"Earth's bank account is overdrawn.
Those few of us worldwide who employ organic methods are the only depositors.
Our bank has suffered a flood of counterfeit currency. As a result, we face
bankruptcy. We must all become depositors and repay our debt with interest."
(Organic Gardening Magazine, USA, Reader's Letter, July 1976)
"Capitalist production disturbs the circulation of matter between man and soil,
that is, prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the
form of food and clothing; it therefore violates conditions necessary to the
lasting fertility of the soil."
Karl Marx, 1867
"The earth willingly teaches righteousness to those who can learn: the better
she is served, the more good things she gives in return."
Xenophon in 'Oeconomicus', ca. 400 B.C.
In the last Green Letter we told of how our 'Bogota Rep.' Anne Barr had made contact with a community of the poorest of the poor who are trying to scrape a living on a clay mountain 'moonscape' overlooking the polluted city. Much of Anne's activity this last month has gone into helping them to get the waste materials needed to make compost in order to revivify the dry compacted desert under their feet sufficiently to grow some food. Here we reproduce excerpts from some of her many reports on the tangle of redtape she has had to wade through to move, not just the mountains of organic waste produced by the City every day, but the often well-meaning but hopelessly out of touch bureaucrats sitting on it..
8th Sept. .. Yesterday I went to see the local Mayor about the 'Moon Gardens'. I wanted some fencing wire and an appointment with the rubbish collecting company so they could deliver us all the grass cuttings from that part of the city. I also went to the Botanical Gardens and have been promised lots of the little plants they throw on their compost heap when they weed their huge herb garden. I found out from a down-to-earth friend I have who works there that they are supposed during the last eight months to have made food gardens with the help of money from Bogota City Hall but all they have done, according to my friend is 'make stupid plans on those useless computers and haven't planted a seed and how do they think that those damned machines are going to solve hunger?!'
When I heard that the Botanical Gardens has been reprimanded by Bogota's leftwing mayor, Lucho Garzon, for being behind schedule, I felt braver and decided to push for a few lorry-loads of earth and some seeds and fruit trees too for good measure, and got an immediate 'yes' from the Boss of the Gardens.
Every move costs hours of meetings, and behind that the waste of money, time, energy and people caused by even the best-willed politicians and bureaucracy, then occasionally the fresh air of a woman like Nubia, a completely practical little social worker who said simply: 'I will work with you on this.'
11th September . yesterday I had my first work meeting with the ex-brickmakers of the Moon gardens who want to grow food on their dry hill of pottery clay. The social workers who help this community had done a good job of putting up posters and telling all and sundry to come, but a local funeral coincided, so I started with about 15 of the most determined, all women except for one. Yesterday I went again to the Botanical Gardens and an old man who's worked there for 30 years spent ages with me collecting about 30 different kinds of herbs and explaining the uses of the ones that were new to me. Then the social workers came with a car which we filled up with the cuttings, and off we went to the Moon.
It is cold and windy up there and where the grass is worn off the earth, it is as hard as concrete. We walked around to look at various possible sites to start a garden and chose an area below a cliff where in a previous effort the local people had clubbed together to BUY earth at 80,000 pesos a lorry load, but it was just fine dust and did nothing to create fertility. A woman had planted strawberries inside the little brick enclosures that used to be kilns and we shared the half a dozen there were. We went to look at the local horse stables - horses that are used to pull the carts of the local recyclers amongst the heavy Bogota traffic; these produce two sacks of horse manure a day and we organized ways to get it up the long steep hill.
Most of the people are rubbish recyclers but have no tools to dig with as when the kilns were closed down and they got very poor, they sold all the tools they had. So as we are forced into starting no-dig gardens, I had asked them to bring lots of newspaper and cardboard and we soaked it with water and covered the grass with thick layers of it, weighed it down with broken bricks and some grass and horse manure and then sat back on our heels to consider the fact that all the bureaucratic promises of getting the city's grass clippings delivered to us had come to nothing. I have now sent a message to the Vice-Mayor of Bogota to complain about this. I have also secured a promise of a few lorry loads of earth from the botanical gardens and a social worker got the promise of a lorry. The two social workers are excellent, they work seven days a week and are strict but very friendly with the people.
