Becoming a Citizen

Juan and I have been married now for over 7 years, but today he officially became a US citizen. I'm very proud of him and proud of his commitment to this process, for him, but also for Sofia and I. Becoming a US citizen is a long and hard process, and that's the legal way! There are lots of twists and turns in the road, but he has done it and in doing so has made me so proud of him and so honored to have him as my partner....it did not hit me until today what an act of love it is to take on someone else's country as your home in full and complete ways until today...

Heading Home....

I have been in Bogota since Saturday afternoon, spending my remaining few days visiting family. Sofia was very happy to see me, and we have had some time to explore other parts of Bogota and outlying areas. We have also had some great time visiting family and friends who we only see about once a year, if lucky. Last time Sofia and I were here was in the summer of 2005, I bought Juan a plane ticket to go on a surprise visit to his mom over Easter this past spring. Last year when we came here I said to Juan that I consider Colombia my country as much as the United States, I feel at home and comfortable here. Juan also has a very large and gracious family that I enjoy a great deal. This is also the first trip to Colombia where I have been allowed to be on my own! One of my frustrations with travel to Colobmia is the security situation, and my in-laws are very, very protective of me. This time I got to travel alone in Colombia, see some of the country on my own, and I have done taxis alone in Bogota which is quite an adventure! I took one home to my mother-in-laws home a few nights ago and as is usual in Bogota, the driver wanted to go a different way, and got lost. We spent about five minutes arguing about how to drive back, and I held my own, which was good, but I am also not going to tell my mother-in-law about this (and she has no idea how to go online!) or else that will be the last taxi ride I will EVER be allowed to take alone in Bogota. She is very careful with my safety and security here in Bogota which can get crazy at times. But it fufilled my need for five minutes of adventure and we got home ok. Travelling to Barranquilla with the PPF was such a joy and seeing the work of the church was wonderful, even if I only got to see some of it. I hope to be able to come back in the next year for some more accompaniment time.

One of the reasons we scheduled our trip for November was because my sister-in-law was due to have her first child on November 8th and Sofia wanted to be here for the birth of her first full-fledged cousin. Sara was born five weeks early after it was discovered that she was in distress. It has been a long and stressful few weeks for our family with little Bebe Sarita, but she is growing, and we have had some good times with her. Last night Diana, my sister-in-law, and her husband Jorge asked me to serve as her godmother which sent me into tears of joy. I am so honored by this. In the Presbyterian Church we do not usually affirm godparents, even though it is a common practice, I remember having a spirited discussion in seminary with one of my professors about this. I am very close to my two godparents, so I just am unwilling to give into the theological idea in the PC(USA) that they are not needed. I intend to be the spoiling type, but also take good care of Sarita. She is so little, barely five pounds, but we have had such a good time being with her, she is adorable. As I always am at the conclusion of an international trip, I am grateful, I am ready to head home, but I am also filled up. I look forward to seeing everyone over the weekend when we return! Sofia is looking forward to coming home, and sharing all about her very special little cousin who she just adores!

Last Day

November 16, 2006

Today is my last day with the IPC here on the Barranquilla coast. Rachel and Billie leave tomorrow am for a three day trip that I cannot go on with them so I am going to spend my final day here in Barranquilla with family. I found myself getting a bit teared up at different points today, I have met wonderful, beautiful people who are living out their faith in active ways. My accompaniment partners, Billie and Rachel have been fantastic, and I have finally been able to be a part for a short period of time, with the church here in Colombia that interests me so much. I have only scratched the surface, but luckily, Juan and I come back to Colombia yearly. German, our leader kept talking about the same thing today. He was saying, ¨We´ve talked about and listened to all sorts of political, social, anthropological, theological issues. The question now, is what does this mean for how you live out your faith.¨ And then he leans over to me, the only pastor in the group, and asks me how I´d deal with these things with the congregation I serve. These are tough questions. My local church has been struggling lately with issues of peacemaking, now that we are in a time of war. One of my friends at my church, Sue, sent me a quote yesterday via email that has a lot to say about the translation of all of these societal issues to our faith, as people who follow the Prince of Peace…

"The moral health of our world depends on the continued existence of communities of moral formation and accountability. Our communities can provide us with a place of integrity and respect where we are able to struggle with life dilemmas, build relationships, and foster understanding. This does not mean that communities are necessarily homogenous, nor are they places of refuge from conflict. Rather, communities are places where we are able to disagree, to challenge, to question, and to wrestle with moral issues within an environment of integrity and respect. The moral health of individuals depends on our ability to continue to sort out our responses to the world within the context of a community of dialogue and accountability."

