Checkers anyone?

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So they asked me if I wanted to play checkers.   It was clear from watching a couple games that I was going to be in serious trouble.  I've played a lot of checkers, but not with "queens" that can move and jump unlimited straight-line spaces with possible 90 degree jump turns at the end of each jump.  Did you get that?  Me either, and that's why I was worried.  I actually won two out of three games, mostly on blind luck.  Following my Dad's poker-playing advice, I quit while I was ahead.

Trying to explain my work here is just as frustrating as trying to explain how Colombian checkers are played.  You need to try it yourself.  In Las Pavas, where I was the past week, the game is framed generally as the small farmer good guys against the multinational palm oil bad guys.   But after the sun went down on Thursday night one or two of the palm oil workers living in "the big house" next to the community's temporary shelters started heaving bricks over the fence and onto our corrugated metal roofs. Insults were thrown along with the bricks.  Maybe they were drunk.  It was loud.  You couldn't see who was doing it.  It was scary, but there wasn't much risk of bodily harm as far as I could see.  It went on sporadically for nearly two hours.  It felt more personal than a land dispute.  How it ended up is not today's story.

There is a history of bad feelings between the palm oil employees and the agricultural cooperative, ASOCAB, that comprises the Las Pavas community.  The most direct threats and assaults have come from the employees, who are mostly campesinos that live nearby with their families and see a potential court decision against the palm oil company as a threat to their economic future and the fault of ASOCAB.  Whether this is true or not is not relevant.  The point is that they believe this to be true, and they feel it perversely unjust that all these international visitors, including gringos like me, are working against them.   Conflicts are anchored in what people believe to be true.

It is easy for us to paint the palm oil company and the political system weighted toward investment in large companies as the bullies.   At the same time, we need to acknowledge that even if the courts decide tomorrow in favor of ASOCAB, a local conflict will remain between alienated neighbors.  It will have no reason to subside if we keep handling it the same way we are at present.  Non-violent activism can also produce unanticipated "blowback".   Just like losing my queens in the checker game, I wonder what else we're not seeing on the horizon.

Can I charge my phone?

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Pastor Salvador's small wooden church sits right next to his house.  In the middle of the north wall underneath the light switch there is a herd of five electrical outlets, unmatched and randomly spaced, with the bottom one dangling two feet below the rest.  There are three more clustered on another post in the back corner. 

When the sun begins to set each evening Salvador cranks the 75 year-old diesel motor that powers his generator.  That generator runs the pump that refills the water tanks, lights the house, runs the TV.   It runs during church services, too, for the piano, sound system, lights, ceiling fans, and lastly, to use those outlets to charge cell phones.  It is another example of a shared resource and community solidarity.  No one else has even a generator.  Cell coverage is spotty, but everybody has a basic phone, and they are critical for the campaign to regain property titles.

When I left off Garzal's story last year, they were on the brink of an incredible success.  Sixty-four titles were delivered while Julie and I were on the plane to Paris to celebrate our anniversary.  As we also expected, there were wrinkles.  They were still awaiting the remaining two hundred and some titles.  The Barreto family continued to file counter suits.  And Salvador and his wife received death threats so serious that they decided to leave Garzal in late May.  They just returned home again prior to the new year.

The Garzal-Nueva Esperanza titling process is not only continuing with renewed optimism, but other communities are asking for advice on how do the same thing.  I was present this last week as Salvador shared the first of several training sessions with the community of El Guayabo, across the Magdalena and downstream a few miles.  Guayabo farmers are experiencing threats from another wealthy family very similar to the Garzal situation.  Most have been working their land for twenty to forty years, far more than needed to establish ownership of abandoned territory. 

The excitement, optimism, and sense of unity at that meeting was palpable as Salvador laid out the legal framework for possession and the basic rules of working together non-violently towards their goal.  We were there along with another group from Switzerland who share accompaniment responsibilities with CPT.  The residents kept expressing their amazement that people in the US, Canada, and Europe actually cared about what was happening in their lives.  It was a powerful moment for me, as well.

Thank you friends and family for mentoring and encouraging me to be here and for helping to pay my way.

Sidewalk Pink

         

The sidewalk in front of the new office is dusted with delicate pink petals.  Standing in the street you can't even see the flowers that shed them hidden in the pair of green lollipop trees that frame the porch.  The petals almost match the walls of the house.  Finding space to live and work in Barranca has been a bit of a dance the last couple years with the landlords wanting one building back for family and that precipitating the search for another space that is close, secure, and big enough to handle needs.  The new office is right across the street from the main Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) residence.  Way better than last year's cramped little bodega.

My first week has been meetings, getting to know several new fulltime members, and fixing things around the house.  The team makes a point of having a repair list for Felipe.  I enjoy that, but I miss having my own tools.  I'm making a point of avoiding the TV in favor of reading in my spare time.  It feels decadent to allow myself a weekend of reading without my Ohio to do list of home and church responsibilities.  The first book was fantastic, and the odd connections between it and my life are too spooky not to recount.

The novel was The Book Thief, a recent best seller about a foster daughter living outside of Munich, Germany from the late 1930s to the end of WWII.   It is a heart-wrenching look at the war and it's affect on the lower class German society.  There were three moments that struck me as eerily connected to my own life.  First was that fact that Liesel was traumatized by her abandonment to the foster agency.   The week prior to coming down I was talking to the parents of an adopted young man in my life who is struggling to understand why his birth mother would give him up.  Liesel's grief seemed especially personal and painful.

The second connection was Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, which takes on almost the role of a character in the novel as it saves the life of a Jew who is reading it for hours on a train trying to avoid suspicion and arrest.  Later, in hiding, that man rips the pages out of the book, paints them white, and uses them to write another story.  So I was stunned when our young Colombian intern, Jhon Henry, walked into my room with Mein Kampf tucked under his arm.  He is currently reading it in an effort to understand how people's minds could have been swayed to such extremes of hate.

Third is a description of the summer of 1942 and thirteen-year-old Liesel helping her father to paint black the blinds of windows in the neighborhood to hide them from expected Allied bombers.  It dawned on me as I read that section that my mother was almost exactly Liesel's age and that very same summer was sitting in front of thirty-some beehives on the edge of town.  Watching for swarms.  Sugar was being rationed and honey was extremely valuable.  She would follow a swarm to where it settled and then run to the tool factory a few blocks away.  There she knocked on the window where the hive owner was working.  He had permission from the company to shut down his machine and capture the swarm.  I have always loved that story.  Connecting it to Liesel's story was special.