The first week of
April is my last in the Peace Community. It is an internal council member
inviting our team to an overnight stay at his house before I leave. We hike to
a place I have never been- a farm house with an avocado tree outside,
overlooking the jungle with a river rushing outside from which on a clear day
you can see the ocean. It is he passing us over the various deep river
crossings on the back of his horse and his wife cooking us delicious
(vegetarian!) meals. It is a beautiful goodbye, since neither of them would be
attending my going away party in La Union.
April is celebrating
Michaela’s birthday with campo chocolate chip pancakes, it is Noelia jumping
like a tree frog from wall to wall of the mosquito net, killing all of the bugs
that made it inside before laying down to go to bed. April is a fallen guama
tree and the heyday of fruit removal that the children participate in, now that
the branches are within reach. It is formal goodbyes to the internal council,
and an informal goodbye to La Union with- a dance! April is dancing until four
in the morning in the kiosk, eating soup and bunuelos and celebrating my
near-two years in La Union.
In my goodbye to my
neighbors at their weekly meeting in La Union, I said, among other things,
“Remember that whenever you want you can stop and watch the hummingbirds. You
can stomp in puddles and jump like a baby sheep on the football field. You can
climb trees and hang like monkeys and listen to the wind through the sugarcane.
Whenever you want you can tell children that you love them. You can do whatever
it is that makes you the happiest, because we only get one life and despite all
odds, we have to do our best to enjoy it”- I chose these particular examples
because whenever I did them, people said I was crazy. And whenever I did them,
I felt better.
On April 9th
(the same day millions of Colombians march for Peace in the capital), after finishing
my last reports and preparing to have a relaxing 72 hours to say goodbye to my
neighbors before moving to Bogota, I was lying in a hammock with a particularly
busy neighbor of mine. Every few months we make a “date” and go hang in my
favorite kiosk in La Union, overlooking town. She said to me, “Stop working for
an hour and let’s go hang out before you leave” and so we did. We were talking
about how hard it is for the community to say goodbye to FOR volunteers, and
how hard it is for us to leave. She said, “You should leave La Union just like
you came into town, Gina- laughing.”
By four o’clock four
of us were up on this hill, taking in the late afternoon sun and talking about
life, when combat broke out between the FARC and the military on the opposite
side of town and we were caught in the middle of army crossfire. Yes. I was,
three weeks after almost dying in a boat crash, caught in the crossfire of the
Colombian conflict. After it all, after the shower of whistling bullets and the
diving to the ground, after running the ridgeline searching for cover and
adults throwing random children in the nearest houses and locking themselves in
windowless rooms and enacting our emergency response and writing up reports,
after the biggest surge of adrenaline of my life (aside from, arguably, three
weeks before in the Amazon) and the nervous energy to follow and the tornado of
work that came out of such an emergency, after recounting with my neighbors how
this happened and where they were and what they did and how scary whistling
bullets are, after one neighbor saying
to me, “Your going away dance on Saturday was way better than the going away the army gave you” and another
saying, “I brought you up there to say goodbye- it was almost the final goodbye
to both of us!”… after all that, 72 hours later, I was uprooted from La Union
to Bogota.
Without any pretty
imagery to go along with it, I will say that this initiated three of the most
difficult weeks of my life. Not just three of the most difficult weeks since
coming to Latin America, or since working in human rights or since living in
the war zone but three of the darkest weeks of my entire life.
Once able, I focused
my post-traumatic self through an entire gamut of mental health services from
talk therapy to acupuncture to esoteric healing to energy massage and I am
thankful to be in Colombia where the approach to mental health is not based in
pill-popping and where trauma is understood in general society and in the
medical community at a level only a country at war could aspire to. And where
trauma is taken seriously, in all its forms. I try and take my own advice from
my goodbye in La Union and remind myself that whenever I want to I can _______.
In Bogota, April is an
African dance class with a live drum circle that has me shaking it all out
three hours a week. It is the People’s Peace Congress where I participate at a
table for international protective accompaniment and then the International Day
of Dance where Jeanine and I take in a salsa concert in an outdoor park and a
tango show in a fancy theatre. April is reconnecting with friends and family
near and far and running the Sunday ciclovia. It is a complete lack of bug
bites to itch, and feeling like there is so much extra time on my hands since all
of a sudden I don’t have to dedicate as much of my time to getting daily things
like house cleaning and hand-washing. In
Bogota, April is live music: singing along to Systema Solar in a neighborhood
bar and seeing Liza perform at the Blues and Jazz fest. It is sunny mornings
and rainy afternoons. It is people, everywhere, so many of them doing
everything people do in a city and feeling overwhelmed by all of this. April is
a trip to a farm outside of Bogota to buy homemade yogurt and run through
portreros where the cows live and breathe fresh air and get out of the city. It
is preparing myself for May political work both in Bogota and in the United
States.
April is the spaces we
move in- physically, mentally, spiritually. And April is the trauma of war.
P.S. If you have not yet taken political action around the combat that I was caught in, and would be willing to contact the US Embassy in Bogota with your concern about the Colombian army's opening fire in a civilian populated peace community, please follow this link:
http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/army-actions-increase-risk-for-for-peace-community/12082
