You are herecol-pp-update0705
col-pp-update0705
Colombia Peace Presence Update, July 2005
In this Update:
Action Alert: Call Congress for Bipartisan Letter to President Uribe
Curt Wands: Assistance, Development & War on the Lower Atrato River
Letter from the Field: "There is going to be shooting."
Congressional letter to President Uribe on Human Rights
Representatives Joseph Pitts (R-PA) and James McGovern (D-MA) have initiated a letter in the House of Representatives to Colombia's President Uribe on human rights. It calls for greater protection by the Colombian government of civilians, human rights defenders and church leaders, as well as for prosecution in a number of existing human rights abuse cases. Your member has until this Friday, July 22 to sign the letter.
The letter is a bipartisan effort to draw attention to the plight of Colombia¹s civilian population and urge the government of Colombia to take action to protect civilians in the conflict. According to Amnesty International, the civilian population has borne the brunt of human rights abuses in Colombia with over 70,000 killed in the past 20 years and an estimated 3 million forcibly displaced.
Civilians are not merely caught in the cross-fire, but are directly targeted for violence by armed groups including the Colombian armed forces. Amnesty International has repeatedly called on all armed actors to respect the right of civilians to remain outside of the armed conflict. Nevertheless, armed groups continue to target civilians and social organizations that have expressed peaceful opposition to the conflict. The recent massacre of eight in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó is an example of how civilians are being targeted.
ACTION: Click here to read the letter and send a message to your Representative urging him/her to sign on to the Pitts/McGovern letter. Or call the foreign policy aide at your representative's office. You can call the office numbers listed on their webpage at www.house.gov or call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and they will connect you to the right office.
back to top
Assistance, Development & War on the Lower Atrato River
By Curt Wands
Assistance?
The building closest to the health center in Río Sucio is a dilapidated cement block structure that was never finished. Outside the gaping doorless entrance an acrid wisp of smoke from the last of a burning trash pile wafts upward. In this tragic environment some of the poorest of the poor eke out a living. I am fortunate to share bits of that life with them.
Here lives Fernando, a diabetic man in his 40s, his leg amputated from complications of diabetes. He has been 5 months without his medicine, and his blood sugar shows it, 500% above normal limits. When he was displaced from his home by the violence he lost all his official documents, so he doesn't qualify for services at the clinic next door. I am able to give him enough medication for the upcoming months. The cost of his medications is less than $10.
I make my way among the mix of plastic sheeting strung over twine, old cardboard, and rusted sheet metal that section off individual and family living areas. I make my way over to Luisa, a woman in her 70s with an enormously disproportionate abdomen. She struggles to breathe and talk while sitting on her mattress of boards, shrouded by her mildewed mosquito netting. She has been sleeping in a sitting position for weeks, as her lungs fill with fluid whenever she lies down. She also stays awake worrying about snakes behind the boards in the ceiling, not necessarily delusional thinking. She complains when she eats, that occasionally worms leave on their own volition from her nose and mouth. Her ankles are twice their normal size, her lungs full of fluid from her heart failure. I give a heavy dose of diuretics (furosamide) and refill the medicine that helps her heart pump better (digoxin.) Before I leave I also give her medication for intestinal parasites. When I visit the next day she has had 50 visible worms leave her intestinal tract, with 33 more joining the exodus over the next 24 hours. She is very relieved to be able to rest lying down.
The health center staff finished seeing their daily quota of 25 patients by 11:00 a.m. Unfortunately for the local population, being assigned to work at the Río Sucio Health Center is seen as a punishment post for most of the medical providers who spend their 4-month rotation here. Home visits are almost unheard of.
The town of Río Sucio is largely built over marshland. The rough-hewn board shacks and houses are largely built on platforms over the swampy murk below. While traversing from board to board over the fetid mud and water from shack to shack, there is much laughter, especially if one falls in. Shouts of "Turtle! Turtle!" bring people rushing to see who has fallen in. The visits to these homes / hovels is almost inevitably filled with the sharing of worries about pain, concerns about life lived, nearness to death, and the path of life each has taken to be where s/he is. It is exceedingly difficult to visit these homes, and even harder to leave for those bound by their terminal cancer, uncontrolled seizures, partial paralysis from a stroke, Parkinson's or other debilitating illnesses. While I recognize the importance of our work in development and support for local efforts there are days when ethically I cannot leave people suffering, and the assistance work needs to continue. Certainly while millions of individuals, families and entire communities remain displaced from their villages, jobs and secure life, the need for direct assistance continues.
Or Development?
On the other hand, our principal hope is to leave in place a structure for local health workers to continue to improve the lot of their communities. This is the reason that the majority of our efforts focus on courses and supervisory visits in the communities.
One of our recent courses with the nine advanced promoters focused on trauma repair, suturing of tendons and deep tissues. As usual, the promoters went to the task with great enthusiasm, to such a degree that they frequently had to be cautioned: "Your suturing needs to be done with less deep stitches." "Inject that a bit more delicately." It was a very successful course, but one that we would like to reserve for those who are working on accidents and not the war injuries too common in this country. By the time the promoters
returned a moth later they had almost all put into practice some of the techniques they had learned, utilizing the new instruments (forceps, scissors, clamps, suture, local anesthesia) they received.
A recent 1st level course for student Health Promoters focused on respiratory illnesses. Everyone gathered around as we dissected a pig. When the lungs were removed, we blew into the trachea so that all could see the effect of air going into the lungs. One of the promoters was so impressed that he repeated the same dynamic when he returned to his community the next week. After the anatomy class, parts of the pig were used for practice in suturing with the 2nd level promoters. Regardless of the theme being taught, our constant methodology is to teach basic theory mixed with practice, practice and more practice. The results are beginning to show in some of these communities where we can see an increase in appropriate diagnosis and treatment of the basic illnesses they encounter. It is hard to recall that only a year ago, no one could accurately take a temperature.
The promoters now come in from 32 different communities, speaking Wauunan, Emberá, and the Chocó version of Spanish. They are Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and Mestizo, women and men. It is an exciting process to hear them make connections and discover their commonalities, in spite of the differing armed groups that dominate in their various river basins. One of the Indigenous promoters recently exclaimed, "I used to think that when you Afro-Colombians were displaced to other regions that you got everything you needed while we Indigenous suffered behind the blockades put up by the paramilitary. Now I see that we all suffered the same!"
Next week we add our 1st level midwifery course to the efforts here. We hope to be able to prevent some of the deaths attributable to preventable neonatal (newborn) tetanus as well as the common Group B Strep bacteria. Complications of pregnancy and labor will be taught during this course as well as we try to change the illness and death rates of both infant and mother. The midwifery course will be challenging, as many of the Indigenous midwives are monolingual in one of the two separate language groups, but we have an excellent Guatemalan midwife here who has spent years teaching women of other language groups how to safely monitor pregnancy and deliver children under these conditions. She herself lived through the violence of the war in her own country and is most adept at understanding the situation here. A month later she will be teach complicated delivery procedures and prenatal care to the advanced health promoters, while I teach an "essential medicines" course to the 1st level.
There are many needs here in the region. The first and most crucial is the need to end the war by stopping ALL money and hardware that keep this war going. The destruction and death caused by the U.S. military presence here is incalculable. The shift to $2,000,000 a day in support for teachers, health/medical personnel, and other constructive efforts will bring a true end to the war and good friends with it. Our efforts here hinge on the thread of security conditions, which are made less secure each day by the armament and clamor for continued war. It is reassuring to see so many groups of faith, human rights organizations, and people of good will both here in Colombia as well as in the U.S. striving to make a positive change in both of our countries. Both Julie and I are blessed to be in this project, working with these people.
Curt Wands practices as a Quaker and works as a Physician Assistant in the Bajo Atrato, Chocó region of Colombia with his wife Julie. They are expecting their first child this month.
back to top
Letter from the Field: "There is going to be shooting."
FOR Colombia Program coordinators John Lindsay-Poland and Susana Pimiento visited the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó this month, where they worked with the community and FOR team. This is an account of events while they were visiting the Peace Community settlement of La Unión, where the FOR team lives.
I had not even thought about the five-year anniversary. The afternoon before, we had heard shots coming from a valley over the hill, called La Sucia. No explosions, but shots clear enough to indicate there was combat. It was a clear day in La Union, and hot, and we stood with community leaders on a roof where cocoa beans were laid out to dry, trying in vain to see anything with binoculars that might tell us what was happening.
The next morning someone heard dogs barking at first light, and thought soldiers must be passing close by. At 6:15 we were awakened by the sound of gunfire very near, in a grove of cocoa trees, or cacaoterra, that is owned by the community and an important source of work. Later Don Rodrigo told me that he had gotten up early to take his dog to a swimming hole next to the cacaoterra. Don Rodrigo loves his dogs, and one of them has a blood disease. As he was washing it, he saw guerrillas, who told him, "There¹s going to be shooting. If it starts before you leave, don¹t run." And shooting there was, some of it very close to the settlement, some further up the mountain.
We called the FOR Bogotá office to alert others of the combat so close to a civilian population, and a team member there called the Colombian military¹s 17th Brigade, responsible for Army operations in the region. She spoke with a colonel who yelled at her that a soldier had been killed the day before in La Sucia and his body could not be taken out because there was too much combat. He said we only worry about civilians, while the soldier's mother was in his office crying earlier that day. He said the fighting would continue to be heavy because the area was full of "bandidos." He said they weren't fighting the civilians, but it was not his fault that the community "lives with the bandidos." "We are doing our job, " he said. "What do you want us to do?" The team member said she was sorry about the death of the soldier, and that she wanted the military to be aware of the civilian population in the area.
I think the message got through, in a way. Two hours later, we heard the arrival of a helicopter. It flew low over the community, circling several times, low enough that they could see us on the ground in our FOR t-shirts, looking up at them. That¹s what I wanted, anyway. Trish, an FOR team member from England, turned to me and said: "It¹s an attack helicopter. You know how I know? You can see the two things on the side for firing weapons."
After a few circles, the helicopter made wider circles and flew higher, and began to fire .50 machinegun rounds into an area further up the mountain. After a few minutes of this, it fired a rocket, with an unmistakeable boom and smoke rising from a point some 30 minutes walk up the hill, toward Jhon Jairo¹s house.
It was then that Clemencia came to our house. Clemencia is widowed. Her husband had been killed exactly five years before, in the same community, when paramilitaries massacred six leaders while an Army helicopter flew overhead. A year later, her son had been shot by paramilitaries as he ran away from them. Clemencia didn¹t say anything when she came to the house, but her fear was evident. She didn¹t know what to do with her hands. A nun who works in the community took her hands and massaged them. I don¹t think Clemencia knew that it was the anniversary of Jaime¹s death. But she didn¹t need to.
The helicopter circled again and fired another rocket from a point directly above the settlement, leaving a trail of smoke across the sky, and then another. Later, community members would find a shell of brass five inches long that rained down from the helicopter, a danger in itself if it landed on someone, especially a child. Twenty minutes after it arrived, the helicopter flew away.
But the danger wasn¹t over. Later that day, we saw a line of Army soldiers trudging up to a low ridge across from the settlement, some 50 or 60 troops sweating in their uniforms and packs. Some carried bright blue mats or pails, which seemed an unwise advertisement of their presence in the bush. They climbed up a hill to a cross where we had planned to bring Susana to give her a panorama of the community, and from there several hiked into the brush, apparently looking for water, while others continued to the other side of the hill.
The next morning it was Clemencia who pointed out to me that several soldiers were still stationed up at the cross. Just two hours later, a teenaged girl living in the settlement said that there were guerrillas in the mango grove, just 100 yards from the settlement. "Van a haber tiros," they told her. "There¹s going to be shooting." The soldiers were no longer visible on the hill, but community members instinctively moved toward the opposite edge of the settlement.
I thought immediately of Toribio, the Nasa indigenous community in Cauca province in southwestern Colombia that lives by the same principles of nonviolent resistance as the Peace Community of San José, where in April guerrillas attacked military targets in the midst of town, destroying the homes and businesses there and leading to an Army occupation in response. Resistance there has been very effective in dealing with single armed groups who try to kidnap or abuse community members, but has a harder time preventing the armed groups from fighting within populated areas.
Back in La Unión, no one had gone out to work, and instead passed the time cutting wood, doing other domestic chores, or playing board games or dominoes. Community members joked with us that this was a special welcome to Susana and I, complete with fireworks. The day off from labor in the fields and enforced confinement lent a tense and social calm to the village.
In the late afternoon we saw three guerrillas running up the hill to the cross, and sprint back down to the mango grove. Then they left, ten of them, carrying nothing but their weapons. The relief was palpable.
John Lindsay-Poland
back to top
In Peace,
Marcie Ley and John Lindsay-Poland
FOR Colombia Peace Program Fellowship of Reconciliation
Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean
2017 Mission St. #305, San Francisco, CA 94110
phone: (415) 495-6334, fax: (415) 495-5628
www.forusa.org
