Getting to a place called Hope

I seem to keep ending my recent posts with a promise of “more to come”. Hopefully this post will fulfill that promise to at least some extent. As always, there is much to recount. I think the best place to begin is with corn fritters (isn’t it always?). I have mentioned these fried corn delights before when talking about the wide variety of edibles formed from fresh corn, or chocolo, and expressing my surprise at discovering the Colombian counterpart of a western PA treat. Well, they showed up again as fresh corn was ripe for the picking in this last month and brought down to our village from higher up fields.
Most folks that live here in La Unión work community land or family land north east of the village and higher up in the mountains. In October of last year, the community realized a return of families to a vereda in this area called La Esperanza("Hope"). The people of this vereda had been forced to displace due to the rampant violence and massacres of the nineties, in 1996 paramilitaries issued a “get out or be killed” ultimatum to all civilians in the area. It is estimated that over 800 campesinos displaced. In 1998 some families went back, only having to displace once again. Last October’s return was the start of what the Community hopes will be the gradual and steady repopulation of the area.

Last week we were asked to accompany community leaders on a trip to La Esperanza in order to meet with the around 12 families that are currently living there and working the super-fertile land. I have been expecting to go to LE since I arrived last November, so I was very excited to finally be on my way. The trip is up-up-up and then down-down-down and full of mud-mud-mud. I hopped up on a mule when it was offered and was glad to spend the six-hour journey with the advantage of four, sturdy mule legs. At one point the sturdy mule legs carried me under a half-felled tree causing me to do my best on-mule limbo, resulting in some keepsake scars on my belly. And, on the way back, the sturdy mule legs didn’t stop the mule from falling. One of the community leaders and I were moseying along, having a nice conversation when he suddenly yelled, “The mule is falling!” and I automatically kicked my legs out of the stirrups and flung them over my head, catapulting myself –backpack and all- backwards over the left flank of the mule as it fell. Having never fallen off a mule before I wasn’t sure if it would roll towards me so I added some extra backwards rolls for insurance sake and finally stopped when my friend began saying “Enough, Amanda, enough” in between not-too-suppressed giggles. I was laughing, too. It was a ridiculous situation even by my standards, made more slapstick by my extra backwards tumbles. Muddy but amused and, not to be deterred, I got right back on.

Adventures in mule (mis)management aside, it was quite a beautiful trip. The further up into the mountains we went, the bigger things seemed to grow. The same flora and fauna existed as in La Unión, but I seemed to shrink – Honey I Shrunk the Kids style – as the ferns and palms and trees got bigger and bigger. When we got to the farm of one of the community members we had to walk through a field of super-sized corn to reach the house. I grew up in farming land – there was a cornfield in front of our house, and I am well acquainted with the fact that corn back home is supposed to be "knee high by the fourth of July". Here it must be knee high about 2 weeks after it is planted because it is gigantic at the time it is harvested. This picture here doesn’t even seem to do justice to its enormity. And there are no mechanical harvesters to bring in the crop – when ready the corn is harvested by hand. People here are not screwing around.

Because I was lucky to spend most of the journey on the mule, I was able to look around me instead of focusing on where my next step would go. The views were just breathtaking. Everywhere I looked, I saw endless varieties of green bouncing off the mountains. The journey to La Esperanza has helped me to appreciate how urban the village I live in really is. There, houses here are spread out and are built in folds of the mountain and surrounded by fields and fields of crops. There is no journey to town for supplies every couple of days. There is no electricity. There is, however, some cell phone coverage – modernity finds an entrance wherever possible, I guess. This, friends, was the campo campo. Children there have no school – but the community hopes to correct that soon. They are looking for a teacher and plans are in motion to build a school and more houses for other families considering the return.

This strengthening of La Esperanza is part of the plan to expand the reach of the Peace Community by way of Humanitarian Zones. The HZ’s have been the way in which the Community has designated outlying areas as neutral territory. In the more remote veredas combat can be more dangerous for civilians as there is no clear village area – so civilians can more easily be caught in the crossfire. The HZ’s are neutral areas that also have a designated ‘safe space’ for civilians to flee to in case of combat.These spaces are to be respected by all armed actors and combat should not take place near them. Of course, back in February, combat took place just minutes away from the school in the vereda of La Cristalina - the designated Humanitarian Zone. So, it has been harder in practice to have these zones respected. Another obstacle has been what more and more seems like a targeting of HZ leaders. Four of the men that have been the leaders of the HZ project in their vereda have been assassinated in the past year and a half. The two most recent have been talked about in this blog – Francisco Puertas and Dairo Torres. Arlen Salas and Berto Vasquez were assassinated in late 2005 and early 2006. This emerging trend is troubling and added reason for the community’s newly focused efforts to nurture and support the HZ project.

