In the beginning of October, I left the war zone for
Bogota (again) and the team retreat where talked of the future. It was a week
of r and r from the intense sun of Uraba and a week to get my body back in
order after the hard fall. Liza says maybe the back and forth will get easier
the more I do it. She read poetry from The Sun Magazine. In Bogota I ate a
breakfast bagel and nurtured a wandering mind. I dreamt at night and had visions
of Ireland and of small town somewhere. I thought about paradigm shifts in my
personal life and in the world. I spent
a lot of time with the team. We talked of the different stages of resistance
and of survival and of grief and action. We talked about our nation of
medication that doesn’t feel the indignation of what is happening in the world.
The nation that is numbed to what our lifestyle creates for others and
ourselves. A nation on medication that doesn’t think about renovation, doesn’t
have time for contemplation. Individuals with no rage for the wars and violence
and injustice around the world. Individuals that back the war in Colombia so
that the USA can maintain a culture pumped full of panic medication when
really, sometimes you gotta think anyone that is not panicking about the state of our world has no pulse. We talked
of trauma survivor workshops and community building. We talked about how dreams
are our reality and how from our fear comes our power. And we worked. A lot.
And then I came home.
She was washing clothes and I was
holding her baby as the rain came across the canyon. It was pouring when the
lightening came crashing, 500 yards away and stuck a tree, blowing it up in
crackling flames. We both dove to the ground as the cows came running across
the plain. I thought it was combat at first. After the moment calmed she
laughed and said, “your lucky I didn’t end up on your shoulders.” It was so
loud, that crashing lightening. And a few days later that tall old tree died
and fell to the ground.
Searching through my email one day
in Apartado, I accidently found an old document from when I applied to my study
abroad program. The last question was: why do you want to do this program? I
responded: Because every moment is as substantial as it is fleeting. I was 20.
When I read it I could picture where I was when I wrote it. Now I am 30 and I
wonder what I write now that I will reflect on again when I am 40.
October in the war zone was walking
along the riverbed as it rose and fell in the oncoming raining season… at first
the rains come lightly. It was visions of Apartado on my way through several
times, of boys rolling each other in tires and women sauntering with decorative
umbrellas in the mid-day heat. It was children throwing rocks at the liquor trucks
as they dropped off beer in poor neighborhoods and yelling, “bad bad bad!”at
the men unloading it. October was
planting pumpkins and forgetting about Halloween, but laughing to myself that
nobody here will know jack-o-lanterns are out of season when we carve them in
January. October was a wasted dead bug in a web from which the spider had
already moved on. My neighbor telling me that if I promise to stay forever she
will help me build a house and donate a cow to me. October was combats and
power outages and the potent smell of manderine trees in the jungle. It was the
cotton tips of sugarcane ready to be cut. It was cutting and carrying sugarcane
to be made into honey. It was the rain storm that damaged the water tubing and
had us bathing in the ever rising river. It was baking cakes and a hummingbird
that flew through my window and fluttered in my face for a moment before flying
away, and then the pit that its absence left in my stomach. It was pouring
runny honey into molding blocks in the fuscia sunset and borrowing a machete to
cut the grass. It was Charlotte trying to lift my bag before we walked home and
saying, “well, that’s a challenge.” October was citrus canker sores. It was
late night working meetings with Charlotte and eating a manderine alone in the
mid-night darkness and seeing nothing, hearing no one.
One morning in October I was half
dreaming in the early morning hours when a neighbor came to tap on my window.
And then I was not dreaming at all as a bomb exploded and I realized that the
neighbor tapping on my window in my dream was actually the sound of machine gun
fire on the far side of the hill. I backflipped outta bed and into the street
where my neighbors were already gathered listening to the combat. We talked
about where it was as I came to and my neighbor laughed at me and said, “pretty
good alarm clock, eh?”and then my other neighbor said, “as long as I’m up I may
as well go see if Jesusa made arepas for breakfast.” The combat didn’t last
long, but it was quite loud. After the combat the helicopters flew low all day
long and they were even louder, circling overhead. Later a neighbor told me that her
three-year-old daughter was scared. She said she understood why, with all that
noise but that she told her daughter not to let those noises scare her, since
those are the noises of the war and they live in a war zone. I was caught
thinking about my dream- in every other place I have other lived it would have
been reversed- I would have been dreaming of machine gun fire to awake to the gentle
reality that a neighbor had come to visit. Here I dream of someone taping at my
window to wake up to the reality of war.
A conversation with a two year old:
Did your dad die?
No.
Did your mom die?
No.
Well then, where are they?
They live very far away.
In Medellin?
Even further.
Further than Medellin? Like… on the
moon?
Just about.
I slice myself on barbed wire and
think about the last time I had a tetanus shot. It was such a clean cut that
didn’t feel anything until the blood started dripping. Then it spent the entire
month of November not healing in the tropical climate.
November brought the arrival of my
new co-worker, Alejandro from Mexico. He arrives to a large poisonous scorpion
in his shower. He arrives to rainy season’s coral sunrises and fuscia sunsets.
At the fifth grade graduation (the
highest grade in our village) the professor talks about how the kids should
keep studying. The kids put on their gowns and walk across the stage and
receive their diplomas. I try not to tear up. It will be the end of formal
education for many of them.
When the rumors start circulating
that a young man left to join the FARC, one of his friends comes to me and
says, “if this is true, we will be having another funeral in a matter of weeks.
There will be another mother crying and another headstone in the
cemetery." When the young man in question returned after several days
away, I could not have been more happy to see anyone.
November was removing beans from
their shells, and eating snap peas from the garden. There was a clear night sky
in the middle of a rainy week and a sliver moon emerged with the full outline
behind it’s penumbra. November was
building houses and planting seeds, it was moonless darkness on rainy nights
and the coral onset of the sunrise. November was Red velvet cake on a homemade
oven, then chocolate almond cake on a homemade oven and then banana cake on a
homemade oven… all practicing my open flame culinary skills for my 30th
birthday. November was the arrival of a package from Lee with all sorts of goodies
and an unforeseen disaster in the garden when I accidently weighed too much and
caused one of the arms of the papaya tree to come crashing down on the tomato
and pepper plants. It was the rainy season in full force- with rushing rivers
and wet water filled boots from the crossings we make on our way down to town.
November was hanging off of the back of jeeps and walking home through swarms
of butterflies. It was the one year anniversary of Ottoniel's death and
planting flowers at his gravesite as the sun set. November brought the election
of Obama, but my absentee ballot arrived a day too late to be sent back.
November is passion fruit juice and cockroaches in the computer. It is me
walking in Apartado as the Christmas decorations come out and feeling a pang of
nostalgia and sadness in knowing I won’t be going home for the holidays. The
week of my birthday brings a crisp moon in the western sky that night after
night outdoes the beauty of the tropical sunset on the other horizon. People
say the full moon makes Soila even crazier. Sapa is so pregnant she can barely
fit through the bars on my window and is hungry 100% of the time. She chews my
pen when I try to write and sits on the magazine if I try to read. She needs
attention, apparently. November is heavy downpours and knee deep mud. It is hot
and humid air before the rains and wispy clouds in the blue sky after. It is
the reflection of golden sunsets in the small puddles all the way down the
street.
The local municipality celebrates
“farmer’s day” and floods San Jose with people who actually live in poor
neighborhoods of Apartado. They tape the military handing out rice and oil to
the “farmers” and they bring in at least ten times the amount of people that
actually live in the war ravened town by the bus loads. It is eerie and strange
as I walk through town on my way to a meeting. A neighbor says to me, “how
embarrassing that people in other parts of the country watch this on TV and buy
that propaganda. How embarrassing to think farmer’s aren’t capable of
cultivating rice… how sad for Colombia that there are people poor enough in
Apartado to be bought by a publicity stint for a kilo of rice and some oil…”
A nearby combat between paramilitary
and the FARC causes all kinds of chaos mid-month. It is long and severe and
many young men die. On a quiet night with no light, a casket is built in the
central kiosk. Women and children come to my house and we drink hot chocolate
in candlelight and wait for the men to come back with the body for burial. We
drink hot chocolate to the sounds of saws and hammers and nails. Later a
neighbor says she saw one of the wounded before he died, as they were trying to
get him to the hospital. He was already near the end and she looked down at him
crying and said, “I never thought I would see this boy like this…”and she
related how he silently had tears rolling out of his closed eyes at hearing her
voice.
Ivan Marquez is on the cover of the
local Semana magazine and an old man here tells me how he met the FARC
commander twice about twenty years ago- once in San Jose and once in La
Esperanza. This month the FARC are seen around in larger numbers, and they go
on the heavy offensive. November 20th brought the swelling of peace
negotiations between the government and the FARC and a unilateral ceasefire,
but it’s hard to believe the fighting will cease in Uraba.
I turned thirty on a sunny morning
and went walking in the jungle to find wood to cook rice milk over an open
flame. I turned thirty on a rainy afternoon spent decorating four cakes that I
baked with home made pink frosting. I turned 30 on a humid evening and I
walked house to house through the mud reminding people of their utterly
important responsibility to come dance with me (rain or shine). I turned thirty
on a starry night; people dressed up
despite the mud and came to the center of town and ate rice milk and cake and
danced with me. I danced vallenato until midnight, in rubber boots, with my
neighbors who get up at 5am for work. I turned 30 in a rural peace community village
in the middle of the war zone and there was nothing else to do but dance.
