The first time Ottoniel was hospitalized overnight in late July, everyone got pretty scared. As an integral community leader, he could tell stories spanning the entire process leading up to and including the creation of the Peace Community. As the single community carpenter he could look back and see that it was he who literally set foundations and built what is today the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. It seemed his hospitalization came out of the blue. He was back the next day, though, and the “lung infection” seemed to be subsiding. I brought him marigolds from our garden and told them that they had committed to making him feel better. Later in the week his second wife came to ask us for remedies from our garden to make him a tea. And Emily and I brought him chamomile from town. He quit smoking, and I tried to as well in solidarity.
When we accompanied him to the hospital in August and saw the radiographs of his lungs, Emily and my suspicions were confirmed that this man did not have a minor “lung infection” as the local medics had been claiming for nearly a year. I also did not believe he had pneumonia. Or bronchitis. Or even some sort of tropical lung disease that I’d never heard of. I was pretty sure that this man had cancer. But Ottoniel was jovial and kind. He joked with us and thanked us for our visit.
The next day while I was accompanying his son in the jungle, he turned and asked me how I thought his father was. “He’s fighting,” I said. “He’s really strong,” his son said. “He’s really sick,” I said. But his son just kept saying, “He’s really strong.”
Once he was so weak he couldn’t climb the hill even on a horse, he stayed in LH. I saw him often, stopped to talk to him every time I went through. I asked him if there was anything from town that could make him happy. He said he really liked green apples. And I brought him one. Every time I went down.
At the end of October his granddaughter turned five years old. Emily and I were accompanying his son through the jungle again and asked him what he was going to do to celebrate the event. He turned to us and said, “the greatest gift my daughter has is that her parents are alive.”
Before he was so sick that he couldn’t talk I was lamenting to him how I hadn’t been out to see several of the peace community villages. He said to stop that because FOR was supposed to be in LU. That’s why we were asked to accompany. You are accompanying all the time, he said. La Union needs you, he told me.
Once he was hospitalized permanently I went to see him everytime I was in Apartadó. And he just got sicker and sicker and smaller and smaller and before long he couldn’t talk at all.
It had been five years since his son had been to town and his oldest daughter was nearly nine months pregnant, but all four of his kids put on their nicest clothes and paid the money to go down to town and see him in the hospital.
When he asked to see his mom in the first week of November, I started to cry. His siblings and his in-laws brought her down. They carried her across rivers and carried her across plains so that she could go and see her first born son die. She would see him die now as a full-grown man as she had seen multiple of her other full-grown sons die, shot in a massacre right in front of her, and how she had seen other of her children die, before they even had the chance to grow. The day she went to see him, she had to make the decision as whether or not to put him on life support.
The community work day took us high into the hills the day after the family decided not to put Ottoniel on life-support. I was removing cacao seeds with his sister when she suddenly sat down under a cacao tree with her machete at her side, set her head in her hands, looked out over the jungle landscape with La Union tucked away in a distant valley, and began to silently cry.
Ottoniel died at two in the morning and by six funeral arrangements were being made. The plan to bring up the body was being set. People were donating horses and mules to bring up the materials for the burial and people were volunteering to dig the grave and help haul up the body. In the United States, when someone dies, there are so many different people involved. There are so many processes and laws and rules and regulations. Accompanying through this death was very different. Emily and I went about trying to do what you do when people die- giving our condolences to the family, helping in whatever way we could to make the preparations for the funeral easier, agreeing to accompany the funeral procession up from San José.
The morning he died, the flowers his daughter planted in our garden the week Emily and I first arrived in La Union started to bloom.
The walk down to retrieve Ottoniel was so sunny- there was not a cloud in the sky- but there was a constant rain. It was one of the most beautiful walks I have experienced since being in the Peace Community. I kept thinking to myself, “it is so beautiful today.”We passed hordes of people walking up for the funeral and vigil. When we arrived and met the hearse in San Jose, the men attached his casket to a long log. They hung it from this log and two at a time took turns balancing the log on their shoulders and carrying him up the hill. And we walked in procession as his family and friends carried him up the hill. We walked behind them across the river and through the forests and across the fields and up the vertical hill, all the way home to the kiosk where the vigil was planned.
Because the body can’t be alone, the entire community stayed up all night for the vigil. They killed a cow and cooked it. The burned candles and talked. Some told jokes and some cried. And the night was clear, the first without rain in at least a month. There were candles in the kiosk. And a light fog. His daughter sat on a rock next to me, doubled over and cried on my lap. I rubbed her back and felt her tears falling down my legs.
I didn’t look at the body. Neither did his pregnant daughter or his distraught mother. In fact, none of the pregnant women were allowed to look at his body and neither were any of the individuals who suffer from “nightmares or nervousness,” but the great majority of the community did look. And several of them confirmed that when his family was hysterically crying at the casket his corpse also produced tears. His corpse was crying because they were so sad.
The sun came up to us playing cards and drinking coffee around his body. Planning for the burial, at first light the volunteers to dig his grave headed to the cemetery. I watched as his apprentice measured out and constructed the space for his casket to be put to rest. I watched the men rotate through, shoveling dirt in the hot sun. I watched his son, after a night of no sleep, dig his father’s grave.
By mid-afternoon it was confirmed that family travelling from Medellin would not make it up in time for the funeral, and thus the vigil was extended for another night to wait for them. The second night the group was considerably smaller. We sat in hammocks hung around the kiosk and listened to music quietly. At 3 AM I made potatoes. There was a thick fog and a biting wind, but it did not rain. Everyone was bundled in sweatshirts drinking coffee and trying to see eachother through the god. We shivered a lot. And stared at candles flickering in the kiosk. Walking back and forth from the kiosk to the house through the fog, it was hard not to think about the haunting.
My neighbors have walked all of the paths in this village a million times. They walk them a handful of times a day. Somehow seeing the funeral procession take off from the kiosk, I got the feeling that everything was happening in slow motion. That walk down and across the canyon on the day of the funeral seemed endless… down and up the ravine to the plot in the cementary. His children all made eye contact with me as they walked by and I couldn’t help but start to cry.
As the final preparations were being made, people wailed over his casket and cried silently in the distance. A letter was read. A song was sung. His son just kept doing things, fixing a shovel, re-running the hose for water. Three of his four kids were there, two girls and a boy. When they were going to close off the casket his older daughter fell wailing on her brother and sister. His son collapsed to one knee and all three of them buckled down on top of eachother and cried silently. I think this image will be in my mind forever. This image of pure grief. It seemed to go on and on and then she yelled out through the tears- “Daddy! Why WHY did you have to leave us!?” And their grief became my grief and it was like I just didn’t even know what to do.
