Five months since the last Green Letter, and a long journey in between - to the United States of America, invited by a gardening contact. Then on to Ireland for Mary's trial where the jury found it impossilbe to convict her as a criminal for damaging a US warplane, in spite of the judge's insistence. Nearly all the newspapers kept very quiet about this somewhat astonishing victory.
Five weeks in America in the States of Maine and Massachussetts, green and rural to an amazing degree. I travelled with my 18 year old daughter Katie and we saw more trees than we'd ever seen in the Colombian forests. Whatever the US do abroad, they certainly look after themselves, their environment and their wildlife at home... squirrels running up lampposts, a deer walking past the kitchen window, a porcupine crossing the road, beaver dams, and trees, trees, everywhere.
But in Boston town, piles of sleeping bodies of homeless people huddled in the doorways with night temperatures below freezing point .. we could have been in Bogota, especially as Spanish was often the main language we'd hear in the markets, amongst airport staff, on the buses..
In the quiet suburbs of Massachussetts, it was hard to imagine that a faraway nation was being invaded and slaughtered by these seemingly peaceloving people who are the world's most wellbehaved drivers .. but who seem to be labouring under a deep insecurity regarding their identity as the whole country was festooned with a forest of flags hanging outside every house, as if there was some doubt this was in fact America?
A friend in the peace movement said she had displayed an anti-war sign in her car window, but that the threats coming from other drivers became so dangerous, she had to take it down.
And one day after Iraq was invaded, we were shocked to see in monster capital
letters in a shop window this message:
Scary country. Scary because it seems so tranquil and beautiful. Exquisite wooden houses, immaculate gardens ... we didn't actually see any people in the streets, as no-one walks in America: our Southern-tuned eyes were used to seeing milling crowds of noisy laughing shouting people filling every inch of urban space night and day in Colombian towns ... here in America, not a soul. And definitely not a dog. Dogs are not allowed out .. nor presumably are children, as we never saw any.
But we did see many horrificly obese people, who simply took our breath, as well as their own, away. People who could hardly walk. In Ireland, obesity is also a huge problem, but in America, it is off the scale. Used to the bony, wiry peasants of the South, we simply stared stunned at one another. Something has gone radically wrong in this country, to put it mildly.
We went to the meetings of peace groups, spoke about Colombia, were moved by the age group of those attending .. up to 90 years of age; moved by their hopeless battle, by their determination and caring, and by the dreadful climate in which they have to function.
In the end, the sense of unreality was too much for us, the bored, stiflingly
cocooned lifestyles juxtaposed against the wreckage going on in Iraq. We got
very depressed and were glad finally to get on even the tightly packed, cramped
American aeroplanes run by badtempered staff, and to arrive, dazed, at Shannon
airport where we were met by Mary who had obtained a special waiver of her bail
conditions to be there at all. Whilst sitting chatting with us, she was greeted
by a tall policeman in a very civil manner. "That's the detective who arrested
me," she grinned when he'd passed by.
"The environment issue is more ominous than that of peace and war." - Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector (taken from New Leaves of the Vegan Movement for Compassionate Living)
Ireland, where no wilderness is left, where the suicide rate, road fatalities, drug-taking and the number of children smoking soar each year, and where the country is now so Europeanized that anything 'Irish' is encapsulated in phoney facades for the tourist trade .. but where you can still laugh and speak your truth and get an honest response, where everyone openly shares their horror of the invasion of Iraq and where people are still refreshingly conspiratorial in their anti-Establishment, anti-authority attitudes.
But oh! how I missed the raw day-to-day need to scrabble in the earth to produce
our own vibrant free food, to awaken without the sound and smell of diesel
engines in the harbour, to sleep without the constant accompaniment of public
electric lighting. I helped my daughter Becky get rid of yet more unwanted
possessions in preparation for her final take-off from Europe in our renovated
wooden sailing boat, I started yet another vegetable garden ... and then
homesickness for the mountains overcame me and forced me back to the dreadful
airports and the insanity of air travel, back once again to where life is always
people-sized, to a place for some reason we call the Third World, the only world
where I feel like a human being.
The lovely lady in her 40s who came to sit next to me on the spacious Avianca plane in Miami immediately started chatting to me. As I roused myself out of my travel-induced stupour, I realized with a shock that she was the first person who had spoken to me on that long journey, discounting the hostile barked orders of endless airport officials or the begrudging air attendants who evidently believe vegetarians eat turkeys ... The panpipe music and relaxed atmosphere told me I had arrived. This was Colombia already. Within minutes, my lady companion had told me her lifestory. She said she lived in America because she couldn't stand Colombian men's attitudes to women and had found herself a North American husband through a marriage agency...
