“Well kill me if that’s what you came to do-
isn’t that what your guns are for?” An old man practically dares one illegal
armed group to kill him. And a different illegal armed group, on the other side
of the mountain, catches our neighbors as they hike the hill toward home because,
“they just walk so fast it’s impossible to stay ahead of them. We dove in the
bushes and let them pass…”
In December the FOR team is on the
move. First to Arenas Altas where, in the height of the rainy season, the mosquitos
are practically able to bite through our rubber boots (or at least it seems
like they are- after 24 hours everywhere itches all the time anyway). Arenas
Altas, where our acompanado loses his underwear to a waterfall while bathing
and the work group whistles and sings as they chop cacao. Where there is no
light, but a battery powered radio set to a music station that plays tango in
the early morning; where a boy in the work group is breaking in a young horse
and there is an even younger (baby) horse that is too fast to touch. Where men jump
up and down from the low branches of cacao trees and I pass the days sitting in
recently pruned cacao trees and breathing fresh air, listening to songs of
rebellion and revolution and love. Where
we walk through mud in rubber boots, surrounded by flies and sometimes Alejo
sets up his tripod and captures high-tech photos in the half light of the cacao
grove. Where the full moon rises behind the house like a spotlight over the
soccer field of this near abandoned town.
From Arenas we barely stop off to
say hello to our home in La Union before we are off to La Esperanza. There, a
large family of brothers and sisters fish together by hand in the river. And
after so much walking in the rainy humid season, my feet break out in fungi,
which I treat, along with an acompanado who has the same, with salt and lemon
by candlelight in the evenings. In La Esperanza we stay in a new house. We
swing in hammocks and I make morning arepas in the shape of hearts. We hear
about the threats of mining and the threats of armed groups and we talk about
what is to become of the zone in the coming year.
On my days off in December, I go to
the beach. Sometimes it’s hard to remember while living in La Union that the
Caribbean is actually only a half hour drive from Apartado. I watch the waves
roll and think about how far away the idea of “December” is while I am in the
tropics. I drink mango juice and swim in the clear water and think of a Raffi
Christmas album and of the holidazzle and of how it blows my mind that in other
parts of the world snow exists. There is drift wood and there are sand crabs,
but I am the only person on the beach in the middle of the work week. I tan a
bit and swim some more and think of all
the things I’ve ever done and all the things I ever will. Then, back to
Apartado to talk to my family over a computer.
When Alejo leaves for Mexico to
spend Christmas with his family, I find myself alone again in La Union. I enjoy
the cool breezes on the December nights as the rainy season takes its last toll
on town. I eat lots of fresh veggies and read a couple good books. Families make
their life-size anno Viejo dolls of straw and dress them in old clothes to be
burned on the 31st at midnight. They set these life-sized tutumo
faced dolls on their front porches and scared toddlers cry as they pass by
beady-eyed strangers staring out from their neighbor’s homes. I harvest a HUGE
cucumber from the garden and spend a lot of time trying to revive the tomatos
from the first half of the month when they were abandoned. I visit my neighbors
and the trees by the kiosks and watch my neighbors make honey from suger cane.
I water plants and wash sheets. I eat corn on the cob (no point in explaining
that we eat this in the summer time in Minnesota) and bunuelos and got caught
in the rain.
And then Emily comes for the week of
Christmas and we laugh about our lives. When the heat was is hot and the
barometric pressure so high that there is nothing for the sky to do but
downpour, Emily runs from one house to the other, bursts into the kitchen and
says in a near yell (both from exasperation and to be heard over the rain on
the tin roof), “THANK GOD IT STARTED RAINING!” My thought exactly. We tan
together on the secadora. We bake Christmas cookies, which the children cut in
the shapes of machetes, horses, pigs, and a few (prompted) pine trees and
hearts and stars. We make homemade frosting and for my lack of color-wheel
foresight, we don’t use white sugar. The frosting colors end up intended color
+ a mix of brownish yellow (thanks,
sugar); bright blue, for example, becomes industrial grey. And thus, there is
an industrial grey stovetop fried machete Christmas cookie. You know, the
classic holiday favorites. We decorate our campo Christmas cookies despite the
unfortunate color shemes and eat so much frosting that we and every child in LU
have parasites and in the end, when even looking at the sugar gives me a
headache, we let a nearby horse lick the superfluous frosting from the back of
Emily’s hand.
On the 24th the community
kills a cow and we dance the night away in the kiosk. My favorite image of that
night: two women dozed off on the stomach of the anno Viejo sitting between
them on the porch of their house.