Walking back from the cemetery alone, Emily and I both start to cry. Sleep-deprived and hungry and tired and emotionally exhausted we hugged in front of the library and tried to come up with an action plan. What are we supposed to do? Feeling so cracked out and lost and grief ridden as though all of the grief of the community was ours. All of the pain was ours. We decide to make some breakfast, sweep the floor of the kitchen and then go to bed. And that is exactly what we do. Because sometimes you just have to follow an action plan.
After a nap I go to visit his mother. She just stares straight ahead. She walks in circles around the kitchen looking for an egg she is holding in her hand. Nobody tells her, whether because they don’t notice or don’t want to break her thought pattern I’m unsure. I told her. I said, “the egg you are looking for is in your hand.” And she said, “you’re right.” She cracked it, put it in a bowl, and walked out of the kitchen to sit in a chair and stare straight ahead.
For the week and a half following Ottoniel’s burial, we prayed a novena in the kiosk each night. On the ninth night, on the last amen of the last prayer, without any wind blowing whatsoever, the candle went out on its own. His wife turned to me and said, “You see, he is telling us he doesn’t want us to mourn anymore.”
Since he died two weeks ago, nearly all of my conversations in the community have been centered around death. While sitting in her kitchen surrounded by geese, we came to the conclusion that neither of us knew if it was life or death that was strongest, but that as humans we need to be brave when facing both. The community is still in mourning, of course. I have been looking for strength in the cacaotera, looking out over a breezy point and reminding myself that it’s all gonna be ok. That it’s all going to be fine.
And then this weekend, two weeks to the day after his death, his daughter gave birth to a baby girl.
November has had me reflecting a lot on accompaniment. There is accompaniment in a professional sense. There is non-interference and observing from afar. So much of our work is based on analyzing this and making sure we are not crossing lines, that we are remaining distinct and distant. There is, as PBI puts in their slogan, the idea that we are only “creating the space for peace.” But what happens when professional becomes personal. When a friend’s father dies, son dies, brother dies. When your observation becomes your participation. When empathy makes the pain of those around you become your pain as well. When you realize that your relationships with the community are not only based in the professional, but rather in the very personal… they are based in love.
martes, 22 de noviembre de 2011
11/11
I quit smoking on November 7th. I am still in a state of permanent nic-fit, but doing better. My body has been pretty crazy all month, so confused about why it is doing this to itself. I had a headache for ten straight days. In the 103,842,476 degree heat, I put on a sweatshirt with the cold sweats. I fall asleep kicking in night and wake up at 2AM wanting to smoke. I chew gum like a rabid squirrel chews an acorn. People keep telling me I “didn’t look well” and for the first couple days I kept thinking I was going to vomit. I shake so much that people now impersonate me unable to drink a glass of water and laugh amongst themselves. But I am doing it. And I will make it. Addiction is a strange thing. The mind never ceases to amaze. There is now a sign on my wall that reads: Dear Gina, you no longer smoke, so find something else to do.
At 5AM when I accidentally broke the handle off of our prized campo espresso maker, Emily struggled to pour herself a cup of coffee in the dark without three degree burning herself. She sighed and said, “Mornings in the campo just got a little harder.”
Our accompaniment took us to another Peace Community village. This one makes our home like a bustling city center: individual ranches separated by mud paths and knee high fields of grass. It reminded me of some semblance of a tropical Montana at the turn of the century. A tropical River Runs Through It, if you will. Mountains and valleys and plains. And war.
The walk there took us straight up the hill behind our house, through thick jungles and vines and moss and mud and more mud and pits of mud that seems like quicksand and dried mud that you can walk on and bog mud and pond mud and mud that steals your boots and mud that sticks to your legs and mug that splatters onto your face. A jungle plant tipped towards me, thorned itself to my hat and pulled back, taking my cap with it. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. We saw our neighbor’s farms and small huts where they sleep in the jungle while they are away and working. Coming out of the jungle into the valley there was a rainbow. Our neighbor said, “Now we just have to follow that rainbow and at the end of it we will have arrived.”
We were hosted in a wooden house by a mutli-generational family of ten. We slept in high-hung hammocks under drying rice. On Sunday there was a birthday party and families came from the hills around the valley, some walking three hours to celebrate and have some social time. Their lives are mountain lives. The men played soccer in the pouring rain. The women cooked all day. When the cake came out so did the confetti. They call confetti hallelujah.
There was not any cell phone coverage and our satellite phone was having technical difficulties. Elisabeth and I whipped out our high-tech solar charger to try and amp the battery. We had a satellite phone balancing on a wooden plank, solar panels tempting the sun. We had out the manual and directions, we spoke rapidly in a foreign language, pleading with our little piece of gringo technology to work. In the background, on a different slab of wood, our hosts gutted a pig for lunch.
The soccer field is in the valley. The backdrop is of lush green mountains. I found myself thinking how hard it is to believe that people grow up here. That this is the field on which they learn to play soccer.
By candlelight, the family tells us of getting lost in the jungle, of ghosts and witches and these things that happen to them and why they are scared and when they are not. They talk between themselves and distinguish parts of the landscape around them with personal experience (“I was at the part of the hill where a few years ago you said you were scared of mines”; “I came out at the mouth of the river where we ran into the soldiers last week”; “It was in the rice field where Julian disappeared”). Listening to them made me feel like any time there are young men in a war zone, there is reason to be scared. Because war is not healthy for children, or other living things.
By candlelight they make us a map, drawing the mountains and rivers and streams and hills and valleys between our town and theirs. Elisabeth continuously asks what the pets are named and every time the matriarch says, “we haven’t registered them yet.” Her children take a less sarcastic approach, but it comes out with nearly the same tone: “The dog is called dog, the parrot is called parrot…” We laugh into the evening. Before going to bed they all agree, “it’s fun talking to you guys.”
We spend a few days in their company, eyeing the situation, learning about the problems. We listen to plantains falling into the hot oil and the dripping of water in the kitchen being pumped from the river beyond. The kids fish in the early morning. They milk the cows. They shuck corn and kill animals. They wash clothes in the river and sweat in the open fire kitchen. They work from dusk to dawn, all ten of them, all the time, just to sustain themselves on their farm in the valley.
Hiking back home we have a mule to carry our bags. We set a pace through the jungle. When the oranges fall from the tree I look up to see a man there. “Eat one,” he says. I do and I keep walking. If the oranges hadn’t fallen, I would’ve walked right under him. I think about how many people have seen me walking and not said a thing. We walk back through the same mud in the hot sun. Finally coming back down into the La Union, we pick up our familiar home path. We come out into the clearing, overlooking our thick jungle home with the Caribbean off in the distance. It’s postcard perfect. It’s paradise. As we come down the path into our cacaotera, Elisabeth and I stop. I ask her if it’s true we actually live here. I ask her if she can really believe it. This place is just so beautiful.
