Roles and Expectations

This was the report my accompaniment partner, Craig, wrote about our first week in Urabà (The prayer is a Nicaraguan prayer):

Before lunch we prayed these words together: "May those who hunger have food, and may those who have food hunger for justice".

After lunch we were taken on a tour around town to see the neighborhood and its inhabitants.  It was not striking to me that some of the houses had dirt floors and were hand built out of scrap wood.  It was not striking that most of the plumbing was "outdoors."  It was not striking that many of the inhabitants were displaced and had lost family members in the violence.  My training had taught me to expect many of these things.  What was striking was how normal it all seemed.

Coming from a middle class U.S neighborhood with every convenience and security imaginable, I had somehow believed that this would be a sad, shattered place.  How could people go through so much and be any other way?  And yet this was not the case.  Children were playing or going to school, adults went to church and work, and life more or less went on.  I listened to stories of horrible tragedy and loss, while in the background unsuspecting neighbors laughed and played music.  The experience contradicted my every conception of the situation.  Having watched many of my peers and role models in the United States fly into a rage over congested traffic, I couldn't understand how a community could take such hardship in stride.  Perhaps, I began to believe, that things were not really so bad.  Maybe all the stuff I had read about displacement was exaggerated or just spoke of isolated incidents…

But then I looked around myself.  I listened to the stories of displacement and witnessed with my own eyes and ears what was going on.  Things were not exaggerated, we had not heard only of isolated incidents; the displacement was bad and it was all around us.  And yet everyone and everything still seemed so normal in context.  How could this be?  

Suddenly the lunchtime prayer came back to me, but reformulated to fit the reality of this community: "May those who have been displaced from their comforts find peace, and may those who have peace be displaced from their comforts".  It was all so clear to me.  The Colombian people had overcome incredible adversity in order to carry on with life.  Each day they grapple with the trauma they had experienced, but, true to our prayer, they were finding peace in their hearts amidst the violence around them.  Now the onus fell on me.  As a person who had always taken peace as a given, I wondered if my words at lunch were a real prayer for change, or mere flippancy?  At the end of my trip here I will have to decide whether to go back and sit on my comfortable couch, or to displace myself into action.  Now the only question that remains is 'Have I, as a U.S. citizen, finally found a problem greater than my own apathy?'

Craig and me with the youth group on our last night in the first town we stayed in.

Our Soul is Divided

This is the report I wrote for our second week here. If you receive the Accompanier reports this will be a repeat.

Craig and I spent the second week of our month in Urabà as accompaniers in the least urban place we’ve been so far with the pastor and his family in their house behind the church.  It was a hot week.  Often, as we were lying in the hammocks in the heat of the day, digesting the huge lunch we had just eaten and trying to stay cool, an hermano from the iglesia would come to the house to bring some fruit or a chicken to the family and would stay and talk a while with us.  

One afternoon, a man rode up on his bike bringing some mangoes for the family and sat down beside me in a plastic chair in front of the fan on the porch.  We exchanged the usual “Hello, how did you wake up this morning?” “Very well, and you?” “Very well, thanks to God.”  I asked him if he had been born there in that town, and he began to tell me part of his story of how he came to live in that town.  

He used to have some land and some cattle in the mountains until one Friday at lunch the guerilla came and stayed in his house for several days.  On Sunday morning, before he went to church, he got up the courage to ask them how long they would be there, because iif it was much longer he would leave and they could have the house since he was afraid what would happen if the paramilitaries found out the guerilla were there.  When he got back from church they had gone.  

He stayed there with his family for a few more months, hardly sleeping at night, worrying every minute of the day, praying to God to protect his family.  Finally, he and his wife felt that the violence was all around them and they left one night, carrying the two youngest children through the forest.  He has never been back.  

Now, his daughters are around my age, in their 20’s and 30’s, and he has several grandchildren, thanks to God.  Even after leaving their home to escape la violencia, though, one of his sons-in-law was killed about two years ago, leaving his grandchildren without a father and his youngest daughter a widow.  

When we arrived in Colombia, our hosts told us that there is hardly anyone who hasn’t been affected by the violence, even if they haven’t been displaced.  I sometimes forget, though, because when we go to church, the services are much more joyful than an average Sunday morning in a Presbyterian Church in the States, and the hospitality and welcoming with which Craig and I have been received is overwhelming.

During Communion that Sunday, several of the women led a hymn with a line that has stuck with me: “Està divida, nuestra alma, entre gozo y dolor”--It is divided, our soul, between joy and pain.  It seemed to speak not only to the sentiment surrounding the sacrament of Communion around the world, but also and especially of the small piece we have seen of the lives of a few Presbyterian herman@s here in Urabà.  Whether it was recently or many years ago, no one has been left untouched by la violencia.  Yet everyone who has shared stories of pain and loss with us has ended by saying they are grateful to God for the church or their family or their home.  The pain is deep and tangible, but so is the joy and the hope.

Quick Update

Just a quick update - We're now halfway through our month here in Colombia.  We haven't had as much internet access as I had expected, but I'm hoping to be able to do a more detailed blog post later this week.

For now though, I'll just say that everything has been going really well.  We have been well-taken care of and very well-fed. Lots of plantains and delicious tropical fruit, and last night we ate armadillo for dinner, which is a very expensive and rare treat here.  The hospitality we have been shown is overwhelming and humbling, as are many of the stories we have heard.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and support - and I hope you know that every time we go to church (which is about 5 times a week) the hermanos and hermanas here are praying for you all as well and send their "saludos."