Invierno, Cacao and Living with Violence

It is hard to imagine that it has only been two weeks since I arrived in the community. Time is at once creeping and speeding by. My teammate Mireille continues to recover from malaria, keeping us from traipsing off on too many adventures. The “invierno” or heavy rains continue almost every day. The heat builds here as the sun rises higher in the sky; clothes put on the line at 1:00 are dry by 1:15. The rain seems to come around 3:00 everyday and leaves a cool, fresh breeze in its wake. We have been completing my training in this last week, going over security protocols, evacuation procedures, important events in the community’s history, our agreements with the Internal Council. I have also kept busy with the everyday tasks that seem to take just a little bit longer here. Washing clothes by hand, cooking every meal, washing every dish, gathering food from our garden or trekking down to town and its markets. All of this while kids clamor to have then new FOR volunteer take them to the swimming hole, or carry them on her back, or sing them a song, and as adults come past for a visit and a chance to share their stories. It seems the main task of this job is to build relationships with the people here as the more you are trusted as an accompanier, the more information you are privy to, the better your analysis of the security situation, the more effective your accompaniment.

It seems every day I am struck anew with the realization that the violence of this war has woven itself directly into the fabric of everyday life here. Yesterday I was going over a list of the massacres and killings that have happened since 1977 and an older man walks in, tired from a days work in his fields, and begins to recount his own history. His life story brings to life these atrocities, as each massacre, displacement or threat affected him, was something he survived or something a loved one did not survive. A couple hours later I sat down with the same list of events and a middle-aged woman came over and matter-of-factly recounted loosing two of her brothers in the 2000 massacre that happened in the center of this settlement, La Unión. Paramilitary troops marched into town and took people from their homes, gathering them together at the kiosk in the center of the village. The paras demanded that the leaders identify themselves. After realizing that the community would not give up its leaders, it picked them out on their own, having identified them beforehand, and told everyone else to leave by going further up the mountain into the work fields behind the village. As the men, women and children made it up to the cacao fields they heard the shots begin as each leader was executed. When they were sure the paramilitary had left, they gathered their things and displaced to the main village of San José. They remained displaced for months returning eventually only to suffer through more killings and more displacements. And yet they continue to return and their commitment to the process of this Peace Community holds strong, a remarkable testament to non-violent resistance maintained in the most violent of circumstances.


Last week I sucked on my first cacao bean. The chocolate bean grows in these orange/yellow pods, you break it upon and inside our purple beans covered in a citrus-like membrane. Folks here suck on the bean until the citrus flavor disappears and then throw it out. When harvesting the cacao, the beans are pulled out and dried out, on rooftops here, for about a week, and then the beans are roasted and eventually ground into a paste of pure chocolate. I got to try some of the paste in my first days here as Paul and Mireille prepared some to send home to their families for the holidays. We ground the beans then mixed it with panela and nuts then formed them into delicious chocolate bars. The globalization lesson for today is this: the community sells this rich chocolate and then buys Nestle “ quick choco” to drink and eat.