The show’s greatest theme is not politics, but the artist’s life- not justice, but beauty.

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. 

So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, a new one just begun...

 “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 31^st 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 24^th 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 31^st 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 1^st 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 30^th 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 31^st 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.

Monthly Update November

Here is an article I wrote for out monthly update aboput the mid-November combat:

http://forusa.org/blogs/for-colombia/even-those-who-chose-peace-suffer-war-zone/11456

always back to the rain...

 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 20^th 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.

September in the War Zone

Here is a FOR post for our Latin American Monthly Update that I wrote about being back in the Peace Community for the third time this month:

http://forusa.org/blogs/for-colombia/life-war-go/11140