These are all the things that it will come to me to be about as I return home and continue the journey…

Shakira, Shakira!

November 16, 2006

Today I´m a little tired, since I got home last night at 1am! Last night Rachel, Billie, and I went along with friends from the seminary-university to the Shakira benefit concert here in Barranquilla. Shakira, if you don´t know who she is, well, just google her, or ask any teenager and they will tell you about her, is a Latina pop sensation. I first started listening to her music back in 1998 when I was starting seminary in Chicago and one of my roommates got me listening to her music. Shakira is probably the most famous-in a positive way-Colombian on the planet right now, and Barranquilla, where I am, is her hometown. As I was saying to some friends at lunch today, she is like the Queen of Barranquilla. Anyway, I´m a big fan, as is my four-year old daughter Sofia who loves to point out that she is exactly like Shakira because she is also from Colombia, speaks Spanish and English, like Shakira, and Sofia can do the Hips Don´t Lie dance, with her little hips, and some of our friends at home have been lucky enough to see Sofia do this dance, it is very funny. She was most recently doing it in the dairy aisle in Bogota the night before I came here because Shakira music was playing in the grocery store near my mother-in-law´s house. Shakira´s music, in my humble opinion is awesome, and I just love it. Juan and I have all of her albums, and so going to her concert last night was just pure joy for me. Rachel told me that a few times during the concert, I was the only one in our section dancing, while everyone was sitting. I was very excited.

Getting into the concert was interesting. The local paper said that over 1000 Colombian police and security were going to ring the stadium, and I was one of 70,000 people with tickets. Juan reminded me that the crowds can get crazy sometimes, to be prepared. It took a close to three-hour wait outside of the stadium to get in as we waited on line. At one point some people tried to cut in line and a bit of a scuffle ensued. At another time we walked past the makeshift police-army command post where we witnessed a group of police-army beating a man as they took him into custody. Standing a few paces ahead of us in line was a man dressed as a woman-and a very beautiful woman at that. She was very nice but as we got closer to the stadium we were separated into male-female lines, she got in line with us girls. We walked past a line of Colombian army officers who proceeded to harass her verbally and in horribly sexual explicit ways. I was really upset by this and by the beating I had just witnessed a bit earlier. At one point she rallied, threw back an insult at one of the army guys-a brave thing to do-and got them to turn on one of their own to laugh at. I got the sense that people in the line were ready to protect her. After we got into the concert all of the crazy on the outside went away and we were just able to relax and enjoy the beautiful music. But getting inside was a reminder of what life is like here in Colombia. At the same time I could easily see similar things happen in the United States but luckily I have never witnessed them firsthand, but have watched them happen on the evening news…

Land and Law

November 15, 2006

Yesterday was a very busy day here, and a day of contrasts. In the morning we sat in on a land meeting with a group of about 20 men, who are displaced from the violence here in Colombia. The meeting was being run by a young lawyer and was held here on the campus of the Reformed University. The lawyer walked them through the steps towards land aquistion, and with petitioning for their rights as desplazados. The process in Colombia reminds me some of the INS process that Juan and I have gone through over the last six years. It is complex, hard to follow, multiple steps, and next to impossible for the lay person to navigate. I feel with immigration at home that the system is set up that way on purpose, and I suspect that it is some of the same desire here in Colombia, there is a legal process, but it is not set up in a fashion that allows the regular person, let alone someone with limited capabilities to navigate it. It was interesting sitting in the room as an observer, the men all had varying levels of anxiety and interest in figuring out the process, and varying degrees of need among them. All wanted to move forward in their lives and to return to dignity as one man shared with me. It felt humbling to sit there and listen to them talk and as I listened to the complexity of the legal battle they would have to fight, I was once again reminded of how difficult a road it is to travel here in Colombia for many people. I was also deeply impressed by the ability and the intelligence of the lawyer who was working with them who was my age, who is deeply committed to this work and who has already been writing to the government to petition for the rights of this group of families represented by the men in the room. In many ways he is putting his own life on the line. One of the other lawyers who did this work on the coast and who was supported in part here by the Presbyterian Church has just left the country a few days ago because of threats to his life and time he spent in jail, it was suggested that he was collaborating with the guerilla. Alexa Smith, now an independent journalist, who used to be on staff with the PCUSA has written numerous times about his plight. Her latest appeared in the Presbyterian Outlook just a few weeks ago.
http://www.pres-outlook.com/tabid/1151/Article/3238/Default.aspx
As I was listening to this lawyer, my age, work all morning explaining bit by bit, detail by detail all of this to these men I kept on thinking about the other lawyer who had to leave. I wonder about the person standing in the room in front of me now. I have come to regard him as a friend while here just these two short weeks on the coast, we have hung out, spent time traveling together, if I lived here or he lived in the States I know that he and I and Juan and our other extended group of friends our age would become fast friends, would enjoy being together. As I watch him teaching the law, doing work that so many will not do here, are afraid to, I am amazed. As I watch these men who are working to figure out a new way for their families I am also amazed and shaken. Another humbling day…..