We distributed the herb cuttings and the spinach roots and onion ends I had saved from my own kitchen and talked about how to re-sprout them and organized the jobs for the next few days. It was a bit like organizing a flock of chickens as they all talk at once so we had to lay down some 'European' ground rules such as: One at a time, Shut Up and Listen and Don't nick the plant cuttings but wait till they're given to you. However, I was delighted at their enthusiasm, as I hadn't expected so much.
I will go back in a few days to see how they have treated the herb plants and to start on the fencing as they are gathering poles. All bureaucratic promises of wire have come to nothing but I am determined to keep going.
15th Sept.. I have just come back from a few hours' Moon gardening, though I'm sure the Moon is more fertile.
I went with piles of paper to lay down and we did a bit of gathering of what compost materials there are, but there were very few of the group there as it was a weekday, so mostly I walked around the area. It is a Hobbitland, all funny corners, higgledy-piggledy houses built out of bricks and what the people find on the streets. Very nice as there are no cars. But I end up feeling like taking up arms against the Powers that Be, seeing the poverty there. One of the older leaders took me to her hidden, meandering, flower-bedecked, very poor house and gave me coffee while her husband, a man in his 60s talked, full of fire and bitterness. When their kilns were closed down, there were a million promises (all from Antanas Mockus' crew, the previous mayor so beloved of Liberals and Green Europeans who don't know Colombia): nothing materialized and the people literally have no food, so naturally the young ones turn to crime. You can see in the people that they are all workers and hate being idle. The women used to make bricks too, many of the kilns belong to women. The day the kilns were closed, over 60 riot police arrived, making out that it was a guerrilla-run community, which unfortunately they are not as they could do with that kind of strict organizing to keep the hooligans amongst them under control.
They asked me if I, as a foreigner, could talk to anyone in Lucho's (the
Mayor's) office as they have great faith in him. I said we would get a letter
together - hardly anyone here can write - and I would make sure it got read and
see what we can do.
21st September.Very Complicated Compost
After really looking at and feeling out the sterility of the land (I can't say 'soil' as there isn't any) on the South Bogota Moon, I thought I'd try ringing some "experts", so I looked through my address book and saw that I had the home number of X who is like the guru of organic gardening here. I knew him years ago when he used to head a big posh organization where I used to go begging for eco-materials for the schools in Caqueta. He is a very nice man, even though he chain-smokes, and he remembered me and immediately invited me to his house. We had breakfast in the large scruffy garden. Not a food plant in sight. His lovely natural wife and big sons were lovely too, utter friendliness all around.
Then we got down to business. I described the situation in the 'Moon' area, the poverty the people have been forced into, their hopes to make their land work for them. He did not take it in. This damn country needs to go on an intensive course in Listening. He started going on about all the things that people can do that cost Money, like buying complicated compost starters being sold here by PRIESTS, or buying calcium and phosphorous. I kept pulling him up and reminding him that if these people have 1,000 pesos (1/3 of a euro), it is a big deal, but this did not sink in. I got heavier and heavier in my description of their poverty, it began to get to him, but like a train that has always been on the same track, there was no turning or stopping him. As he got more affected by my protests and by the obvious unhappiness coming off me - I was often on the brink of tears as I talked - he got more determined to block out the reality of what I was saying. He was genuinely upset when I rejected all his complicated compost recipes saying that they would put people off ever doing any gardening, and I kept asking him questions like who would give me some wire and how can I get the damn grass cuttings that are wasting all over the city transported up there. I tried to explain to him why I just needed practical, cost-free solutions and what we have done ourselves with gardens over the decades, but the ears and what was behind them just did not work that way.
He rushed off and got me posters of his lovely paintings - the costs of producing each one of which would have bought the wire needed for each household to make a little garden. He was genuinely nice in the midst of all this, but suffers from a kind of social-class-induced madness that can only be cured by sending him to live on the streets for a few years.
