For Love of Coffee

I cannot describe in words the economic poverty in Haiti. I have worked and lived all over the place, and still never seen anything like Haiti. I thought Bolivia would compare, but it does not. I notice that I now use Haiti as the benchmark....arethe roads as bad as in Haiti? Are there as many people living without clean water, electricity, and something besides an open fire for cooking? Is adult illiteracyas high? Are there as many houses that look substandard?

The answer is always no. I hate writing this, truthfully, because I feel like all my Haitian friends who receive these emails will be horrified. Haiti is much more than economic deprivation. As I write this, I am drinking Haitian rum and thinking about past fun times in Baraderes (...singing Haitian folk songs in the rectory in Baraderes at the top of our lungs, teaching the middle school students how to sing "We Are Marching in the Light of God" in 5 languages, drinking Prestige beer on the balcony...). Haiti remains in my heart, which explains why I spent 9 days of my vacation there.

And yes, it has more to offer than just fine alcoholic beverages.....When I was working on the US-Mexico Border last summer, one of the groups CPT worked with was called JustCoffee, which is the brand name of a cooperative of coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. The organization buys the coffee from its members at a fair trade price, then roasts, bags, markets, and ships it to the north. Providing a just price to the farmers and keeping the jobs in Mexico is way of facilitating people being able to stay on their land, instead of migrating through the dangerous desert heat and the Border Patrol in order to findbetter wages up north, in the US.

I began to think that perhaps we could replicate the JustCoffee model in Baraderes. I knew from past work that there are coffee farmers in Baraderes, and also that at one time Haiti produced some of the best coffee in the world. I also knew that St. John's has done awesome work in Baraderes with education and public health, but while the children are being educated and staying healthier, there are still no jobs. Anyway, long story short, a group of us assembled to test out the idea, and found it warmly received by the coffee producers in Baraderes. So we traveled in October to talk to the farmers and see the coffee farms.

The trip to the growers involved a long and grueling hike in the heat and humidity. When we reached the top of the mountain, the site of the home of one of the growers, his wife greeted us with freshly-prepared coffee served on fine china. This was in a home with no sanitation facilities and with dirt floors.

We are all learning a great deal about coffee production. These are useful things that they do not teach you in seminary, such as what color the berry has to be when you pick it, how to husk them by hand, and what is the most common coffee bean pest. I am now the proud owner of two manuals about management of the commoncoffee borer.

We are still processing what we learned in Baraderes and have not made any decisions about how we will proceed next. We brought back about 25 lbs. of green beans for quality testing and will evaluate the results. As the project continues to unfold, I will write about it.

Mobilization of Miners in Sur de Boliver, Part 2

See Part 1 before reading this.

There are a few important stories that actually belong with the first part. When we entered the village where the miners were gathered, after climbing up that mountain, for the second time for me since working in Colombia, the campesinos started applauding as we walked in.

It is moving and embarrassing at the same time, and for that reason it made me think. It feels to me that these little towns are so isolated...the only way you can get there is by mule...and that increases their sense of insecurity, and their sense that the armed groups can do whatever they want to them with impunity. For that reason the presence of outsiders brings huge relief. Later, in talking with one of the community leaders privately, I felt that my sense of this was confirmed. He said that before the accompaniment group arrived, the people were really agitated and talking of taking up arms, not able to think of another option to defend their rights. But once the accompaniment arrived, they calmed down.

Another useful bit of information is that the mining region has been used for growing coca as a cash crop for the past number of years, and artisan mining is the community's answer to replacing a cash crop with something else that brings in cash. But now the multinational mining companies have made a deal with the Colombian government, and so the campesinos are being forced out. And, on top of everything else, there are fumigations going on in the same area, which kills off the coca, but also kills off everything else alive in its path.

Like other campesinos I have talked to, these folks just want to be kept out of the government's war. They want to preserve their way of life on the land with their human rights respected, and they would like to do it peacefully. But what they say is that the military assumes that all campesinos are guerrilla, and they use that as an excuse to abuse them, when the real reason for the abuse is that powerful Colombians stand to make lots of money when the multinationals take over the mining operations. Not to mention powerful North Americans.

To continue from part 1: we accompanied about 140 campesinos to Santa Rosa, the regional center, and about 400 more came the next afternoon, and by Sunday there were over a thousand. Sunday night they held a candlelight march and vigil in the central plaza to remember their assassinated leader and other assassinated and disappeared leaders. It was that night when I overheard one of the miners say "Que multitud tan linda," because a group of them that size had never gathered together before to do a public action.

Early in the process they started lobbying high level government officials to come to Santa Rosa for a dialogue about military abuses in their region. The Catholic diocese was heavily involved in these negotiations, and also with accompaniment of the mobilization to Santa Rosa. The miners stipulated that they did not want elements from the military at the table with them. They said that Colombia is supposed to be a democracy, and in a democracy the civilian authorities are in charge of the military authorities, and they wanted to talk to the bosses. When the delegation arrived from Bogota, and it was a high level delegation, there were generals aboard the helicopter. The communities said they would not meet with the miltary, and they took to the streets again. This was Tuesday. The delegation from Bogota left without dialogue.

The miners again marched for justice, and at the end they occupied the central plaza, staying there through Tuesday evening. They decided to draft a letter to the government expressing the urgent need for dialogue and repeating that they did not want military at the table. They said they planned to stay mobilized in Santa Rosa until they get a meeting. As of today, they are still there.

We returned Wednesday night to Barranca, because we felt that they were likely not under threat of violence in Santa Rosa at this moment, and we could be of more help to them from Barranca, where there are functioning computers. We have written our own letter to Colombian authorities, and have put an urgent action out on CPTs listserve inviting others to do likewise.

When think about the miner demand to meet only with civilian authorities, I think of it as them refusing to negotiate with their abusers, but rather holding the abusers accountable to a higher authority. At first I could not understand it, but after thinking of it in this way, it makes sense to me that they would not want to meet with them.

I was at Mass one night in Santa Rosa--they have one every evening at 7:00--with my required CPT shirt on, and afterward two women from the town who were sitting next to me and who had read my shirt followed me outside because they wanted to give me a blessing. They made the sign of the cross over my chest and prayed that the Holy Spirit would stay in my heart so that I would be able to work for peace.

Mobilization of Miners in Sur de Boliver, Part 1

I returned yesterday from an accompaniment that was supposed to be three days and turned into a week. On Wednesday of last week we learned that a leader in one of the mining communities in the Sur de Bolivar region of Colombia had been found dead, killed by the military.

This region is home to small-scale gold miners and subsistence farmers. The area is mountainous, really beautiful, sparsely populated, and poor. But large multinational mining companies are interested in the area, and the campesinos believe the Colombian government is trying to force them out. The area is highly militarized, but like other campesino areas of Colombia that I have worked in, the residents complain that the State is there in the form of the military, but not in the form of basic services, such as roads, schools, and utilities.

When we started to call around we learned that the army was accusing the deceased of being a guerrilla and that the miners were mobilizing in the small village of San Luquitas. Groups that we really trust, such as the Catholic Diocese of Marangue, one of our local partner organizations called Programa de Desarrollo y Paz, and the Defensoria del Pueblo, a department of the Colombian government charged with defending human rights, were going up there to investigate and to accompany the miners, and they asked if we would be a part of the accompaniment commission.

On Thursday I left with one other CPTer. We got to the regional capital, Santa Rosa, that evening, after 3 hours in a car and 2 hours in boat. Then we got up at 3:30 am on Friday, drove 3 hours through the mountains to the small village of La Toreda, and then proceeded to walk and ride--by mule--the rest of the way up the mountain. It was a lovely 3-hour hike, except that it was straight up, no switchbacks like our well-manicured national parks have. And there are guerrilla in the mountains, so one cannot stray far from the mule path. I walked part of the way and rode part of the way. Both were hard for different reasons. The walk left me out of breath, but the mule left my knee nearly unusable, because the stirrups were too short and the knee was left in an awkward position.

Around 10:30 Friday morning we got to San Luquitas. There were hundreds of miners there from several dozen villages, all gathered to discuss what they were going to do. They confirmed that Alejandro was not a guerrilla, that he was a miner and a leader in his community. Trust me, the campesinos know who the guerrilla are...that is why they get into trouble from the paramilitaries and from the military. Just for knowing. But if you collaborate with one side, you get killed by the other. So they cannot tell what they know.

I read the official military comunique about his death. It said that they had killed an unidentified armed guerrillero in the place and time that Alejandro was killed. By the time the comunique was released, the body had already been identified, returned, and buried. I heard a radio interview with a general two days after Alejandro was buried saying that the person killed in that time and place was not yet identified but was certainly a guerrillero. I interviewed personally the person who was with him one-half hour before he was killed on the road, who said Alejandro had just attended a meeting of miners, was in civilian clothing, and was on his way home to his wife and children.

The miners said that the death of Alejandro, a young man in his late 20s with two small children, was the most recent of years of abuses from the Colombian military, including threats, assassinations, disappearances, intimidation. They also said that the army had come through San Luquitas the day before, telling them openly that there were going to be more deaths. The people were really frightened.

So they decided to unify and organize. They decided to converge on the regional capital, Santa Rosa, to demand a meeting with national government officials asking them to investigate the death of Alejandro and to tell the truth that he was not a guerrillero. They created the Assembly of AgroMiners and planned to have their first official meetings in Santa Rosa. They decided to send one group to Santa Rosa immediately and another the next day. The two CPTers were to accompany the first group back down the mountain, and other accompaniers waited until morning for the rest.

This meant we had to go back down that mountain on the same day, after getting up at 3:30 am and basically not eating all day. I nearly did not make it. There were no mules this time, and the knee gave out completely. The leader of all the mining communities, Teofilo, stayed with me on the trail and helped me down the mountain. I made an embarassingingly late appearance at La Toreda, where everyone was waiting for us and the cars to take us back down to Santa Rosa. We finally arrived in Santa Rosa at 1:30 am, a 22 hour day.

As I understand it, the reason the miners wanted our accompaniment was that they were afraid of the army and what they might do to them on the mountain. It is risky to organize in this country. Colombian union leaders get assassinated in high numbers, hundreds each year. Most union leaders live with death threats. Colombians seem to feel that our presence provides a shield.

Reflection on the Colombia Accompaniment

This week CPT won an award from the Catholic Diocese of Barranca for our peace and justice work. It is a reflection of how much CPT is respected in this community and how valuable they consider our accompaniment work. How the local and regional human rights workers view our work feels important because it makes me feel like we are accomplishing something, even when we ourselves are not sure what that might be.

Human rights violations on the part of the Colombian army are staggering. Two of us did an accompaniment in another region this week which was a community process to verify human rights violations on the part of the army and report them. The community was afraid to do the verification process without our presence. We learned that the army came into town, accused some men of being guerrilla, and the men put their hands up in the air to surrender and the army killed them. This was verified by numerous witnesses. They also shot a child who was running away from fright.

I have reflected a lot on why I am here, what it means to me. Part of it is that we--meaning citizens of the US--are paying for this war. And it feels to me like this war looks like all the other wars that we pay for. We hear something in the news about US soldiers being killed, or so-called terrorist actions, but we never really hear about or think much about the real human costs of what we are paying for.

The cases of mistaken identity. The families forced to flee. Violations of women. Poverty. Refugee camps and homeless shelters. Random assassinations. I think that most of us do not know what our money is doing. We have dehumanized the "enemy."

CPT organized a workshop the last couple of days for women of the region to learn about the process of documentation of all the abuses against them in this armed conflict. Listening to women talk about what they have been through was powerful. They all told stories about spouses being assassinated by one group or another, or one of their children. Of displacements, and not being able to support their families in the city. Of verbal abuse from soldiers or paramilitaries. Of sexual assault.

I often feel inadequate. We are so few. I felt this way in Palestine as well...that if there were 5,000 of us, we could transform the conflict. Right now we are 5, and about to be 4. And the regular team members who are leaving for retreat do so very reluctantly, because people are dying and displacing here, and our accompaniment might prevent some of it.

Reflection From the Desert II

Reflection From the Desert
On September 29, 2004, along with a colleague, I was attacked and brutally beaten by Israeli settlers while walking Palestinian children to school in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Using sticks, chains, and their boots, these Israeli extremists severely injured my knee, broke my elbow, punctured my colleague´s lung, and inflicted cuts and bruises on our faces and hands.

I could write a whole article about the politics behind what happened that morning, about the extremism that permits a gang of Israeli settler men to target school children and their escorts with impunity, about my own government´s support of a failed policy. But that is not this article. This article is a reflection on my spiritual journey subsequent to the attack.

Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life, and my hope is that my reflections will help all of us to think a bit about the spirituality of trauma and forgiveness.

In those moments right after the attack I was the most vulnerable I have ever been in my entire life. I was bleeding, scared, and could not walk. The first thing that happened was that my colleague made his way over to where I was lying on the ground, and we prayed for the attackers. It was his idea, and when I think of it now I am amazed that either of us was up for it emotionally. He could barely breathe and I could not stand up. I remember feeling irritated about the obligation of having to pray for those who had left me in this condition. But when I look back on it now I think that offering of prayer was a key to the process of letting go and forgiving later. Also, in a moment when we felt alone and abandoned, prayer focused us on the presence of God, who never abandons us.

I am certain that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. I have reflected a lot on that word "abandonment," because in the Latin it is the root for "desert," (i.e. to desert someone) and desert has symbolic meaning for Christians. And the attack took place in the desert. And because there is reference to abandonment in the Passion.

We abandon God, over and over. We act as though God does not exist, meaning that we must control what happens because we do not trust God. So in that sense God is always in the desert, always abandoned. In Christian spirituality, the desert is a symbol for abandonment of self, of ego, of "attachments" as Ignatius would say, and of control, and turning ourselves over to the will of God, which by definition means service of others.

I think of being in the desert as bringing the interior self, who is one with the will of God, to the surface, to become that person on the outside that we all are in our deepest interior selves. This can happen only through abandonment of that exterior self, and abandonment can only happen through prayer. This prayer that leads to liberation from our attachments is the desert. But really, just as God is always in the desert, so must the person of faith be always in the desert, always in that prayer of abandonment of self in order to attach to God. The minute we leave it, all our old desires, attachments, and impulses to try and control everyone else come back.

We do not trust God--we think we are in control--and therefore we do not trust each other. Instead of trust, it seems to me that we spend our time trying to get everyone else to be different than who they really are, and trying to get them to do our will. Just as we are afraid to abandon our self and allow God to work in us and become us, we are afraid to trust God to do the same in others.

For reasons that I cannot explain, I walked (well, actually, was carried) away from the attack with a much more profound trust in God. Perhaps it was because I went through what most would describe as their worst nightmare. I could have been killed, and had the attackers wanted to kill us they would have. I think we order our lives around a lot of fear--fear of death, of pain, of suffering, of not being in control, of something happening to our children, of not being valuable or valued. Most especially the latter. So instead of trying to reach for what God calls us to be doing, we make our decisions based on that fear. And I have been liberated from much of my fear. I imagine that it does not take getting beat up to get to this place. I think that is what it took for me.

In the aftermath of the attack, I had to let go of control over my life, because I certainly was not in control in that moment. I know that I cannot control whether I live or whether I die, that life is short, and that all I have that matters is my time. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know that all that will seem important is that I loved--gave myself away--without counting the cost. And that is what we were doing that morning.

Someone told me shortly after the attack that I "had" to forgive the attackers. I do not know if this was helpful or not. I know I resented anyone telling me I "had" to. But I also think that this, in combination with my Catholic faith and its emphasis on forgiveness, got me thinking about forgiveness really quickly. I think if I were not Catholic, meaning that if forgiveness was not deeply ingrained in who I am and what I accept as the truth, then I probably would have been angry instead of accepting of the early advice to forgive. And I think that if we do not forgive, then the offense, whatever it is, takes us over and prevents us from moving forward with our lives. The offense, or the offender, is in control of us, instead of God. So I wanted to forgive.

I had no idea what forgiveness looked like in a situation like this. I felt I understood what it meant to forgive (or not to) in personal relationships, with people I know well, or in a work situation. But I had never experienced the need to forgive people whom I had never met and could not identify, and who had committed a crime against me. So as a first step I decided to reflect on my feelings toward and about the attackers.

When I probed my deepest feelings, I realized that I never felt any anger toward them. I wanted them (and still do) caught and prosecuted, not out of a desire for revenge, but because I feel that it would deter other Israeli settlers from equally violent actions. I tried hard, for as long as it seemed to make sense, to get the US Embassy to pressure the Israelis to continue to investigate. In the end, I was told they had no leads, because we could not identify the attackers.

I think that the reason I have not felt anger or desire for revenge is that I have been able to understand the attackers as victims. Jews have been systematically murdered for centuries, and the violent actions of settlers on the West Bank is happening as a result of their trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify with them.

I do not know if all of this adds up to forgiveness. When I experience forgiveness in personal relationships, I experience it as love. I do not feel love for the attackers. I feel compassion, though, and empathy, and I wonder if compassion and empathy are the same thing as love when it comes to a person one does not know. I want them to accept the responsibility and consequences for what they did, but I do not want them harmed or destroyed emotionally or physically. I hope it is enough.

I returned to at-Tuwani nearly 6 months after the attack, to continue the work of accompaniment, to ensure that Palestinian children are able to get to school unharmed, and that Palestinian shepherds are able to graze their sheep unhindered, and that Palestinian farmers are able to plant and plow without the constant threat of violence from the nearby settlement. For me, it was important to return to at-Tuwani that first time, for closure, and because I needed to know that the attack, and the attackers, had not taken control of my life. I was still me, still able to do the same work, still good at it. The night before I returned to at-Tuwani I had a dream in which I felt embraced by God. I knew then that everything was okay, that no matter what happened, God would never abandon me.

Human Rights Accompaniment, Part 2

See Part 1 before reading this.

Just as we were leaving the last village--the one with all the applause--someone handed us a packet of pictures and said it was proof that they were fumigating in the area. Crop fumigations are part of US drug policy and are US funded to eradicate coca. They do flyovers spraying this toxic chemical which kills everything, including legal crops, and makes people sick. The only thing is, everyone agrees that there is no coca in this area. It is a drug corridor, meaning that coca is transported through there from the mountains to the ocean, but it is not grown there, so why the crop fumigations?

In the famous meeting with officials (more about that below) they vehemently denied the fumigations. But we showed the photos to some other officials, and they said, yep, it looks like fumigations. They killed avacado trees, which is the main cash crop of the region. The officials who denied the fumigations said the trees had been infected with a fungus, and later we learned that, in fact, they are now fumigating with a fungus. So nobody lied. Presumably the military killed the avocado trees in order to target the guerrilla, who are active in the area, and probably own some of the avocado plantations. But by doing so they also target small subsistence farmers.

The meeting came as a surprise to everyone involved. The group of lawyers had invited a small group of civil and military functionaries from the region, and when we got there, about 50 had shown up. They brought with them two truckloads of campesinos to contradict the complaints we were about to present. The lasted all day, and became a shouting match at times, and at times I was afraid it was going to get violent. When we met separately with the campesinos planted by the government, they did not contradict anything we had to present. Rather, they came to make statements that the guerrilla do bad things, too. Apparently the miltary had told them that we were there to denounce the military on behalf of the guerrilla!

It seemed to us that the authorities were doing everything possible to prevent the group from presenting and pursuing the complaints. One of the main points of contention at the meeting (aside from fumigations) was over the presence of paramilitary in the region. All of the civil and military authorities in the room flatly denied the presence of paramilitaries. However, the Defensor de Pueblo, the government authority vested with human rights protection, confirmed to us privately that they know paras are present, despite the famous demobilization program.

And, we know better. We have heard too many horrific reports of paramilitary activity from other communities in the region. People talk about massacres when paramilitaries cut people up alive with chainsaws and use their heads as soccer balls. Your tax dollars at work, because it is widely understood that paramilitaries act on behalf of the Colombian military.

Human Rights Accompaniment, Part 1

I just returned from a 10-day trip accompanying a group of human rights lawyers from Bogota into a very high conflict region up north, called Montes de Maria. The area we traveled to had been experiencing open combat between the guerilla and government troops just days before we went. Both guerilla and paramilitary are present in the area, each holding part of the territory, though the government troops deny the presence of the paras (more about that in part 2). The area is littered with antipersonnel mines placed by the guerilla, and there are many reports of deaths and maimings. There are also widespread human rights violations on the part of government troops and paras.

Basically the campesinos (small subsistence farmers) are caught between all armed groups, are being pressured from all sides, and say they just want to be left in peace. The message I heard over and again from them is that this is not their war, and they are determined to stay on their land and preserve their way of life and their culture. The purpose of the accompaniment was to provide an international presence with the delegation, which Colombians feel gives it some protection. In other words, with us there, the lawyers were less likely to be subjected to violence or to be prevented from going.

I have lots of stories to tell, but here is a brief summary of what we did. The lawyers were traveling to the region to hold meetings telling the campesino communities what their rights under the law actually are, and to collect complaints of human rights violations perpetrated by government troops. They collected the complaints in writing, created a document, and submitted it to the appropriate authorities and legal processes.

To sum up, they found three classes of human rights violations in every single community and on a large scale. They are: blockades of food and medicine, prevention of travel along the roads, and massive and arbitrary detentions without due process. The military is preventing food and medicine from moving between communities because they claim that the campesinos are feeding the guerrilla, and the military is also preventing them from moving freely because they claim that they are aiding the guerrilla. To accomplish this the military has set up road blocks and check points, which we had to go through and so I can vouch that they exist.

There was one set up in the middle of town, placing the residents at risk of being caught in the middle of armed combat. We got detained at them but ultimately were let through. Detentions take place because some paramilitary informant will claim that some campesino is guerrilla, and then they get arrested and held, sometimes for years, without trial. According to government statistics 80 percent are eventually released for lack of evidence.

On our way in to one of the communities we got stopped at a road block where there had been fighting the day before. It was about 5 in the afternoon, and was going to be dark by 6, when it is dangerous to be on the roads due to guerrilla presence. The military held us for 45 minutes, so we ended up traveling the last 45 minutes in the dark on some of the worst roads I have ever seen, rivaling even those in Haiti.

It may have been one of the most dangerous things I have ever done. In addition to the bad roads, the darkness, the jungle, and the presence of armed groups, I was sitting on the passenger side of a jeep with no front door. It was a knuckle-whitening experience. But when we got there, we were greeted by 5000 campesinos lining the road, applauding ing wildly. They had come from all over the region, and had been waiting for us for hours. This was the first visit of its kind to this region. If I did not know before, I knew then how important our mission was to the communities, because it would allow them to file formal complaints against their abusers.

We visited four seperate campesino communities, doing the same thing in each one. Each meeting had representatives from several campesino communities present. At the end of the presentations by the lawyers, people could submit their complaints in writing. Every community insisted on some kind of cultural presentation at the end of the meetings. They were determined to let us know the value of their cultural heritage and their desire to preserve it. We heard over and over that this is not their war, but they feel they are bearing the brunt of the punishment for it.

They also said that they feel abandoned by the government. The roads are not passable, they have no electricity, running water, schools or health care. And unlike Haiti, Colombia is a fairly developed country. The campesinos feel that the government is doing it on purpose, in order to force them off the land.

I asked a lot of different people why there was fighting over this land. We know it is a drug corridor--meaning that although no coca is grown there, it is a corridor between the river and the ocean where drugs are shipped, and all sides seem to profit from control of the corridor. We also know that it is rich agricultural land. There is speculation that there is mineral wealth underneath, but we have no proof. One of the lawyers in our delegation told me that the president of Colombia (Uribe) is buying up parcels of land in this area--through intermediaries-- in order to profit from future large transnational corporations who want to locate there. Obviously, I have no way of verifying that.

Colombia is the second or third largest recipient of US aid, and 80 percent of that is military aid. So our tax dollars are going to fund human rights abuses against small subsistence farmers, most of whom are either Afro-Colombian or indigenous. I felt that this was a very important accompaniment, and I felt that we were right where we were supposed to be, which is making it possible for the most marginalized groups in this country to raise their voice against abuse that is financed by my own country.

Introduction to Barrancabermeja

I arrived in Colombia almost exactly 2 weeks ago, on July 4. I spent 2 nights in Bogota trying to get a bus ticket to Barrancabermeja, where I will be working with CPT for the next three months.

Barranca is the site of the largest oil refinery in the country, and for that reason strategically important in the civil war that has been going on here for 50 years. There is a gas cartel that operates here by stealing gas out of a pipeline that runs from the refinery. They put holes in the pipeline and fill up containers, and transport the stuff in small boats along the Opon river that runs into the Magdalena river, which runs through Barranca.

The gas cartel is currently operated by paramilitary groups, who fund themselves by selling it. In the past the cartel was in the hands of the guerrilla, but paramilitary forces have taken over this area in recent years.

In very general terms, the guerrilla are a left movement that supports land rights for campesinos and labor organizing, but by violent means. The paramilitaries are private forces, often supported by large companies, such as mines, gas, and oil, that put campesinos off their land by force so that the companies can move in, and who are also responsible for high numbers of assassinations of labor leaders. In general the paras support government policies and most believe that at minimum, the goverment allows them to operate.

About a year ago the main para forces signed a demobilization agreement, but as far as anyone can tell they are not really demobilizing but reconstituting themselves as private security forces. In this area, nobody has any doubt that the oil company, ECOPETROL, knows that their gas is being stolen by paras.

When CPT first came here 5 years ago, it was to accompany 2 small campesino communities along the Opon River that had been forcibly displaced due to the gas cartel and wanted to return to their homes. The people who live there farm small plots of land and fish for their livelihood. When the communities first returned CPT had a presence there all the time, with a team rotating in and out of Barranca, because the level of violence was quite high. It was not uncommon to see bodies floating down the river. It was our main work.

But in the last year or so the communities have stabilized, so much so that other kinds of organizations have come in with development assistence. We are now phasing out of the Opon work, at least that what it looks like to me, and gathering information about other communities who need the same kind of accompaniment. Very recently, a community member from the Opon was assassinated and another was displaced due to a threat on his life. It seems that they were somehow involved in the cartel. So the violence continues, but the communities seem to be able to maintain themselves as long as they are able to refrain from being involved with either side.

Reflection From the Desert I

I have been using this time in Bolivia for reflection on the events of my life in the past 2 years or so and what they mean for my future and vocation. For that reason I have not spent a lot of time sending analyses of the political situation in Bolivia (although God knows, I am capable of that).

So, here goes. Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life (I say "may" because really, there have been a lot of profound spiritual events, and who can place a value on them?). I have talked to many of you about different things, but I feel it is time to write something down. Maybe I will throw in a few comments about the political situation in Bolivia alongthe way! My hope is that my reflections will help all of us to think a bit about the spiritualityof trauma and forgiveness.

One thing I have spent a lot of time thinking about is why I did so well emotionallyafterward. I have never exhibited any symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, never had any bad dreams or flashbacks, and did fine when I went back to Tuwani later. I have only ever had one dream about the attack, and it happened the night before I left to return to Tuwani for the first time. I will spare you the details, but it was a healing dream, a survival dream, a dream that made manifest the presence of God. For me, it was important to return to Tuwani that first time, for closure, and because I needed to know that the attack, and the attackers, had not taken controlof my life. I was still me, still able to do the same work, still good at it.

But why? On the one hand, I have no clue, but on the other hand, I have some ideas based on some of the things that happened right afterward. One thing I think I understand is that in those moments right after the attack I was the most vulnerable I have ever been in my entire life (I was bleeding, scared, and could not walk), and so what happened right then was really important. The first thing that happened after Chris made his way over to where I was lying on the ground (and called for help) was that we prayed for the attackers. It was his idea, and when I think of it now I am amazed that either of of was up for it. He could barely breathe and I could not get up. I remember thinking something like "why the hell would I want to do that in this moment." But anyway, we did, and when I look back on it now I think that was important in the process of letting go and forgiving.

It also helped us to focus on the presence of God,who never abandons us. I am certain that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. It seems likea paradox, but I was never so aware of the presence of God, the love of God, than I was in those moments after the attack. Part of that was the prayer, but another part was Diane and Piergiorgio reaching us as quickly as they could. (Some of you may remember this part of the story from when it happened.) I experience, then and now, their act of coming out to be with us while we waited for an ambulance to be a profound act of love. Waiting for them was when I was the most frightened, because I knew that our attackers could be lurking in the trees, and that they could get the 2 of them as well. They were in serious danger, and unlike me and Chris when we set out to walk the kids to school that morning, they knew the danger theywere in and they came anyway. It was an abandonment of the self for the sake ofthe other. It was like Jesus going to Jerusalem.

