A Northerner’s First Encounter with Colombian Campesinos

27.02.06

January 25th, 2006

I entered the countryside in North-eastern Antioquia on December 4th, 2005, to do physical accompaniment as a member of IPO. Our first collaboration was with CAHUCOPANA, to travel by mule and foot for three days through mountains to accompany campesinos (rural workers) to a Human Rights Workshop. I seized the opportunity to stay in the region for six weeks while I accompanied many more events with CAHUCOPANA and the ACVC. The people, their struggle, the scenery, and the purpose, quickly enlivened me.

During the Workshop, a man came down with malaria and was unable to sit up. We put him in a hammock suspended from a log and carried him to a neighbor’s house a few hours away where there were injections to help him recuperate enough to ride a mule. It was obvious that the people there are used to this. There is nothing resembling a clinic, much less a hospital, within two days walk, so they invent a system. This rural community lives in an interdependence I’ve never experienced.

One of my friends there explained simply and sincerely, “I’m really bad at eating alone. If I’m around people and I have something to eat, I go talk to someone and share a little and eat a little. Then I go chat and share with someone else until its gone.” Little kids who shouldn’t know better, offer to share their candy before eating themselves. This is the norm there. I am trying to learn to share, but I’m not very good at it yet.

The radiance of the people is astounding, when they live a life of few luxuries that is so close to death. In these villages the running water is the river: electricity exists in a very small minority of houses that have generators or solar panels. The reason we travel by mule is because this terrain of mountainous jungle has no roads. Everyone living in the region is targeted for displacement or death, however, or maybe as a result of this, they laugh a lot and sing and dance and work hard- and live well. When they meet each other in the trail, they greet each other, “How are you? Good or what?” (Its like an elaborate lifting of the finger off the steering wheel salutation used in the country in the U.S.) The families of the region share what they have, which is little. The rural regional culture knows things about living that the culture of “civilization”, which includes that of urban in Colombia, has forgotten, or never learned.

People are fascinated by the fact that I don’t speak Spanish with my family or friends at home and that it wasn’t hard for me to learn English growing up. They ask me to say things in English just to hear how it sounds. And they are excited that an ‘international’ likes to dance to the local music (vallenato, a style from the Coast featuring the accordian). We come from very different cultures, not only because of difference in nationality, but due to the contrast between rural and city culture. However we understand that neither of us supports the policies of our own governments, nor that of the other. These rural Colombians and I have more in common with each other than either one of us has with our own governments, with whom we share a language and culture. There is a very deep mutual respect and appreciation that pierces the heart and runs through our blood.

The campesinos and I argue about who is more brave. They say I am brave for coming from another country to immerse myself in an unknown situation. I don’t deny that I was scared to come to Colombia, but it is obvious that they are the more valiant, risking their lives every day to defend the land on which they have made their home. As these families refuse to submit to the displacement that the Colombian government and multinational corporations are so desperately attempting, they put themselves in the line of fire, but even moreso when they openly resist. They are the inspiration that is more than what I was hoping for when I got to Colombia. “We have to struggle until the end,” I’ve heard on more than one occasion. My own commitment to the struggle is fortified as it is now united intimately with that of the campesinos.

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