What is solidarity?
Kids: Sharing!
Teacher: Do we work together in this community?
Kids: SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!”
While overhearing this, one of our new neighbors commented on the importance of this alternative education and expressed how proud of the community he was that they were able to organize this day for the kids.
The four of us (Sean/Martin, Jon, Emily and I) live in the FOR house. Truth be told, it is two separate structures. Emily, Jon and I have rooms in the wooden one, which also houses the laundry area (wash by hand), the bathroom (flush by bucket), the shower (cold), the back porch (where we have meetings), the office (room for one) and the garden (we win). The other house has Sean’s room (he must snore) and the kitchen (fruit fly heaven). I share my room with several spiders, but my mosquito net has no holes and doubles as a spider net during the day to keep them out of my bed. Emily and I unpacked and decorated our rooms and during the unpacking explosion, the twin neighbor girls (2yo) made there way from hiding behind a rock watching us (totally invisible, obviously), to digging through my stuff while I was sweeping out the room. I came out to find them dressed up in my clothes. They particularly liked my pink slippers, hats and plastic glasses.
We have a cat named Sapa (“informant”) who kills rats and sits on our laps and generally acts as the punching bag on which we take out affection. She is probably the friendliest cat on the planet. I wish she hunted spiders. One of our neighbors told me that such a nice cat should not have such an ugly name. I had to agree, although facetious is funny and funny is key to keeping us sane. We didn’t actually claim our dog, but the community says he is ours anyway. His name is Nueve Bolas (“Nine Balls”) due to the fact that he has some illness that caused him to grow nine tumors where his two balls should be (we did not give him that name). I call him, affectionately, Nueve. He sits outside our house looking sickly, and I think our indifference to him is the nicest he can expect to be treated (animals aren’t really treated like house pets here, if that wasn’t obvious from the previous description of bags on the horse). Somehow this indifference makes him “ours” as far as everyone else is concerned.
As people came up, we were introduced to them by Jon and Sean. We soon found out that everyone has a few names: their given names (generally compounded, ex: “Maria Cristina Rosario”), their general nicknames (something to do with their looks, ex: Maria “the white one”), their name’s nicknames (ex: “Mari” instead of Maria or the white one), their community nicknames (something to do with how they act or what they do ex: Maria “the egg lady” instead of Maria, the white one or Mari, and our code names for them (more on that below). While Jon may introduce us to “Marco,” he then responds that his actual name is “William” and that people call him “Chatty”. By the end of the afternoon I had no idea what anyone’s name was, much less what they preferred to be called, where they lived or what they did.
I awoke my first day in La Union and crossed the street to the kitchen through a cluster of kids playing war. They had guns fashioned out of their fingers and ran about yelling pow and bang, chasing one another from house to tree to fence. Over coffee we talked about playing war in a war zone. Is it any different than kids playing fighting games in the USA? Cowboys and Indians? Sword fighting? Don’t all of these “games” come out of a real war sometime in history? Is their understanding of their game different? How is such violence changed into children’s play games? Should this disturb me? Barely had we finished this conversation when another neighbor arrived with a petition. There had been a combat near another peace village two hours away by foot and the residents were scared. They wanted us to go there for the night to observe what was going on and show international solidarity. From child’s play to real life in seconds: a reality check that we lived in the war zone.
We generally receive “petitions” from the community to accompany with a previously agreed upon amount of time for us to do our security analysis, talk to sources, make political calls and come to a consensus as to whether we are going to accept them. However, since the war doesn’t wait around for protocol, sometimes we get emergency petitions, which we analyze in a shorter period with the ability to respond as accompaniers in a time of crisis for the community. We began our security analysis with a 6-hour time frame, if we were to go for the night and leave in time to make it there before dark.
Analysis is exhausting. This was our first day, and would be a bit of a snowballing precedent. We were to receive 6 petitions in our first four days. We sat on our back porch and debriefed. Due to phones being tapped and general communication safety (because you never know who is listening in) we don’t use real names for people and places. Imagine Emily and my confusion when the 6 hours of security analysis kicked off with some semblance of (fake names changed to protect nonexistent people): “The Pink Panther heard from Dracula that Lucky Charm would meet Cornhusk on Neptune at dawn.”
While we talked in code and decided our fate for the evening, little boys climbed trees to get coconuts and pigs rolled in the mud. We analyzed to the beat of our neighbors cutting wood and babies crying and free-range cows stampeding through town. When the military helicopters started circling around above (close enough for us to see the people inside), our neighbors started to gather on our porch. We watched helicopters circle and ran a safe house of sorts and continued to decide what to do. 6 hours later it was decided, at the last minute before we had to leave (our boots were on and we were ready to go) that we would not go, but rather stay where we were for the night. We made dinner and tried to relax.
Just as we sighed and sat down to pat ourselves on the back in the darkness out on the back porch and reflect about how awesome we were and what amazing analysis we had done, another neighbor arrived with a new petition. A petition that had nothing to do with the one we just spent 6 hours analyzing. I almost started crying at the thought of repeating the process. He explained the situation. We repeated the process. This one we did take, and within 24 hours we were headed off on our first accompaniment outside the village we live in. In some nth hour of coffeed-up middle of the night delirium, before we broke for dreaming, these things were said and we laughed:
Jon: “Oh my gosh! Look at this! A nice little frog in the office… (and then quieter)… that might be poisonous.”
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Emily: “Can I take a second break?”
Jon: “When was your first break?”
Emily: “When I mentally checked out.”
It is avocado season. This deserves its own happy paragraph.
Our accompaniment brought us first to San Josecito, where we spent the night. We collapsed after dinner, too tired to even read our books. Had we had more energy, we discovered that I would have read, The Jungle Book and Jon would have read, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. It appeared we needed a bit of an escape. “I can almost feel the closet door opening as I am holding this book,” he said. I said I was really looking forward to the RikkiTikkiTavi chapter.
In the morning, while waiting for the jeep to pass, a little girl about 6 years old exited the community and crossed the street to grab a free-range horse. “I’m going to get a horse,” she said. She climbed up the hill, passing the stallion and several other horses clad in her hot patterned light blue rubber boots (they only come in black for adults, unfortunately) and disappeared into the woods. A few minutes later she emerged from the woods a few hundred yards up the road, pulling a horse behind her. She pushed it up against the fence, then climbed the fence from the other side and mounted it. She rode down passed us and laughed. Just like that she became my hero, obviously.
Our accompaniment took us, by several busses, us up and around Uraba. In a city center I bought flip-flops, which are bouncy and I call my moon shoes. They are also the inspiration for our first family band hit entitled, “Moon Shoes.” The first verse starts something like: “Walking round the town in my moon shoes…” (Someday we will have time to learn to play instruments and start a family band.) I also found the right sized boots (very helpful on the hike). We road-tripped some 10 hours. We arrived at the Urra damn. It looks beautiful from afar, almost like a natural lake. But it isn’t a natural lake. It’s a large multinational project of a dam. And it flooded the community that used to exist where it now sits. The surviving people have all displaced to higher ground. Their views are now comprised of a dam that drowned the villages of their past. The man who sold us our breakfast on the “lake shore” told us of when the waters of the current dam rose so high that their kitchen was flooded to the height of the upper part of the door frame. In another city we saw a march for peace. The whole town came out dressed in white. The kids carried balloons with peace written across them in black markers. The adults rode on motorbikes. People carried banners with slogans asking for peace and posters with photos of civilian war victims. From the busses that took us through countryside and city, across rivers and through jungles, I saw schools and tiendas and community centers, a large portion of which had the word “peace” incorporated into their titles. War as a way of life is scary.
I am heat-rashed and sunburned and bug-bitten. The other day Jon pulled a burrowing bug from my arm and this morning a neighbor pulled a different kind of burrowing bug from Sean’s foot. Eeww.
It is mango season. This deserves its own happy paragraph.
Jon and I returned first from our 72-hour accompaniment ahead of the other two, who drew the long straws to continue. In San Josecito on our way back, we heard there had been a murder while we were away. A man had been macheted to death 500 meters from the peace community entrance. We walked up to La Union, passing the scene of the crime not 24 hours later, in the heat of the day with thirty pound backpacks and arrived too tired to think. Our heads were already filled with pending work we had to do: write up reports, respond to the man killed 500 meters from San Josecito, a recent comment to us that “the war doesn’t ever put itself on hold” (which we took as a gentle pre-warning of a pending and upcoming petition), not to mention all of the things we were going to do before the first petition ever came in. But we were too tired for all of this…
Instead of starting anything, we laughed at ourselves for being too wrapped up in work to remember to brush our teeth all day long. We made hot chocolate with cinnamon and sat on the back porch to watch the storm come in. When it arrived, we fell asleep to the sound of rain on the roof.
The community has suffered over 180 deaths of its members. It is a Peace Community in a war zone and death is everywhere all the time. Jon was commenting on the difference between violence in the zone and violence against the community (or the threat of it) to which we have to respond. The difference in reaction is subtle to an observer, but felt very strongly from within.
Everyone wanted to know the dead man’s name. Maybe they thought they knew him, or maybe they just didn’t want him to be referred to as “the dead man” who was murdered near the community.
Petitions continue to pour in and we continue to assess them.
Every day or so we get a mental health call from a coworker in Bogotá. Even though we talk to them 395,427,549,837,650,780 times a day in these crazy times, they still call. They call to ask us each how we feel. It is the best “work conversation” of any given day.
Colombian Spanish is difficult. It’s frustrating to go from a place where I could hold my own at rapid-fire conversation speed and understand all the slang and tell jokes to a place where I barely understand the syllables people speak to me. When did the noun “mercado” become the verb “mercar”? And when did “averiguar” become a fully functioning verb? And what exactly does “amanar” mean? And why does every farm animal have six names? Everyone says I’ll be fine in a month. I wonder where they get this timeframe and if they have noticed that I am ten days in and still have no idea what people are saying to me. Soon I’m going to just talk to talk, or follow our security protocol when we don’t want to divulge something (respond with something else). I can imagine the conversation already:
Them: What do you think about the pig over there?
Me: I love dancing salsa!
Them: Have you seen the flowering purple bush at your neighbor’s house?
Me: Eggs are my favorite breakfast food.
The last 48 hours have been relatively tranquil. I have had time to write this blog, for example.
We have juggled a few times, me spinning poi and Emily tossing pins. Kids gather around to watch us. We hope we can teach them and have a fully functioning circus soon.
We are also hoping that someday our grand plan of having endless carefree country days to suntan and watch baby animals and garden and be silly becomes a reality.
Emily has started planting her seeds and spends a few minutes every couple hours staring at them and trying to get them to grow from her love.
We have started to de-weed/de-snake the backyard. This is particularly difficult with the tools we have at hand. It’s nice to take out the stress of work on the decrepit garden tools. After I swung a hoe for a few hours yesterday, I walked through town and everyone commented on how I was “finally working.” I think they think we are on permanent vacation.
Our next-door neighbor laughed at us our first day back. Emily was chasing baby ducks (another of her past times), I was juggling and Jon was fully gloved and washing poor half-dead Nueve. We looked over and realized that we are taking the crazy gringo thing to a whole new level for our neighbors. Jon said, “Yeah, well at least Nueve will die clean.” And he did. A day later. We buried him in the back yard behind the garden, overlooking the river.
I have yet to sleep through the night due to every free-range animal making noises. I am still trying to get used to the mosquito net and the bed and everything. In the middle of the night, I look up and see all of the lightening bugs flying around in my pitch black room.