I have reflected a lot on that word "abandonment," because in the Latin it is the root for "desert," (i.e. to desert someone) and desert has alot of symbolic meaning for Christians. And the attack took place in the desert. And because there is a lot of reference to abandonment in the Passion. We abandon God, over and over. We act as though God does not exist, so that we can and must control what happens because we do not trust God. So in that sense God is always in the desert, always abandoned.

In Christian spirituality, the desert is a symbol for abandonment of self, of ego, of "attachments" as Ignatius would say, and of control, and turning ourselves over to the will of God, which by definition means service of others. I think of being in the desert as bringing the interior self, who is one with the will of God, to the surface, to become that person on the outside that we all are in our deepest interior selves. This can happen only through abandonment of that exterior self, and abandonment can only happen through prayer. This prayer that leads to liberation from our attachments is the desert.

But really, just as God is always in the desert, so must the personof faith be always in the desert, always in that prayer of abandonment of self inorder to attach to God. The minute we leave it, all our old desires, attachments,and impulses to try and control everyone else come back. All this from the fact that I did not get abandoned in the desert!

Love and trust are also important here, meaning what they are and why they are so hard for us. We do not trust God--we think we are in control--and therefore we do not trust each other. Instead of trust, it seems to me that we spend our time trying to get everyone else to be different than who they really are, and trying to get them to do our will. I will spare you all the dreadful stories of me doing this--but I think we all have similar stories. Just as we are afraid to abandon our self and allow God to work in us and become us, we are afraid to trust God todo the same in others.

In CPT work, we have to trust each other, because our lives are at stake. But Iam not sure we do, and I am not sure that as an organization we are doing the inner work that would make it possible. I did not experience that happening in training, nor have I experienced it in our so-called retreats. The thing is, not only do we have to trust, but we also have to be worthy of trust. In other words, we all have to be willing to not abandon the other in the desert, and I am uncertain that I could be sure of that with every CPTer.

I think it is the reason that sometimes, it seems to me anyway, CPTers are unwilling to take the risks that we say we are willing to take in our projects. We do take the risks in Tuwani for sure. I am interested to see how much of it we do in Colombia. I know that I am willing to take the risks, but not if I cannot trust the people I am working with. And therein lies the heart of the problem in CPT right now. For the CPT Palestine folks reading this: I have come to understand that the heart of my problem with Luna was that--for good reason and with hard evidence--I did not trust her not to abandon me in the desert.

For reasons that I cannot explain, I walked (well, actually, was carried) away from the attack with a much more profound trust in God. Perhaps it was because I went through what most would describe as their worst nightmare. I could have been killed, and had the attackers wanted to kill us they would have. And....? It is all okay.

I think we order our lives around a lot of fear--fear of death, of pain, of suffering, of prison, of not being in control, of something happening to our children, of not being valuable or valued (most especially the latter). So instead of trying to touch what God calls us to be doing, we make our decisions based on that fear. And I have been liberated from much of my fear. I imagine that it does not take getting beat up to get to this place. I think that is what it took for me.

Not to say that I am not dealing with some issues. I have an irrational reaction each time I see someone running toward me on the street, whether or not they are wearing a black ski mask. There are kids in La Paz walking around polishing shoes,and they all wear black ski masks, and for that reason alone they scare me. People holding anything that looks like a stick or a chain scare me. Etc.

But for some reason, insteaad of the attack making me more afraid of trusting other people, it has made me more willing to. I think it is because I have had to let go of control over my life (I certainly was not in control in that moment) and to accept that as a fact. I am not in control, of my own life or the life of anyone else. I am doing the best I can, and so is everyone else. I know that I cannot control whether I live or whether I die, that life is short,and that all I have that matters is my time. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know that all that will seem important is that I loved--gave myself away--without counting the cost. And that is what Chris and I were doing that morning.

I feel like this is way too long, but I also feel like I need to add something about forgiveness. Someone told me shortly after the attack that I "had" toforgive the attackers. I do not know if this was helpful or not. I know I resented anyone telling me I "had" to. But I also think that this, in combination with my Catholic faith and its emphasis on forgiveness, got me thinking about forgiveness really quickly. I think if I were not Catholic, meaning that if forgiveness was not deeply ingrained in who I am and what I accept as the truth, then I probably would have been angry instead of accepting of the early advice to forgive. And I think that if we do not forgive, then the crime, or the offense, whatever it is,takes us over and prevents us from moving forward with our lives. The offense, or the offender, is in control of us, instead of God.

So I wanted to forgive. I realized that I had no idea what forgiveness looked like in a situation like this.I felt I understood what it meant to forgive (or not to) in personal relationships, with people I know well, or in a work situation. But I had never experienced the need to forgive people whom I had never met and could not identify, and who had committed a crime against me.