Sharing Websites

Tonight we are heading to the Shakira concert, it´s a benefit to raise funds for a school she is building and working to bring some attention to the issue of los desplazados, the displaced people, victims of the conflict here in Colombia
Her website can be accessed at http://www.fundacionpiesdescalzos.com/castellano/index.php

I also was online last night looking through the School of the Americas website, the annual protest is in Ft Benning, GA this weekend to close the School of the Americas. What is interesting is that there is a protest in Bogota this weekend that I will head to as I return to the capital. The website for the work here in Colombia, Christians for Peace with Justice and Dignity is http://www.cristianosporlapaz.info

Our work here is part of these larger peace movements. The church in Colombia I am finding more and more is working to be a part of larger movements, and to be the grassroots change it can be in the places where it is present, living out the gospel each day.

The peacemaking reading for today is Psalm 121
Psalm 121
1I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?
2My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
3He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
4He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
5The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
6The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
7The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
8The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

This is one of my favorite psalms, so I was happy to see it on the lectionary today. It feels like it has deeper signifigance here in a place where the problems if you allow them to be, can seem insurmountable. The psalm discusses how God is with each one of us, holds each one of us, and allows each one of us to feel peace and security. it is important to remember, as the church here reminds us that no matter what movement we are a part of, they are only a response to what God is doing in our lives, that our ultimate authority and peace can only come from one place.

The Week Ahead

November 14, 2006

Today we are in the Presbytery office spending some time getting organized for the week ahead. I was able to upload photos from the finca and some of our other travels, you can view them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/svanceocampo/

One of the things I have been able to take in the last day or so has been the news. President Uribe from Colombia was in the United States visiting with Bush, today he is here in Barranquilla to dedicate a statue of Shakira, interesting work for a President….. If you don´t know who she is, you should find out and listen to some of her music, it´s beautiful Colombian music, and her popularity has grown a great deal all over the world, and she has branched out into other types of music. http://www.shakira.com/

I have had a chance to look over a few Colombian newspapers here, which have quite a few stories of killings and other atrocities in them, along with photos that we wouldn´t publish in the United States. Thanks to the PCUSA Colombia egroup, I have also received a few articles from various news outlets about issues here in Colombia. The level of the violence in some parts of the country is staggering and the level of lack of resources is equally upsetting. I have spent a lot of time the last few days wondering about what is the appropriate response, how do those of us with many resources channel them in appropriate ways. I am finding that my time here in Colombia with the IPC is leaving me with more questions than answers, more things left undone than done.

Tomorrow we are attending a Land and Law conference, going back to the issues of the finca that we visited last week, that will be held here on the University campus. Representatives are coming from the Colombian government to talk along with lawyers about land issues. That will be interesting and will continue to educate us on the issues of land here in Colombia, an issue that underpins a lot of what goes on here. Then in the evening we are having some diversion, a Shakira concert here in Barranquila, which is a benefit for a school for children she wants to build here in town. It is being held at the huge soccer stadium here in town and promises to be a wild, and fun event. I love her music, so getting to see her live, even from some seats up high, sounds like a lot of fun.

Work, Play, and Rest

November 12, 2006
Thanks first of all to everyone who is emailing me! I love getting emails and hearing from you!
Since going to the finca, things have been both busy and quiet here in Barranquilla. First the busy….

On Wednesday Rachel, Billie, and I met with German, the Colombian who is in charge of the accompaniers while we are here working with the IPC. We had a very dynamic morning with German talking about all sorts of theological, social, and political issues in a mix of Spanish and English. It was a joy and I wish I had more time here to spend with German and to get to know him better. I can tell that he is one of the gems here. After that we spent most of the day Wednesday at the Presbytery office meeting all sorts of different people and talking to them about all sorts of different issues. Thursday we left with a busload of people from Barranquilla, for Cartagena about an hour and a half up the coast. There we attended a human rights conference organized by an NGO out of Bogota, and this was the annual consultation with the northern coast workers. There were human rights workers there from churches, from children´s advocacy groups, women´s advocacy groups, along with others. The conference went all day Thursday and Friday and for me it was very interesting, and the documentation of various human rights abuses that this group has managed to put together is impressive. It is also very upsetting, because as you read the abuses they range from the harrasement and threats to our own pastors here Colombia, to journalists, to other community leaders and organizers, many of whom have been disappeared or killed. The level of detail to the reports was great, and there was a great deal of discussion, oftentimes heated on what to do next, and what things to do for the next year. It was a rich experience. I also got very frustrated at the end of the day on Thursday! The conference is totally in Spanish and while I consider my Spanish skills good, I realized they are actually quite poor in that kind of situation on Thursday. Conference speakers, comments from the group, and the din of an air conditioning unit all combined together to make it hard to hear and hard to follow sometimes. Rachel, who has been here nearly three months reminded me when I was getting frustrated that this is all normal, and that conferences are some of the hardest work because they can be overwhelming in terms of the information put out and the variety of types of conversations and accents and types of Spanish spoken. I certainly found this to be true. For the first time in a long time I found myself in a Spanish speaking environment when I felt like I didn´t understand a word of Spanish at times! It was tough, and a reminder to my ego that there is a still a lot of vocabulary to go! Thursday night we went out for some beer in Cartagena with our friends from Barranquilla, two of which had been to the finca with us two days before. It was good to get to know them better and I had some nice conversation with seminary students here about their work and studies in Colombia and the church process here. I also talked to a young lawyer who is doing some pro bono human rights work. As I talked to him and the young seminarian, I know young is a relative term !!! they are my age, I felt a twinge of excitement and sadness about their work. I know from hearing of other experiences that the work of both a pastor and a human rights lawyer is not safe work all the time in Colombia and as I listened to them and enjoyed their company a great deal, I found myself beginning to worry about them, but to also understand what a calling is and why they are doing what they do.

There is a huge mountain of human rights work to climb here in Colombia and it affects people on all sorts of levels. I left the conference humbled by the experience, by the work that so many of the Colombians are doing and by the things they are working tirelessly to accomplish. I was also very glad to see that some of the human rights violations that have specifically been targeting my Presbyterian collegues here are being documented, and I have now seen them documented by a few different NGO´s for which I am grateful.

Rachel, Billie, and I stayed on an extra night in Cartagena for some sightseeing and early Christmas shopping. We had a great time seeing the sights and taking in what is a very beautiful city set in a very beautiful area. We came home to Barranquilla last night on a little bus, and halfway here the bus was stopped on the road by a carnival type procession on the road as we made our way through a small town. About five floats went by, each with people dressed up and dancing on top of them, and hundreds of people in the streets. We got home tired, and with a lot of laundry to do.

Today, Sunday, we attended worship at the 5th Presbyterian Church in Barranquilla and the pastor there invited me to preach, but unfortunately my time here is short, so I couldn´t take him up on his invitation, and what would have been very good practice for me on a future Sunday! There we ran into the Ewers, another PCUSA couple who is here as permanent accompaniers for three years. After church we had a quiet afternoon and then met the Ewers again for some Mexican food for dinner.

One of the drawbacks I´m finding to being here is that most accompaniers spend one month or more. The PPF was very kind to let me come for two weeks, with the family connections to Colombia I have I have a deep interest in the work that is going on here, and so I am really glad to have the opportunity to be here and to have some real experiences of my own to go with what I read and talk with friends and family about Colombia. At the same time I am realizing after a week why a month is a very good idea. It´s hard to pack things in in two weeks, and life moves at a much slower pace here than in the States, so in two weeks you can miss a lot. Rachel and Billie are heading to another church for a few days early next weekend and I will be unable to join them on what would be a very interesting trip and part of accompaniment work. Add to that the frequency of Colombian holidays! I´m here over two weekends and both have been holiday weekends, which means that Monday is off, so the school is closed, as is the Presbytery office, so we have long stretches of time without official accompaniment work to do. With Monday as a holiday, the whole weekend slows down, the city gets very quiet, and a lot of stores and other places are closed. I know the pace will pick back up on Tuesday, but for right now, it´s been a quiet, and a bit slow weekend, a chance to catch up on email, and this blog, and to reflect on everything going on around me.

November 12, 2006
Thanks first of all to everyone who is emailing me! I love getting emails and hearing from you!
Since going to the finca, things have been both busy and quiet here in Barranquilla. First the busy….

On Wednesday Rachel, Billie, and I met with German, the Colombian who is in charge of the accompaniers while we are here working with the IPC. We had a very dynamic morning with German talking about all sorts of theological, social, and political issues in a mix of Spanish and English. It was a joy and I wish I had more time here to spend with German and to get to know him better. I can tell that he is one of the gems here. After that we spent most of the day Wednesday at the Presbytery office meeting all sorts of different people and talking to them about all sorts of different issues. Thursday we left with a busload of people from Barranquilla, for Cartagena about an hour and a half up the coast. There we attended a human rights conference organized by an NGO out of Bogota, and this was the annual consultation with the northern coast workers. There were human rights workers there from churches, from children´s advocacy groups, women´s advocacy groups, along with others. The conference went all day Thursday and Friday and for me it was very interesting, and the documentation of various human rights abuses that this group has managed to put together is impressive. It is also very upsetting, because as you read the abuses they range from the harrasement and threats to our own pastors here Colombia, to journalists, to other community leaders and organizers, many of whom have been disappeared or killed. The level of detail to the reports was great, and there was a great deal of discussion, oftentimes heated on what to do next, and what things to do for the next year. It was a rich experience. I also got very frustrated at the end of the day on Thursday! The conference is totally in Spanish and while I consider my Spanish skills good, I realized they are actually quite poor in that kind of situation on Thursday. Conference speakers, comments from the group, and the din of an air conditioning unit all combined together to make it hard to hear and hard to follow sometimes. Rachel, who has been here nearly three months reminded me when I was getting frustrated that this is all normal, and that conferences are some of the hardest work because they can be overwhelming in terms of the information put out and the variety of types of conversations and accents and types of Spanish spoken. I certainly found this to be true. For the first time in a long time I found myself in a Spanish speaking environment when I felt like I didn´t understand a word of Spanish at times! It was tough, and a reminder to my ego that there is a still a lot of vocabulary to go! Thursday night we went out for some beer in Cartagena with our friends from Barranquilla, two of which had been to the finca with us two days before. It was good to get to know them better and I had some nice conversation with seminary students here about their work and studies in Colombia and the church process here. I also talked to a young lawyer who is doing some pro bono human rights work. As I talked to him and the young seminarian, I know young is a relative term !!! they are my age, I felt a twinge of excitement and sadness about their work. I know from hearing of other experiences that the work of both a pastor and a human rights lawyer is not safe work all the time in Colombia and as I listened to them and enjoyed their company a great deal, I found myself beginning to worry about them, but to also understand what a calling is and why they are doing what they do.

There is a huge mountain of human rights work to climb here in Colombia and it affects people on all sorts of levels. I left the conference humbled by the experience, by the work that so many of the Colombians are doing and by the things they are working tirelessly to accomplish. I was also very glad to see that some of the human rights violations that have specifically been targeting my Presbyterian collegues here are being documented, and I have now seen them documented by a few different NGO´s for which I am grateful.

Rachel, Billie, and I stayed on an extra night in Cartagena for some sightseeing and early Christmas shopping. We had a great time seeing the sights and taking in what is a very beautiful city set in a very beautiful area. We came home to Barranquilla last night on a little bus, and halfway here the bus was stopped on the road by a carnival type procession on the road as we made our way through a small town. About five floats went by, each with people dressed up and dancing on top of them, and hundreds of people in the streets. We got home tired, and with a lot of laundry to do.

Today, Sunday, we attended worship at the 5th Presbyterian Church in Barranquilla and the pastor there invited me to preach, but unfortunately my time here is short, so I couldn´t take him up on his invitation, and what would have been very good practice for me on a future Sunday! There we ran into the Ewers, another PCUSA couple who is here as permanent accompaniers for three years. After church we had a quiet afternoon and then met the Ewers again for some Mexican food for dinner.

One of the drawbacks I´m finding to being here is that most accompaniers spend one month or more. The PPF was very kind to let me come for two weeks, with the family connections to Colombia I have I have a deep interest in the work that is going on here, and so I am really glad to have the opportunity to be here and to have some real experiences of my own to go with what I read and talk with friends and family about Colombia. At the same time I am realizing after a week why a month is a very good idea. It´s hard to pack things in in two weeks, and life moves at a much slower pace here than in the States, so in two weeks you can miss a lot. Rachel and Billie are heading to another church for a few days early next weekend and I will be unable to join them on what would be a very interesting trip and part of accompaniment work. Add to that the frequency of Colombian holidays! I´m here over two weekends and both have been holiday weekends, which means that Monday is off, so the school is closed, as is the Presbytery office, so we have long stretches of time without official accompaniment work to do. With Monday as a holiday, the whole weekend slows down, the city gets very quiet, and a lot of stores and other places are closed. I know the pace will pick back up on Tuesday, but for right now, it´s been a quiet, and a bit slow weekend, a chance to catch up on email, and this blog, and to reflect on everything going on around me.

Finca

November 7, 2006

The posting of what is happening here onto the blog I think is going to be slow going, but I´ll keep working to get stuff up as soon as I can!

Today we went to a town on the outskirts of Barranquilla called La Central in the providence of Soledad. It was explained to us that this is a barrio, and that there are many displaced people, los desplazados, living there. There is a constant and growing number of displaced persons in Colombia, prior to the Iraq War many human rights groups put the number of internally displaced persons the highest within Colombia. Getting to La Central was a long process. We took a bus from town, then walked through the barrio until we got to the home of a friend of one of our guides, and waited there for about a half hour for a Jeep to take us overland. While we were waiting we were offered someone´s front porch to sit on to keep out of the hot midday sun. There we got the unusual entertainment of watching two young boys capture a baby lizard and then struggle with him to get a small piece of string tied around the lizard´s body! After a couple narrow escapes the poor little lizard didn´t stand a chance, and the boys succeeded in tying him up. They brought him over to visit us and we talked some with them. I kept waiting for the lizard to shed its tail and make that final escape, but it never did and so the boys let us snap a couple photos of them with their new pet. It was wonderful to interact with a few children and to share with them this little adventure with the lizard, I even had a go at hold it, but the lizard kept trying to get up and I´d already watched it try to bite of the kids, so I was not very good at holding onto it!

The jeep arrived and we climbed in the back and took about another 10 minute drive overland, a very bumpy ride out to the area that was our final destination, a swath of land outside of the La Central barrio where some of the displaced persons were trying to create a small farm, finca, to grow food for sale. This group of men are engaged in a struggle with the local land office of the Colombian government to get the land so that they can permantely grow and cultivate crops on it. Once we arrived out near where the finca was we had another 10 or 15 minute walk out to it which included walking through a cattle grazing area, with the big cattle stopping to watch us as we passed by. The finca is about 2 hectacres in size and about 8 or so cooperative farmers are growing their first crop of corn and beans. Many of the people in Colombia who are displaced have come from rural areas where farming was their livehood. Now many of them find themselves in more urban areas where they need to continue to make a living, but their way of doing so, oftentimes for generations is no longer available to them or viable. This lack of work, and lack of similar kinds of ways of making money and supporting families is one of the major issues that is facing the displaced population in Colombia. The other, as highlighted by the finca we visited is receiving help and assistance from the government, and being given a fair hearing. The men who worked the finca were very proud of their work and the progress they had made thus far. They were very eager to have us visit and to document their work and to photograph what they were doing. One farmer says he was told by the Colombian government, ¨There is no free land in Atlantico.¨ He waved his hand around and said, ¨So, what is this¨ The other part of their work on the finca involves making charcoal to sell at market. They reported to us that they make about 4500 pesos a bag at market, which is about 2USD. Making charcoal from the surrounding trees is backbreaking, dirty, and very hot work. The men at this farm are working so hard, to make so little from our point of view, yet there was a deep sense of pride in their work, and they were so eager to have us come and see it.

In La Central there is a great deal of poverty, small homes and many small children who had little to wear. For me, that was probably the most difficult part of the day. As we rode back to the camp we passed some Colombian army patrols, walking through La Central on foot. One of the community organizers who took us around said they were there to watch the people. After that we toured a large open air market in the Soledad providence, and discussed some of the violence that had occurred there over time, especially in regards to paramilitary activity.

As I was walking around a passage from a book I have just finished reading came to me in which the author describes a feeling that he often has. He describes it as ¨…a chronic restlessness, an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessing that were right in front of me. It´s a flaw that is endemic to modern life…¨ Isn´t that how we are, I am certainly guilty of this much of the time. I worry about what I don´t have rather than focus on what I do have.

When we got back to our apartments in the evening I sat down to read the peacemaking reading for today. As I read it I was struck with how much it reflected back onto the work we did today: ¨…They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, but thy shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.¨

As I read this passage I was thinking about how fitting it was to what we saw today, that these men are actively choosing to not participate in violence, actively choosing to make something their own, despite the odds stacked against them, actively choosing to focus on what they have and what they can do rather than what is absent from their lives. It is a powerful witness.

First Day

My day today started pretty early. I left our family´s home in Bogota at 730am and headed to the airport in Bogota. After a short flight I was in Barranquilla. While on the plane I was reading a book I got right before I left titled, ¨The Audacity of Hope¨ by Senator Barack Obama of IL. I have been interested in his rise into the senate for more faith based that political reasons, he served in the South Side of Chicago where I went to seminary, and I just heard his minister give a sermon last week at the Fosdick Convocation at the Riverside Church in NYC. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave this amazing sermon and Senator Obama is getting a lot of press in the US, but he is also doing some writing most recently for faith based journals like Sojourners. He´s making some interesting connections between faith and politics and I thought I´d read his book on this trip, along with a few others I brought along. I was reading it on the plane and a Colombian man next to me struck up a converstion in half Spanish, half English. He wanted to look at the book and had heard about Senator Obama. We talked a bit and the Colombian announced to me that he wouldn´t vote in the US for a democrat, they are the party all the wars start under! As with most Colombians, political opinions are strongly held and the conversations can get going very quickly. I really didn´t want to start one on the plane today but it was interesting and got me using some vocabulary I wasn´t all that well versed in which was a good thing!

I landed in Barranquilla and the two other accomanpiers for the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, Rachael and Billy met me at the aiport. It was great to see them after hearing about both of them and they both instantly made me feel at home. We head back to the IPC campus where I was shown to a small apartment where I´ll be staying that is right off of one of the classrooms at the seminary. Barranqilla is on the coast so it´s about 90 degrees and humid all the time here. HOT!!!! We headed out for lunch and enjoyed some great conversation and discussion about the places we´ll be working with over the next two weeks. Rachael is in her last three weeks of a three month term here and Billy is here for just a month, so Rachael is a pro and has lots to share. I can tell that the trip will be very worthwhile, that lots of things will come up and that a great deal of learning and sharing in faith will take place.

The campus of the IPC is beautiful. Like other Colombian universities, the classrooms are all off terraces and are open air. Wooden shutters are pushed open to allow some cross breeze to circulate through the classrooms. There are many tropical birds flying around and about fifteen minutes ago they were engaged in some sort of a fight or something, there was a few screaming away, but it is a beautiful sound. The campus sits in the middle of an urban neighborhood, down the street from the Barranquilla Cathedral which from the outside looks impressive. This is a holiday weekend in Colombia so the start up will be a bit slow today and tomorrow, we´re going to an on campus concert of Christian music tonight and there are no set plans for tomorrow. We will start up in earnest on Tuesday when a local church worker gets back to begin setting up the schedule. Some things are already pre planned and it looks like I will get to see a variety of ministries here on the northern coast.

Once again today I was hit with the contrasts of Colombia. As I was leaving Bogota I went down Avenida el Dorado the main road to the El Dorado aiport. On that road you go by the impressive and somewhat overwhelming military structures, the main office for the police and the army. Along many of the mountains that surround Bogota are various telecommunications outposts, many of them belonging to the Colombian military. Billy and I went to the supermarket and the police where there having people walking out looking at a most wanted type of poster with about 25 faces on it. At the same time we walked by the Peace Park with a man holding a dove in hand statue and are with a church that stands for peace above all else. Like my conversation on the plane, the lines sometimes seems clear, the opinions and preferences strong. I am looking forward to getting started to seeing what paths are yet to be opened up ahead of me.