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.