I made my excuses and escaped and came home to find M, our lawyer friend, waiting for me - she had had some personal bumps and was really upset. I told her of my morning and couldn't stop crying and said that the only thing that surprises me about Colombia is that there are not more people in the Guerrilla force as 80% of the country has a deep need to revolt against the kind of thing I had just experienced. That really got to her as she knows it's true, as she has worked in a government 'anti-corruption' unit - for a corrupt boss. She let me explete, then gave me 50,000 pesos to buy wire for the gardens and offered me the use of her (second) car to take grass cuttings up to the Moon. Then I gave her some therapy and she went off calmer and rosier.
Then my friend Gloria who works for the Mayor came in, and she got an earful too
and has promised to help me get a letter to Lucho and get the Moon community put
on some kind of emergency rating to get them help. But did I mention that I
hate posh, poncey, piddley, pickety, nickety, stupid expensive theories of how
to make compost, especially when they are expounded by people with delicate
white hands and clean nails with a maid in the kitchen cooking up meat?
Middle-class Colombia is full of them.
"Dark with Power, we remain the invaders of our land, leaving deserts where
forests were, Scars where there were Hills.
On the mountains, on the rivers, on the cities, on the farmlands,
We lay weighted hands, our breath potent with the death of all things."
Wendell Berry
22nd September . Despair as yesterday I found that of all the people in the Moon settlement who haven't enough food, only four or five are willing to do the work to grow some. In a way, it is better to work with a small enthusiastic team, but the whole urban degenerate wait-for-handouts attitude got to me. However, we decided to make one very good little garden to show the rest. The women who do want to get on with it are lovely, tough, strong little Indians, very desperate, but willing to put their despair into struggling with that barren mountain. My lawyer friend is taking me to a meeting there this afternoon. It will be good for her education.
25th September..I went to look at tons of potential compost at one of the food markets. I can't believe that it is so easy to get loads of compost materials and get the transport to move it, all the local mayors have lorries that they seem to be very willing to lend for this kind of thing. I think no-one has done it before because they have no faith in compost magic and have been taught that it is Difficult, Complicated and Dangerous. So I want to prove them all wrong by making a mountain of the stuff up on the Moon. I have arranged for a lorry to pick up a few tons of vegetable waste from this market place to leave my gardening group with an enormous pile of compost cooking..
4th October.I am poking my nose into what really happens to the thousands of tons of vegetable waste that daily get dumped in Bogota. I went to the market place where I have arranged that the people separate their organic waste from the plastic so that we can use it. The woman in charge showed me around, she was very positive and wants to do something constructive with the waste. They produce of lot and there are 18 other market places that produce a lot more.
The idea of recycling has been talked about here for several years, but nothing has been done, except for a few complicated worm-projects. Everyone in the city wears posh, clean, detergent-stinking, bleached white clothes, they poison their houses with chemicals in the name of cleanliness, cover their bodies with poisonous chemicals in the name of 'beauty', yet feel OK about driving through rubbish-filled streets and stinking filthy rivers. The Vice Mayor of Bogota had me choking when he asked, don't I think Bogota is beautiful?! It is the third most polluted city in South America.Vegetable waste is considered dangerous and dirty and recycling has to be so complicated and 'scientific' that it becomes impossible.
However, I preach the faith I have in compost, in how easy it is to make, how clean and wonderful it is, I communicate about the potential magic in bags of grass clippings and when I tell people that I cry when I have to pass vegetable peelings on the street and can't take them home. all this gets to people and inspires them and makes it seem possible, and they really want a solution but there are no leaders to take them there, so it looks like I've got a job.
After visiting the market-place, I went to a Moon garden meeting as another huge crowd of women want to join in as they feel inspired by what I've done with the few hard-core ladies I've been working with. Them feeling inspired is tragic, as it means they are extremely hard-up for inspiration and it must just be the fact that I go there at all that is inspiring as we have achieved f.all in my eyes. But one of the hard-core ladies made an impassioned speech saying that the grass has died back with no digging, thanks to the paper and cardboard and weeds we covered it with and that she feels really good recycling all her waste and having a project that has real meaning. I felt stunned and very moved, as I feel I have mainly spent my time phoning and cursing bureaucrats.
These women are the poorest of the poor but are used to physical work because of their former occupation as brickmakers, they are like city peasants in some respects. I threw open the idea of them coming to our farm in the South of Colombia in small groups to learn. There was much enthusiasm, but no ideas of where to get the bus fares from, except that my lawyer woman-friend is going to ask one of her millionaire lovers to help.