That evening in La Esperanza Mayra and I washed up in the small stream by the houses as the community leaders we were with met with the families of La Esperanza. Later on we joined up for dinner and the guys began telling tales of the soccer tournaments they regularly had between the villages and veredas of the county. The teams all had uniforms and there were even some women’s teams. According to our friends, La Unión was the force to be reckoned with. They eventually switched into telling us “Campesino in the Big City” stories. I was laughing so hard at these that tears rolled down my face. After having almost ten months of ridiculous gringo mistakes in the campo, it was so enjoyable and hilarious to hear about some of the misadventures of community leaders when in Bogotá or the US or Europe. They reminisced about one leader seeing his bag go past on the luggage belt at the airport and, thinking he had only the one chance to get it, jumping up on the belt and crawling over bags until he had claimed his own. We laughed as they talked about one of the women leaders being told mid-down escalator that she was headed the wrong way. She immediately turned around and started determinedly walking up the stairs, fighting against the mechanically dictated direction. An automatic sliding glass door was quite a foil for one of our friends and another was stranded in Bogotá for a couple of days only because he didn’t understand how to pick up the cell phone he had been loaned in order to meet up with his contacts. These stories came pouring out of our friends as the night sky darkened and the lightning bugs came out, adding their random blinking to the heavenly twinkling of the celestial splendor. As the laughter died down and we prepared to get some sleep in our hammocks I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that some of the heroes of those stories were leaders that have since been killed. Hearing them humanized and joyfully remembered by those who remain was extremely touching.

The absurdity of lives lost to the violence of war is never far from the surface here. On our journey home we paused for a break at the top of the mountain with only the descent ahead of us. The view, as seen here, is spectacular. That is ocean in that picture. La Unión lies hidden down the first dip of the mountain, but the background of this photo shows how close we really are to the Gulf of Uraba. You can see one of the small towns in the center of the picture and to the left is the bigger town of Turbo – where the nearest beach can be found. We paused to admire the breathtaking view and then began our descent. As we began, one of the men we were with quietly mentioned that his father and cousin had been killed by paramilitaries in that very look-out spot just four years ago. The realization that everyone here has been affected by this war came rushing to the surface. He told us that his brother was killed on the same day in a different location. All three were simple campesinos coming back from some family land back nearby. They were guilty of no crime, they were aligned with no armed actor, they were simply passing through a well-traveled path after a long day working in their fields.

I sunk into thought about this reality as my mule half stepped, half fell down the mountain, carrying me towards the place I have come to call home. I looked out towards the ocean and thought about the recent massacre that had taken place the day before (Aug 22)– we had only learned of it that morning on the radio. This massacre was carried out by the FARC and happened not far from Apartadó, closer to the ocean-side town of Turbo. The town, Currulao has been a long disputed area between paramilitary and guerrilla forces. This most recent massacre is only the latest in a long string of atrocities committed by both sides in order to gain control of the town and its surrounding areas. Nevertheless, a place, a people, never becomes accustomed to rampant killings of the civilian population. During this massacre, a group of 8 guerrillas entered homes in the three different neighborhoods, apparently looking for people associated with the former AUC (now ‘demobilized’ paramilitary) “Bloque Bananero”. They killed three men and three women, all civilians – among them friends, family members and mistaken identities of ex-Bloque Bananero paramilitaries. According to news sources, all were civilians. The assassinations took place over a three-hour period – forcing one to imagine the horror that survivors must have felt as doors were knocked down and shots rang out through the neighborhoods.

This past week, the FARC showed up again, this time on the other side of Apartadó. About five minutes after a Police check point outside the town of Chigorodó (30 minutes south of Apartadó) the FARC set up a check point and proceeded to search cars. Among the cars stopped was a car carrying two of our fellow accompaniers from PBI and a community leader. Mayra and I were almost in that car as we had originally been asked to do this particular accompaniment. When the car our friends were in was stopped, the guerrillas had just found who they were looking for and kidnapped two men from nearby Mutata. However, 2 guerrillas had stayed behind to continue searching the cars. They took cell phones from people and eventually told everyone to be on their way. But it was a scare for our friends. Not to mention another indicator that the FARC have re-emerged in the zone in an undeniable way.

As the war continues to unfold all around us, I find myself struggling against the swelling cynicism that wants me to admit that there is no solution to this war. The daily news of massacres and kidnappings and the augmented military presence in the zone I live in seem to draw me closer to resignation. But there is so much beauty to be found in this country, in the people I am privileged to work with and to meet. There are countless places I have yet to explore, countless stories I have yet to hear. And my time is limited. As one of our older neighbors said to me earlier today as she held tight to my waist – “Time flies and you will soon leave us, just wait and see, time will fly.” I know she is right, but I am feeling so settled in lately that I can imagine no other reality than the here and now –gigantic plants, tragic tales, mule rides, guerrilla warfare and all. And I am challenged to hold on to a a belief that a solution to the violence is possible - I am challenged to get through the mud and murk of the daily reality and get to that hopeful place - to find "la esperanza" that is made possible through shared stories, shared laughter, shared tragedy, shared mule mishaps. The hope made possible through genuine fellowship with one another.