March kicks off with my three rest days for the month, and after five petitions in three weeks, I am ready for it. I spend the weekend in Apartado, where I read all of “About a Boy” and skype with family and friends and have a drink with some PBIers. I reflect on how quickly I adapted back to campo life. I wake early in the morning. I jump at a car’s lights in the dark. I dream of the cacautera. I go to sleep early and drink cold things and eat ice cream.
March kicks off with more deaths and more vigils and more mourning- during my weekend in town, my co-worker tells me first thing when I arrive back home, I missed one vigil. In the next days there would be more, the leap year living up to its reputation.
Avocados and mangos start to grow. I have a severe talk with several trees, hoping that one will have some ripe fruit before I leave for Bogota in a month. Yes, I speak to avocados and mangos in the first week of March.
On International Women’s Day, the men cook and serve the women a delicious lunch. I am impressed.
At the comunitario, I walk my favorite path for the first time since being back and remember other trips to the boca toma. I think about how this land, despite its changing seasons and scapes, holds all of our history.
For the first couple weeks of March, my baby blanket is missing more than it is found. When I asked my friend about it she simply says, “Why, your baby blanket, you say? Are you missing your diapers as well?” I usually found it pretty quick, but one time when they hid it, I was still looking after two days. I had to get to the bottom of it. When, after a round of hot and cold hints, it was located in the compost, I started hiding it myself. From there on out, I slept with it every night.
While standing on the large rock next to the kiosk talking to Emily on the phone one day, I feel something wet on the back of my leg and I giggle. She asks who tickled me. I turn around to see the culprit, none other than: Loud Cow! Loud Cow licked me! From ankle to thigh! And then just blinked his long eyelashes at me as if I was supposed to know what he wanted. And in identifying Loud Cow, I said, “Loud Cow! So nice to see you! How you have grown!” And I understand for the first time how everyone knows whose everyone’s animals are: they watch them grow from birth. The free range madness of a year ago seems now like such organized chaos.
In the evening she serves me hot chocolate and says we should look out the window, as it is “the hour of the deer.” So we do. But I don’t see any deer on the field. Actually, I never see any deer on that field or anywhere else in the war zone jungle. But her comment does make me think of home. Because in Minnesota, at dusk, the fields are always full of deer. I tell her this, but she doesn’t believe me. Equally disbelieving, I wonder if someone has just told her of this “hour of the deer” or if there are indeed deer in the tropics.
One evening I count five children, all different ages, all from different families, sitting on my bed and talking to me and being silly. For a second I am lost in this thought: where else on the planet will this happen to me? Where else will all of my neighbors walk into my house and sit on my bed and talk to me without an invitation and without thinking twice? Where else will I be surrounded by so many children? And I felt so whole and cradled by their presence.
At the water tank in the cacaotera, she tells me about the witch that killed her big sister. We talk about mangoes and laugh about our now shared history. We dance vallenato on top of the tank with the kids, inspired by music that plays from her phone. On the way back down to town, the 6pm national anthem comes on the radio and they sing it mockingly as we crunch over dry leaves.
Cristian and I climb trees for large, juicy, red pomas. He tells me stories of the haunted house on the hill and we fill my backpack with fruit. Later I learn that another neighbor, 26 years old, planted the tree we climbed as a school assignment when she was ten years old. I have this overwhelming urge to thank her. And thank her teacher. And thank that tree. And thank the jungle that let it grow so quickly. Because in Minnesota, for that tree to grow that tall from a sprig would take generations. I decide there is so much to be thankful for. I decide this jungle is magical.
French reporters come and interview us about accompaniment: What is solidarity? What is deterrence? What is peaceful resistance to war? What is nonviolence? After we speak to them for some time, I walk away and think to myself- if this community can do all that it has for peace and nonviolence all while in the middle of the war zone, why can’t the rest of the world get on board?
“Where did this cat come from?” The town buzzes with hatred for the new chicken-eating fat cat that showed up overnight. I am, also, totally baffled by where it came from, but have no hatred for its hunting skills. I just think the cat is smart. I had sort of always wondered why the other cats didn’t eat chickens- they are obviously easier to catch than birds that fly or bats. Soon I realize why: because this cat is to be killed for its “bad habit.” (By which they refer to its brains, so we can just assume that all smart cats have been killed off in the region and that is why none of them eat chicken.) This particular cat is scared of all of my neighbors (brains), but not scared of me. It isn’t long before everyone has me pegged as the one to catch this kitty. Not hard, but every time I pick it up and start walking towards a neighbor’s house I sort of let it go. On purpose. “Gina!” She yells at me, “Why do you keep letting him go?” “I feel like such a traitor (heavy word for the zone) and I can’t kill a cat,” I say. “I’m not going to kill it,” she says, “I’m gonna take it down to San Jose and dump it there.” I laugh, and say, “Well, I guess now we know how it got here.”