7th October 2004 . slept badly worrying about dumping a lorry-load of quite smelly 'rubbish' on the Moon people's doorstep, got up at 5.0 a.m. and went looking for leaves to disguise the smelly veg. with, found an unlimited amount, rang the lorry-man who came with the rubbish which was now twice as smelly after getting drenched by the downpours last night and we loaded a pile of freshly-cut branches on top and then headed for the hills.
I was particularly nervous because the old lady whose land we are starting work on phoned me to say that a man who owns some of the neighbouring land had decided to get into compost-making as a business after hearing about us and had brought up several lorry loads so smelly that everyone called the police. I went to see this project and it turned out to be dung and body bits from the leather tanning factories, the latter a poisonous and morally unacceptable additive. The problem of smell was dealt with by covering it with sawdust.
As I arrived in the lorry, two women came to guide us up the hill and en route
we collected many bags of horse poo from a stables. When we arrived and began
unloading, everyone was delighted and said I should have brought even more as
they want to make a lot of compost. We had a lovely day making huge heaps,
fencing, getting fed too much food, sitting knitting in the sun when I got too
tired, listening to about 16 women getting excited about compost-making as they
worked knee-deep in 'rubbish'..
"One Acre composted is worth acres three,
At Harvest thy barns shall declare it to thee." Thomas Tusser, 1558
8th October 2004 ..I have got myself into the centre of a whole whirl of energy here that keeps growing, as the 'posh' part of my Bogota network of contacts has now got involved, for example, when I got home last night, several people of the 'office variety' had phoned to ask how the compost-making went (because I talk about it constantly everywhere I go!), the Vice Mayor of Bogota wants to visit Moon mountain next week to see what we are doing, a friend's husband wants me to apply to the office that donates to good causes, goods purchased with the ill-gotten gains of narco-money, several market places want their rubbish collected and recycled, and my lawyer woman-friend just came unexpectedly to talk about setting up a Foundation dedicated to this work, the Botanical Gardens wants the 200 trees they've donated collected tomorrow, and astrological clients at the President's office have said they will organize a collection to pay for the Moon women's fares to visit our farm in the South, four or five at a time. I would like the Vice-Mayor to come when we are actually sorting out compost material so that he can see what that involves!
And now the Moon ladies have asked me to help them make the area into a kind of reserve or park as the city bureaucrats want to turf them out, with the excuse that the terrain is dangerously unstable (probably true, but probably curable with tree-planting), but I don't want it turned into the official sterile, expensive, posh version of a park, as the people would be paid little for their land and would end up living in even worse conditions elsewhere. I have asked for an interview with the office that decides such things. The Moon women say they aren't even allowed into offices as their clothes aren't posh enough - actually mine are even scruffier, but my attitude carries me through!
9th October .. I have just spent the afternoon in the little Moon garden which
is now beginning to look like a garden, the market refuse is steaming away, so
we covered two big beds of it with topsoil and planted some potatoes, peas and
butter beans that we cadged off the local shopman..
"I was raised in the north of Canada in old rolling mountains.surrounded by
nature and was the main caretaker of my mother's compost. I understand about
compost, it is mystical. It is matter transformed and getting transformed into
more matter right in front of you. It is like a time machine, as you see one
element getting changed into another and its future just below it, which it will
soon be changed into. It is dark and energy-filled. In the end, everything
from A to Z comes from, is made of and will end up as star-dust. So compost
makes sense."
Excerpt from a letter from a Canadian correspondent called Ralph
"A petition presented to the Sicilian Parliament in 1742 said, 'Agriculture is
generally self-regulating and needs no more than the hard work of farmers. But
when government tries to interfere, the result is complete confusion. Expenses
increase all around, the normal pattern of farming is overthrown, many people go
bankrupt and give up altogether."