And then, there we were, in the welcome hustle and bustle of Bogota airport, and
my unhappy voyage into the smooth cool North was over.
WHY WE ARE HERE (excerpt, by Robert Arthur Lewis, distributed at the WTO Seattle protests) What we want, money no longer recognizes Like the vitality of Nature, the integrity of work. We don't want cheaper wood, we want living trees. We don't want engineered fruit, We want to see and smell the fruit growing in our neighbourhoods. ... We are here to defend and honour What is real, natural, human and basic, against the rising tide of greed. We are here by the insistence of spirit And the authority of Nature..
I had by now been travelling for four days, with two nights spent 'sleeping' in airports and one on a Colombian bus. As I stepped down to the absolute silence of a fresh morning in the mountains I call home, I was assailed by the strong scent of wild mint and I breathed in the utterly pure air with something akin to shock: this was the first real air I'd breathed for weeks. Oh, the joy of feet, however weak and wobbly. A five hour walk ahead of me, I didn't care. The sun was just coming up and I never met a soul.
Halfway home, I sat on rocks in a stream, drinking the pure water and wondering, still stunned, where I'd been and why ... an attempt to raise my voice against the latest round of wars, one more voice amongst a billion ignored voices. Now I had to heal, to remember what life is about. Feet in cold water, feet walking long country miles, feet slipping and sliding on mud. An exhausted body falling, rising, resting, continuing. Home, a riot of flowers and animal fragrances, a glut of produce to give away, an overgrown, luscious garden, delicious real work ahead. But first, sleep, long sleep, awakening only to the sound of rabbits (very noisy creatures in case you didn't know!), goats, chickens, hundreds of squeaking guinea pigs (our compost makers), the crackling of the kitchen wood-stove ...
And a new baby. My daughter Alice's 2-month old son, not a replacement for my murdered grandson Tris, but certainly a sign that Life insists on continuing, despite all the horror and death. Alice, 'widowed' at 16 when her Colombian boyfriend Javier was killed alongside Tris, is now with a local farming lad and at 20 is an utterly delighted young mother.
She is also having to fight strongly against the nonsensical local customs and taboos surrounding baby-rearing that people shower upon her. Some examples:-
* You can't sit a baby up because its cheeks will get big and hang down.
* You mustn't let a baby look up at the ceiling because it will get cross-eyed - so you have to paint its nose to make it look down!
* A woman who has a period must not lift the baby as he will start to grunt (!?).
* You must keep a hat on the baby at all times because all the diseases around will enter through the hole in his head.
* It's good for a baby to sweat (i.e. overdress it!).
* When a baby has hiccups, you should put a bit of wet cotton-wool on its forehead and they will go away.
* And the worst of all: People bind their babies up tightly so that they can't
move. This is supposed to make them strong because they kick and struggle to
get out! (Oh, mercy be!)
A Day in the Life of Colombia
Report of a not-so-unusual journey by Ned.
I decided to travel the many hours from Popayan to our farm on rough mountain roads on our small motorbike.
It was a pity the army chose that morning to send 130 men to the paramo (high cold plains in the mountains) to attack the guerrilla there...
When I approached the invisible 'border' between Army and guerrilla territory, there were about 20 lorries and buses waiting. They had heard lots of shooting further on and had turned back and warned everyone. They were all waiting for a vehicle to come from the other direction to say that it was alright to go on. But after three or four hours of freezing rain and hunger, nothing at all had come.
I said to everyone that we should all proceed in convoy and nothing could happen to us that way, but everyone seemed to be having a good time squeezing into a tiny wooden shack where a lady was serving black coffee. I was soaked even through my plastic cape, shivering, so I blew on the fire, and helped her to make and serve the nonstop coffee and collect the money and everyone was laughing and joking and taking the piss out of each other, including out of me, very good-humouredly. And then we cooked up a load of potatoes that a lorry driver contributed and distributed them free.
Eventually, two minibuses decided they'd dare to proceed and test the water and I went with them.
First, we found chatty guerrilleros in woollen ponchos at the wooden shack where Jenny once stayed the night. They said they'd heard the battle but didn't know what was happening as it was further along, but thought it was probably over now and to go on if we wanted to. They'd heard a helicopter come and go.
Then we reached a more formal guerrillero stop point where they looked at my papers and then said, yes, there was no problem now as the army were going and it was all over. I left them casually searching the buses.
