Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 22. Autumnal Equinox

 

The fruit we saw hanging from the trees on the campus of the University in Medellin – which looked like Idaho's biggest baking potatoes – was Zapote (Pachira acuatica), which is called chila blanca in Salvador, pumpunjuche in Honduras, and castana in Cuba. Here at Concisa's cochina in Unguia, with horses tied to the hitching post on the dirt street in front, Leon makes Zapote into first rate milk shakes, practically a whole meal. He does equally well with Cantaroon, Lolo, Borojo, Passion Fruit, or Guayava, which you can get con leche or con aqua. We have been eating here every day and Concisa, whose speciality is deep-fried fish, is doing her best to accommodate the one or two vegetarians in this group of 35, here to study or teach "Permacultura, Ecoconstruccion, y Tecnologia Apropiada."

 

The military was apparently worried for our safety so they garrisoned a regiment of the armed forces under the command of a two-star, Tenete Nelson Enrique Chacon, so that now you can't sneeze in this town without dampening the collar of a soldier. Nelson enrolled in our course but Pablo says it is to keep an eye on us, because he is not taking notes or understanding the material. Not to be outdone, the National Police also assigned a Lt. Hernandez, but in contrast, he is very studious because Chief of Police Reyes has instructed him to teach him everything he learns after the course is done.

 

Today we did a cob dance with the C.O. and the Lt., their M-16s leaning against coconut palms, out there stomping and tossing cobs, with 1000 schoolkids gawking, pointing and giggling at these jugheads getting all muddy.

 

The panga from Turbo was pushing the envelope. Smaller boat, without cover, 26 passengers, choppy sea. I drew a back seat from Turbo to Unguia and found myself alternating between wash cycle and spin cycle as we careened off the bouncing washboard of the bay to be swallowed down the gullet of Cienegas (lakes) and alternate between the hot but smoother ride of the river segments and the cold, wet and rough open seas. This turned out to be a blessing because today I left my fanny pack against a tree while I slogged cob and returned to find it unzipped. No money missing because the cash is all still hanging by clothespins, like a counterfeiter's polyester, in the bedroom window fronting Pepe's mother's pigsty and chicken coop. I am staying at Pepe's mother's house because even with the pigs it is better than either hotel in Unguia. Pepe is the local community activist. He used to be mayor of this cowtown and now runs the free clinic. He set up the ecoconstruction course and filled it with every bright young teacher or farmer within 50 km. These are the ova we are here to inseminate. Pepe wants the 5000 Unguians to become an ecovillage, block by block if necessary.

 

The school where we are meeting was selected because it has one room with an air conditioner. Except, after an hour the diesel fuel runs out at the town's power station so we start to bake. Then we remove ourselves to a thatchroofed gazebo by the basketball court; under the watchful wonderment of all these children. Jeff Clearwater and I take a walk around at lunchtime and decide that the first afternoon should be spent in a design exercise involving the school. We break the class into 4 groups and have them look for water, waste, people and pollution vectors, map them, and come back for evaluation. This turns out to be a really good exercise.

 

The school's water comes from a well. One well went bad and was abandoned, an open malaria generator 20 feet from the classrooms. A short distance away is the new well, cement cased but also open, and between the two is the waste pile, rotting coconuts and banana peels, half-burnt plastic bags, old lead batteries, and scrap toxic chemicals from the school laboratory. Over a hundred inches of rain per year insures that this content will eventually soak into the wells. Pigs, chickens, and cows wander the spaces between classrooms, fertilizing the grass and drawing those wonderful little bacteria buses, the flies. Asbestos shingles crumble from the roofs, and where the roofs have failed, those cement classrooms have been abandoned. The toilets are all stopped up. The septic tank has probably never been emptied and overflows when it rains. The gas engine that pumps water to a 30' tower failed and was abandoned. The electric pump that replaced it – bare undersized wires strung across the walkways – burned up and was abandoned. Now water is hand carried from the cement well to flush toilets and to wash hands. There is no cafeteria, vendors peddle junkfood by the gate. There are no books, except about 100 in the small, locked library. Barbed wire separates the schoolyard from the cattle ranches on three sides. Last year 20 poisonous snakes were caught in the high grass that comes up to the walkways between classes.

 

On the other side of town is the Catholic School, run by nuns, for those who can afford it. It has perhaps 200 children. This public school is run by the public servants, whom I guess you would have to say are the serpent handlers. Often they are not paid.

 

The downtown is not a lot better. The central plaza has a half-completed bandshell that collects plastic trash and algae in its 20' deep concrete cellar, which was to have been a team dugout for futbol games in the plaza, but had to be abandoned when graft and corruption evaporated the building fund halfway through the renovation. Where majestic shade trees stood on stone pedestals are now freshly cut stumps – too close to the power lines, I'd guess. Hogs and chickens wander the dirt main streets. Vaqueros ride into town and tether their ponies outside the bars, or drive Brahma steers down to the stockyards by the docks. Plastic and paper trash is strewn everywhere, with broken glass and poptops catching the unwary barefoot. In rainy season Unguia is Mud City. At Carnival, it is Dodge before the Earp brothers. This week there is a sort of revival in a tent at the end of one street. The faithful will consume Aquacante from a huge punchbowl until Revelation or Judgement Day, whichever arrives first. The hardiest usually last about 5 days, a truly amazing feat.

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 23

 

On the first night in Unguia we were taken to a sort of dinner in our honor, without the food. Thirty prominent citizens gathered in the upstairs of a disco beside the plaza and the M.C. – a radio DJ before the military shut down his station (like maybe it would draw guerrillas?) introduces us as if we are heading for the goal in a World Cup soccer match and then we're asked to make a few short remarks. He pops up between each of our short speeches to keep the crowd energized. I am beginning to get a better sense of uniforms now. Chief of Police Reyes and his Capitan Chamorra, who can't stop diddling his pistol grip as he speaks, wear this season's fatigues with a splash of the Colombian tricolor rainbowed across one shoulder, and a solid green Foreign Legionnaire's cap like Fidel's. Their weapons are a pistol belt with extra clips, a beaten-up M-16, and an occasional grenade in a tiedown. Army C.O. Chacon is in much sharper seasonal creased grey-green camos, black beret, and neatly folds his pressed trousers into red-topped camo socks that extend from his spit-shined paratroop boots. His arsenal includes a matching ammo harness, a beaten-up (grunge look) automatic sidearm, and an M-16 only slightly better for wear than the police-issue version. His shoulder patch is the torch in the C, for the Armed Forces of Colombia, and on the other shoulder he wears his resumé in concentric arches: paratroop school, antiguerrilla school, antiexplosives, special forces training. On his right breast he wears both paratrooper wings and pilot's wings. And yet, at Alejandra's slide show he is fascinated by the technology. How did she get those photos to go onto the screen, was it a special kind of camera?

 

A year ago Unguia was in deep do do. Both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries told the citizens to leave and started terrorizing farmers and ranchers at the outskirts. Unguia dug in and stayed. 200 displaced farmers moved into town for safety. A few months ago Chacon's cavalry arrived like Patton, or is it Custer? Anyway, coming from the night with the Martians in Trigana, I am happy to see them.

 

Twice a day the town sucks electricity from a big, sooty, diesel generator out near the school. Once at lunchtime, roughly 10 to 2; again at supper, 6 to 10. The residents who string small guage wire from the nearest pole pay by the size of the fuse they use. A 5-amp fuse pays $3/mo, a 30-amp fuse pays $30/mo, with a sliding scale between those points. The wealthier people, and Pepe's mom who has the cement block maker being one, have their own diesel generators and many of those – 50 year old 2-strokers – run 24/7. At the docks the biggest cargo coming off the 50-foot freight pangas (some sail assist) every day (including Sundays and holidays) is diesel. The town spends $120,000 per year in fuel for the central plant and Bogota matches that. Sometimes Bogota runs short and cuts the supply, and they have to cut hours of service. At lunchtime and suppertime a black cloud hangs over the town and diesel fumes smother the central plaza. The school, which is the closest public building, is at least upwind.

 

No-one in town has a cheap source of drinking water. Pepe and some other well-off families catch rainwater and boil it, or use it to flush toilets, shower, wash dishes and clothes, and mop. They have big "Mediterraneos" for this, uncovered but tiled indoor tubs. The poor boil river water, or buy expensive plastic bag water that comes off the panga from Turbo.

 

Today we've organized an excursion. While Jeff and Lucia turn the class compost, Alejandra and I, and seven others, go on 5 motorcycles to Gilgal, 30 clicks south. The track we follow is the main road between these two towns and is apparently plied by heavy trucks, but is really best suited for horse or dirt bike, being paved mainly with 10-lb river stone and quite rough and narrow in places. It is undoubtedly much worse in a month's time, when the rains come in earnest. We pass without incident through the no-man's cattle lands between the battalion garrisoned at Unguia and the company bivouacked at Gilgal. Later I learn that the FARC owns the surrounding mountains and recently killed 60 civilians in roadblocks. The paramilitaries are financed in the main (apart form ransoms) by the cattle rancher who owns nearly all the land we pass en route. So we are definitely out beyond the lines. The dirt bikes are small – 125 to 185s, and at one point we have to put them across a river chasm in a metal cage rigged as a Bosun's chair, one bike at a time.

 

Gilgal has more than 300 displaced persons in a town of 800. This town has a big diesel generator too, and gets its fuel from the port at Unguia. Bogota pays for 6 hr/day for 120 houses, and there is no matching fund, so when Bogota stops, the town goes dark.

 

Gilgal is one of those towns that is stuck in the middle. The guerrillas come and kill the supporters of the army and demand provisions; the paramilitaries come and kill the supporters of the guerrillas and demand ransoms or just steal what they want. With nearly half the town made up of refugees, despair runs high.

 

We visit the house of one of our course participants, who is a teacher at the local school here. The house is pretty standard cinderblock and lamina, and he has hogs, chickens, and fruit trees in the backyard. Completely unremarkable for rural South America. But just as I am beginning to wonder why we came, he takes us to the Gilgal school and it becomes crystal clear.

 

The Gilgal school is everything Escuela Agricola Unguia is not. In fact, I'd match the Gilgal school against any in the world. I am really impressed.

 

The Gilgal school consists of a half-dozen rondellas – they call them kiosks – poured cement frame gazebos with thatched roof, painted rainbow colors, each with a blackboard, arranged in a 100-meter circle around a central, larger rondella – Aula Central. Each of the smaller rooms serves as an open-aired classroom for a single grade. Aula Central contains a kitchen and cafeteria, library, faculty offices, art room, and science room. The spaces between the kiosks are an edible landscape of the indigenous fruit trees of Colombia, with common names and latin names displayed on each tree. Here are Acacia de Giraroot (bean-tree, Polonix pegia), Arbol de Pan (breadfruit, Atocarpus communo), Guacimo (Guazumul mifolia), Acacia Blanco (Leucaena leucacepho), Guanabana (Annona glabra), and scores of other food plants. Commodes are well-tended 2-compartment baño seco dry compost toilets, swaled to arrest rainwater infusion at their base. Here there are compost piles, raised vegetable beds mulched with palm leaves, agroforestry plots, fruit and leaf drying, and ponds for fish farming.

 

The school was initially financed by the local farmers'cooperative,  Las Tribus, but governed by the children's "Systema Asembleario." There is a bulletin board in each kiosk with three pages — one each for criticisms, proposals, and commendations. At the weekly assemblies, student notations are read and discussed, and action taken by vote of each grade. Commendations are awarded, proposals debated, and punishments meted by the student assemblies.

 

One case we listened to was that of a boy who cut down a young fruit tree. He was criticized and when the matter came up before his class assembly, he said only in his defense that he had come to school angry at his father for beating his mother and had taken out his anger on the tree. His classmates decided that while it was good for him to get rid of his anger, he would have to plant two replacement trees and water and care for them until they were well established.

 

The Gilgal school — Instituto Comunitario Regional Alcides Fernandez — was the dream of Padre Alcides Fernandez, the man who also conceived — and found money for — many of the rural development projects that distinguish this remote part of the Urubá region of the Rio Atratos. Padre Alcides is a local cultural hero and it isn't hard to see why.

 

We walk over to the adjacent hostel, which sleeps 150 children who come to this school from more distant farms and only go home on weekends. It reminds me of the School for the deaf run by Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka — clean, spacious, well-organized — a dream learning center for the rural poor.

 

If we look at the sheer size of the world population, 6 billion and growing, the majority of grade school age, somewhere in that mass of young minds is an Einstein, a Sivananda, a Hawking, a Tesla, a DaVinci, a Carver. How many of these keen intellects will die of bad water, malnutrition, tropical parasites? How many will never see a school or a book in their lifetime? One or more of them may hold the key to our collective future as a species in this galaxy, if only they are lucky enough to have a school such as this one. There are 124 students in the Instituto. Parents pay $2,000 pesos (one dollar) per month, about $20,000 pesos per year ($10).

 

The population of Gilgal is approximately 168 families, less than half of what it was before the Violence arrived. When we visited the Las Tribus Co-op that started all these wonders, and we were saddened to learn that it had to close, because the Violence considered it too communist. The Co-op's Granja is now a small roadside stand at the corner of two streets in Gilgal. It adjoins the demonstration hectares know as El Paradiso. The land is owned by the Las Tribus farmers' cooperative, which has now been disbanded, and the Granja, which once sold farm produce, milled and preserved foods, seed, and supplies to its members, now sells only ice cream and confections to passers-by. They still mill rice and sugar, and grow banana, plaintain, and fruit trees in a swaled food forest. I find some oyster mushrooms growing in a stump and explain to a group of farmers how they could grow more of these in rice straw and other cellulose waste. I describe a single steamed plastic bag method of inoculation and hope that it gets through my rough Spanish well enough to give him some success.

 

Founded in 1976 by Padre Jose Francisco Ibañaz Artiga, a Claretano missionery, Las Tribus created a communal store, encouraged home organic food gardens, designed composting toilets, dug many wells, trained people in home water storage systems and planted demonstration hectares of intercropped rice, corn, beans and sugar cane in the 17-ha. communal plot. For twenty years Las Tribus gave meaning to sustainable agriculture in rural Colombia. Then the Violence found Padre Jose on its third attempt, in 1986, at 33 years old, and it claimed Las Tribus soon after. All the farmers who were part of the co-op have been driven off their farms and into Gilgal for the safety of the army, which is to say that small company we passed camped in a cattle pasture outside town.

 

The Gilgal health center was built with money from Padre Jose's family in Spain after his death. And it was because of Padre Jose that Padre Alcides came to Gilgal to build the school. The Gilgal school is still kept up, but when the farmers' cooperative disbanded and it lost that financial support, it fell onto hard times. It is now run by the municipio. The teachers have not been paid in 3 months.

 

It is starting to get overcast and late in the day, so we gather ourselves and motor back towards Unguia. When my driver, in sunglasses to protect him from the dust blindness although the sun is low and gathering clouds are making it dark, chooses to change from the right stone rut to the left stone rut at 40 kph, the gravel grinding across my bare knees and the hot muffler held by the weight of the horizontal motorcycle on my sliding right ankle as it bounces from stone to stone lets me know, quite without pretense of subtlety, that my assessment of the skill of my driver was spot on. You can't have a 20 meter event horizon at 40 kph and expect that your odds of recovery will be in the plus column. He frees my feet from under himself and the bike and we straighten the handlebars, dab at my bleeding knees, and get going again, only to go off the road a second time 5 clicks later. I tell him no hurry. I am not due back for another hour. Still, he is trying to catch up to the others and may be worried about either the Martians or the Africans, as the guerrillas are known in these parts. Around sunset they rise from their crypts and foray in search of fresh blood, especially each other's.

 

I can only partially assess my injuries in the weak light produced by Pepe's home generator. I have a tiger claw print of 3 stripes on my left knee that hurts the most but seems to be mostly lost skin, no blood. I have bruises and bleeding cuts from my right ankle to thigh, a small cut on my right elbow, and a large bruised area right of my sternum. That my right ankle and leg are intact are a testament to the integrity of my hiking boots. At Pepe's I take a cold rainwater shower and soap the injuries as best I can. I inquire after Bacitracin and Neosporin but nobody has anything except aloe and zinc oxide. I ask Rodrigo, Alejandra's volunteer homeopathic doctor, what he recommends and he says salt.

 

Saturday night is party night in Unguia and it seems like a whole town, and many from outlying regions, is in the Central plaza, with loudspeakers blaring 4 different kinds of music from 4 different discos, converging on the brass band – mainly a rough Mariachi mix — on their wooden bandshell. After two shakes from Leon's blender I retire to Pepe's to watch Chinese Ping Pongers and East European weightlifters from Sydney on the DirectTV and transcribe the other night at Trigana with the Martians to Alejandra's laptop for emailing to my family.

 

I seem to have kept a running meditation since that night, trying to digest what happened. I compare it to other moments of extreme fright in my life. My first nightmare, my face-to-face with a charging bull in the ring after the race through the streets of Pamplona in 1968, the time the Dodge travel van hit black ice in the mountains and a semi-trailer jackknifed and slid at me and the kids at 60 mph, Will trapped in a sinking canoe under a snag across the Buffalo River in flood. But this time, utter serenity. What does it mean? Each of the earlier episodes involved adrenelin, sometimes frozen limbs, other times super-fast, life-saving reflexes. This time I was blissfully serene. Do I value my life so much less now? Am I wed to my own mortality in ways I was not when I was younger?

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 24

 

Sunday morning is the time we have set aside for a trip to the Cienega, the "lakes," really all part of the huge river system which is the Rio Atrato. The Cienega are separated by floating islands and mangrove swamps that have produced occasional dry soils in a patchwork of "land," rivers, tunnel channels, and lakes. A local guide shows us a path too small for our panga but which a putt-putt fishing canoe would use to take half an hour off our travel time.

 

14,000 mm/yr of rain in Choco and Antiqueño – the most in the world – contributes to give the Atrato, whose tributaries extend as far as the mountains above Cali, the largest volume outflow in the world. It has rained all night – my laundry was left out on the line – but as the sun breaks through we stop for breakfast at Mariella (8-06-N, 76-57-W), a fishing village on "land" at the junction of three large branches, 25 km from Turbo, 16 km from Unguia, 35 km from Trigana.

 

It is hard to believe, but there are glaciers still here near the equator, remnants of an Ice Age long ago. They are in the Nevada do Huila to the southeast of Cali at elevations above 15000 feet. None drain into the Atrato watershed. To the west of the river, the geology is related to the Western Andes – dating back to when there was open ocean between Panama and Venezuela, 38 million years ago.

 

The Serrania del Darien flexes 1900 meters up for a thumb grip on the Isthmus. There is also a little of the Andes in the blood of the Cerro Cuchillo, a 1500 foot rise on the eastern bank of the river. Between the two banks, however, is as much as 2100 km of river. If the Gulf of Uruba were to rise a few meters and flood its own wetlands, it would resemble the size and shape of the State of Florida. This would be unhappy news for the many residents; egrets, herons, bitterns, ibises, flycatchers (140 species of them in Colombia), storks, spoonbills, ant-birds, ant-shrikes, ant-thrushes and ant-wrens, Collared Plovers, White-faced Whistling Ducks, and Wattled Jacana.

 

The typical fisherman's house in the Atrato is made of hand-milled wood, thatched with palm leaves or covered with rusting tin. It stands on stilts out of the reach of floods, extending over the river, connected to neighbors by a rattling and rocking woodplank walkway which follows the river, to which are tied paddle or putt-putt dugouts filled with nets. Behind the stilt houses are pigs and chickens rooting at the base of trees; oranges, guavas, lemons, plaintains, coconut, sugar cane, chontaduro palms, pineapples, gourds and various medicinals. Mariella's boardwalk runs past some homes with the restaurant/store/disco/community center in the middle.

 

At dawn the dugout fleet sails out to their favorite holes and by 9 am they start trickling back in and unloading their catch. The little boys, 8 to 12, gut the fish on the boardwalk, spilling blood and guts back into the river and giving the finished product a quick rinse. Only meters away the toilets consist of 2 open bamboo rails on which one squats over the river and invites fish to come recycle. The cleaned catch moves to the hands of still younger girls, 5 to 8, and their grandmothers, to scale and crate for girls 9 and over to take to town. Older boys repair nets and boats. Older women cook and garden. Few in the village need to work more than a 3 or 4 hours each day, except for the few who go to town.

 

About a quarter of plants found in Choco are exclusive to the region, Marentaceas and Melastomataceas with big shiny leaves, deep red Hoja del Sol (Heliconia metalica), a hundred kinds of palms. The semi-flooded catival forests of the lower Atrato are endangered, mainly from human logging. Mariella was taken to the cleaners by a logging company that came to them with wonderful promises and vanished, leaving only stumps.

 

The black population is extremely healthy – the young men look like Wesley Snipes or Evander Holifield – very buff. They have no police, no military, and no trouble from the war. Fishing is good. I photograph two little boys flicking fish guts into the water with their quick knives. The guts become a vitamin blender for eager fish waiting anxiously below the surface. Mariella has an average of 5 babies each month, attended by their own midwives. They say the fish of the Atrato confer health, so they are never sick and looking at them, I believe it. There is a study made by a researcher in a similar community in Pacific Choco which describes the non-fish part of the diet in great detail (Fundación Esparé, Sistema Tradicional de Alimentación de Patos y Gallinas en una Comunidad Negra del Pacifico Colombiano). Andrew Weil might be interested.

 

Their staple foods are (in alphabetical order) achin, aquacate, aji (hot peppers), albahaca (a basil also used for oils, dies, sweeteners and soaps), arbol del pan, arroz, batata, bija (similar to milkweed and high in Vitamins A and C), bledo, cebolla, chontoduro (palm nuts - 3500 kcal/kg), cilantro, coco, guayaba, limoncillo, maiz, matarroton (leaf pods from trees used as beans), nacedera (berries are 18% protein), papaya, pimenton (another pepper), piña, plantano (plaintain is 3000 kcal/kg), potra (for Vit. E), tomate, totumo, venturosa, yerba mora, yuca (7% protein), and of course pescado (fish), mostly Characidae, which are 18% protein, 3% fat, and high in minerals and vitamins.

 

They think this is the best place in the world to live, and wonder out loud if this is where Adam and Eve began. The village Abuelo, a white man who resembles George Carlin, suggests we look into it.

 

This village has largely taken Pepe's advice and changed its nets to have larger holes. The commercial nets with a finer weave were scouring the Cienega and reducing the seed fishlings for the next generation. Now the fish are plentiful again and by noon the day's catch is cleaned, packed, and on its way to Turbo.

 

George Carlin says to me, "There are no problems which are not also solutions. Death is a problem. It is also a solution." He has big plans for ecotourism but no big boats, he warns. If the big boat is invented which can reach this place, says the Abuelo, well, we have plenty of dynamite. He hopes that damn logging company will come back, for just one night.

 

They offer us mostly deep fried fish, which I pass up, but I eat the sweet overripe plaintain, which is salmon-red and comes wrapped in banana leaf. On the way back we take a different route, but the panga driver has to divert from his usual tour because of the presence of Africanized bees. I first noticed the Africans in Montaña Magica, and photographed a pregnant flower with no fewer than five kinds of bees in attendance. One of them was a big guy, and Don Gabriel agreed it was an African. Gabriel wants to keep bees, and the extension service is advising him to start with an Africanized variety, since anything he uses will become Africanized anyway. In Sasdardí, where there can be as many as 200 species of bees inhabiting a single tree, the presence of Africans is particularly troubling, because they make their own monoculture, either cross breeding or starving out the competition. They have become a nuisance for the fisherman of the Atrato, who now steer wide of the small islands where they have taken up residence.

 

Back in Unguia, Alejandra, Jeff and I had planned to jump from our panga straight onto horses for a ride to Kuna land, but the rain delay, the two hours spent going each way on the river, and our lingering sojourn in Mariella's Garden of Eden has thrown our schedule off and we return to find the horses otherwise disposed. There are hundreds of vaqueros riding wild in the streets of Unguia, drinking Aguacante, celebrating the equinox (or maybe they do this every Sunday) and rallying behind their mayoral candidates. Balboa, a town near here, had the first democratically elected mayor in the hemisphere in the early 16^th Century, and so claims the title of Western cradle of democracy.

 

In this town, after dark, you don't have to worry about cars (there are none), or motorcycles (they have lights), but galloping horses – their sound drowned out by the blare of loudspeakers from competing discos – are a real hazard.

 

I go back to the school and check on my earthbag bench, repair a few cracks in the plaster, and notice that the rice hulls have arrested rain erosion on the cob serpent bench. So I spread a layer of rice hulls on both benches and lightly grind them into the surface. When I get home I discover my laundry has completely dried after just a few hours of sunlight.

 

Its our last night in Unguia and the townspeople are filling the square, dancing the fandango around the bandshell, brass band blaring. The fandango is like El Pavo, rows of hopping and twirling happy people, circumnavigating the band which has only one neverending tune. The younger ones drop from one row and circulate to the next, displaying charms and stamina, all night long. It is going on when we enter the disco for our closing circle, and the same song will still be playing when we go to bed. In the upstairs of the disco we pack the hall with course participants, their friends and families, dozens of schoolchildren, a troupe of exotic (and erotic) African Dancers of Darien, and our radio DJ and his portable megaspeakers. Tenete Nelson and I chat about my travels in the region and he calls me Albert and is very warm and friendly, for a black beret festooned with armaments.

 

We do the alternating high-decibel salsa and DJ intro and public speaking ritual again. With the crowd swelling from a couple hundred teenagers I begin to wonder about the compressive strength of the floor, with its one stairwell exit. Where is that Fire Marshall? I keep my remarks short: there are 3 laws of permaculture; care for people; care for Earth – and from these two come abundance for the practitioner, and from abundance comes the third – obligation to share. And in this sharing we have three personal responsibilities: first to learn, then to practice, and then to teach. And from teaching will come abundance for all. This draws applause, and when I sit down the Tenete shakes my hand and pats me on the back. I hope there are no Martians in the crowd taking notes.

 

Leon's Borojo Shakes:

Into a blender mix:

Pulpa de borojo: 2 cuchcradas soperas (75 g)

1 litro leche;

Azucar al gusto o miel abejas (o brandy)

 

La Chocoana Original:

1 litro aqua filtrada o hervida que se deja enfriar (boiled water then cooled)

Pulpa de borojo: 3 cuchadadas muy limpia (100 g) (they like it ripe here, you should smell it from a meter away to be really authentic)

Azucar al gusto y limon

(Add ice cubes in the blender if you have them).

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia Day 25

 

Six am and we assemble in the Unguia Square, truck over to the waiting panga, and splash back to Turbo. There we find the whole ENA crowd, having made the flight from Medellin that morning. We fill the large, canopied boat and by 9 am we are gliding across smooth seas to Trigana, the beach swim, the arepas at Christina's, Juangee's goldfish pond, the waterfall hike, stopping at a deep pool to skinny dip and revive in the cascade. Rice and beans are waiting when we top the cliff to the Sasardi cocina at 2:30 and then we are free to catch up on sleep, read, write and visit with old friends, too often worlds apart.

 

The little black faced monkeys I had been calling squirrel monkeys venture closer and their salt-and-pepper saddles and white crown patches tell me they are much rarer than I had suspected. These are Geoffroy's Tamarin (Saguinus oedipus Geoffroy). They have been exterminated throughout much of the Isthmus. They prefer second growth but that is where they are most vulnerable. Strictly diurnal, they feed twice each day, 60% fruit, 30% insects, 10% green plants. They stay in monogamous pairs, one pair to a troup and the rest are generally their offspring, although the younger ones switch troups when they converge to feed in the same trees. They need home range of only about 26 ha. so in theory Sasardi may support 9 troups, and we have seen the two that come by the office and cocina twice a day.

 

In Turbo I picked up the Monday morning Medellin paper and the news is mixed. Magic Mountain has made the front page. It is now part of a 10,000 ha. Natural Park (a regional strategy to deny yet another economic base to the guerrillas). Endless unseasonal rain and unusual cold has brought a flu epidemic to Medellin and schools are starting to close to limit its spread. The massacre of 60 people at roadblocks that we heard about is reported, but additional military units are en route, which should secure our direction of withdrawal through the airport at Apartado a couple of weeks from now.

 

All in all, I am glad to be back in Sasardi, where it feels strangely like home.

 

Verse rodeado por el fuego,

To see oneself surrounded by the fire,

Abrazado a un mediodia calcinate,

Embracing the incinerating heat of mid-day,

Cercano a la libelula,

Near to the dragonfly,

Al carbon,

To the black rock,

Al calor del misterio.

To the color of mystery.

 

Fundido tambien al lodo

From foundations of mud

Y la desesperacion del horrendo vivir

And despair, borne of living horrors

En ciertas plazas

In some plazas

Donde no rige otro tiempo

Where there is no other time

Distinto al oro

Different than gold.

 

Nadie se salva de la vida

Nobody is safe from the presence of life

Ni de la muerte

Neither from death

Y todos se empeñan en rendir culto al sol:

And all are committed to worship the sun:

Que enciende

That brightens

Vibra

Vibrates

Y vuelve cenizas!

And returns all to ashes!

 

- Jorge David

 

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 27.

 

With the ENA group on the Reserva the rythem has been altered. We are in our second day of meetings and most have not yet abandoned the pretense of civilization. Even ecovillagers cannot resist staying up partying until late, drawing down the solar charge on the batteries, forcing Claudio to unmuzzle the generator. Or sleeping until 15 minutes to 9, then throwing on some shorts, chugging lukewarm coffee, and teetering down the steep rock path to the thatched meeting kiosk.

 

The forest is powerful but it is not fast. The consciousness of the trees is thick here, but you have to open yourself a little to feel it.

 

My cuts have not healed. The worst are the ones on my left knee which didn't bleed at first, then crusted over red, then turned grey, then green. I pick at my scabs and wash them often, but the area around the lacerations is now swollen and inflamed. My bruises have become huge and blue. I went to Rodrigo again for help and he said salt. Then Linda told me she uses Citricil - Grapefruit Seed Extract - for her horses as a topical antibiotic, so I'll try that. Nobody has any Triple Antibiotic!

 

Today a local hummingbird appeared. It was not exotic one I have been waiting to see, Colibri Cola de Ragueta (Ocreatus underwoodii). It was a White-bearded Hermit (Phaethornis hispidis). While Jeff runs down the Living Routes initiatives, it grazes the red flowers Claudio planted in the river stone raised beds at the entrance to our gathering space. At dusk a large bat circles the forest edge outside our enclosure, and after taking a full sonar recon, sweeps the room of gnats so fast that almost none of the people in the room are aware of his comings or goings. I don't have any idea what he looks like. He is a stealth bat.

 

An unusual daytime rain today, the second in a row, but we hardly notice, cocooned in our business as if we were in Colorado or Massachusetts and outside it was snowing. The insularity of our cultural addictions might be insulting to this forest, but it doesn't really care. The night belongs to other species and they are serenely confident, knowing we ignore them at our peril.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 28.

 

At lunch we finish the last of the really hot salsa. It was in a 1/2 pint French's mustard container and the active ingredient was a tiny red berry the size of a wheat kernal, Aji pajarito (Capsicum baccatum), It was first observed by Europeans in the 16^th Century, and was then in widespread use by the indigenous peoples of the West Indies. Capitan Gonzolo Fernandez de Oriendo y Valdes (1478-1557) wrote in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias:

 

"Axi es una planta muy conecida e usada en todos las parte desdas Indias, islas e Tierra-Firme, e provechosa e necessario, porque es caliente e da muy buen gusto e apetito con los otros manjares; … es la pimenta de los Indios … porque en todas las diligencia e atencion porque continuadmente lo comen … E no es menos agradable a los chripstianos … por ser muy buena especia, da buen gusto e calor al estomago … Llevarse a Espana e a Italia."

 

The Indians of Vichada, out in the llanos to our southeast, prepare an aphrodasiac drug called "pequi" with aji pajarito. We are going to miss this drug. The mild salsa that remains takes 20 times more to confer the same heat, with a fraction of the flavor.

 

The email prods its nose under our blankets like a nasty scorpion. The two PV panels are wringing out enough sunlight for both the radiophone and the laptops. Philip has a far-reaching proposal to restructure the Global Ecovillage Network board, rife with implications. Alison fires off a flare to let me know we have unemployment insurance troubles with the State of Tennessee. Alejandra is busy confirming flights and making other travel arrangements for our departures. Linda and Kailash also have their iBook running and it draws a steady flow of comments and questions from other parts of the network who could not attend the meeting. These things don't roll easily off my back, but I am determined to keep the stress in check, despite a heavy day of presentations, fundraising discussions, and policy debates. At the end of the evening my blood pressure is 126/79.

 

[Ed. note: a selection of my photographs of Sasardi are posted at http://ena.gaia.org/gen-americas/sasardi.html]

 

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 29.

 

Rain lingers through the morning, but Claudio leads another hike through the primary forest. Every scrap of clothing I have is damp. My belt and boots are molding. The dress shirt and pants I wore to the University in Medellin are checkered with mildew. Above the hilltop I watch the swallows - 20 or more - swooping up and down at the canopy. I see what has to be the 10^th different salamander, but Claudio has no reptile book to help with identification.

 

We are followed by the whitefaced monkeys who are after fruit in the Totumo tree (Crescentia acuminata). Caludio says when he cut the two large Tamboleros beside his house the monkeys screamed at him because they were the shortest route to the Totumo and now they have to go a long way around to avoid the dangers of the ground. He said when they screamed and pounded he felt very bad.

 

When Mary had been here for a few years the farmer on the North bank of the stream clear cut his land for plantain and flower crops. When this became a Reserva, he moved away and now balsom, jarumo, and seconias are colonizing the slopes, seeded by the primary forest on the South bank. Already, in less than 12 years, this forest has grown to a larger, denser and more diverse stand than exists at The Farm after 50 years.

 

At a small pool on a side stream a Crowned Woodnymph (Thalurania columbiana) bathes until our movement interrupts her, then returns when we have passed to finish her bath in peace. At two points on our walk we encounter Quetzals. First, a female White-tailed Trogon (Trogon ciridis), large, with a bluish bill, blue eye-ring, and white undertail. Later, a female Blue-tailed Trogon (Trogon camptus) with white eyes and blue rump. There are 12 varieties of Quetzal in Colombia and although none are as impressive as their Guatemalan or Mexican cousins with long peacock tailfeathers, they are nonetheless large and noble, very private birds.

 

In her opening Linda compared our network of more than 12,000 ecovillages to a flock of birds, more like baby ducks, leaving the mama and flying on their own. Some are leaving to fly. Some are already soaring. Soon we will gather larger V-formations and when we get to that, the world will have no choice but to follow our honking flight as they look skyward from every doorstep and sidewalk. An interesting image to juxtapose with the Dubya juggernaut.

 

The grapefruit seed extract seems to have reduced some of my swelling and the smaller cuts on my right leg have cleared up now. The tiger paw stripes on my left knee are still ugly and full of pus, so I show them to Rodrigo again. "Salt" he says.

 

The stealth bat returns at sundown and this time, as he scans his route into the kiosk with some inverted loops, I get to notice his irredescent blue wings. I suspect this makes him Myotis albescens, because that bat's dorsal hairs are black at the base and white at the tip, making it look frosted when still and irridesce in movement, reflecting off the blue sky as it performs its daring low altitude stunts.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 30.

 

Today is our agreed beach day. It's difficult to muster the troops, but after granola and coconut milk - and fried fish for the pescaterians - we get the train moving around 9 am and follow the River Sardi to its terminus, a mile-long stretch of open sandy beach, no houses, no people, called Playa Sardi. Here we swim for 4 hours then dine on rice, beans and plantain fritters, brought by the local black brujo named "The Conch" and served on banana leaves. The salt water and topical Citricil concentrate is starting to repair my infected knees, which still recall the gravel moto slide, sometime in the distant past.

 

Where the Sardi meets the sea are tidal pool edge ecosystems and they draw a lot of jungle traffic. Crocodiles and 2-foot-long lizards crawl the dark inland banks. There frogs lay their eggs 20 feet up in broad leaves, where they hatch into tadpoles before dropping into the river. I am transfixed by a chattering pair of irredescent green tanagers with white stripes on their crown and bib, brilliant yellow vests, black faces and eyes. They chatter and demonstrate to their flock passing overhead. These ones are not in the book, because their closest description fits Hemithrarpis guira; squared tail, wolverine helmet, brilliant canary waistcoat, squeeky phrases, fluttering and gleaning the top of the canopy in pairs within a mixed flock. But they lack the red collar that distinguishes the Guira tanager, so I am stumped. Overhead an osprey (Pandion haliacetus) circles offshore. A kingfisher rollercoasters over the tidal pools, while a 28-inch green lizard hides in the crotch of two limbs.

 

Our plans shift as the weather changes. We hike the kilometer over to Trigana then decide it is best to cancel our planned restaurant dinner to climb the waterfall route back to the Reserva before incipient thunderstorms swell the creeks and force us back to a riskier overnight in Trigana's cabanas, where there may be Martians.

 

While we were off in Unguia the Martians visited Santa Maria, a beachfront only a little bigger than Trigana a few clicks up the coast. They cut off a man's head and played futbol on the beach with it. They killed a horse and a pig which were wandering loose, as most animals here do. Now the people of Trigana keep their animals in pens and pastures, so as not to tempt more terrors.

 

The Martians don't venture far inland from the beach because the Africans control the mountains and are usually camped in much larger bands. If they accidentally stumble into such a nest, the Martians might find themselves stung by 500 swarming Africans.

 

Back on the Reserve, we are called to committee meetings. After the finance committee I eat the regular weightwatchers' supper - a slice of bread and a glass of fruit juice - and go to bed. My mind is back on Playa Sardi, snorkling after a school of silver sea bass, "donde un pez interroga al misterio."

 

Otra vez el agua

Asaltandome por las cañadas

Metiendes en mispeñascos

Acompañando mis cataratas

Porque?

Por el espejo bendecido

Por los instrumentos musicales

Que euloquecian a Van Goh?

Amarillo de trebol tostado

Ocres en las lianas

Habian lianas en el viejo mundo?

 

La liana,

El privilegio del tropico donde cuelgan ellas,

Las serpientes muertas

Las cabellos de la luna

Vibra el bosque,

Saltan los grillos,

Miles de dulzainas encienden esta noche.

Quisera hamacarme en tu magica voz

Que conduce al principio originario.

 

Donde un pez interroga al misterio

Quien hable detras de cada quien?

Su doble o el ejercito de espiritus que le rondan?

Tal vez sea la voz de Lao Tse

O el canto de Whitman

Eran doncellas y angeles en todo caso

Los que anidaban en el principio.

 

Quieres arrastramo a tus profundidades

Alla voy, alisto mis arreos,

Cambio de piel, de nombre, de sitio de hemisferio.

Alla voy, a reunirme con los osos

Las lagartijas,

Las serpiente vivas,

El gavilan arrogante

Dejame navegar por tus praderas

Que yo soy el viento que las hara florecer!

 

 

Again the water

Catching me in the creeks,

Going inside my boulders,

Rolling with my waterfalls.

Why?

For the blessed mirror,

The musical instrument

That drove Van Gogh crazy?

Yellow from toasted clover,

Ochre in the vines.

Were there vines in the old world?

 

The vine,

The tropical privilege where hang

The deadly serpents,

The hairs of the moon.

The forest vibrates,

Grasshoppers dance.

Thousands of harmonies are lighting the night.

I would love to rock in the hammock of your magic voice

That guides into the original beginning.

 

Where a fish probes the mysteries

Who speaks behind each one?

Your double or the spirit army that surrounds?

Maybe it will be the voice of Lao Tsu

Or the chant of Whitman.

They were maidens and angels anyway

The ones who were nestlings in the beginnings.

 

Would you like to sweep me into your depths?

There, I ready my load,

I change from skin, from name, from place, from hemisphere.

There I go, to gather with the bears,

The salamanders,

The living snake,

The arrogant hawk.

Let me navigate in your prairies,

That I am the wind that made them flower!

 

- Jorge David

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 31.

 

Most crashed early last night, although a few lasted through Enrique's raw video footage of Bolivia. Jungle consciousness eventually claims even the most cable ready. Here there are roots which bleed red sap when cut, ferns which close when touched, and vines which tack slowly to human movements nearby. I rose early and went back to work on my greywater system, transplanting water plants into the rock filter, pacing the distance to available stream gravel, scaming materials from unused fencing and the firewood pile. We are waiting on more cut boards to finish the reed bed retaining walls, which snake down the west slope from the cocina. Then it will take some time to haul golf-ball sized rock from the creek up the steep and muddy trail.

 

A coquette hummingbird can-cans at my elbow, grazing the potted bird of paradise on the serving sideboard. Its going to be a Nivea day. As the legions troop in for breakfast, more than a few are seriously sunburned. It is amazing that with so many people who have not learned some simple limits we have progressed so far as an organization. It is also a constant irritant to me that as accomplished permaculturists we do not stack functions, by singing and dancing while we work, advancing our efforts, rather than partying afterword or in-between - such as dancing on top of Unguia school's earthbag wall (a cause of plaster cracking in the days which followed), or staying up drinking Columbian coffee until we lose precious sleep and are late and hungover in the following day's meetings.

 

Another pet peeve of mine is circle dances and songs to the 4-beat theme of "Drums Along the Mohawk," accent on the first beat. I can now tell within the first 4 bars that a song will contain a chorus of some phoney Hollywood Little Red Sambo chant: Haya Hoya Haya Ho, or Whichitay-tay, queueing Custer's cavalry to ride over the hill and do some serious ethnic cleansing. These songs are justifyably offensive to Native Americans, whose own songs tend to run in 2-beat like a heartbeat, and I have no idea why such a green-minded group persists in accumulating a repertoire. Maybe it would clarify the issue if I would sing some blackface Minstrel songs like "Mammy from Alabamie." For now I am simply excusing myself and making the sign of the cross to ward off Nosferatu. I have also been translating from Spanish to English. Whenever people say "Ah ho!" I say "Garlic!"

 

This being the first sunny day on the Reserva in the past week, I think doing my laundry would be A Good Thing. Unfortunately, the other 30 wearers of clammy undergarments are miraculously struck by the same bolt of inspiration and by the start of Council every clothesline, rooftop and low-hanging tree limb has sprouted cotton. Well, they'll be gone in 2 days and then I can wash my socks.

 

Much as I enjoy this place, this company, these slow days, the wonders it is doing for my physical recuperation, my mind is beginning to bend homeward and I have started to count the days. One more day of Council. Three days to spend with Mary on my idea for a children's book, and to plan the next course. Two days in that course before turning it over to Jeff and Julio and heading back to Trigana, then Turbo, then Montaña Magica, repacking from advance base Seal pack to base camp cached roller luggage, the 7-am trip to Medellin airport, a 6-hour layover in Miami, Alison at the airport, hugs and tears.

 

To get from here to there we have 23 still-open decision items and a closing evaluation, an overbooked course without a concept, never mind a curriculum, a dicey overnight in Trigana, three or four military checkpoints with dogs and guns, three takeoffs and three landings - all told more hazards than 32 holes with Tiger Woods.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 32.

 

Everything clicks for our last day in Council. We slide through a tough agenda with relatively little friction. A dozen significant agreements consensed to.

 

DECISIONS

 

1.     Approved the ENA logo

2.     Re-elected officers

3.     Created 9^th region

4.     Chose the 9^th region's initial delegate

5.     Created an Ecovillage Contact Office (ECO) in each region

6.     Limited access to the Council internal list by lurkers

7.     Clarified decisionmaking process between meetings

8.     Approved the Regional Network Policy

9.     Elected a representative to the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) board

10.   Set dates for the next Council meeting and narrowed the site selections (Jamaica, Cuba)

11.   Created a timetable for revising the Strategic Plan

12.   Created a plan for bylaws revision

13.   Reported in numerous decisions by committees

 

There was some disappointment with unfulfilled expectations related to creation of budget detail and final strategic plan. Maybe I should have spent more time in the financial committeee meetings. This is reassigned to committee. Likewise the ECO guidelines were presented too unformed and have been sent back. But on the whole we are satisfied.

 

After lunch I muster a dozen pairs of hands and start putting stone into bags at the stream and schlepping them up the hill. If we had twice as many people we could have formed a bucket brigade, and if we had twice as much time we might have rigged a cable hoist. As it is, we use the four strongest backs - the Cuban, Roberto; Juan the Colombian; Giovanni the Mexican; and the Venezuelan, Orlando - making the most climbs to carry sacks of rock 130 meters upslope to the newly constructed wetland by the dishwashing sink. Within the hour we are done and I shout down to Alberto, "Finito!" and soon he and the other stonepickers, Uruguayan Lucia, Canadian Lee and Venezuelan Daniel, are back with the tools and admiring our work.

 

Giovanni sets about reworking the Reserva's wooden drums - disassembling the broken pieces, sanding the edges, repairing the rawhide strings, and cutting new hides for heads. Linda, Kailash and Beatriz take a pack horse and depart for the panga. Others pack for Unguia, where they will begin a Community Consensus course in 3 days time.

 

This night we all soon retire after dinner. After my experience in Trigana with the Martians I had planned to keep a jump bag next to my bed with all the bare essentials: flashlight, glasses, prescriptions, compass, watch, passport, money, credit cards, socks. I scoped out a quick exit route from my bed through the side window, onto the slope above, out of view from the path, and up through the underbrush into hiding in the forest. Thinking if I were the head Martian, I would first send in a recon unit, find my principal targets - cocina, dog, office, houses - and then bring up the main force, posting sentries on the escape routes (the streambed and its access points) before giving the order for my troops to take the village. From this standpoint, the house I am sleeping in is probably one of the safer ones - farthest up from the stream, hard to reach without first taking down several others along the way, perhaps with a lot of noise. Claudio has made the trail to this house very obscure from the hillside above the office, so it is possible that at night - unless there is a light on here - it would go undiscovered. Still, I can't eliminate the possibility that my first warning would be Martians downstairs, giving me only seconds to react and scurry through the window.

 

On the first night back here I was comforted that Claudio's dog, a cross between a Great Dane and a Chocolate Labrador, has decided to sleep just under my window every night. This moves my early warning tripwire up by at least 3 minutes, although it diminishes the prospect of escaping notice entirely, unless the dog charges out to meet the intruders at the streambed. It also means the initial recon might not go undetected, as Claudio's house has excellent sound and smell access to the channel of the creek.

 

Thinking it through, unless we were selected as special targets, any reconnoiter in force in the direction of this village would first have to bypass a number of choice targets of opportunity at houses and smaller villages down valley. Any gunfire or shouts would echo up the waterfall route to Claudio's from at least a mile away.

 

That being the case, I stop straining my ears to listen to jungle movements as I lie in bed at night and instead just let sleep engulf me. Eventually I forget about even keeping a jump kit.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 33.

 

Up at 6:30, awakened by a female band-tailed barbthroat (Threnetes ruckeri) hovering over my mosquito net. The sun has been making a huge rainbow behind us for more than half an hour. Grab my shorts, water flask, head for the office for a chance on the laptop before Alejandra awakes, but it has only 3% of its battery left and the sun is not above the forest enough for solar power. The computer is immunized from my pesterings. While Giovanni restrings the drums I sip coffee and continue translating the poems of Jorge David, occasionally interrupting his concentration to ask for interpretations of phrases like "el quebranto de los rocas."

 

Overhead a black-cheeked woodpecker (Melanerpes pucherani) with churring cherrr, is looking for the same fruit the monkeys like. It dawns on me that when Mary first came into this valley, a city runaway at 15, and was smitten by the abundance, what she was looking at was the garden of the monkeys. The fruit that they liked - the passaflora, guayaba, plantain, banana, coconut, avocado, and papaya - these are seeds they passed through and deposited, encased in fertilizer, onto prime sunny locations on these slopes. Generations of monkeys gardened here between the occasional interventions of men. This is the monkey's garden, and it just happens that we two-leggeds like to eat most of the same things.

 

Starting at 9 am it takes me until 2:30 to handwash 24 pieces of clothing with bar soap and a soft bush. Three hours of that time needs to be devoted to an instructors' meeting in hopes of developing a concept, curriculum, schedule and teaching assignments for the advanced permaculture course. The day is sunny, however, and many items, now polkadotted with mildew, get nearly dry before sunset. Wisely, I move them all to indoor lines in the washshed despite the clear skies. I am down to my last pair of shorts but I don't need much else.

 

Jeff cajoled Don Harris, whose Harris Hydro Turbine of Davenport, California has been making cast silicon-bronze pelton wheel turbines for 30 years, into donating a $1000 reconditioned unit to ENA so we could install it for the Reserva. Jeff then managed to get it through the various customs checks and schlep it up the waterfall path to where it is now being installed on the river bank below the kitchen. Its feed pipe gathers 300 feet of head over 150 feet of horizontal run upstream. The Harris will produce up to 1,500 watts of low voltage DC power (12, 24, or 48 volt), which should virtually eliminate the need for the Reserva's portable gas generator.

 

Since 1970 more than 1.3 billion people in the developing world have gotten access to electricity through government programs, but those are nearly all urban grid extensions. Outside of the cities, the number of rural poor with no access to electricity has remained constant at 4 billion people for the past 2 decades. This of course creates a lower standard for health, nutrition, infant mortality and potential lifespan, which in turn accelerates urban in-migration. The solution that most international agencies are promoting is extension of the costly and inefficient national grid system, with projects like the Three Gorges Dam or nuclear power at its base. The path less traveled by is the one we are demonstrating here at the Reserva: off-grid microhydro, solar PV, and eventually, biomass stirling and fuel cell systems. A recent Worldwatch Report (No 151) goes so far as to suggest that rapid technical advances now underway in micropower may permit rural regions to leapfrog the dinosaur distribution networks and go directly to state of the art superefficient solar and renewables.

 

A sweatlodge has been prepared so we all skip supper and gather around the bonfire while Alberto explains the ritual and his provenance as a provider in the Lakota tradition. The fire is extraordinary. Sparks leap 50 feet with long glimmering tails, like Chinese banner dancers. My blood pressure is down so I feel good about doing this. Inside the lodge I make it okay through the first round invocations and prayers of gratitude. The second round, dedicated to the plant kingdom, goes on a long time and causes my heart to race. I feel lightheaded so when the flap opens, I ask to exit. The third round was a good one for me to sit out. They cover the Hit Parade of Little Red Sambo songs and Giovanni tells a pretty long Coyote story as Alberto turns up the steam. When the flap finally goes up, a half-dozen naked bodies plop out, some of them prostrate in the muddy path for a good long while.

 

I go back in with the smaller tribe for the fourth round and something strange occurs. Halfway through the round - it's now around 10 pm - there is a distant roll of thunder, as if to emphasize a point Alberto is making as he ladles water onto the 28 steaming rocks. Two minutes later it begins to rain, and a minute after that, crack, boom and the torrent is directly overhead lighting our silhouettes and drowning our prayers.

 

We don't realize it yet but the sweatlodge is only 2 minutes from destruction. Those of us on the Western side first appreciate that we are sitting in 2 inches of water, and while some squirm and shift about, it is actually a welcome respite from the heat of the basalt pyre glowing 2 feet away. The torrent picks up and 2 inches becomes 6 inches and those on the Eastern side are also engulfed. Alberto cries "Om Mytakoeosi!" six times, throws open the flap, and we exit to stand in the flashing torrent, steaming naked.

 

"Quien se acuerda del sol? Nadie.

Quien se acuerda del aire? Nadie."

Quien se acuerdade la inocencia de los dioces

Que aroman las hojas,

La nariz de los grillos

Y el quebranto de las rocas?

Nadie.

 

Que bremos el espejo de la ingratitud

Y vayamos a la mirada sagrada

Que hace reverencia al primer rayo de sol, al ultimo,

Que invoca a los espiritus del almiento,

A los guardianes de la noche.

 

Vayamos otra vez al temblor

De contemplar lo existente

Y horrorizados por su fuerza

Hinguemos el pie,

Inclinemos la cabeza.

 

La gracia del vivir surgira

Como una flecha de la tierra,

Y convertida en aureola benevola

Coronara nuestras cabezas como principes.

 

Solo es rey quien ha sido grato con el viento!

Solo ese: el que bendice la tormenta y el rayol!

 

 

Who remembers the sun? No-one.

Who remembers the air? No-one.

Who remembers the innocence of the Gods

That sweetens the scent of the leaves

The nose of the crickets

And the chattering of the rocks?

No-one.

 

We should break the ungrateful mirror

And bring together sacred reflections

That make ceremonies to the first rays of the sun, and to the last,

Which invoke the spirits of the food plants,

To the guardians of the night.

 

Let us go once more to the trembling earth

To contemplate what exists,

And the horror, that by its strength

Puts us to our knees,

Inclines our heads.

 

The grace of being alive will emerge

Like an arrow shot from the earth,

Becoming a hopeful rainbow

Crowning our heads like princes.

 

The King has been grateful, giving us the wind!

He has blessed us with the thunder and the storm!

 

— Jorge David

 

To the light of the lightning we wander naked up the stone-stepped forest paths, now cascades of muddy water, making us choose our steps wisely, pausing between strikes to await our next selections.

 

At the cocina there is cabbage soup and whole grain bread from the dutch oven on the Lorena, but I am not hungry and continue selecting rock steps up to the office where I collect my flashlight and water flask before continuing on to Claudio's house and bed, dodging whistling frogs and giraffe-patterned black and yellow toads.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 34.

 

The Reserva Network's own panga, which costs $100 in fuel everytime it makes the crossing, is being brought to Trigana to carry the Consensus instructors and translators to Unguia. Claudio rises at first light to go down for pack horses. I rise at 6:30 to rainbows again, to jot in my journal and then go make a floppy copy of my dispatches from Alejandra's laptop, which will leave on the panga. From this point I won't be emailing anything home and the days will seem very long indeed.

 

Within 4 hours the population of the Reserva has metamorphosed. ENA is gone. Twenty new course participants have trekked up from the beach. Mary's husband, Steve, returned from Costa Rica. It turns out Mary is married to the Minister of Environment. I reposition my damp clothing to the roof of the laundryhouse and hope for more sun. The sky is making no promises.

 

The story Mary tells is a real stemtwister. She left home at 15, stealing money from her mother's dresser, enough to take the bus from Medellin to Turbo. When she arrived there, she bribed a panga driver to take her across the Bay for some oranges and some songs she would sing on the crossing. Alone on the beach, she followed the sounds of drums to a small village of half-naked black people who were celebrating the full moon. From them she learned enough of the forest to find her own food, and so she set off and went deep into the jungle, until she discovered the monkey's garden. There she lived for two years in a stick hut, alone. The stories she tells - of local characters, animal encounters, life and death and war - are wonderful and frightening.

 

As darkness approaches I break away from my talk with Mary to gather my somewhat drier laundry off the lines. It will rain again tonight. My clothes still have a dampness, but I doubt it will get much drier now.

 

With the change of population the wildlife has also shifted. Howlers are up closer to the village. A huge iguana, easily 10 kg and maybe 20 kg and over 4 feet long has intersected the Tamarins' afternoon route and demonstrates at the monkeys with bobbing head, craned neck, and raised comb, and then changes his mind and starts stalking the little fellows with snail speed, hoping for meal of rare mono. Jeff came across a boa in the creek as thick as his thigh, while he was measuring the route for the hydro system. We are also being visited by a bumble bee that is larger than some of the hummingbirds we have seen.

 

Mary has given depth to more of the characters here: Juan Paramont, who wears the short orange boots, different color knee socks and never stops running, chopping, carrying, hefting; Juan who works in the kitchen offering food to everyone; Jorge and Hugo, the omniscient office staff who came early to this site and transformed the vision from sustainable family to sustainable rainforest; Julian, the neighbor who grazes 4 horses on slopes steeper than the lemon terraces at Torri, and always wears a broad-brimmed, low-crowned straw hat, rubber boots, and sheathed machete; Nuña, whose grandmother mothered Mary when she was a teenager; Mono, who walks 6 hours to the Leatherback beach every 2 weeks to check on the tortoise population and the safety of their nests, a smiling local teenager who brought himself here to study nature and learn to read; Inez, his pregnant wife who cooks and cleans; Mara, Mary's 12-year-old daughter who has the same haunting beauty and grace as her mother; Monica and Willy, who have been here for a year and 6 months, respectively, city kids building this strange ecovillage in the jungle; Louisa, Claudio's lovely, literate girlfriend who does the bookeeping; Steve, Mary's husband, who divides his time between the Reserva, Apartado where he is Minister of the Environment, and Medellin where he is the head of Colombia's system of National Parks and Reserves, who speaks a little English and wants to know how we make our geiger counters.

 

The Abuela has come up from Trigana for our course and brought a killer picante salsa, the kind you dispense with a toothpick. The other night we were exchanging stories of insects we had eaten and Alejandra stole the trophy with her tale of fat-bellied termites used as (extremely) hot sauce by some tribe in the Gran Sabana. She said after eating one she lay on her back in her mosquito net for half the night in an acid trip of swirling colors and Ghosts of Chanukkah's Past. We were all impressed, even Orlando, who ladles the Abuela's salsa onto his Noodles Coconoff with a spoon.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 35.

 

I am awakened by a sound like the beating of hummingbird wings, but it is still dark and hummingbird wings rise and fall in pitch and this is more constant, and besides, it is pitch black. I cannot figure it out. An over-the-mountain helicopter? A Trigana chain saw? A nocturnal honey bee? At last it dawns on me as I detect cautious steps on dry leaves. It is the growling stomach of a panther or tigerette, so quiet it has not awakened the dog or disturbed the snores of Julio, whose bed platform is much closer to the prowler's path. The cat moves uphill and trips the early warning system of the Howlers, whose shreiks roll everyone over and make the dog bark. Light is still an hour away, so all are soon back to sleep, except for me, who reaches for a flashlight and moves into Chapter 12 of Frank McCrory's 'Tis. What would young, low-self-esteemed, struggling Frank think about this fellow reading stories of a Irish busboy in New York City while lying with a flashlight in a mosquito net listening to monkeys feuding with panthers in the deepest jungles of the Isthmus of Panama?

 

Once more half the class has had travel problems and are expected to arrive more than halfway through the second day. Once more we have the dilemma of what to do with the half that is here, while still providing a full course to the late arrivals. The instructors confer and decide to switch the order of days, so that Julio will begin with construction of terraced gardens in the morning, and I will continue to develop my biological wastewater system in the afternoon.

 

At lunch all but two of the remaining participants miraculously appear so we go back to Plan A and focus the remainder of Day 1 on a review of permaculture principles and theory. After dinner we watch the Cuban's gardening videos.

 

Roberto the Cuban is going through some changes. He is a principal officer of the Antonio Nuñez Jimenez Foundation, one of Cuba's leading ecology think tanks. Antonio Nuñez Jimenez rode on horseback with Fidel into Havana when they kicked out Battista. He was an ecologist who went to the mountain camps to help the revolution. After the change of government, he founded Cuba's Academy of Sciences. He gave it a focus on nature and sustainability, which was very far-sighted if you are old enough to remember the 1960's.

 

Fidel appointed him Ambassador to Peru and Director of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. In the latter role he got the country to adopt organic gardening as its national standard. He also founded the Academy of Geography and Academy of Speliology and explored the Amazon from its springs to the ocean by canoe. When he died a few years ago, he left a personal library of 40,000 books. In the economic crisis of 1995 Jimenez invited Bill Mollison to come give them pointers in Permaculture and now that, too, has become official government policy and Roberto, as one of the Foundation staff, is called upon to teach it.

 

For Roberto, first there was the ENA meeting with its North-South bilingual harmony and quick consensus process. This ran against the grain of the political theory he had grown up with. Then there was the permaculture course, with Southern and Northern teachers, both of whom go back much farther in organic gardening and permaculture than Cuba does, teaching together. For him this is amazing.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 36.

 

This morning I saw the biggest cockroach ever. Three and a half inches long, one and a half inches wide, it climbed a post to the second deck of Claudio's house a few minutes after sunrise and scurried across to the safety of the shadows under the East railing. Closer examination shows it is most definitely a cockroach. I wonder if they still have "biggest roach" contests in NY or Chicago? This ringer is heavyweight belt material.

 

I am sleeping much better since stealing a cushion Alejandra had been using for a bed before she left for Unguia. I stick it under my mattress and the floor is now much softer. Next time I will bring a pillowcase to stuff with laundry so I can also have better neck support.

 

The woman who works for the network of National Reserves has a sad story, which she relates to Alberto who relates it to me. Sixty of the Natural Reserves, about half, have been closed by paramilitaries or guerrillas in the past few years. The first of the Darien parques has recently fallen the same way - the residents who study the biology and host the visiting scientists have been forced to leave on penalty of death. To the south, these respositories of biodiversity have then become battlefields, suffering indescriminant burning by the guerrillas, aerial bombardment from the army, crop and forest defoliation for antinarcotrafficantes, and other unthinkable crimes against the very heart of nature. It is ecowar writ large, not in the deserts of Kuwait, but in the deepest sanctuaries of life. It is Srebrenica or Grbavica, the peacekeepers withdrawing to leave the utterly dependent refugee Safe Haven in the hands of the perpetrators of ecocide. The country is not moving towards peace, she says, it is moving towards war as the base of its economy, with impoverished youth taking jobs with whomever can pay them, clothe them and feed them.

 

Julio takes the class on a creek walk and tells the story of how he learned to listen to the chattering of the plants; how some vines will follow the fingers of children which lead them through a maze; how deep jungles like these are alive and aware in multiple levels - as if none of us had yet noticed.

 

Back in class there is a vigorous discussion of appropriate technology, both in our ethical, context-dependent sense, and in the sense of appropriating technologies from the rich and unscrupulous to give to the poor and conscientious.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 37

 

A capuchin monkey dislodges a grey hawk (Buteo nitidus) who swoops in one clean motion over 50 meters to midway up a branchless Acacia, where in a second his distinctive black and white stripes are completely hidden in the slightest folds of a climbing vine. This fellow is more adept at concealment than Rambo. I am looking right at him with my field glasses and I cannot see anything but this thin vine, no bigger than one strand of morning glory.

 

Steve takes his and Mary's 4-year-old down to the nursery for some bean trees to transplant and discovers that there are a score of butterfly pupae wiggling under the leaves of a knee-high specimen. He points to the passiflora climbing the shade trellis at the edge of the bed and says that the mother mariposa was attracted to the flowers, which bloomed some months ago, and laid her eggs close by. I have seen the B-52 breeding near the kitchen. I think this is the same butterfly which used to be exported to make special colored dies for U.S. paper currency. I can't imagine how many butterflies it must have taken, boiled down, to make that much die.

 

I saw the orange and black butterflies breeding in a red-flowered bush near the gift shop. I am pretty sure we have these ones back in Tennessee as well. The other butterfly I see every day is a little black and white which works the pathways between houses and can occasionally be seen at the swimming hole. I paid my last visit to that pool this morning and washed away the scabs off my left knee wound, leaving clean, unscarred skin behind. The Citricil is truly miraculous. I soaked a cut on my left heel which came from stomping in the reed bed yesterday and then applied Citricil before putting on my snake boots.

 

Up at the kitchen I show Rodrigo my healed cuts. "Sal" he says, proudly. I trot out my Citricil and try to explain how grapefruit seed extract - semila de toronja - cures everything and Steve asks if I know how to make it. I have to confess I don't.

 

Jeff was sick and Julio was sleeping in this morning so I took the first class and did a session on design methodologies. The pack horses are due after lunch, so I hustle to pack my luggage, now swollen with ENA folderol. We have lunch, a farewell drumming and native dance, and load the pack horses. Alberto sets a quick pace to Trigana and after a beer at Christina's we settle in at Juangee's house, soak in the sea, shower in Juangee's knockout tile cabana, dine at sunset on Trigana's resort deck (scene of my Martian encounter) and as thunder approaches, retreat to the upstairs of Juangee's and tell stories in candlelight of saints and hippies we knew long ago.

 

Dispatches from the front

Colombia, Day 38

 

At 6:30 there are signs of life at Christina's so I walk down the beach and plop down 500 pesos (25 cents) for a cup of presweetened coffee. Ten minutes later Steve shows up, out of breath, having run the waterfall trail and along the way set his hand on a nest of despues mañanas and been stung 5 times. His hand is now swollen badly. He says the panga often gets there at 6:30 so he is glad he hasn't missed it. No worries, it doesn't show up for hours. The three of us have time for a full breakfast with Juangee and a leisurely swim.

 

By 10 am we are starting to get a little nervous about the panga. Steve says he has had to wait 2 or 3 days sometimes. We have to make it to the Apartado airport by 2 pm or our connections are blown. That means we need to be off this beach before 11, to Turbo before 1. Our pooling of all our loose bills in an attempt to blackmail the owner of the one remaining outboard in the harbor to take us to Turbo is interrupted by the arrival of the panga, at 10:15, nearly empty. With calm seas and 2 brief stops, we are in Turbo by 12:40, for me a record crossing. En route Steve points out the Santa Maria ruins where the old jetty built by the Conquistadors in 1515 still can be found under 10 feet of water. Framed in the valley of the original city of Darien stands the Takiakuna, a sacred mountain of the Kuna, where their history says they saught refuge from the flood that covered the Earth between ages.

 

In Turbo we meet a party of Kuna men who are setting out to hike the Takiakuna into Panama. This journey will carry them through the strongholds of the Africans, but Alberto says they will be safe because they are Kuna.

 

The precariousness of Sasardí is stark, looking at the coastline with the mountains outlined above. Paramilitaries control the beaches. Guerrillas control the mountains. The Isthmus is a prime transshipment point between the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, and from the coasts much of Colombia can be reached by sea or by river, which is why it is so strategic for all parties to the war. And there, smack dab in the middle, are the natural reserves, biological treasure chests, exposed to the raiders of our future.

 

We make it to the airport by a pony express of collectivo, bus, and taxi with 5 minutes to spare. Alberto needs all my remaining cash to pay for his ticket because they don't take plastic. Giovanni and Lee join us to fly to Medellin where Steve and Alberto say their goodbyes and we three overnight at Magic Mountain before hitting the Rio Negro airport for Miami and home. It is only when I get home that I learn what has befallen Alejandra.

 

If this were a novel I would probably want to create a dramatic flourish here. Alejandra dies in a hail of bullets as she tries to make her way back from Unguia. In actuality, it is not that dramatic, but it is another close call. She writes:

 

When we arrived to Unguia to do the Consensus workshop, Pepe informed me that at 4pm the women's displaced persons group was meeting with Mayo, a social worker and displaced person herself. They have been meeting for the last 3 to 4 months weekly. The women's group is part of a larger group of displaced people which number approximately 700 (150 families). After being introduced to the group I began by asking people to speak about their dreams for the future. Almost unanimously people spoke about their need for land and a return to farming. These people were campesinos and fishermen and are not accustomed to city life. They are living with friends or renting space in people's homes. Many described having had to move 8-10 times in the last year. I spoke about the ecobarrio concept, the courses we have envisioned and people got very excited. The women are especially interested in micro-business training.

 

During the four day course, I had further opportunities to converse with the DP Association president. He has been able to get them certain educational and health rights. He was himself displaced from Rio Sucio four years ago. He is a dynamic young man in his late twenties or early thirties, with a lovely pregnant wife and young child. He is quite charismatic and committed, despite the hardships he and his family are living. I invited him to join me on the trip to Gilgal and Balboa and Pepe arranged food for his family to enable him to be away during the two days we would be gone. The other representative from the displaced persons group was unfortunately only able to attend the course for one day as a child took sick and she could not continue.

 

We set off on Monday, at 6 AM in a "chiva" taxi: Bea Briggs, Lucia, the president and myself, escorted by Gildardo, one of the Gilgal teachers, husband of Luz Marina who had taken the PC/Ecoconstruction/AT course. Gildardo had taken the Consensus course and was very enthusiastic about our impending visit. Our driver was Hector, a preventive health worker for the ESS in Balboa. The hour long ride was uneventful; although the river had risen quite a lot due to recent rains, we were able to pass with no difficulty. As we entered Gilgal we noticed a very large army encampment, which seemed unusual but not especially noteworthy, as army movements generally defy logic.

 

After a wonderfully hospitable breakfast at the home of Luz Marina and Gildardo, by 8 AM Lucia, Alberto, Gildardo and I got on the waiting horses for the two and a half hour horseback ride to Balboa. As we were making the long trip both ways that same day, Bea decided to pass on the Balboa trip and rest in Gilgal.

 

The horseback ride, trotting and cantering across the countryside, was glorious. The landscape was nonetheless a sad testimony to the environmental destruction occasioned by the cattle industry. There was barely a tree left standing in what was once lush jungle. Cattle ranchers cut almost all trees in the belief that the grass will grow better that way.

 

When we arrived to Balboa we were greeted by the local priest who was expecting us. After the de riguer tour of the crypt of Padre Alcides and the place where farmer children stay to be able to go to school, we had a delicious lunch. By then it was time for the meeting.

 

More than 65 displaced persons met with us in the cock fighting stadium, a common place for communal meetings . They represented the several hundred displaced people currently in Balboa. Through the International Red Cross, these DP's had been receiving food rations most of the last three months. There was mixed feeling about this program on the part of the Padre and the ESS worker, as they felt that these "handouts" were creating a negative impact on people who were used to working for their food. They pointed out the people in the cantina, drinking in the middle of the afternoon, who ordinarily would have been at work in their fields. The ration program in any case was coming to an end and the Padre was trying to negotiate with the guerrillas and the paramilitaries for the people to be able to go back to their fincas to work on their land. At that point it seemed that the guerrillas had agreed and the rep from the Red Cross was coming the following day to inform them as to the results of the negotiations with the paramilitaries.

 

After explaining a bit about who we were and why we were there, we again asked people to speak about their dreams for the future. All were in agreement that their greatest desire was to return to their former life. They were more focused on this possibility than the people from Unguia, due to the relatively short time they had been displaced (less than 3 months) and the work of the Padre to try to help negotiate. For this reason they had not made any alternative plans for the future. There was quite a bit of interest in organizing an association, training courses and the possible development of an alternative settlement should the current situation continue

 

There is a feeling of a "ghost" town in Balboa. A large percentage of the population has left and many others do not venture far from their houses. Many businesses have closed due to incidents in the past with both sides of the armed struggle. The Padre is frustrated in his work, and although he has great support from the people of the town he is asking for a transfer (He has been there three years now). He describes difficult social problems, including alcoholism, sexual promiscuity (encouraged by the army presence), abusive family relationships, lack of educational and cultural opportunities and lack of environmental awareness.

 

The meeting lasted over an hour and at various points people were quite animated, contributing ideas and points of view. The president was an important contributor by relating the discussion realistically to the problems people are facing.

 

After taking a photo of the entire group we set out again on horseback. Unfortunately Lucia was feeling quite ill and spent the whole ride back vomiting frequently. I was also quite stiff by then and not at all in the mood to gallop, so we wound up needing to walk most of the way, which lengthened the trip to over three hours. As we came into Gilgal after dark we noticed quite a few army soldiers at what we were told was the paramilitary encampment. We were not stopped though, and continued on to Luz Marina and Gildardo's house where we quickly collapsed in exhaustion.

 

Next morning, despite our expectations of being so sore we could not walk, we felt quite good. Bea had spent a lovely day with Luz Marina, exploring the town, school, resting and reading and was happy to see us back. After a hearty breakfast we went to the anticipated meeting with the displaced people of Gilgal. Most have been there since February or July and they seemed resigned to the unlikelihood of being able to return to their homes at any time in the near future. They were most interested in courses and possible projects, although they were not sure how long they would stay in Gilgal which has also lost a great deal of their population due to the insecurity in the area.

 

After the meeting we prepared our things as the taxi driver, Hector, who had brought us was scheduled to pick us up at 10AM for the trip back to Unguia. We said our goodbyes and awaited his arrival. When he had not arrived by 10:45, Gildardo set out to look for him. He returned saying that Hector had been informed that there were problems on the road and that he therefore was not going to Unguia that day. I set out to the town phone to call Pepe who had not heard anything about any problems on the road. He said he would confirm though and to call him back in half an hour. When I reached him again he reconfirmed that no one knew of any problems on the road, and said there was a taxi waiting in the park for more passengers to go to Gilgal. He said he would send word and some money so the taxi would leave immediately to come get us in Gilgal.

 

We continued to wait and still no taxi appeared. Meanwhile I used the time to discuss the whole political/historical/social situation with Luz Marina and Jorge, the director of the school. We also took a walk to see the 17 acre piece of land still owned by the cooperative as well as the finca owned by two residents of Gilgal which they have already considered turning into an ecovillage project. We brainstormed the possibility of developing an ecovillage that would manage a DP center, where people could live while they were displaced. If they moved on, their residence would revert to the project for use by another family. When the war is over the center could be used as a residence for an ecovillage training facility.

 

After we got back with these dreams buzzing in our heads we waited some more. At about 3 PM we got an urgent message from the phone office that Pepe needed to speak with me. A rather comical scene ensued at the phone office with the protestant evangelical preacher, some soldiers, and your friend Alejandra needling the preacher about his beliefs in tolerance while we waited for the connection to Unguia. Finally I reached Pepe who explained that the driver of the taxi who was coming to Gilgal to pick us up had been kidnapped on the road, about 20 minutes outside of Unguia.

 

The rest of the passengers walked back to town, which was how the word got back to him. Apparently the guerrillas took advantage of the army having moved out of Unguia on Sunday morning and had been waiting for that particular man. It was fortunate indeed that Hector had received word by 10AM even though the incident did not happen til after 1PM. Otherwise we three innocent "gringas" would have met that roadblock. Although the guerrilla were not looking for us, it is possible they would have regarded us as a "bonus." So Hector took to a place near the river in his taxi and Pepe sent a panga for us. It was a beautiful lesson in protection, faith and calm. Left some food for thought though. Thoughts about life hanging from quite thin threads....

 

We arrived back to Unguia by 6 PM, having missed the 4PM meeting of the displaced people's association (the larger group). We did make it to the meeting of the Committee for Bienestar Comunal that was formed after the Consensus course. They held their meeting by consensus with help from Bea. A good start. Lucely (from the Permaculture course - the thin young girl) did the facilitation.

 

Dispatches from the front - Epilogue

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

 

More bad news from Alejandra. The Martians relocated their base camp to Trigana and they have begun inquiring about the Reserva and intimating that they plan to visit Sasardi. Once they see the solar and hydro powered radiophones and laptops they may never leave. That means Mary and Claudio and the others may have to bug out soon, before they have to host the unholy ghosts. Their only challenge is how to get to Turbo without an encounter. I'm guessing Claudio will set up a rendezvous with the Reserve Network's boat at the Sardi beach, maybe after dark, and avoid Trigana entirely.

 

Pepe reports that the Africans are now in residence in Unguia. The mayoral election went well for the reformers and Pepe's candidate won, which is good news for the DPs, but with the backing of the Martians the incumbant party is planning to stay in office and there is no one able to dispute them. Pepe is perhaps in as much danger as anyone there. Balboa has also fallen to the FARC and the DP camps there are moving along the roads, looking for someplace safer.

 

Ask me what I think about the war now and I am almost as tentative in my judgments as I was when I was flying in the other direction, more than a month ago. I don't have any love for any of the combatants, but I begin to see the possible need for Plan Colombia. I felt safest when the army was there protecting me. So did all the hundreds of displaced peoples I came in contact with. So if it takes more money and more helicopters to make there be more small rural towns more safe more of the time, then I think it might be worth it. Making the Colombian Army stronger will carry its own inexorable karma. Maybe something can be done about that from the start. Maybe some of us from The Farm may even have some part to play in the unfolding. We can at least continue helping the DPs, and we shall. I will likely be going back next year for another round of courses. And I don't plan to quit talking about this any time soon.

 

I wouldn't want to see a U.S. "peacekeeping" force in Colombia and really there wouldn't be any point in it. A "Colombianization" of the war is now U.S. policy. The only thing that might change that is some rabid nark in Washington who sees money or reputations to be made or a good practice field for the US Army's latest jungle technologies. That would be a real tragedy. Colombian military technology is already hard enough on the monkeys, the hummingbirds, and the Kogi.

 

We go through life collecting people and places we love, and they become our memories. On this trip, I collected Montaña Magica, Sasardí, Gabriel and Blanca, Steve and Mary, Claudio, Jorge David,  Don Orlando, Alejandra and the Abuela, Pepe, Tenete Nelson Enrique Chacon, the dockside at Turbo, the beach at Trigana, Casita Juangee, the Yellow Submarine, and Leon's fruit milkshakes in a little open aired restaurant on a dirt street in a poor, dusty, embattled cowtown in the richest country on Earth.

 

The End.