Taken from Organic Gardening Magazine, USA
"I am a 49 year old woman born in the West of Ireland. When I was a young girl, up until the age of 12, we were self-sufficient on our farm. We grew all our own huge variety of vegetables. We had lots of fruit like black currants, apples, plums, gooseberries and cherries. Oats were sown for our large flock of about 50 hens. My father took our wheat to a local man who used to grind it into flour for our wholemeal bread. We also sold a large quantity of wheat and potatoes. We made our own butter and drank the delicious buttermilk. There were lots of geese and ducks and turkeys on the farm, and all the food grown was organic then. To buy luxuries like tea and sugar, we brought our eggs to the local shop and came away with our purchases, plus some money left over. My mother made our clothes on her hand-powered sewing machine. The turf for the winter fires was cut in the bog. This was how all the farming community lived at that time. It was rare indeed for anyone to go to a doctor; children were born at home and breastfed.
I remember clearly the day the cold wind of 'progress' came to our farm. We were all down the field picking potatoes when this man came through the gate. I felt an intense dislike for him as he tried picking his way through the field without dirtying his shiny black shoes. This was the Agricultural Adviser, who went around to all the farms advising the farmers to move with the times, telling them of the great prosperity to come by growing acres of particular crops for the factory which had just opened five miles from our village. Soon we were using chemical fertilizer instead of natural manure. I remember many a winter's night, the kitchen floor covered in Brussels sprouts and us children having to sort through them and throw away the larger and smaller ones as they all had to be of a particular size. My father wept many a tear of despair, but already he was in it too deep and kept hoping all the false promises of the Agricultural Adviser would come true. Like others, my father never realized at that time that these Advisers, the factory owners and the chemical companies were all 'working' together to fool the farmers by enticing them away from their independent self-sufficient way of life. This was the beginning of the hellish road of 'progress' and the birth of the modern factory farm in our village."
Annie's farm is now abandoned, except for the fields rented out to
chemical-spraying cattle farmers who, under EEC rules, are forced to poison
nettles with herbicides in order to qualify for grants. Evidently the EEC has
never heard of the extremely high nutrient value of nettles.
Country Vegetables by Eleanor Farjeon The country vegetables scorn To lie about in shops. They stand upright as they were born In neatly-patterned crops. And when you want your dinner, you Don't buy it from a shelf, You find a lettuce fresh with dew And pull it for yourself. You pick an apronful of peas And shell them on the spot, You cut a cabbage if you please To pop into the pot. The folk who their potatoes buy From sacks before they sup Miss half the fun those folks enjoy Who dig potatoes up.
To follow up on our reports in the last Green Letter about the 'Peasant
University' held at San Jose Peace Community in the paramilitary-infested North
of Colombia, here is another piece that Anne sent out to us during her time
there:
"The 'University' is a very basic gathering of wooden houses, a school, a dining hall and four awful toilet/showers. The 25 participants live in a new wooden house, in uncomfortable bunk beds, several people snore, the floor is made of mud, the mosquitoes have really big teeth, there is MUD everywhere, the kitchen has no chimney, the wood stove has only 2 rings, the toxic level of salt in the food was beyond any scale hitherto known to man or woman, 'greens' is a word unheard of.
"From the moment I got here, I wanted to leave, the group leaders are grumpy, mainly because they are stressed by their position and don't know how to handle things well. When I talk to them or suggest things, however, they are friendly, appreciative and cooperative. Then two minutes later, they are grumpy again. They remind me of dealing with FARC officials, that kind of serious slightly snooty vibe of men-with-a-mission. Most of the people who've come to learn are good crack, all peasants and Indians. The Indians have the nicest vibe, though the campesinos are more fun.
"There were two days of introductions. These were heart-rending, scary and inspiring. All these people come from communities that have suffered terribly from the army and paramilitaries. No-one here differentiates between the two. One man told of going to his house through the woods and meeting the army who said they were going to kill him because he was a Guerrilla on his way to a house nearby full of guerrillas. They were referring to his house full of his children. He said, "Kill me, but leave my kids alone." They told him to shut up, he heard shots, then a soldier came out of the trees carrying the man's little girl, eight years old, shot in the side. Then the soldiers backed down and got the girl to hospital, but she died. This is just one story amongst dozens. The man cried as he spoke.
"When the grumpy leaders talk about what they want the 'University' to be, I love them and feel inspired enough to forget about the mud, the salt and the toilets for a few minutes. This is a small area, an island where they allow no police or army in and it is surrounded by paramilitary areas. We are in a muddy clearing in the midst of lots of forest. The Guerrilla passed through yesterday as I was giving a class on making compost. Katie and I gathered leaves, kitchen compost and horse-poo to show people how to make it. Now this might seem so simple that it is an insult to people's intelligence, but it's not, most of these people really don't know anything about anything - the first day we spent gathering and burying rubbish and had to explain to them in detail why it is bad to burn plastic. Anyway, we fenced a reasonable area with split bamboo and big stones, made compost enclosures, and it seems there will be a garden! I felt better here after that.
"During the introductory talks, the organizers said they'd been offered help from conventional Universities and NGOs, but had refused as they want total independence. Food self-sufficiency is their aim. They allow no-one to sell alcoholic drink in the area.
"We spent one boring day putting up a shelter and putting earth into little plastic bags for cacao (cocoa) seedlings, which is the local cash crop. I accepted the boredom temporarily as these people are putting a lot of time and energy to get this event together. This is supposed to be an 'agro-alimentary' course, but I don't know where they think the 'aliment' bit is supposed to appear from as the kitchen is a hell-hole and the first day I arrived the women (local volunteers) were chopping onions with one pen-knife and one machete and I got a grump from the organizers when I said I'd help in the kitchen when there were chopping boards and knives. Anyway, I've made bits of food, we now have two knives and more coming, and Katie made a sauté which they all love. I will add a bit each day to relieve the regulation Colombian rice, beans and eggs (there is no meat at all here thank goodness). They grow their own beans and plantains - it is very rich land, no wonder the paramilitaries are after it.
"Having Katie here was wonderful, as what better way of preaching the simple
healthy country life, and her singing has been food for my soul and for many
other people's too. We had a long session last night which was very
appreciated. There are lots of great hard-working kids here and a very rotund
black teacher. I am very glad to be here in spite of the large difficulties -
the mud and the hellish kitchen are just representative of a very macho approach
to life. But they've agreed to a path-making team, so the mud situation should
improve. After I moaned a lot, the salt level has dropped to near-acceptable
levels and they have sent to buy vegetables.
Aftermath of the San Jose bombing tragedy
Here is a follow-up report from Anne on the accidental Army grenade explosion
mentioned in the last Green Letter:
"I spent two days in Medellin in the hospital with the young boy who was damaged by the bomb and with his father, Luis Eduardo. Seeing the effects of war at such close quarters was heart-rending. However, the boy, Andres, showed no self-pity and neither did his father. They both talk with intense clarity about all that happened, about losing the mother and the other girl, who was 16, and they are 100% admirable in all of it.
"When I first got there, the doctors were saying that the boy would lose the
lower half of one leg because the extremely deep wounds were infected and would
become gangrenous. However, that prognosis changed after they worked for many
hours to clean the wounds. I couldn't say enough about the excellence of the
medical care at this free public hospital, the humanity of all concerned and the
communicativeness of the doctors and nurses. They let me in and out as I wished
at any hour though they told me it was against the rules as I'm not 'family',
but they did it for the 'poor boy'. The lady I was lodged with, the rich friend
of a friend here in Bogota, did a clothes, books and toys collection for me and
I went on day 2 to the hospital with a sack of lovely gifts and when I got home
late that night, found another sackload so had to go back to the hospital again.
I did massages for Andres and the other kids there and generally became a
Florence Nightingale, which as you all know is not my usual way, but there
wasn't much choice."
Cultural Catastrophe
A friend in London, after reading about our work with campesinos, wrote to us about the awfulness of peasants having so lost touch with their roots that we have to teach them to make compost, something which never ceases to amaze us though we work daily with this irony. Here is what Anne had to say in answer:
"The extremely invasive and aggressive virus that is Western 'culture', spread by TV and the media in general is very effective and has managed to cause amnesia very rapidly. Poor, simple country folk are generally open and trusting and have been made to feel inferior, so there is a tendency to try and imitate the rich, posh, 'successful', 'better', 'more cultured' 'first' world.