We arrive home to our newest FOR co-worker, Carla, fresh off the jet from England. We watch her settle in. I think about how we adapt, all of us, wherever we are. The day Emily left for vacation, we shared one final cup of campo coffee at 5AM. 8 months together in the campo and then she walked down the hill and that was it. Everything changed, then changed again.
They finally took down the decrepit fence around the central kiosk, but I find myself still walking the long way around the park. I walk through the center of town as if it is still there, crossing where the openings in the fence were, not stepping where I haven’t before stepped. No matter how much I remove myself from my comfort zone, I am still such a creature of habit.
“You must be used to walking in the mud, otherwise that would itch you,” a neighbor says looking at my muddy legs. “If I were really used to walking in the mud, my boots would look more like yours,” I said. He looked down, confused. (His boots had no mud on them at all, even though we’d just walked the same path.)
I have learned about focus here in the community. While working, my neighbors only think about what they are doing. There is no multi-tasking, there is no zoning out. They focus on the movement of their machete, they think about the yucca they are pulling from the earth. This makes sense, of course, because if they don’t focus on what they are doing they could cut off their limbs, but still, it is a nice lesson. This is why they say there is time for everything- to work, to play, to talk, to think. And they really do this. They dedicate time to things and then they do them with their full attention dedicated to them. I want to learn to focus this way… as though my life and limbs depended on it.
I went up with him at 6AM to pull yucca from the earth. I walked a path I had not yet walked across a rushing river with huge flat boulders. I tried to keep his morning pace through banana fields and over jungle logs. Up on the slope where the yucca was planted we weren’t high enough for the Caribbean view or the overlook of the valley, we had only the view of more jungle slopes. For a moment, I had this feeling that the dense jungle went on forever and ever and ever. That where we were was all there was. Sometimes the jungle does seem that immense. Sometimes life does seem that intense.
Tropical jungle humidity ruins everything. All of my CDs now skip. I have taken to listening to the military radio channel (there isn’t much option with the reception in our zone). In the evenings, it bounces from romantic vallenatos to army propaganda to family shoutouts aimed at the soldiers in my backyard.
November was hot days without rain
November was many community member’s birthdays
November was mourning
It was the sudden unexpected relief of a thunderstorm at sunset
Hauling sugar cane and grinding sugarcane and cooking sugarcane in smoking machinery on the hill next to the cementary and then there is panela and then there is honey in caldron pots Bunuelos and hot chocolate
A baby stillborn, a baby buried in the backyard
Fog lying low in the valley between us and town
Slipping through a hole in the fence only to be attacked by ants on the underside of the wodden boards
Men walking out of waist high grass in beautifully brimmed hats woven in shades of browns and grays
Bombs and shots and the sounds of distant combats
Muddy footpaths between homes and snakes and tall grasses swaying in the wind
A river runs the valley, swelling with every rainstorm.
Swinging tandom in hammocks and laughing while my friend impersonates me
Dancing on top of a water tank at dawn
Trying not to punch my neighbors when they come day after day to bum cigarettes from me knowing full well I have quit smoking
The full moon calling me from bed and watching her fall in the darkness and then the half light behind the filo
A new mother is carried up in a hammock with her new born baby
A new mother’s father is carried up in a casket for his funeral
Walking in mango groves at dusk in a light rain
Hiking through thick jungle, knee deep mud and knee high grass
Oranges and guavas and coconuts, oh my!
Birthday cakes and candle lights and cracking cacao from its shells
I turn 29 years old tomorrow. A neighbor talks about how proud she is her son never went to war. He is my age. Here, kids my age didn’t grow up in the Peace Community. They are teaching their kids to do what they did as if it is normal, because now they are part of a neutral Peace Community. To the children it is as if that is how it has always been. I look at the men and women here aged 25 and older and I think: you really resisted. You really are changing your world for the better. You really do practice what you preach. Living in the war zone, I have realized it is hard not to go to war.
When she stopped by on her way home, I was reading by candlelight. She lit up all the spiders spinning webs in my bedframe and then looked at me quietly for a few minutes while I read. She said, “You could really live here with us.” I said, “I do really live here with you.” She said, “I mean for real. For your whole life.”
This morning I was invited to eat yet another birthday cake. He turns 17 today. His grandmother said, “he brought the light.” I assumed she meant this in a figurative way, as in- “he is the light of my life” but as we talked more I realized that she was talking about literal light. The same day her grandson was born, they wired the path from San Jose to La Union, giving the community electricity. He is the first resident of La Union to live his entire life with electricity. And he is 17.
All things outside the war zone seem so far away, but they are so close now. In less than 1 week, I will live in the Bogota. In one month I will be on vacation in the Minnesota snow. Right now, as I sweat through my shirt in the mid-day heat and listen to a light rain outside my window, it’s hard to believe that in a couple of days there will no longer be tropical heat or cows mooing outside my window. There won’t be fireflies above my bed or lizards on my wall. I will exchange mud for salsa shoes and military radio for my itunes library. From the country to the city… Oh! How we all adapt!
At 5AM when I accidentally broke the handle off of our prized campo espresso maker, Emily struggled to pour herself a cup of coffee in the dark without three degree burning herself. She sighed and said, “Mornings in the campo just got a little harder.”
Our accompaniment took us to another Peace Community village. This one makes our home like a bustling city center: individual ranches separated by mud paths and knee high fields of grass. It reminded me of some semblance of a tropical Montana at the turn of the century. A tropical River Runs Through It, if you will. Mountains and valleys and plains. And war.
The walk there took us straight up the hill behind our house, through thick jungles and vines and moss and mud and more mud and pits of mud that seems like quicksand and dried mud that you can walk on and bog mud and pond mud and mud that steals your boots and mud that sticks to your legs and mug that splatters onto your face. A jungle plant tipped towards me, thorned itself to my hat and pulled back, taking my cap with it. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. We saw our neighbor’s farms and small huts where they sleep in the jungle while they are away and working. Coming out of the jungle into the valley there was a rainbow. Our neighbor said, “Now we just have to follow that rainbow and at the end of it we will have arrived.”
We were hosted in a wooden house by a mutli-generational family of ten. We slept in high-hung hammocks under drying rice. On Sunday there was a birthday party and families came from the hills around the valley, some walking three hours to celebrate and have some social time. Their lives are mountain lives. The men played soccer in the pouring rain. The women cooked all day. When the cake came out so did the confetti. They call confetti hallelujah.