We go for bananas, but get caught up in conversation about her family’s displacement and the FARC and the military and where they went when she was a child and what they did. We get caught in conversation about her first boyfriend and the one time she went to the beach and what she did with her brothers and cousins for fun when they were young. We get caught in her history, all of it pumped with visions of war. And then we get caught in the rain. We stand, two feet apart, under huge banana leaves and listen as the storm rolls in over us. We keep talking and laughing, louder and louder until our voices hurt from screaming and then we just look at each other until the rain comes down so hard that I can no longer see her through it. And then, just like it came, the rain stops and we walk home through dripping leaves. We see all sorts of creatures coming out of their hiding spaces. Monkeys jump out right in front of us, daring us to play in the banana trees with them.
The 15th Anniversary of the Peace Community is March 23rd. My last blog post is an article about it- the activities and marches and some poignant things my neighbors said. It was amazing to be a part of the celebration and it’s so humbling to be a small part of this community’s struggle. The town bustled with activity leading up to the event. People came from all or the world, I think there was at least one foreigner for every CdP member. The saying, somos muchos pueblos, pero solo una lucha, is about the best way to sum it all up. FOR sent up nearly the whole team and we ran around like crazy people. For the dance I had my hair braided and borrowed a beautiful skirt from a neighbor and modified a FOR shirt to be runway 2012 fashionable. And we danced. All night long. Literally, until the dawn, we danced. And after being up all night in silent vigil and mourning during the past months in the very same kiosk, it was nice to welcome the dawn dancing there. It felt right and fitting and a perfect way to celebrate 15 years of peaceful resistance to war.
March is black birds with long yellow tails sailing across the sky
March is making brooms from picked plants and letting the garden grow
It is children throwing dried dry-season leaves at one another in the cacaotera, reminding me of jumping into leave piles as a kid in the north country
March is carrying sugarcane and feeding it through a smokey machine to make guarapo and then boiling it to make honey
It’s the wind in the palms sounding like rain
March is a young girl singing me romantic ranchera and various vallenatos blasting from homes, bug bites and plant scratches scathing my body, bathing in rivers and sleeping in hammocks, pre-dawn dusty blue skies, mid-day stifling heat and the inspiration that rises in the penumbra of the moon
March is the sweat that falls with every swing of the arm and the rhythmic sound of the machete
It is Ants on logs, spiders in webs, bees in honeycomb and it is dead fish in a floating pond, drown after a hard rain (Fish that drown, woah)
It is parrots as they begin their nightly calls, with the cows and the parakeets and the bugs and the thunder threatening against the back drop of a bright blue sky, lilac purple and deep red flowers popping out of the green backdrop of the jungle, a huge bug like a leaf and a huge bug like a stick walking over me on my bed
March is picking beans in the hot sun and then removing them from their shells in the shade
It is stealing papaya from my neighbor’s trees and holding new born babies and holding year old babies who I met the day they were born
March is days for planting and days for harvesting, tanning with the cacao on a neighbor’s roof and reciting Spanish tongue twisters as I hand wash my laundry
March is frijoles con coles, primitivo con leche and squash soup served to me in my neighbor’s homes
It is walking along ridges and across rivers, planting cacao and climbing trees
March is friendly small town interaction: a man walks by my window at with arepas. He passes a women carrying meat from a just butchered pig- they joke about swapping to make a complete meal and wave to me through the window.
March is births the same week as deaths that have men carrying up hammocks and caskets daily
It is ants and cockroaches and rats in the kitchen, which turns into Gina deep-cleaning with her favorite neighbors, which turns into a water-fight.
March is cycles: in weather and in life and in death and in harvests and in anniversaries. It is my one year celebration in the Peace Community. And the Peace Community’s 15th year anniversary. And a party with arroz con leche to welcome Dominique who, in the final week of the month, celebrates her first week in the war zone.