"However, the same people are now getting over all that, as it has become obvious where it leads, i.e. to spiritual and material poverty. In this, the Indians are the leaders, because although they eat white rubbish and chuck their refuse around, they have preserved something that all the compost-making, rubbish-separation and organic-vegetable-eating in the world will not create, which is an unquestioned sense of community, so strong that we have no vocabulary for it. In spite of 500 years of unimaginable violence, they have never lost the basic harmonious 'hum' they have with the earth and each other. Not that I would like to be an Indian, definitely not, as their cultural attitudes are so different and they often bore me stiff with their lecturing about what the elders say and they are so chauvinist. But in spite of all that, they have retained something that is respected and admired by most Colombians.
"Recently, 70,000 Indians marched for four days along the PanAmerican highway to protest against the US 'Free Trade Agreement'. The media tried to belittle what was happening, but at the end when the march entered the big city of Cali, the whole town came out to cheer and play music, and even the shallow newspaper reporters were visibly moved and affected. It was more a show of real people power than any kind of protest on specific points as their position is that they reject everything about the present regime.
"As for the Colombian peasants, they are worse off than the Indians in some
ways, and better off in others: worse off in the sense that they are more
divided into nuclear families and have no real cultural roots, better off in
that they are more dynamic, less prejudiced, and much more fun. Sometimes it is
a nightmare just to look at the cultural amnesia and irreparable damage caused
by the epidemic that is our culture, and to see how long and hard the climb back
to better values will be. But the fun, humility, dignity, intelligence,
bravery, music, dancing, appreciation, jokes, piss-taking, perception of what is
real and what is crap, the political consciousness, the fresh air, clean water,
forests, monkeys, lack of cars, no shops, birdsong.. all make our work in the
countryside with the peasants superior to any other way of life we have known."
"Half of our misery and weakness derives from the fact that we have broken with
the soil and that we have allowed the roots that bound us to the earth to rot.
We have become detached from the earth, we have abandoned her. And a man who
abandons nature has begun to abandon himself."
Pierre van Paassen, quoted in Organic Gardening Magazine, USA
News Distortion
Anne writes: I have just had a pink fit because I watched the midday news and
saw a long report on the HUGE indigenous march that is going on, about 65,000
Guambiano and Paez Indians marching to Cali. After much crap reporting about
their food and camping arrangements, they finally got around to asking what the
march is about. I happen to know what that march is about as one of the main
Paez leaders was at the campesino 'University' in Uraba and had to leave early
to organize the march. It is about Free Trade Agreements and vindictive laws
coming in to put Indian land up for grabs, especially by the USA, and it is
about army, paramilitary and police abuse of their communities. But the TV
managed to say it was against the guerrilla! though they did mention one Indian
leader who was killed by 'unknown' killers - and I happen to know this was the
work of the army/paramilitaries as the victim was the cousin of another man at
the course. I know I should be cynical and hardened by now, but I just hate the
media so much!
However, the main newspaper did carry this report, Sept. 13th 2004, under the
heading: "Paramilitary Presence near Exit of Indigenous March".
Some 100 hooded men arrived in the area, well armed and dressed in Army uniform. They established themselves in three farms, two of them belonging to the multinational Carton Colombia.
This latter company was owned by Michael Smurfit, one of the richest men in
Ireland.
By day we work. At night, the horrors suffered by our boys who were murdered come back to haunt us. During the time Anne had to read through the legal papers for the court case, she produced the following nightmare:
"I experienced the constant repetition of the following situation: an armed man, a guerrillero, had a gun pointed at my head and said he was going to kill me because I'd accidentally entered his area. I tried to talk him out of it. He seemed to listen and then he'd start threatening again. Each time, I'd go through a long period of imagining very clearly what the bullet impact would feel like, then he'd back off. I'd feel relieved for a moment and then he'd start again. It was like the visual version of a stuck record. I was woken up out of it by a dog barking. Then I went back to sleep and dreamt about it all again, but at a distance: I was telling it to you and saying that in a way I had asked for the dream as I wanted to re-live what our boys had felt."
And recently, Anne had the following dream: "I dreamt that I was with Tristan and Javier, we were all kidnapped and scared. The killers were there. I couldn't speak or protest, I was too scared even to make a noise though I don't remember what the threats were that made me like this. I heard a killer get a gun ready. I saw Tristan lying there already bashed-up and tortured-looking, then the killer put the gun to Tristan's head. I couldn't scream or move but just had to wait for the click and to see his brains scattering. Then the killer put a gun to Javier's head and I managed to make a noise that woke me up."