There was not any cell phone coverage and our satellite phone was having technical difficulties. Elisabeth and I whipped out our high-tech solar charger to try and amp the battery. We had a satellite phone balancing on a wooden plank, solar panels tempting the sun. We had out the manual and directions, we spoke rapidly in a foreign language, pleading with our little piece of gringo technology to work. In the background, on a different slab of wood, our hosts gutted a pig for lunch.
The soccer field is in the valley. The backdrop is of lush green mountains. I found myself thinking how hard it is to believe that people grow up here. That this is the field on which they learn to play soccer.
By candlelight, the family tells us of getting lost in the jungle, of ghosts and witches and these things that happen to them and why they are scared and when they are not. They talk between themselves and distinguish parts of the landscape around them with personal experience (“I was at the part of the hill where a few years ago you said you were scared of mines”; “I came out at the mouth of the river where we ran into the soldiers last week”; “It was in the rice field where Julian disappeared”). Listening to them made me feel like any time there are young men in a war zone, there is reason to be scared. Because war is not healthy for children, or other living things.
By candlelight they make us a map, drawing the mountains and rivers and streams and hills and valleys between our town and theirs. Elisabeth continuously asks what the pets are named and every time the matriarch says, “we haven’t registered them yet.” Her children take a less sarcastic approach, but it comes out with nearly the same tone: “The dog is called dog, the parrot is called parrot…” We laugh into the evening. Before going to bed they all agree, “it’s fun talking to you guys.”
We spend a few days in their company, eyeing the situation, learning about the problems. We listen to plantains falling into the hot oil and the dripping of water in the kitchen being pumped from the river beyond. The kids fish in the early morning. They milk the cows. They shuck corn and kill animals. They wash clothes in the river and sweat in the open fire kitchen. They work from dusk to dawn, all ten of them, all the time, just to sustain themselves on their farm in the valley.
Hiking back home we have a mule to carry our bags. We set a pace through the jungle. When the oranges fall from the tree I look up to see a man there. “Eat one,” he says. I do and I keep walking. If the oranges hadn’t fallen, I would’ve walked right under him. I think about how many people have seen me walking and not said a thing. We walk back through the same mud in the hot sun. Finally coming back down into the La Union, we pick up our familiar home path. We come out into the clearing, overlooking our thick jungle home with the Caribbean off in the distance. It’s postcard perfect. It’s paradise. As we come down the path into our cacaotera, Elisabeth and I stop. I ask her if it’s true we actually live here. I ask her if she can really believe it. This place is just so beautiful.
We arrive home to our newest FOR co-worker, Carla, fresh off the jet from England. We watch her settle in. I think about how we adapt, all of us, wherever we are. The day Emily left for vacation, we shared one final cup of campo coffee at 5AM. 8 months together in the campo and then she walked down the hill and that was it. Everything changed, then changed again.
They finally took down the decrepit fence around the central kiosk, but I find myself still walking the long way around the park. I walk through the center of town as if it is still there, crossing where the openings in the fence were, not stepping where I haven’t before stepped. No matter how much I remove myself from my comfort zone, I am still such a creature of habit.
“You must be used to walking in the mud, otherwise that would itch you,” a neighbor says looking at my muddy legs. “If I were really used to walking in the mud, my boots would look more like yours,” I said. He looked down, confused. (His boots had no mud on them at all, even though we’d just walked the same path.)
I have learned about focus here in the community. While working, my neighbors only think about what they are doing. There is no multi-tasking, there is no zoning out. They focus on the movement of their machete, they think about the yucca they are pulling from the earth. This makes sense, of course, because if they don’t focus on what they are doing they could cut off their limbs, but still, it is a nice lesson. This is why they say there is time for everything- to work, to play, to talk, to think. And they really do this. They dedicate time to things and then they do them with their full attention dedicated to them. I want to learn to focus this way… as though my life and limbs depended on it.
I went up with him at 6AM to pull yucca from the earth. I walked a path I had not yet walked across a rushing river with huge flat boulders. I tried to keep his morning pace through banana fields and over jungle logs. Up on the slope where the yucca was planted we weren’t high enough for the Caribbean view or the overlook of the valley, we had only the view of more jungle slopes. For a moment, I had this feeling that the dense jungle went on forever and ever and ever. That where we were was all there was. Sometimes the jungle does seem that immense. Sometimes life does seem that intense.
Tropical jungle humidity ruins everything. All of my CDs now skip. I have taken to listening to the military radio channel (there isn’t much option with the reception in our zone). In the evenings, it bounces from romantic vallenatos to army propaganda to family shoutouts aimed at the soldiers in my backyard.
November was hot days without rain
November was many community member’s birthdays
November was mourning
It was the sudden unexpected relief of a thunderstorm at sunset
Hauling sugar cane and grinding sugarcane and cooking sugarcane in smoking machinery on the hill next to the cementary and then there is panela and then there is honey in caldron pots Bunuelos and hot chocolate
A baby stillborn, a baby buried in the backyard
Fog lying low in the valley between us and town
Slipping through a hole in the fence only to be attacked by ants on the underside of the wodden boards
Men walking out of waist high grass in beautifully brimmed hats woven in shades of browns and grays
Bombs and shots and the sounds of distant combats
Muddy footpaths between homes and snakes and tall grasses swaying in the wind
A river runs the valley, swelling with every rainstorm.
Swinging tandom in hammocks and laughing while my friend impersonates me
Dancing on top of a water tank at dawn
Trying not to punch my neighbors when they come day after day to bum cigarettes from me knowing full well I have quit smoking
The full moon calling me from bed and watching her fall in the darkness and then the half light behind the filo
A new mother is carried up in a hammock with her new born baby
A new mother’s father is carried up in a casket for his funeral
Walking in mango groves at dusk in a light rain
Hiking through thick jungle, knee deep mud and knee high grass
Oranges and guavas and coconuts, oh my!
Birthday cakes and candle lights and cracking cacao from its shells
I turn 29 years old tomorrow. A neighbor talks about how proud she is her son never went to war. He is my age. Here, kids my age didn’t grow up in the Peace Community. They are teaching their kids to do what they did as if it is normal, because now they are part of a neutral Peace Community. To the children it is as if that is how it has always been. I look at the men and women here aged 25 and older and I think: you really resisted. You really are changing your world for the better. You really do practice what you preach. Living in the war zone, I have realized it is hard not to go to war.
When she stopped by on her way home, I was reading by candlelight. She lit up all the spiders spinning webs in my bedframe and then looked at me quietly for a few minutes while I read. She said, “You could really live here with us.” I said, “I do really live here with you.” She said, “I mean for real. For your whole life.”
This morning I was invited to eat yet another birthday cake. He turns 17 today. His grandmother said, “he brought the light.” I assumed she meant this in a figurative way, as in- “he is the light of my life” but as we talked more I realized that she was talking about literal light. The same day her grandson was born, they wired the path from San Jose to La Union, giving the community electricity. He is the first resident of La Union to live his entire life with electricity. And he is 17.