Further on, I saw loads of plastic bags and rubbish scattered around by the Army, then, over a distace of a mile or two, there were all the soldiers walking along in twos and threes towards the nearest country town, Leticia. The soldiers didn't seem to have anyone in charge and didn't know whether to let me and the other vehicles by or not.
I was the first to approach and when they stopped me, I asked politely if it was normal policy to leave their rubbish lying around? He answered, 'How are we going to start picking up rubbish after all THAT?' I didn't ask him 'after all WHAT?' None of them looked very happy. Another lot sent me back a few yards in a hateful officious way and said we'd all have to wait until all the soldiers had reached Leticia on foot, which would have been hours. Then some others stopped me and accused me of taking information to the guerrilla because they kept seeing me ride up and down. I don't think they believed this themselves, they just wanted to pick on someone. They were all tired and scared and taking refuge in being aggressive. Local people said the helicopter that came must have been to take away the dead and injured.
When the soldiers who had said we couldn't proceed eventually took a short cut through some fields, we all immediately took the law into our own hands and accelerated and overtook them on the road.
I was told later by soldiers in Belen, the nearest village to our farm, that the radio had claimed they'd killed eight guerrilleros, but lost one of their own. Later the radio said it was 3 guerrilla fighters and no mention of a soldier. But everyone knows who runs the radio and that it is not reliable.
Nobody could explain why the army was so unorganized and unprotected and why so many of them couldn't stop 5 guerrilleros from charging 20,000 pesos (about 6 dollars) to let the cattle lorries go by, which apparently was the big crime that caused the army attack.
Later still, I met guerrilleros and local people who all expressed sympathy for
the young soldiers and how they are conscripted and used mercilessly by the
government.
We have always considered the Indian tribe who are our farming neighbours a polite and gentle people. But one day, in answer to the question 'are you married?', one of their numnbr who was working with us for the day casually told the following horrific tale of how their internal 'justice' system works. He said he used to have a wife, but that she ran off with another man. For this, both she and her lover were tied up by the tribe, stripped, and beaten by everyone with sticks upon their bare backsides until they were bleeding.
Later on, the pair renewed their relationship. And the punishment was repeated.
Health Info. Request
The regular visits of local people needing to be stitched up after work accidents, or seeking cures for all manner of unpleasant local ailments does not abate. Added to this, we now have in our minds the trauma of what Alice went through, at the time of her baby's birth, at the hands of Popayan doctors when she got into trouble with a prolonged labour and could no longer handle the birth at home.
All of which has forced us to take seriously our own education in medical matters, as no amount of protestations of ignorance can stop the locally created myth that we are wizards and witch-doctors, given that the girls' and Ned's careful stitchings-up of people have worked perfectly, as have our herbal and dietary cures and Anne's accidental midwifery.
We did not seek this fame or this profession, but would now like to ask for the following help from anyone who could oblige: to watch out for simple home and herbal cures in magazines, natural-cure health journals, or from your own experience and post to us at: Atlantis, Telecom, Belen, Huila, Colombia, or email the info. to: atlantiscol@hotmail.com. Also if anyone is willing to send thread, needles, local anaesthetic or any helpful creams and lotions, we would be most grateful.
And if anyone has practical experience in midwifery (we don't care about
university degrees, only common sense and experience) we would be relieved to
correspond over what went wrong with Alice's birthing and how we might handle
such eventualities ourselves in the future. Expensive professional advice and
treatment, often erroneous and hatefully deleivered, is not an option in these
parts.
Worrying news
The latest news to arrive from Anne - who of all things has been called by people in Bogota working for the World Bank to do their astrology charts! - is that the identity of the man who helped us in many ways in the aftermath of our boys' murders, has now been discovered by the corrupt gang of guerrilla militiamen responsible for so many deaths in the area we were displaced from in 1999, and his life is in danger. A 15-year-old nephew of his has already been killed by the same gang. Anne was also warned that she is in danger. This news has to be left as a cliffhanger, as Anne is still away, and we know no further information at the moment.
The reason Anne had to leave the farm this time was that she received a call from the DAS (Colombian Security Police) who wanted to ask one or two questions... like why we express opposition to the United States and to Colombian Government policy ...
She answered well, but we are mentally ever ready for the fact that one day it
may no longer be possible to live in Colombia.
But the Music continues..
On a lighter note, our musical band of girls have now completed their first CD
of social, political, environmental and anti-war songs. It is very good indeed.
If anyone is interested in receiving a copy, in spite of all but two songs being
in Spanish, please write to us. (Long term helpers and friends will
automatically receive a copy)
Goodbye and love to everyone, Jenny James
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water.... And for a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry
PS All previous Green Letters are available on: