The title of my blog was a caption, pulled from a review of a long since forgotten (in
my mind) off-broadway play. For some reason it rang so true in my life in
February and March (even before the boat crash) that it’s re-written in three
separate entries in my journal. I guess it makes sense that it caught my
attention. I came to Colombia for work in large part due to my understanding of
politics and justice, but recently everything has returned to me and my life- a
set of experiences and situations paired with my responses and choices that
melt into me, my life and its beauty.
February is white and orange butterflies on the path and hummingbirds
plucking spiders from their webs. It is Guama season, and eating them with neighbors
on the hill. It is the beginning of my collection of jungle treasures to take
with me to the andean capital- beautiful seeds and dried flowers and river
stones. February is me in the near splitz at the top of a papaya tree, not
willing to let the birds eat all the fruits of the jungle and then my neighbor
saying, “you’re stretchier than an
acordian.” It’s a community leader’s ancient looking mother, waving from her
kitchen doorway as I start off on my trek home to the next village. It is my
neighbor’s blasting vallenato across the canyon that announces her return to
town and a baby playing by a clump of bananas.
February is picking, drying, smashing, toasting and grinding coffee. My
first week ever in La Union in early 2011, I saw the coffee and said, “I am
going to help when you pick this.” Two years later, the first harvest was ready
for picking. February is the best coffee I have ever had in my life. And
feeling so proud of making it myself, even though my stomach had heat rash for
a week due to the toasting process.
February is a moment where everything stopped for no reason. I am in the
cacao and this overwhelming thought occurs…how
did I get here? And then another, also difficult question with more obvious
options for answers: what is the true
color of cacao? (Mauve? Purple? Yellow? Green?) And then a mix of the two-
How did I get here? Purple.
February is bomber planes and armed groups (all of them) mourning the
deaths of soldiers young and old as military operatives in the zone pick up,
again. February is accompanying the community work days and lazing in the arms
of trees until the fire ants arrive to kick me out. It is me realizing the
things I have learned in La Union, like how I am good at locating where people
are in the jungle by the sound of their machetes. I am good at hearing fruits
fall and then finding them. I am good at being a morning person.
February is Elisabeth’s arrival to the CdP for a visit with English
magazines and personal mail in tow. It is the 2012 essay called, “The Things
They Googled” originally published in the Sun that everyone should read. It is music
mixes and birthday packages and Christmas cards from friends far away finally
arriving to my hands in La Union. February is military propaganda on the radio
in the early mornings while I read poems with beautiful imagery and think to
myself about how I woulda constructed them differently. February is rain. And how
it calls me beside itself, to walk through it and look for Nuri’s purple and
white flowers and then the mango grove. February is morning stretching and the
light through sheets of water. It is treasured memories of the CdP.
Sitting with my community ‘mom,’ hummingbirds dive bomb past us as we
sit outside. We say nothing- her because it is normal and not worth commenting
on and I because I want it to be.
An 8 year old boy in Mulatos breaks his arm falling of a horse. The left
one. In two places. The eventual ex-ray looks pretty much like mine did when I
broke my arm at the age of 10. I was in that acute pain for maybe an hour
between flipping off the swing-set and being sedated in the hospital. Thinking
about the moment my arm snapped 20 years later still gives me a shot of phantom
pain. The trauma. Jimar broke his arm in the jungle outside a village. He
walked to neighboring farms with his mother to verify it was broken (ahem, I
can assure you he was certain) and
then rode a horse with a double fractured arm for 6 hours through thick mud and
then spent the night waiting for
public transport to come up to San Jose and then,
rode a bumpy jeep to the hospital and waited a whole additional day for a
qualified doctor to arrive and perform the surgery. It blew my mind. The different realities we live on this planet.
February is walking home in a downpour: double timing it to the river as
to cross before the flashflood and then walking up the last vertical hill as a
waterfall came down around me. It is visions of my neighbors walking up towards
the foggy morning mountains to work. And visions of Laura Ingles when a little
girl comes to say hello in her blue cloth dress with double braids before
chasing her puppy down the street in the morning sun. February is the community
making honey from sugar cane on valentine’s day. It’s me explaining that
“honey” is a term of endearment in English and asking if husbands or wives have
done anything special for their other halves. It is everyone staring blankly
until one guy says, “She can pick her own flowers.” February is a spider across
the floor, and packs of horses running together at full speed up the street. It
is Ash Wed catching me in Apartado and my impromptu step into a church. The ash
is sweat of my brow before I make it to the first river crossing on my way
home.