All things outside the war zone seem so far away, but they are so close now. In less than 1 week, I will live in the Bogota. In one month I will be on vacation in the Minnesota snow. Right now, as I sweat through my shirt in the mid-day heat and listen to a light rain outside my window, it’s hard to believe that in a couple of days there will no longer be tropical heat or cows mooing outside my window. There won’t be fireflies above my bed or lizards on my wall. I will exchange mud for salsa shoes and military radio for my itunes library. From the country to the city… Oh! How we all adapt!
15 years of Sturggle, Ten Years of Presence, Every Single Day
Hey everyone! We are kicking off our fundraising campaign for FOR and the Peace Community's anniversaries this coming March. Have a look at the video and information we sent out this week and please consider donating to the campaign in my honor: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2507/p/salsa/web/common/public/content?content_item_KEY=10609#top
Thanks,
G
In 2002, the first two FOR volunteers made the muddy trek up a mountainside to accompany the San José de Apartadó peace community -- a project of campesinos in northwestern Colombia who had declared themselves neutral five years earlier, committing to nonviolent resistance in the midst of war.
Watch video interviews of our Colombia peace presence volunteers from the past 10 years:
http://vimeo.com/32466287
In the 10 years since, more than 30 volunteers have been international observers as part of the Colombia Peace Presence, and spent a portion of their lives there -- amidst the heat, rain and intense green, with the sounds of helicopters above, waking to gun shots fired in the night, five river crossings away from the nearest city, without a refrigerator and with the incredible life stories of these campesinos who have much to teach us about war, nonviolence and the story of their resistance.
We are there because we believe in the peace community's struggle.
We believe that U.S. citizens must stand up and do something about what the United States is doing in our name, to other people's lands. We believe in accompaniment -- the power of regular people whose presence and political work protects others from death, displacement or exile.
We believe that nonviolence works. We know that the war machine is strong, and that words are our only weapon, but we also know that in these past 10 years, we have stood in the way of death to protect life.
Like any human relationship worth its salt, the last decade that FOR has spent with the community has been both full of hard times and highlighted with good.
When the paramilitaries imposed a food blockade on the road to the community, we accompanied leaders, ensuring that they and their food got across. We accompanied the return of people to their lands in the village of La Esperanza. We've climbed trees to get fruits in season and cheered at soccer games.
When the community got news that one of their leaders and seven others were massacred, we accompanied them to the site to find out what happened. Later we witnessed the transformation of Mulatos from a village known for that brutal massacre to a sacred site that symbolizes peace. When Don Gilberto lost his leg to a land mine, we were there to accompany the rescue mission, in the night, in the rain, down the hill so that he could safely get to a hospital. And each year we have celebrated Christmas, Easter and baptisms of the newly born alongside the community members.
We will be there next March to celebrate 15 years that San José de Apartadó has been nonviolently resisting in the midst of a brutal war. And we are committed to staying there as long as our presence is needed to keep them alive.
Please make a donation to continue to make our nonviolent work in San José de Apartadó possible.
To show our gratitude for your donation, for every gift of $50 and above we will send you a box of cards beautifully designed by one of our current volunteers.
And for those who donate $100 or more, we will send you a t-shirt, also designed by a current volunteer.
Join us in our celebration, and make a contribution today.
In solidarity,
The FOR Colombia Team: Gina, Emily, Elisabeth, Isaac, Jon, Liza, John and Susana
Thanks,
G
In 2002, the first two FOR volunteers made the muddy trek up a mountainside to accompany the San José de Apartadó peace community -- a project of campesinos in northwestern Colombia who had declared themselves neutral five years earlier, committing to nonviolent resistance in the midst of war.
Watch video interviews of our Colombia peace presence volunteers from the past 10 years:
http://vimeo.com/32466287
In the 10 years since, more than 30 volunteers have been international observers as part of the Colombia Peace Presence, and spent a portion of their lives there -- amidst the heat, rain and intense green, with the sounds of helicopters above, waking to gun shots fired in the night, five river crossings away from the nearest city, without a refrigerator and with the incredible life stories of these campesinos who have much to teach us about war, nonviolence and the story of their resistance.
We are there because we believe in the peace community's struggle.
We believe that U.S. citizens must stand up and do something about what the United States is doing in our name, to other people's lands. We believe in accompaniment -- the power of regular people whose presence and political work protects others from death, displacement or exile.
We believe that nonviolence works. We know that the war machine is strong, and that words are our only weapon, but we also know that in these past 10 years, we have stood in the way of death to protect life.
Like any human relationship worth its salt, the last decade that FOR has spent with the community has been both full of hard times and highlighted with good.
When the paramilitaries imposed a food blockade on the road to the community, we accompanied leaders, ensuring that they and their food got across. We accompanied the return of people to their lands in the village of La Esperanza. We've climbed trees to get fruits in season and cheered at soccer games.
When the community got news that one of their leaders and seven others were massacred, we accompanied them to the site to find out what happened. Later we witnessed the transformation of Mulatos from a village known for that brutal massacre to a sacred site that symbolizes peace. When Don Gilberto lost his leg to a land mine, we were there to accompany the rescue mission, in the night, in the rain, down the hill so that he could safely get to a hospital. And each year we have celebrated Christmas, Easter and baptisms of the newly born alongside the community members.
We will be there next March to celebrate 15 years that San José de Apartadó has been nonviolently resisting in the midst of a brutal war. And we are committed to staying there as long as our presence is needed to keep them alive.
Please make a donation to continue to make our nonviolent work in San José de Apartadó possible.
To show our gratitude for your donation, for every gift of $50 and above we will send you a box of cards beautifully designed by one of our current volunteers.
And for those who donate $100 or more, we will send you a t-shirt, also designed by a current volunteer.
Join us in our celebration, and make a contribution today.
In solidarity,
The FOR Colombia Team: Gina, Emily, Elisabeth, Isaac, Jon, Liza, John and Susana
miércoles, 9 de noviembre de 2011
Solo el amor, con su ciencia, nos vuelve tan inocentes- Violetta Parra
The month of October kicked off with the Amigo Secreto dance. I failed to correctly guess who had me and sang a lackluster song in English as penance. The boy who I had correctly guessed me, leaving me a failure in both uncovering and keeping secrets. I was given a fuscia (and I do mean FUSCIA) skirt that reminds me of a Disney princess. Despite my fashion sense, I have been told by multiple neighbors that this skirt is in fact in style. The night of the dance everyone was out and about, dressed to the nines (except us, because we always are in our nasty FOR shirts). People came from other veredas to join in the festivities and when a neighbor invited me to ice cream I looked around to see none other than an icecream vendor (where the hell did he come from and can someone lock him up here). We danced well into the morning and I probably lost 15 pounds in sweat. To bed at 3 only to wake at 6 and head to our team retreat in Medellin.
It’s weird to leave the community and, just like that, arrive in Medellin. This is the first time I’ve been so close to a community of people that I can literally picture what any given person is doing at any given hour of the day. And at the same time, from far away in Medellin it’s like the LU reality couldn’t really exist. Our retreat was a success, full of work plans and work calendars and talking things through as a team and planning a fundraising campaign and listening to music and designing tshirts, playing fun games and generally enjoying having the whole team in one place. This only happens twice a year, so must be taken advantage of. I think my faovorite moment of the whole week was when Jon forgot the rules of charades and, during his Tony the Tiger interpretation, actually roared out loud. He really sounded like a tiger. And he scared the shit out of me.
Coco juice is delicious and I have no idea why my neighbors don’t make it daily. I have sort of decided that this should be a personal goal. They laugh at us “crazy gringos” because “coco is not for juice” but we gulp it down just the same. A blender can do amazing things. Multiple neighbors have taken to doing us the favor of macheting down coconuts until they look like a shaved egg. A work of art widdled with what could be a deadly weapon.
After baking the cake, she made homemade frosting in white and pink and blue. All of her kids and her husband sat around her while she decorated the cake for a neighbor’s 5th birthday. She delicately added curlycues and boxes to the white frosting while simultaneaously telling stories. She had her five kids aged 4 to 15 laughing so hard they were crying. She impersonated voices and reminded them of a time when bats took over the roof of a house. After her story had died down a bit her husband took a large drink of coffee. She surprised him with one last hysterical tidbit and he spit out his coffee all over me. So much laughter. So much love. Laughter and baked goods = success.
And sometimes things are just so hard. And the mind gets all shuffled up or concentrated on itself. And then I run in the downpour of the rain. Or cartwheel down the street to mix up my mind and take it off of itself. One day Emily and I did Richard Simmons reminiscent excersizes across the soccer field, jumping and flipping and kicking and looking like idiots just to get our minds off of everything. Then we sprinted up the mountain in our rubber boots. Later our neighbor said we brought her such joy, “playing on the soccer field like a pair of baby sheep.”
Emily said she’d “never be able to understand time without seasons” and in the constant tropical heat here, I have to agree. It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s autumn in the north country with the apples and colors and pumpkin-pie and costumes. That Midwestern calendar that actually works by physical change in season and not by calendar dates. And it does affect how we think about time.
Despite me being the most obnoxious cheerleader possible at the soccer game, we lost in the semifinals.
There was a surprise dance when a little boy turned 4. It came outta nowhere. First there were children and cakes and balloons and then the sun went down and all the adults showed up and danced the night away. Dances are the only time it is appropriate to hug in this community and since I love dancing and hugging, they are pretty much my favorite activities ever. I win.
When a poisonous snake bit a neighbor’s dog, a group of guys went up to “find and kill it.” They can do this because after this particular snake bites it stays in one place for three or four days, “being mad”. I guessed that it was “mad” because it was low on venom, but they all assured me that this is actually the most dangerous time to get bitten by the snake. You would, “die at once.” And I said, “So you are going to look for the meanest snake at it’s angriest moment and hoping that you kill it before it bites you?” They laughed. Hilarious.
I have been waking up around 5am for a few months now. I get up and sit on the most beautifully constructed bench in La Union and drink my morning coffee. My morning coffee is strong. No sugar. No milk. (We don’t have the later anyway) and very different from the way that our neighbors drink their coffee (more aptly described sugar water, and often with milk). And sometimes he comes to sit next to me and share a cup of coffee. Everyone else knows better, so one day I ask him why he drinks my coffee when I know full well he doesn’t like it. “We all come into this life to suffer,” he says. I laugh, “That doesn’t mean you have to go out looking for bitter coffee- or any other additional reason to suffer.”
When her husband goes off to work the fields at another vereda for a month, she sleeps at her mother in law's house. In her mother in law's bed. She can’t sleep alone: “When I’m alone in a bed all I can do is think about the people I know who have died.”
About a half hour into a hike, it was obvious that neither of our guides had been to the destination for quite sometime. In fact, it seemed that nobody had walked this path in quite some time. Ahead of us a 40-something year old woman was literally macheting the vines out of the way to clear a path through the jungle. Somewhere in the second hour it was awknoledged that we were significantly lost and so the women started to whistle. This whole whistleing across canyons and actually finding eachother in the jungle is something I can't describe or even believe, even though I see it daily with my own eyes. Out from behind the caucao trees comes a boy to guide us to the path. He wasn’t gonna come up and meet us, because he "didn’t know who we were and nobody in this zone would respond to a whistle of someone they didn’t know," but then he heard our voices and felt safe and came out. The trip went without other incident, but on the way home I ran out of water and was grabbing limes and oranges and cacao to suck out the juice and keep me hidrated on the way home. We jumped over canyons and pulled ourselves up vines. After a trip walking through the jungle like that, my body felt so strong. And so exhaiusted at the same time.
We find a cd from 2007. ExFORistas listened to this same CD in this same house. A wrinkle in time.
Here the roofs are used for drying cacao seeds. They are also my new beach. Tanning on the roof has me hidden from peering children and is making some leeway on my FOR farmer’s tan.
Everyone warns that living here will change you. Here my thought
pattern itself seems to be different. I think about sunrises I dream of caucateras.
Caribbean style is much different that my flowing skirts and non-fitted shorts. In my 8th month in the community I finally decided to go by the “when in Rome” motto and buy some tight fitting jean shorts. They are ridiculously caribe and everyone besides myself and co-workers think they are very in style. When I let the little girls braid my hair and wear the jean shorts matched with my cacao secadora tan, I could practically pass for Paisa. Casi.
After climbing the hill through knee deep jungle mud we arrived at a clearing. We saw the troops, but were more interested in the views. When the camera came out, they dove into the bushes and it was as if they were never there. It is sometimes as if there are no armed actors at all, just beautiful views and beautiful people. But they are there always, hiding in the bushes.
My favorite walk is to the boca toma. It takes us through caucateras and up past gorgeous jungle overviews, across small rivers and wider ones. Passed mossy rock and hills of wild grass and wild flowers. Through thick jungles and vines and trees that look prehistoric or out of dreams. The last time Emily and I went she didn’t have her glasses on and went stumbling over rocks and vines.
Thoushands of hawks circling. THOUSANDS. Circling just at the level of the clouds where the storm was about to fall. A child asks his dad why they are having such a big meeting and his father responds, “I don’t know, but if I were a chicken I would hide under a log.”
Accompanying the community to their work days we see tham cut down all of the jungle so that their crops can grow. They hack through bees nests and they hack through snake houses and they hack down so much green that it is hard to believe in two weeks time they will have to do it all again. The rhythmic sound of the machete.
One neighbor comes late at night to tell jokes and another to teach tonguetwisters and couplet verses that have to do with the campo. Language in all of it’s beauty will always inspire me.
I accomplished my dream of riding on the back of a horse with a campesino. The picture in my mind in my mind was something out of Braveheart- romantic and fun. The reality was quite uncomfortable and I don’t think I’ll repeat it.
I was practically running home one evening, trying to beat the sunset, when it started to drizzle. I stopped in a point on the path where there is a slight break in the foliage and oen can look over the river rushing below. I saw the raindrops gain strength and for a moment I seemed to see millions of individual raindrops all falling individually. Millions of raindrops and then a split second later one continuous sheet of falling rain, like a wall before me and then on top of me.
Other images from the month of October:
The first week I was here our neighbor helped us plant her beautiful flowering bushes in our garden. This week the first one has blossomed flowers.
A baby horse stumbling by, not quite knowing how to walk
My neighbors write the vallenato lyrics out for me and then laugh when I sing them
Riding bareback down the street
Sitting in knee deep grass amoung army ants
listening to the rhythmic thwak of machetes clearing the jungle
Sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen talking about death while surrounded by geese
Listening to the quebrada below and the birds and bugs all around
Seeing our home town from afar, nestled in the mountains jungles
Watching half the town chase down a goose for dinner
The sun hidden behind clouds but we still feel it
the bomber plane hidden behind clouds, but we still hear it
At a FARC funeral there is a Colombian flag waiving
Carrying lena down through the caucatera with a neighbor
Balancing a tree trunk on my shoulder
Fog lying low over the filo de la cruz
A neighbor singing ranchera while saddling his horse
The oldest LU resident walking hunchbacked down the hill with a homemade cigar hanging out of his mouth,
camo and combat and falling in thornbushes,
walking through mango groves, and knee deep mud.
Soldiers on the march twenty feet away
Bomber planes overhead
Shots and machine gun fire
helicopters flying so low it alwost feels we could reach up and touch them
A friend gazing out over the hills before he goes to work
Walking through ten foot cana fields
Beautifully barked trees with camoflauged three inch spines growing off them
Sitting at the honey making machine, looking over the plateau, and listening to the rain come in while talking about life decisions with my neighbor
Deshelling beans and removing caucao seeds from the shells
Vericose veins and smoke billowing from kitches,
police requisas and baking cakes
bunuelos in the shapes of campo animals
Standing in the cacautera in the rain feeling the earth turn to a stream beneath my feet
Climbing avocado trees and caucao trees and climbing zapote trees and trees I don’t even know the names of and getting bitten by the bugs on these trees and
how things moves and how things change and how we are so good at adapting to them
Soila peering out from the second story of her house while balancing a jar on her head and putting her finger over her mouth as if to say, “shhhhhhhh, everything that happens in life is our little secret…”
The war zone unravels, layer by layer revealing itself to the observer. As do the histories of my neighbors, of everyone and of everything- layer by layer we are discovered.
And time here sometimes passes so quickly I lose track of the month and other times I am so caught in its swell. Only one month left and then i will bus to Bogota and arrive in the city and just like that i will wonder if this indeed ever did happen, or if it was just the most incredible dream.
It’s weird to leave the community and, just like that, arrive in Medellin. This is the first time I’ve been so close to a community of people that I can literally picture what any given person is doing at any given hour of the day. And at the same time, from far away in Medellin it’s like the LU reality couldn’t really exist. Our retreat was a success, full of work plans and work calendars and talking things through as a team and planning a fundraising campaign and listening to music and designing tshirts, playing fun games and generally enjoying having the whole team in one place. This only happens twice a year, so must be taken advantage of. I think my faovorite moment of the whole week was when Jon forgot the rules of charades and, during his Tony the Tiger interpretation, actually roared out loud. He really sounded like a tiger. And he scared the shit out of me.
Coco juice is delicious and I have no idea why my neighbors don’t make it daily. I have sort of decided that this should be a personal goal. They laugh at us “crazy gringos” because “coco is not for juice” but we gulp it down just the same. A blender can do amazing things. Multiple neighbors have taken to doing us the favor of macheting down coconuts until they look like a shaved egg. A work of art widdled with what could be a deadly weapon.
After baking the cake, she made homemade frosting in white and pink and blue. All of her kids and her husband sat around her while she decorated the cake for a neighbor’s 5th birthday. She delicately added curlycues and boxes to the white frosting while simultaneaously telling stories. She had her five kids aged 4 to 15 laughing so hard they were crying. She impersonated voices and reminded them of a time when bats took over the roof of a house. After her story had died down a bit her husband took a large drink of coffee. She surprised him with one last hysterical tidbit and he spit out his coffee all over me. So much laughter. So much love. Laughter and baked goods = success.
And sometimes things are just so hard. And the mind gets all shuffled up or concentrated on itself. And then I run in the downpour of the rain. Or cartwheel down the street to mix up my mind and take it off of itself. One day Emily and I did Richard Simmons reminiscent excersizes across the soccer field, jumping and flipping and kicking and looking like idiots just to get our minds off of everything. Then we sprinted up the mountain in our rubber boots. Later our neighbor said we brought her such joy, “playing on the soccer field like a pair of baby sheep.”
Emily said she’d “never be able to understand time without seasons” and in the constant tropical heat here, I have to agree. It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s autumn in the north country with the apples and colors and pumpkin-pie and costumes. That Midwestern calendar that actually works by physical change in season and not by calendar dates. And it does affect how we think about time.
Despite me being the most obnoxious cheerleader possible at the soccer game, we lost in the semifinals.
There was a surprise dance when a little boy turned 4. It came outta nowhere. First there were children and cakes and balloons and then the sun went down and all the adults showed up and danced the night away. Dances are the only time it is appropriate to hug in this community and since I love dancing and hugging, they are pretty much my favorite activities ever. I win.
When a poisonous snake bit a neighbor’s dog, a group of guys went up to “find and kill it.” They can do this because after this particular snake bites it stays in one place for three or four days, “being mad”. I guessed that it was “mad” because it was low on venom, but they all assured me that this is actually the most dangerous time to get bitten by the snake. You would, “die at once.” And I said, “So you are going to look for the meanest snake at it’s angriest moment and hoping that you kill it before it bites you?” They laughed. Hilarious.
I have been waking up around 5am for a few months now. I get up and sit on the most beautifully constructed bench in La Union and drink my morning coffee. My morning coffee is strong. No sugar. No milk. (We don’t have the later anyway) and very different from the way that our neighbors drink their coffee (more aptly described sugar water, and often with milk). And sometimes he comes to sit next to me and share a cup of coffee. Everyone else knows better, so one day I ask him why he drinks my coffee when I know full well he doesn’t like it. “We all come into this life to suffer,” he says. I laugh, “That doesn’t mean you have to go out looking for bitter coffee- or any other additional reason to suffer.”
When her husband goes off to work the fields at another vereda for a month, she sleeps at her mother in law's house. In her mother in law's bed. She can’t sleep alone: “When I’m alone in a bed all I can do is think about the people I know who have died.”
About a half hour into a hike, it was obvious that neither of our guides had been to the destination for quite sometime. In fact, it seemed that nobody had walked this path in quite some time. Ahead of us a 40-something year old woman was literally macheting the vines out of the way to clear a path through the jungle. Somewhere in the second hour it was awknoledged that we were significantly lost and so the women started to whistle. This whole whistleing across canyons and actually finding eachother in the jungle is something I can't describe or even believe, even though I see it daily with my own eyes. Out from behind the caucao trees comes a boy to guide us to the path. He wasn’t gonna come up and meet us, because he "didn’t know who we were and nobody in this zone would respond to a whistle of someone they didn’t know," but then he heard our voices and felt safe and came out. The trip went without other incident, but on the way home I ran out of water and was grabbing limes and oranges and cacao to suck out the juice and keep me hidrated on the way home. We jumped over canyons and pulled ourselves up vines. After a trip walking through the jungle like that, my body felt so strong. And so exhaiusted at the same time.
We find a cd from 2007. ExFORistas listened to this same CD in this same house. A wrinkle in time.
Here the roofs are used for drying cacao seeds. They are also my new beach. Tanning on the roof has me hidden from peering children and is making some leeway on my FOR farmer’s tan.
Everyone warns that living here will change you. Here my thought
pattern itself seems to be different. I think about sunrises I dream of caucateras.
Caribbean style is much different that my flowing skirts and non-fitted shorts. In my 8th month in the community I finally decided to go by the “when in Rome” motto and buy some tight fitting jean shorts. They are ridiculously caribe and everyone besides myself and co-workers think they are very in style. When I let the little girls braid my hair and wear the jean shorts matched with my cacao secadora tan, I could practically pass for Paisa. Casi.
After climbing the hill through knee deep jungle mud we arrived at a clearing. We saw the troops, but were more interested in the views. When the camera came out, they dove into the bushes and it was as if they were never there. It is sometimes as if there are no armed actors at all, just beautiful views and beautiful people. But they are there always, hiding in the bushes.
My favorite walk is to the boca toma. It takes us through caucateras and up past gorgeous jungle overviews, across small rivers and wider ones. Passed mossy rock and hills of wild grass and wild flowers. Through thick jungles and vines and trees that look prehistoric or out of dreams. The last time Emily and I went she didn’t have her glasses on and went stumbling over rocks and vines.
Thoushands of hawks circling. THOUSANDS. Circling just at the level of the clouds where the storm was about to fall. A child asks his dad why they are having such a big meeting and his father responds, “I don’t know, but if I were a chicken I would hide under a log.”
Accompanying the community to their work days we see tham cut down all of the jungle so that their crops can grow. They hack through bees nests and they hack through snake houses and they hack down so much green that it is hard to believe in two weeks time they will have to do it all again. The rhythmic sound of the machete.
One neighbor comes late at night to tell jokes and another to teach tonguetwisters and couplet verses that have to do with the campo. Language in all of it’s beauty will always inspire me.
I accomplished my dream of riding on the back of a horse with a campesino. The picture in my mind in my mind was something out of Braveheart- romantic and fun. The reality was quite uncomfortable and I don’t think I’ll repeat it.
I was practically running home one evening, trying to beat the sunset, when it started to drizzle. I stopped in a point on the path where there is a slight break in the foliage and oen can look over the river rushing below. I saw the raindrops gain strength and for a moment I seemed to see millions of individual raindrops all falling individually. Millions of raindrops and then a split second later one continuous sheet of falling rain, like a wall before me and then on top of me.
Other images from the month of October:
The first week I was here our neighbor helped us plant her beautiful flowering bushes in our garden. This week the first one has blossomed flowers.
A baby horse stumbling by, not quite knowing how to walk
My neighbors write the vallenato lyrics out for me and then laugh when I sing them
Riding bareback down the street
Sitting in knee deep grass amoung army ants
listening to the rhythmic thwak of machetes clearing the jungle
Sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen talking about death while surrounded by geese
Listening to the quebrada below and the birds and bugs all around
Seeing our home town from afar, nestled in the mountains jungles
Watching half the town chase down a goose for dinner
The sun hidden behind clouds but we still feel it
the bomber plane hidden behind clouds, but we still hear it
At a FARC funeral there is a Colombian flag waiving
Carrying lena down through the caucatera with a neighbor
Balancing a tree trunk on my shoulder
Fog lying low over the filo de la cruz
A neighbor singing ranchera while saddling his horse
The oldest LU resident walking hunchbacked down the hill with a homemade cigar hanging out of his mouth,
camo and combat and falling in thornbushes,
walking through mango groves, and knee deep mud.
Soldiers on the march twenty feet away
Bomber planes overhead
Shots and machine gun fire
helicopters flying so low it alwost feels we could reach up and touch them
A friend gazing out over the hills before he goes to work
Walking through ten foot cana fields
Beautifully barked trees with camoflauged three inch spines growing off them
Sitting at the honey making machine, looking over the plateau, and listening to the rain come in while talking about life decisions with my neighbor
Deshelling beans and removing caucao seeds from the shells
Vericose veins and smoke billowing from kitches,
police requisas and baking cakes
bunuelos in the shapes of campo animals
Standing in the cacautera in the rain feeling the earth turn to a stream beneath my feet
Climbing avocado trees and caucao trees and climbing zapote trees and trees I don’t even know the names of and getting bitten by the bugs on these trees and
how things moves and how things change and how we are so good at adapting to them
Soila peering out from the second story of her house while balancing a jar on her head and putting her finger over her mouth as if to say, “shhhhhhhh, everything that happens in life is our little secret…”
The war zone unravels, layer by layer revealing itself to the observer. As do the histories of my neighbors, of everyone and of everything- layer by layer we are discovered.
And time here sometimes passes so quickly I lose track of the month and other times I am so caught in its swell. Only one month left and then i will bus to Bogota and arrive in the city and just like that i will wonder if this indeed ever did happen, or if it was just the most incredible dream.
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