Regular Green Letter readers will remember that an old peasant couple, Julio and
Baudelina, who were the close friends Tristan and Javier were visiting just
before they were murdered, were eventually also killed by being forced to drink
poison, for helping us with information. Recently, Anne wrote this note to us:
"I was driving in a poor area of Bogota, when I realized we were near the house
of Baudelina's sister. It was the third anniversary of their death and this
fact had been haunting me all day and the night before. So I asked the social
worker I was driving with to take me to their house. There was no-one in, so I
left a note inside the iron railings, pinned down by a stone, with my telephone
number, saying that my heart still breaks when I think of them and I have not
stopped insisting that their case be treated as the double murder that it was
instead of as the suicide it was criminally made out to be."
On a Lighter Note - CD News
Producing a CD of our girls' social and environmental songs has proved itself to
be an endless source of fertility (if not funds, as we give most of them away!).
A man in Bogota who works with kids who are drug-addicts said he loved Louise's
anti-drug-taking rap on the CD and says he uses it and the catch phrases in it
in his talks. A social worker told Anne that she plays the CD to everyone who
gets into her car. And a peasant-leader from the 'campesino University' said
that the first thing he does when he starts a compost class is play Louise's
song "Yo soy la Tierra" - 'I am Mother Earth', as it says everything that he
wants to teach.."I speak to you from the soil, from the sky and from the depths
of the oceans, you don't hear my lament, nor my voice in the wind. Like an evil
spell, you have transformed my paradise into infernal chaos. You cover my body
with cement, you fill my lungs with pollution, you drill holes in my chest and
wage wars in my heart. You cover my face with rubbish, you fill my eyes with
tears, you fill my veins with poison and my soul with despair, and in my womb
which once was fertile, you sow only destruction. You cover me with barriers,
frontiers and walls, you have destroyed your own future. In me you could have
sown and harvested your dreams, but no, you try to change me. You come to me as
a visitor and soon you will die, but I will go on forever."
There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden
Ned reports from our farm in the mountains of Southern Colombia:
"A few days ago, I saw some plaits in the mane of the big frisky foal in our field. I wondered how Alice had managed to get close enough to do this, as it's not tamed. I asked her and she said she didn't do them and can't get near it, and anyway, it would never stand still for anyone. Mario (her Colombian husband) says it's the pixies, they like to ride horses and then decorate their hair.
Not entirely satisfied with this explanation, I mentioned the plaits to a Guambiano Indian to see if he had any explanation. With a serious face, he told me the same story: that he had often come across the plaits the pixies leave on the horses after they've been galloping them around.."
In the hope of being able to offer Ned some plausible explanation to this mystery, and having discarded my own attempt to visualize an erratic whirlwind blowing a horse's mane first one way, then the other (especially as there is never any wind where we live), I asked my 23 year old daughter, Louise, who grew up in Colombia what she made of this and she told me that throughout their childhood, the children had often seen these plaits on the horses and that the campesinos always told them the same thing. It was the pixies.
Seeds Please! I am kneeling and planting I am making fertile I am putting some of myself back in the soil Soon enough sweet black mother of our food you will have the rest.. Marge Piercy, "Living in the Open"
For all our projects in Colombia, both urban and rural, we need seeds and as the
gardening season has now ended in the Northern Hemisphere, we would be most
grateful to receive any unwanted leftover packets or half-packets! Because of
the levels we work at, i.e. high up, we can use any seeds planted as far North
as Canada, but can't grow crops planted in the Southern States of America. What
we most need are simple veg. such as beetroot, cabbage, carrot, and parsnip.
Our postal address is: Atlantis, Telecom, Belen, Huila, Colombia
Correspondence is welcome and promptly answered - write to:
jennyjames@softhome.net
All previous Green Letters can be read on www.afan.org.uk
P.S. In case anyone finds any part of this Letter, or anything on the TV news
tonight, upsetting, don't worry, we're in good hands..
"The future will be better tomorrow." George Bush
"I'm the commander in chief, see. I don't need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB