Hey Everyone,
You may recall from my blog that I was in La Esperanza a few weeks ago, accompanying the Peace Community there. This was part of the three international accompaniment organizations that work with the Peace Community (PBI of England, Palomas of Italy and FOR of the USA) rotating through the village in response to hightened threats from illegal armed paramilitary groups.
U.S. CITIZENS: FOR released an Urgent Action Letter this week, in response to what is happening in La Esperanza. Please take a few moments to politically support the Peace Community, which has been under severe paramilitary threat since mid-November, by signing this letter. It only takes a few seconds and the letter was written, in part, by yours truly. Click here to sign the letter to the U.S. Ambassador in Colombia and support the Peace Community in their resistance to militant oppression.
NOT A U.S. CITIZEN, BUT STILL LOVE GINA, HER WORK and the FOR COLOMBIA PROGRAM? Below is a copy of the letter to U.S. Ambassador Michael McKinley, for all you amazing friends of mine who are not US citizens, but would be willing to send a similar letter via e-mail to your ambassador in Colombia.
Thanks for supporting me and my work, thanks on behalf of FOR's Colombia program team, and thank you for supporting the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado in their peaceful struggle this holiday season,
Gina
Dear Ambassador McKinley,
I am writing to express my concern about recent paramilitary threats and actions against the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in northwest Colombia.
On two separate occasions in the final weeks of November, armed men self-identified as paramilitaries entered the village of La Esperanza, where several Peace Community members live. These illegal armed groups met with village members, demanded future collaboration, ordered the closure of the village’s two stores and began limiting the amount of food residents can bring up to their families from town. In addition to being inside village limits, many paramilitaries are present in the surrounding area, operating checkpoints along the paths. On November 22, paramilitary and guerrilla gunmen reportedly engaged in intensive combat nearby.
The recent incursion of paramilitary groups is only the latest example of the violence the Peace Community has suffered over the past year. Since March 2011, paramilitary and other illegal armed groups have killed 12 civilians from the San José area and continue to threaten the Peace Community with target lists of those to be murdered next, despite heavy military and police presence.
Paramilitaries, collaborating with the Colombian military, have been involved in the majority of the 195 deaths the Peace Community has suffered since its founding in 1997. In response to such violence, only a few low-ranking army men and paramilitaries have been tried and convicted. Given the history of paramilitary and state-sponsored violence, ongoing impunity and U.S. financial support to the Colombian army, this recent surge in presence is certain to put the civilians of La Esperanza in danger of violence.
I respectfully urge you to:
* Contact Colombian government officials about the paramilitary groups' continued operations, contrary to the assertion that they effectively demobilized in 2006. It is the state’s responsibility to dismantle all paramilitary structures.
* Contact the 17th Brigade to reiterate your concern for the safety of Peace Community members and other civilians living in La Esperanza. Remind the brigade of their responsibility to protect the Peace Community in accordance with the community’s principles of nonviolence and non-involvement in the armed conflict, and the protective measures issued by the Inter-American Human Rights Court.
I look forward to hearing back from you on your actions to protect the Peace Community and other civilians affected by the armed conflict. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
Sincerely,
(Your Name)
jueves, 15 de diciembre de 2011
viernes, 9 de diciembre de 2011
Are you for FOR?
PLEASE click here and help our Campaign:
15 years of resistance, 10 years of presence, Every Single Day.
Alright everyone, here's the deal- FOR's Colombia program is kicking off a fundraiser that will run through March of 2012.
This amazing opportunity for you to support peace in Colombia is in celebration of two major anniversaries coming up this spring:
1.) The Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado will be celebrating 15 years of peaceful resistance to militant repression and
2.) The Fellowship of Reconciliation will be celebrating 10 years as full-time accompaniers to these inspiring human rights defenders.
Could there be a better cause for which to donate your hard-earned cash?
I thought not.
But wait, there’s more! Not only are your FORistas on the ground committed to working for Peace in Colombia and around the world, they are also quite creative and artistic. As you will note on the donation website, gifts are included for donations of 50 dollars or more... gifts designed by current FOR volunteers just like me!
"And what," you may ask, "will $50 do for FOR?" Great question! 50 dollars will support one human rights accompanier for one day in the Peace Community. With some quick math we can see that a mere $350 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire week! $1,000 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire month! And (gasp!) $12,000 will support a FOR volunteer to protect the Peace Community for an entire year! Talk about bang for your buck!
As you see on the lovely FOR-volunteer-designed website, you also have the opportunity to donate “in honor” of someone. Here are some thoughts on that cool feature:
1. You could donate in my honor, which would be amazing, since I will actually directly serve the Peace Community due to your donation.
2. You could donate in honor of a loved one as a holiday gift or a birthday gift or a “hey, thinking of you so I sent a donation to support peace in Colombia” gift…
3. You could donate in honor of all grass-roots communities working around the world for a more just and peaceful existence.
Thank you in advance for visiting ImforFOR.org, where all this information is presented with pretty colors and graphics.
And THANK YOU in advance for donating to support me, FOR’s accompaniment work, the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado and PEACE IN COLOMBIA.
Have a wonderful Holiday Season,
Gina
15 years of resistance, 10 years of presence, Every Single Day.
Alright everyone, here's the deal- FOR's Colombia program is kicking off a fundraiser that will run through March of 2012.
This amazing opportunity for you to support peace in Colombia is in celebration of two major anniversaries coming up this spring:
1.) The Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado will be celebrating 15 years of peaceful resistance to militant repression and
2.) The Fellowship of Reconciliation will be celebrating 10 years as full-time accompaniers to these inspiring human rights defenders.
Could there be a better cause for which to donate your hard-earned cash?
I thought not.
But wait, there’s more! Not only are your FORistas on the ground committed to working for Peace in Colombia and around the world, they are also quite creative and artistic. As you will note on the donation website, gifts are included for donations of 50 dollars or more... gifts designed by current FOR volunteers just like me!
"And what," you may ask, "will $50 do for FOR?" Great question! 50 dollars will support one human rights accompanier for one day in the Peace Community. With some quick math we can see that a mere $350 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire week! $1,000 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire month! And (gasp!) $12,000 will support a FOR volunteer to protect the Peace Community for an entire year! Talk about bang for your buck!
As you see on the lovely FOR-volunteer-designed website, you also have the opportunity to donate “in honor” of someone. Here are some thoughts on that cool feature:
1. You could donate in my honor, which would be amazing, since I will actually directly serve the Peace Community due to your donation.
2. You could donate in honor of a loved one as a holiday gift or a birthday gift or a “hey, thinking of you so I sent a donation to support peace in Colombia” gift…
3. You could donate in honor of all grass-roots communities working around the world for a more just and peaceful existence.
Thank you in advance for visiting ImforFOR.org, where all this information is presented with pretty colors and graphics.
And THANK YOU in advance for donating to support me, FOR’s accompaniment work, the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado and PEACE IN COLOMBIA.
Have a wonderful Holiday Season,
Gina
miércoles, 7 de diciembre de 2011
City Lights
From the plane I say goodbye to Uraba’s lush green mountainous and hello to Medellin’s brown river and tall buildings. While waiting for my plane transfer, I eat lunch in the terminal. There is table service and a waitress dressed stylishly in hoop earrings and high heels. The news blaring from four TV’s at once talks of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” and I realize I forgot about Thanksgiving. The news talks of relations between countries and elections and protests. I realize that all of a sudden I will be up on the news. On politics. On the world. I forgot what it was like to have a TV in front of me. Commercials. Anchors. I forgot so many things. Did I lose them? Will I find them?
Another time up into the air and back down and I land in a familiar city. Welcome to Bogota in its nightlight splendor. For the first time in months I feel chilled. Cold, actually. For the first time in months I am cold. I arrive to an empty apartment and look out over the city to the distant hills as every other FOR volunteer has done upon leaving the campo for the capital metropolis and I feel so very strange. My body has made the transition from rural war zone to one of the biggest cities in Latin America, but my mind has a long ways to go. Just as I start shaking (Cold? Confusion? Too many thoughts all at once?), I look down to see a letter left by my roommate and posted mail with my name on it from the states. Birthday cards and presents from my mom and my Grandma. All of a sudden I will be connected to my family again. And I sit down and I read the cards over and over. And then I think about how I’d had my morning coffee in La Union. I think about my friends that left me in Apartado and waved goodbye to my taxi. I think about Emily… How will I readjust to life without Emily? Then I take my first hot shower in 8 months.
In the night, in a half-sleep/half-identify the campo noise outside your window state I think to myself, “what a strange noise for the rain to make” and then I wake up to car horns. I wake from dreams of the community with a vallenato song in my head, but I listen to Bob Dylan over coffee. It rains at night here too, but the apartment building is tall and I don’t hear it intensely on my roof. Mostly I know it rained because I hear cars splashing through puddles on the pavement. Isaac and I go for breakfast. We eat pastries full of ricotta cheese and spinach while our co-workers in La Union take off on an accompaniment in response to emergencies La Esperanza. Isaac goes to work, but I get a few “adjustment” days which works out fine, because one of my dearest friends is visiting from Holland. And because I have not seen my friends in Bogota for months.
Slumber parties with Lisa and Diwy and Luna are just what the doctor ordered. Lisa works, Luna goes to day-care and then Diwy and I have nothing to do but everything we want. Diwy and I walk city streets and shop for needed items in my new city life. We eat delicious foods, which are ten times as delicious for me because I have been eating the same thing for 8 months. In the grocer I smell guava and immediately think of the tree outside our house. I smell it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Eventually I find it. It’s packaged in plastic. Together we try and adjust to Bogota’s altitude and together we laugh at our failure to do so. We go to Isaac’s goodbye dinner and eat curries. We catch up on life and love and future plans and current adventures. We laugh a lot.
Diwy decides we “need to get out of the city” and, amazingly, after 24 hours of being here, I agree. We road trip to Villa de Leyva, a small colonial Colombian tourist town three hours outside of the capital in pastoral Boyacá. We stroll the central plaza and take photos of ourselves. We drink beer and laugh and loiter in shops, trying on clothes we never buy. We café hop and drink coffees and chocolates and teas. We try and hike a “half hour hike” but it takes us 3 hours because we literally can not breathe in the altitude. We arrive at the summit just in time for a thunderstorm and Diwy pops up her umbrella. We eat artisan pastries in the rain on top of a mountain and then nearly die sliding back down the slick mossy rock in the rain. We’d had great plans to hike to beautiful pastoral waterfalls and lakes, but in the name of oxygen decide to meander cobbled streets instead. People do not understand my Caribbean vernacular. They do understand Diwy’s crystal clear Guatemalan accent. She does most of the negotiating.
Diwy watched me culture shock and let me talk around in circles confused about life. She walked arm in arm with me under the same umbrella and made me laugh talking about all things relevant and what becomes of us through the choices we make. We talked a lot about Colombia. And the world. And travel. And our expat lives. And how in our current society people feel so worldly. And then Diwy said, “People in the first world feel like they are so connected, and they are. They are so connected without knowing what they are connected to.” I was so thankful to have Diwy.
Back in Bogota I unpack my bags and set up my room. I look around and try to adjust to the idea that this is home. I straighten my hair for the first time since Emily chopped it all off our first month in the campo (sans comb) and am impressed with her straight-lined cut. I try to come to terms with the fact that my days are complete without talking to the same people I talked to everyday in the community. I take naps and try to pull myself out of campo time in order to go out dancing. Diwy, Jon and I go out dancing. We dance vallenato and salsa and reggaeton. We bar hop through city lights. I dream about the community. I try on every sweater I own and thank the weather because I love sweaters. Jon and I walk through Bogota’s central plaza and shop for a hammock. I revel in my love for Latin American plazas on Sundays. I buy a colorful umbrella. We buy tropical flowers off the street to put in our home. The kind of tropical flowers that a week ago, I could have picked myself. We get a bright blue hammock for the living room and some Christmas lights to get into the December groove. Jon and I cook good food and watch American movies from comfortable couches. A helicopter flies low and my heart pounds- some internalized physical reaction even though my mind knows that this helicopter is not out to bomb anyone. I waste a river’s worth of water every time I get into the hot shower. It is just that good.
Starting work mixes another world into the whirlwind. There is so much to do! A conference on laws for human rights defenders, a meeting with a group of conscientious objectors, conference calls with people in Austria and the states, planning publications and articles, meeting with other accompanying organizations and hearing about their work and partners, planning webinars, learning about massacres elsewhere in the country and the overall situation in Colombia. In Bogota conversations are so packed- they are jammed with so many themes and topics and everything is so beautifully put together. People are eloquent and they flow from one human rights issue to the next and activists are pumped and people talk fluidly about death and policy and corporations and protest. I know I can do that… I have done that… but right now I am used to conversing about yucca. And when someone says there is an Amnesty International urgent action for the town of La Esperanza in the Peace Community, I don’t just think about the need to respond to it, I actually see the faces of the people there. I think about things they have said to me. I think about the fact that I was there two weeks ago. Is that healthy? Effective? Normal? Inspiring? Scary? There are so very many things I do not know. And so many things that I have a feeling I knew one time but now seem to have lost. This is the first time I have culture shocked within the same country I currently live in. Weird. As in with all things transition or otherwise, there is something to be said for being gentle with oneself.
The rain has started to pour down on our office roof. The rain somehow brings me back to myself. In concretely happy news from my new amazing Bogota life, I am going to a free Calle 13 concert in a park tonight. I suppose his advice is as good as any… atrevete.
Another time up into the air and back down and I land in a familiar city. Welcome to Bogota in its nightlight splendor. For the first time in months I feel chilled. Cold, actually. For the first time in months I am cold. I arrive to an empty apartment and look out over the city to the distant hills as every other FOR volunteer has done upon leaving the campo for the capital metropolis and I feel so very strange. My body has made the transition from rural war zone to one of the biggest cities in Latin America, but my mind has a long ways to go. Just as I start shaking (Cold? Confusion? Too many thoughts all at once?), I look down to see a letter left by my roommate and posted mail with my name on it from the states. Birthday cards and presents from my mom and my Grandma. All of a sudden I will be connected to my family again. And I sit down and I read the cards over and over. And then I think about how I’d had my morning coffee in La Union. I think about my friends that left me in Apartado and waved goodbye to my taxi. I think about Emily… How will I readjust to life without Emily? Then I take my first hot shower in 8 months.
In the night, in a half-sleep/half-identify the campo noise outside your window state I think to myself, “what a strange noise for the rain to make” and then I wake up to car horns. I wake from dreams of the community with a vallenato song in my head, but I listen to Bob Dylan over coffee. It rains at night here too, but the apartment building is tall and I don’t hear it intensely on my roof. Mostly I know it rained because I hear cars splashing through puddles on the pavement. Isaac and I go for breakfast. We eat pastries full of ricotta cheese and spinach while our co-workers in La Union take off on an accompaniment in response to emergencies La Esperanza. Isaac goes to work, but I get a few “adjustment” days which works out fine, because one of my dearest friends is visiting from Holland. And because I have not seen my friends in Bogota for months.
Slumber parties with Lisa and Diwy and Luna are just what the doctor ordered. Lisa works, Luna goes to day-care and then Diwy and I have nothing to do but everything we want. Diwy and I walk city streets and shop for needed items in my new city life. We eat delicious foods, which are ten times as delicious for me because I have been eating the same thing for 8 months. In the grocer I smell guava and immediately think of the tree outside our house. I smell it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Eventually I find it. It’s packaged in plastic. Together we try and adjust to Bogota’s altitude and together we laugh at our failure to do so. We go to Isaac’s goodbye dinner and eat curries. We catch up on life and love and future plans and current adventures. We laugh a lot.
Diwy decides we “need to get out of the city” and, amazingly, after 24 hours of being here, I agree. We road trip to Villa de Leyva, a small colonial Colombian tourist town three hours outside of the capital in pastoral Boyacá. We stroll the central plaza and take photos of ourselves. We drink beer and laugh and loiter in shops, trying on clothes we never buy. We café hop and drink coffees and chocolates and teas. We try and hike a “half hour hike” but it takes us 3 hours because we literally can not breathe in the altitude. We arrive at the summit just in time for a thunderstorm and Diwy pops up her umbrella. We eat artisan pastries in the rain on top of a mountain and then nearly die sliding back down the slick mossy rock in the rain. We’d had great plans to hike to beautiful pastoral waterfalls and lakes, but in the name of oxygen decide to meander cobbled streets instead. People do not understand my Caribbean vernacular. They do understand Diwy’s crystal clear Guatemalan accent. She does most of the negotiating.
Diwy watched me culture shock and let me talk around in circles confused about life. She walked arm in arm with me under the same umbrella and made me laugh talking about all things relevant and what becomes of us through the choices we make. We talked a lot about Colombia. And the world. And travel. And our expat lives. And how in our current society people feel so worldly. And then Diwy said, “People in the first world feel like they are so connected, and they are. They are so connected without knowing what they are connected to.” I was so thankful to have Diwy.
Back in Bogota I unpack my bags and set up my room. I look around and try to adjust to the idea that this is home. I straighten my hair for the first time since Emily chopped it all off our first month in the campo (sans comb) and am impressed with her straight-lined cut. I try to come to terms with the fact that my days are complete without talking to the same people I talked to everyday in the community. I take naps and try to pull myself out of campo time in order to go out dancing. Diwy, Jon and I go out dancing. We dance vallenato and salsa and reggaeton. We bar hop through city lights. I dream about the community. I try on every sweater I own and thank the weather because I love sweaters. Jon and I walk through Bogota’s central plaza and shop for a hammock. I revel in my love for Latin American plazas on Sundays. I buy a colorful umbrella. We buy tropical flowers off the street to put in our home. The kind of tropical flowers that a week ago, I could have picked myself. We get a bright blue hammock for the living room and some Christmas lights to get into the December groove. Jon and I cook good food and watch American movies from comfortable couches. A helicopter flies low and my heart pounds- some internalized physical reaction even though my mind knows that this helicopter is not out to bomb anyone. I waste a river’s worth of water every time I get into the hot shower. It is just that good.
Starting work mixes another world into the whirlwind. There is so much to do! A conference on laws for human rights defenders, a meeting with a group of conscientious objectors, conference calls with people in Austria and the states, planning publications and articles, meeting with other accompanying organizations and hearing about their work and partners, planning webinars, learning about massacres elsewhere in the country and the overall situation in Colombia. In Bogota conversations are so packed- they are jammed with so many themes and topics and everything is so beautifully put together. People are eloquent and they flow from one human rights issue to the next and activists are pumped and people talk fluidly about death and policy and corporations and protest. I know I can do that… I have done that… but right now I am used to conversing about yucca. And when someone says there is an Amnesty International urgent action for the town of La Esperanza in the Peace Community, I don’t just think about the need to respond to it, I actually see the faces of the people there. I think about things they have said to me. I think about the fact that I was there two weeks ago. Is that healthy? Effective? Normal? Inspiring? Scary? There are so very many things I do not know. And so many things that I have a feeling I knew one time but now seem to have lost. This is the first time I have culture shocked within the same country I currently live in. Weird. As in with all things transition or otherwise, there is something to be said for being gentle with oneself.
The rain has started to pour down on our office roof. The rain somehow brings me back to myself. In concretely happy news from my new amazing Bogota life, I am going to a free Calle 13 concert in a park tonight. I suppose his advice is as good as any… atrevete.
martes, 6 de diciembre de 2011
Gina turns 29 and then leaves the peace community in the war zone...
On November 23rd I woke up at 5AM to a decorated house. Charlotte and Elisabeth had snuck in during the night to decorate the house where I sleep with balloons and a fun little birthday game- they folded up a bunch of pieces of paper with suggestions of what people should give me for my birthday and pasted them to the wall. As my neighbors started to come by on their way to work, they were instructed to choose one. The gift suggestions were pretty great- flowers, hugs, dances, tell her how awesome she is, take a photo with her- and I felt pretty loved.
At 5:30 I took off with a couple of my pals to get wood for the stove we were making in order to cook hot chocolate and bunuelos for the entire town. Around the same time my amazing best friend turned cake-baker started whipping up birthday cakes in her cake-mixing bowl (made from a seed that hangs from the tree outside our house). I booted up, put on my ridiculous pink peace glasses, placed all of the flowers given to me in my hair, and threw a large woven basket over my shoulder. As the moon and stars gave way to the sun, we hiked up through the cacautera and down to the river in search of dry branches, passing my favorite view of the community along the way. We had a photo shoot at the river’s edge and walked down the sandbar in the middle of it. We posed with jungle leaves that dwarf a gringa, and on flat smooth slabs of river rock that allow the rapids to break against them, but never budge. We filled our basket with heavy macheted wood in the shape of thin sticks and we put tree trunks over our shoulders to be axed down back at home. The hour of my birth I was wading in a war zone jungle river… this thought crossed my mind. I wonder if my mother would have expected as much the day I was born. I chose river rocks to bring home as a birthday gift to myself.
In the campo, eggs are cracked on the birthday gal’s head. Sometimes. Actually, there were 6 birthdays the same week as mine, and I think I was the only one to get eggs cracked on my head. Four in total. Always a surprise, and always smelly. I showered three times, used nearly an entire bottle of shampoo and still couldn’t get rid of the stench. Most people got a kick out of my plastered, yoked hair. One laughing lady said to me, “Who did that to you?” I listed the names of the culprits. She said, “They haven’t done that to a FOR volunteer before.” “Really?” “Nope. They must really like you.” “Yeah. Clearly.”
By mid-morning the bouquet on the kitchen table had grown considerably and I had received far more hugs than a normal day. I made breakfast from the remaining eggs in the house (a defensive move) and then headed to a friend’s porch to make popsicles. While I had planned to take the day off of work, it just so happened that the Internet connection was out (surprise!) and thus Charlotte and Elisabeth decided to jump on the “why work when it’s Gina’s birthday” train. We went to the swimming hole. We walked further down the canyon than I ever had before and we swam under waterfalls. When it started to rain and the river started to rise, we shimmied back up the rocks and waded along the banks, criss-crossing as necessary to get back home.
It was afternoon and time to get serious about cooking. Cake decoration was in full force, and soon our kitchen was a bunuelo and chocolate factory- cheese grinding and flour kneading, deep oil frying, and wood stove burning. The cakes were decorated pink and blue and when she finished decorating them, she put them on top of my bed so the kids wouldn’t get at them. Not quite a foolproof plan… Sapa got to one cake… and then Sapa was nearly killed by a campesina baker (“10 hours of baking for the cat to lick the frosting!?!”). Thank God the cook has a good sense of humor. We chopped off the cat-eaten corner and then salvaged the rest.
The sun set with a golden hue and I thought I may be in one of the most beautiful places in the world to turn 29.
When the fried food went a wafting into the night sky, my neighbors came by. They wished me well and told me how wonderful I was. (I was never sure if these hugs and well-wishes came from them directly or if they had chosen said paper on the wall, but in the end it didn’t matter.) We ate bunuelos and listened to vallenato. Even though the community is in mourning and there was to be no dancing, they granted me one birthday dance (“she’ll dance alone anyway, so she may as well do it right”). It was vallenato. And amazing. The kids played with balloons and the adults talked and laughed and gorged on bunuelos. Those who stayed late got stuck in the rain and ended up staying really late- later than anyone has ever stayed over. Mostly I think they stayed because the company was good and the party was fun- afterall, the rain never hurt anyone.
I was supposed to get up the day after my birthday to pack and prepare to leave. I was supposed to finish working and say my goodbyes and prepare for the big city downtown. So I did. I packed and cleaned and organized my life into one bag. I finished up work and pulled documents off the computer. I walked through town and said goodbye. I did all of these things right on schedule, but in the end there were so many landslides that I couldn’t go anywhere.
I won a few extra days in the community and because they were unexpected they were oh so fun. Some people in the community are bad at goodbyes (if only they stuck around to see me try and say goodbye they would feel better about themselves) and so they left at 4 in the morning for the fields so that they wouldn’t have to say anything or see me go. I sure did love the looks on their faces when they saw me at lunch time: “What are you doing here?” “I simply couldn’t go with out saying goodbye…”
In my “extra” days in the community, I ran around laughing like a crazy gringa. I cartwheeled and wheelbarrowed and skipped from rock to rock through town. I walked jungle paths and crossed jungle streams. I bathed in jungle waterfalls and jumped in jungle pools. I pulled with all my might to get yucca out of the earth and lifted with all my might to carry a tree on my shoulder. I celebrated a friend’s birthday by eating masamora and I listened to my neighbors whistle. I listened to them rhythmically work their land, swinging a machete without a break for hours on end. I danced in the kiosks overlooking town and played with my favorite campo kids. I tanned next to drying cacao seeds on my friend’s roof and I disappeared behind huge green jungle leaves to protect myself from the Caribbean sun. I talked to a friend of mine in Bogota from atop a jungle mountain. I saw a poisonous snake, and then another and then another. I walked in the rain without changing my pace. I appreciated everything from the symmetry of the palm tree to papaya juice with a squeeze of lime.
I cried saying goodbye to the people I truly love and respect in La Union. Some of them cried too. One said, “It is better to laugh than cry.” So we did. And another said, “This is not a sad goodbye. You will come back. A sad goodbye is when your son leaves to fight in the jungle. That is a sad goodbye. That is a forever goodbye.” Knowing she was talking from experience, I wiped my eyes. Knowing I was crying from experience, she started to laugh.
My last sunrise in the community was clouded over. I took off across the plain and headed down the hill with my two best pals. We talked on the walk down- commenting on the path and the jungle and the memories we have of the places and people we passed. They accompanied me all the way to the city and I held their hands crossing the road and stopped them ahead of cars, just like they’d held my hand crossing rivers and stopped me ahead of prickly jungle thorn bushes. And over juice we talked about this. And we talked of other things good and honest and funny. And we talked about how lucky we are to be such good friends.
Then I got in a cab and I went to the airport and I waited in the waiting room for the plane. I waited with mud from the jeep still on my shoes and prickly jungle thorns from my hike still on my backpack. I looked out the window at the palm trees in the Caribbean sun and the mountains in the distance where my neighbors were just coming down from the fields for lunch. And then I boarded a plane for the capital.
At 5:30 I took off with a couple of my pals to get wood for the stove we were making in order to cook hot chocolate and bunuelos for the entire town. Around the same time my amazing best friend turned cake-baker started whipping up birthday cakes in her cake-mixing bowl (made from a seed that hangs from the tree outside our house). I booted up, put on my ridiculous pink peace glasses, placed all of the flowers given to me in my hair, and threw a large woven basket over my shoulder. As the moon and stars gave way to the sun, we hiked up through the cacautera and down to the river in search of dry branches, passing my favorite view of the community along the way. We had a photo shoot at the river’s edge and walked down the sandbar in the middle of it. We posed with jungle leaves that dwarf a gringa, and on flat smooth slabs of river rock that allow the rapids to break against them, but never budge. We filled our basket with heavy macheted wood in the shape of thin sticks and we put tree trunks over our shoulders to be axed down back at home. The hour of my birth I was wading in a war zone jungle river… this thought crossed my mind. I wonder if my mother would have expected as much the day I was born. I chose river rocks to bring home as a birthday gift to myself.
In the campo, eggs are cracked on the birthday gal’s head. Sometimes. Actually, there were 6 birthdays the same week as mine, and I think I was the only one to get eggs cracked on my head. Four in total. Always a surprise, and always smelly. I showered three times, used nearly an entire bottle of shampoo and still couldn’t get rid of the stench. Most people got a kick out of my plastered, yoked hair. One laughing lady said to me, “Who did that to you?” I listed the names of the culprits. She said, “They haven’t done that to a FOR volunteer before.” “Really?” “Nope. They must really like you.” “Yeah. Clearly.”
By mid-morning the bouquet on the kitchen table had grown considerably and I had received far more hugs than a normal day. I made breakfast from the remaining eggs in the house (a defensive move) and then headed to a friend’s porch to make popsicles. While I had planned to take the day off of work, it just so happened that the Internet connection was out (surprise!) and thus Charlotte and Elisabeth decided to jump on the “why work when it’s Gina’s birthday” train. We went to the swimming hole. We walked further down the canyon than I ever had before and we swam under waterfalls. When it started to rain and the river started to rise, we shimmied back up the rocks and waded along the banks, criss-crossing as necessary to get back home.
It was afternoon and time to get serious about cooking. Cake decoration was in full force, and soon our kitchen was a bunuelo and chocolate factory- cheese grinding and flour kneading, deep oil frying, and wood stove burning. The cakes were decorated pink and blue and when she finished decorating them, she put them on top of my bed so the kids wouldn’t get at them. Not quite a foolproof plan… Sapa got to one cake… and then Sapa was nearly killed by a campesina baker (“10 hours of baking for the cat to lick the frosting!?!”). Thank God the cook has a good sense of humor. We chopped off the cat-eaten corner and then salvaged the rest.
The sun set with a golden hue and I thought I may be in one of the most beautiful places in the world to turn 29.
When the fried food went a wafting into the night sky, my neighbors came by. They wished me well and told me how wonderful I was. (I was never sure if these hugs and well-wishes came from them directly or if they had chosen said paper on the wall, but in the end it didn’t matter.) We ate bunuelos and listened to vallenato. Even though the community is in mourning and there was to be no dancing, they granted me one birthday dance (“she’ll dance alone anyway, so she may as well do it right”). It was vallenato. And amazing. The kids played with balloons and the adults talked and laughed and gorged on bunuelos. Those who stayed late got stuck in the rain and ended up staying really late- later than anyone has ever stayed over. Mostly I think they stayed because the company was good and the party was fun- afterall, the rain never hurt anyone.
I was supposed to get up the day after my birthday to pack and prepare to leave. I was supposed to finish working and say my goodbyes and prepare for the big city downtown. So I did. I packed and cleaned and organized my life into one bag. I finished up work and pulled documents off the computer. I walked through town and said goodbye. I did all of these things right on schedule, but in the end there were so many landslides that I couldn’t go anywhere.
I won a few extra days in the community and because they were unexpected they were oh so fun. Some people in the community are bad at goodbyes (if only they stuck around to see me try and say goodbye they would feel better about themselves) and so they left at 4 in the morning for the fields so that they wouldn’t have to say anything or see me go. I sure did love the looks on their faces when they saw me at lunch time: “What are you doing here?” “I simply couldn’t go with out saying goodbye…”
In my “extra” days in the community, I ran around laughing like a crazy gringa. I cartwheeled and wheelbarrowed and skipped from rock to rock through town. I walked jungle paths and crossed jungle streams. I bathed in jungle waterfalls and jumped in jungle pools. I pulled with all my might to get yucca out of the earth and lifted with all my might to carry a tree on my shoulder. I celebrated a friend’s birthday by eating masamora and I listened to my neighbors whistle. I listened to them rhythmically work their land, swinging a machete without a break for hours on end. I danced in the kiosks overlooking town and played with my favorite campo kids. I tanned next to drying cacao seeds on my friend’s roof and I disappeared behind huge green jungle leaves to protect myself from the Caribbean sun. I talked to a friend of mine in Bogota from atop a jungle mountain. I saw a poisonous snake, and then another and then another. I walked in the rain without changing my pace. I appreciated everything from the symmetry of the palm tree to papaya juice with a squeeze of lime.
I cried saying goodbye to the people I truly love and respect in La Union. Some of them cried too. One said, “It is better to laugh than cry.” So we did. And another said, “This is not a sad goodbye. You will come back. A sad goodbye is when your son leaves to fight in the jungle. That is a sad goodbye. That is a forever goodbye.” Knowing she was talking from experience, I wiped my eyes. Knowing I was crying from experience, she started to laugh.
My last sunrise in the community was clouded over. I took off across the plain and headed down the hill with my two best pals. We talked on the walk down- commenting on the path and the jungle and the memories we have of the places and people we passed. They accompanied me all the way to the city and I held their hands crossing the road and stopped them ahead of cars, just like they’d held my hand crossing rivers and stopped me ahead of prickly jungle thorn bushes. And over juice we talked about this. And we talked of other things good and honest and funny. And we talked about how lucky we are to be such good friends.
Then I got in a cab and I went to the airport and I waited in the waiting room for the plane. I waited with mud from the jeep still on my shoes and prickly jungle thorns from my hike still on my backpack. I looked out the window at the palm trees in the Caribbean sun and the mountains in the distance where my neighbors were just coming down from the fields for lunch. And then I boarded a plane for the capital.
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