After an all-night dance, there is a
Christmas day hike (Good Morning, FOR!). We are sent to Arenas Altas. There is no
Christmas music, nor madness shopping sprees nor gift giving. There is no
Santa, no snow, no elf, no reindeer
(although the Christmas cookie horse prolly could have doubled if the red
frosting hadn’t been poo-brown). There is a near-abandoned war zone town from
which we draft our Gina and Emily Christmas card:
Dear family,
Merry Christmas. We are in a
deserted ghost town in the war zone of Colombia for Christmas. There is no
phone signal, don’t bother trying to call. We will be sitting in (biting)-ant-infested
jungle trees watching men plant beans and chasing baby horses for the foreseeable
future.
Love,
Gina and Emily
In Arenas we walk down the hill to
shit and up the hill to watch men plant beans. The hills are a deep jungle
green (at this time of year the color really is like the Crayola pack Jungle
Green that I remember from elementary school) and the river was rushing high
(in a last attempt to drown everything before dry season). We talk about the
Midwest (Emily if from Milwaukee) and New Years Resolutions and the world bank
trying to buy the forest so that the campesinos don’t work it. (Still
breathing? Thank a tree.) We slept in
hammocks and eat beans and rice and have daily massage hour. And then we walk
back down the hill to our respective homes (me, LU and she, Bogota).
And just like that, Emily is gone.
LU has baby baptisms and I become a godmother- bippityboppityboo. The Lord’s prayer
is sung to the tune of “The Sound of Silence” and I think about subway walls
and tenement halls with a baptismal candle burning in my hand. Emily leaves me
a Sun magazine and I cherish ever paragraph. The moon is full and I don’t sleep
for a couple nights. I walk the streets in the late night and try to understand
how there are so many stars on a full moon and the stars just twinkle back in
conspiracy.
On the 31st I awoke at
6am and the pig is already dead. It is a pig the size of a horse and it will be
eaten all evening, all night and in the early morning of January 1, 2013. Music
blares from the kiosk all afternoon and we start dancing (ahem, “we” being me
and one partner) at 7pm and then we (all of the town) dance until 8am. My shirt
is wet with sweat and for once, so is everyone else’s and the breeze through
the kiosk keet everyone vallenatoing away 2012.
At midnight the music is turned off and all of
the anno viejos are brought to be burned. They go up in glorious flames and the
moon glows ever so beautifully far above the fire and behind a thin veil of
clouds. Everyone stands silently and watches the fire. Some cry, some hug, they
all seem to let go what was in 2012, to welcome the new year. Then everyone
walks around hugging everyone and wishing them a happy new year and then the
music comes on again and we dance some more. And the pig keeps coming in waves
of fried meat, always accompanied by another campo Christmas dish. In the early
morning light those who went to bed creep back out of their houses to laugh at
the all-nighters still boogy-ing away on the dance floor and help re-fry the
remaining pig. All day on the 1st the music still blasts from the
kiosk, although most of the dancers sleep away the day.
December is the soft light of the
early mornings and the thundering wings of hummingbirds that fly into the house
to visit me. It is the baptism of a baby princess in a blue dress- oils and
candles and crosses and love. December is the resolution to write 30 poems in
my 30th year. It is the cry of a baby and the crackle of a stove, a
white and gold rooster doing a dance in the early morning light and the morning
light itself, which looks like honey falling down on the sparkling puddles. A
special edition of Semana comes out, all about the peace process and I read it
while swaying in my hammock bed. A Colombian student somewhere says, “Killing
someone to defend an ideal isn’t defending an ideal- it’s killing someone.” The days stay darker in the morning
and in the pre-dawn darkness there is a song on the radio that sounds like it’s
being played on a record player and how it has the ability to haunt me all day.
And it is an acute pang of sadness as the anno viejos go up in flames at
midnight on the 31st and I realize that 2012 is never to be again.
On January second there is no music
blasting from the kiosk. 2013 comes softly. It sinks and settles around LU like
a fog while the villagers sleep off two days of welcoming parties. The dry
season, however, comes with a bang. From one day to the next, the rain is gone.
Just like 2012, completely and utterly lost. And in its place there is a HEAT
WAVE. I’m talking about the kind of heat that scares me to walk out into the
sun because I can’t help but think of becoming a random case of spontaneous combustion.
The kind of heat where I don’t even wanna touch myself because I stick with my
own sweat. Gross. On the upside, the mushrooms on my feet dry out overnight
(hurrah!) and (when realizing I will be in LU for a few more months) I finally
cave and buy myself a fan.
Alejo comes home and we are sent to
Mulatos. Beautiful Mulatos, my favorite (yes, I pick favorites) peace community
village outside of La Union. In Mulatos the Colombian government started aerial
fumigating coca crops (Happy New Year, Uraba!) and so we go to verify how they
actually aerial spray all of the food crops of the peace community as well.
Aerial fumigations have been protested for years by human rights organizations
as they are neither cost nor eradication effective and on top of that, they
kill food crops, contaminate water sources, do irreversible damage to the
forests and air and cause sickness and death to the human population. This is
the first case of aerial fumigation around the Peace Community (although the
method has been a key part of Plan Colombia in other parts of the country since
the 1990s). We saw the planes spraying and the damage down to the jungle. We
saw the dried up crops and spoke with campesinos
from the fumigated areas. I come back to LU even more (is that possible?)
disgusted with U.S. policy in Colombia.
I read El Hablador and it pumps the
already tangible feeling of magic that abounds in these jungles. And it makes
me think of beauty because it has beautiful images of how people are. And how
communities are. And it makes me think of In Watermelon Sugar, but I can’t
quite remember why. Then I read a memoir of an ex-pat Australian living in
Amsterdam and am so removed from this jungle, laughing at silly things that
ex-pats do abroad that they would (prolly?) never do at home. And for being
able to read both of those books and for their different effects on my mind, I
start of 2013 feeling so very grateful that I can read.
Maybe cross-culturally a change in
the calendar year makes people reflect. Here neighbors seemed to be telling me
more about their youth- of running from armed men time and time again. They
seemed to be telling me more about their community history. And when there is a
gunshot wound, they reflect on all the incredible gun shot wounds they have
seen. This leads to more reflection on who lives, who dies and who was hunted
down later. Their war stories are actually just their life stories. And in the
first part of 2013, I seem to hear a lot about their lives.
January is standing accidently on a fire
ant hill and not realizing until it is way too late. It is leaf cutter ants
marching over my stomach when I fall asleep at the kiosk and the raspberry
suckers purchased in Apartado which have everybody asking what the flavor is
supposed to be. January is community work days with sweeping views and sharing
a blanket with a little girl in braids in the shade of a guava tree. It is how
small we are against a natural jungle landscape, and how we should remember
that. We are so small, so insignificant. January is laying on my back watching
spiders spin their webs, watching fireflies blink in the night, watching starts
twinkle in their glorious dry season spreads across the sky. It is the smooth,
grooved black rocks at the river’s edge-
the best way to cool down when just walking up the street in this heat
takes incredible effort. January is speaking with my family after the holidays
and missing them. It is losing all of my photos from the Fall in the Peace
Community to a technological error on an Apartado computer. January is jumping
into the posa in the last weeks of its depth before the river dries up and the
swimming hole is no more and then the same river has my neighbors floating face
down in shallow river waters, machetes high, ready to impale any fish daring
enough to swim past. It is snakes on paths and flowers of all colors peeking
out of deeps greens. January is days staying lighter visibly longer and the
sunsets turning from a fuscia pink to to a firey orange. It is the oldest man
in LU walking down the street hacking up tobacco and it is military boot tracks
over peace community terrain. January is learning to lossoe like a real live
cowgirl and then I bothering everything from fence posts to baby pigs to
unassuming neighbors with my new skill. Janurary is yellow children suffering
helatitis and all of the papayas in town ripening at the same time. It is Gina
in front of her new fan with arms hanging
like a scarecrow, feet shoulder width apart. January is loud, low flying
fumigation planes spraying poisons across the sky, it is sick children and sick
farm workers, who breathe the air full of chemicals. It is blue and yellow and
read birds and a woodpecker going to town on the side of the house way before
dawn. It is children screaming and children running and children playing hide
and seek and dominoes and cards. January is bombs and combats and sometimes
confusing a particularly loud woodpecker in the canyon for machine gun fire
(whew). It is milking cows and making hot chocolate. January is preparing for meetings
with the military and meetings with the state entities and walking dusty paths
and evening soccer matches in the center of town. It is horses running in herds at full speed
through town and all of our neighbors throwing themselves and their children
out of the way. It is the jungle breaking out in birdsong as the sunrises and
Sapa howling with her kills in the night. January is making honey, and making
sugar and making plans for what the rest of the year will bring.