February is the CdP commemoration of the 2005 massacre. We walk the
pilgrimage to Mulatos and hear the stories of the brutal murders again.
Arriving at the top of the filo, I find myself alone with a neighbor and he
says, “thank you for walking with me today.” He says this because it was a year
to the day that the two of us witnessed the combat that killed his son. And I
said, “I think of you every time I walk here.” And he says, “I can’t believe…”
and is cut off by more people arriving. In Mulatos and La Resbalosa, we honor
the memories of the community leaders and the children killed in the brutal
massacre of 2005. We witness a truly democratic process as the CdP holds its elections
for the internal council. Mulatos! Green parrots in a dense jungle! Beautiful
green mountains! People flooding in from all different community villages and
from places all over the world! Dancing in the center of town under a spread of
stars! Jungle flowers! All things beautiful. Then Ale leaves and another round
of training starts. I realize I have had 13 different co-workers since I
started working with FOR and I pump myself to start yet another training
process with two new co-workers in March. Transition. Growth. Change. February
is more children leaving La Union to study in cities far away. And Jamie
arriving to La Union for the first time.
March arrives with a bang: ERIN COMES! She hikes up to La Union and sees
where I live. We throw a party for my god-daughter on Charit’s first birthday.
We hike to the kiosks and I introduce her to my neighbors. A boy buzzes Erin’s
hair as his mother looks on. We hike our way down and begin our Caribbean
adventure. We bus to Cartagena and within a day I become a tourist. We meet
chatty travelers in a green hostel and saunter along city streets looking at
brightly colored doors and buildings. We go to an urban beach. I read The
Little Prince. And Rumi. We sit at the windy shoreline and then in bookstores
with postcards. Rolling waves and air-conditioning. A traveler says she hasn’t
learned the past tense yet. (So, there is only the here and now?) We drink limonadas
de coco and escape to an island off the coast with blue-green waters and white
sand, with dusty roads and moto-taxis. We take an evening flight to Bogota and
we bring sand from Varu to the Andean Highland capital. On International
Women’s Day, Toto La Momposina dances to her own voice at a free outdoor
concert and we are in the capital plaza, dancing cumbia. Hats and scarves and
bags piling up in the center of the cumbia wheel as the dancers warm up in the
chilly Bogota evening, and for a moment it is like we are back in the Caribbean.
One week later, Erin leaves and: MONICA COMES! We walk city streets and
see markets. Then we take off for Leticia and nearly die when our public boat
between Leticia and Puerto Narino sinks. Yes, our public speed boat sinks with
us inside it, in the middle of the Amazon River. By some miracle we survive.
And after it all- after the adrenaline and the escaping the sunken boat through
small windows and the swimming in the Amazon between Colombia and Peru, and
holding my sister with eyes wide in the middle of one of the biggest water
systems of the world and the uncontrollable shaking on top of a rescue boat and
the police reports and towing the upsidedown boat to the waters edge and recovering
our bags- we start pulling out our waterlogged things. I open up the wet Rumi
book that Erin brought me to the dedication page. It read, “for this moment.”
And we continue on to our lodge in the middle of the forest. And a river runs
through it- a mile wide.
We head up the Amacayacu River on a small motor-boat. We are wet, but
happy to be breathing. We talk about how our surroundings are right out of
National Geographic (featuring us?) and we eat new fruits- copuasu and madrona
and acais right off the trees. We get Huito tattoos and see tamarin, howler,
wooly and flying monkeys. We see snakes and dolphins and caimans. We put-put
around in boats. We laugh. We try and breathe deep. We lay in hammocks and
sleep in a wooden cabin. We hike to a ceiba. We get eaten alive by bugs. We
learn about the jungle around us. We hear native stories. We see small motor-boats
put-putting by in the early morning Amazonian fog. We see glowing mushrooms on
the forest floor in the dark of night. I steal nummy smelling Amazon forest
tree sap and lots of fruit to take home. A coconut falls. I know exactly where
and I think of Uraba. The amazon forest is a lot like the forest of my home,
except for that large river part. Because it is rainy season, we boat through
forest that the river would normally snake around. Juli is a lovely guide. He
followed his dream, too.
We do all of these activities and these things while drying our clothing
from the sunken boat and setting our electronics in the sun, then pulling them
out of the rain. We get sick. We have nightmares. I start thinking about
everything differently. About everyone I have ever known. About everywhere I
have ever been. About why we didn’t die. We spend the week in the Amazon in
post-traumatic mode from almost dying in a boat crash. I hear monkeys in the
night and I journal in the misty morning. The local mother makes teas of all
sorts of things to make us feel better. There is a weaver-bird with a pretty
song and butterflies- citris butterflies swarming around children on the
indigenous reserve. There is a boy blowing bubbles while he washes his clothes
and illegal removal of wood from the national forest. There are thoughts about
how fragile we are and how precious life is. Everything is turbulent and then
it is not. Over and over again.
And then we are on a placid dark water lake with purple water lilies
watching pink dolphins. And I don’t want to swim with the dolphins because I am
cold and sort of feeling ok and I had just swum in the Amazon the day before
when out boat crashed. Monica is too sick too swim, but manages to look over
the side of the canoe to see the dolphins all around us. Juli jumps in, but
Renato says, “swim just to swim? With the anacondas and electric eels?” “No,
silly,” I say, “not with those guys… with the pink dolphins.”
Monica fishes in a spot where human bones were found and she catches
lots of fish. When she tosses back a big one, Renato’s heart drops, but he
tries not to show that she just threw away his dinner. Monica holds a
tarantula. And a snake. And a caiman. All too soon the week is over and we have
to get back on a boat to go back to Leticia and my heart starts to race. Then,
on the radio, a familiar vallenato comes on and I calm down thinking about
dancing in the kiosk of La Union. Leaving Monica in Bogota, I cry. She says on
her next visit we can definitely go to the war zone.
In mid-March and another new co-worker, Michaela, arrives. The poma
flowers give way to the poma fruits. La la la! March is a neighbor saying I
would be a good goalie when I catch every papaya he dislodges from the tree.
March is me feeling like there is nothing linear about where we live and how we
grow or how we feel and what we know, or what we live and where we go while
simultaneously thinking about swim to survive programs and how everything we do
prepares us for what is to come. Is it all planned? Did growing up in MN and
working as a lifeguard actually prepare me for this moment of my life at age
30? March is training and prepping and reports and new roommates in my jungle
home. It is a beautiful song that takes me away from my typing and out to the
porch as a light rain falls. It is my neighbor giving birth while working in
Mulatos and staying there for a month with her baby. It is a Meri under a
flowering purple tree and Javier climbing a poma tree from the saddle of his
horse to throw me down the fruits. It is veggie empanadas and cake for a first
birthday party where the baby sleeps. It is downtown Bogota graffiti and an
urban garden, turqoiuse Caribbean waters and being happy to come home to the
Peace Community, after it all. March is nightmares of a boat filing with water
and disappearing into the river and the warm love of the people around me in La
Union. It is my new tomatoes in the garden. March is new thought processes and
reflections like bolts of lightening.
March is a child coming to my window to say, “thank you for not
drowning. I really would have missed you if you hadn’t come back.” And me
responding, “No problem.” March is my tired body falling in a river without
water, to find myself on the rocky bed in an inch of water, looking up at the
sky. Then ringing out my clothes and having to explain to confused passersby on
the path how I drenched myself (“Gina! Did it rain down below?!” “Gina, you’re
so sweaty considering the sun isn’t even out!”) when the river wasn’t even rushing.
The CdP turns 16 on March 23rd. People come from all over the world and
we hear about the history of the community and the dreams for the future. We
dance in rubber boots in the kiosk of La Holandita. While dancing to the
blaring vallenato, we don’t hear the combat ten minutes down the road in San
Jose. On my walk home the next morning, Oliva is milking a cow and I stop to
help her.
Then it is holy week, the third consecutive Easter week that I have
spent in La Union. An early morning thunderstorm on Sunday and we lose light
for 7 full days. There is candle light and buñuelos and a haunting song stuck
in my head. On Holy Thursday we walk around La Union and hear about various
massacres- in the cacao groves, at the river’s edge, on the hill by the kiosks.
On Good Friday there is still no light and I journal by candle-light in the
early morning. We walk from La Union to Apartado and hear about everyone who
has been killed on that road. I speak to Padre Javier about my trauma in the
Amazon and he says there is an indigenous community in Cauca where the shamans
have to have a near death experience before they can be spiritual leaders in the
community. They recognize that it changes you. La Union is a good place to be
after a near-death experience, because most people there have had one. And I
hear stories of what fear can do- (“we just threw ourselves off that cliff,
swinging by a vine- imagine!”) and how from the fear comes the power and will
to survive.
March ends with my calming in the midst of a storm of work and training
and post-trauma. March ends with my planning for graceful goodbyes to my loved
ones in the community as I prepare to move to Bogota. And as always, I have no
idea what is about to come and shake me up in a whole new way.