So I decided to reflect on my feelings toward and about the attackers. I realized that I never felt any anger toward them. I have no idea why. It just is not there. I wanted them (and still do) caught and prosecuted, not out of a desire for revenge, but because I feel that it would deter other Israeli settlers from equally violent actions. I tried hard, for as long as it seemed to make sense, to get the US Embassy to pressure the Israelis to continue to investigate. In theend, I was told they had no leads, because we could not identify the attackers. I do not have any strong feelings toward them one way or another. It so happened that randomly Chris and I were the ones walking the kids that morning. They were not targetting me but my presence.

I have also been able to understand them as victims. Perhaps that is due to my previous work with Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate (the amusing irony is that so many settlers are former Soviet Jews whosecause I took up for several years). Jews have been systematically murdered for centuries, and the violent actions of some settlers on the West Bank is happeningas a result of their trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify withthem.

I do not know if all of this adds up to forgiveness. When I experience forgiveness in personal relationships, I experience it as love. I do not feel love for the attackers. I feel compassion, though, and empathy, and I wonder if compassion andempathy are the same thing as love when it comes to a person one does not know. I want them to accept the responsibility and consequences for what they did, but I do not want them harmed or destroyed emotionally or physically. I hope it is enough. For those of you with the stamina to read all this, I welcome your comments and reflections.

The Jesuit Reducciones

Last week a big group of us are travelled to the Jesuit reducciones in Eastern Bolivia. If you have seen the movie The Mission, you know what they are. They were an experiment in community established by the Jesuits partly as a way to protect the indigenous of the region from the horrible violence and enslavement perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors.

They were successful early experiements in socialism that worked until the Spanish king, feeling threatened by the power that organized indigenous folks had (and the Jesuits armed them as well), kicked the Jesuits out of South America. The reducciones in Paraguay are in ruins today, but the ones in Bolivia have been preserved and are still functioning towns, with vestiges of their founding principles still present.

The most interesting thing to me about the reducciones is that apparently, according to an article I am reading by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, the reducciones influenced the thinking of Marx, whose writings appeared somewhat after the Jesuits were thrown out of South America. When I was reading Marx, Engles, and Lenin in university, I never saw the Jesuits mentioned, but I am sure all three would have been embarrassed to admit that some Catholics influenced them, since they had no use for religion.

What is interesting about this is that the birthplace of modern socialism is not Europe, but South America, and that it was not designed according to scientific principles, but in fidelity to the Gospel.

My own pilgrimage to the Jesuit reducciones was exhausting but worthwhile. We visited 6 different missions, all built in the later 17th or early 18th century. The Bolivian missions were the last of the reducciones to be built and were functioning as part of the Jesuit experiments for only about 75 years before the Spanish king became jealous and kicked the Jesuits out. But the Bolivian missions remained active even after the Jesuits were expelled and are still functioning villages.

A Swiss architect came here in the 1970s to begin restoration work on the Bolivian missions, all of which were functioning but in poor repair. The restorations were finished in the late 90s. In the process of restoring them, this architect found the music archives. Some of the Jesuit missionaries were also composers, some of them well-known in Europe. They composed music in the reducciones, taught the indigenous to compose, perform it, and even to craft their own instruments.

The music archive, which is now housed in the basement of one of these churches, contain 5000 original pieces of music that were previously thought lost. According to the story, this architect found it in the bathroom. They are painstakingly restoring and cataloging each piece of music, and have finished with 1700 of them.

The choirs in the missions are still performing these pieces of Baroque music. We went to a concert and were awestruck. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, in a village of no more than 3000 people, and listening to a choir of local children singing Baroque music like I had never heard it performed. Some of the pieces were written in the native Chicitania or Guarani languages.

There are so many interesting things to tell about these missions, but I will restrain myself and just mention a few more. Over 100,000 native people were housed in the reducciones at their height. The native people of this region were nomadic, but willingly moved to the reducciones to escape the slavehunters, who were capturing them to work in the Bolivian silver mines. The silver was all sent back to the Spanish crown. Slaves from Africa were also imported for this work, but the story goes that most of them died, which is why there are so few Afro-Bolivians today.

The reducciones were idyllic communities in many ways. Community members worked 6 days per week--three days on communal land and three days on their own. Communal land was used to grow the herb tea they exported in order to pay their taxes to the Spanish crown. When the head of household died, the private land reverted back to the community for redistribution. In this way no-one was able to to inherit wealth and all had what they needed. It seems that often when poor people are empowered, the elite became concerned about their own wealth and put a stop to it.

Adventures with Coffee and Colonialism

I have had lots of adventures with coffee. Bolivia is a coffee-producing country, so there is no shortage of good coffee here, and the one brand that I really like is also organic. But Bolivians do not tend to drink their own coffee; they drink Nescafe instant coffee. That's what they put in front of me in my house when I arrived, and many conversations with many people have confirmed that Nescafe instant is what almost everyone drinks.

Of course, when I travel, I always carry my little one-cup Melitta coffee maker, the kind you just have to pour boiling water through, and a supply of filters, so after one day of Nescafe, I introduced the real thing to my host family. They have fallen in love with their own coffee, and now I will need to leave my little coffee making device with them. Luckily, I have some friends who are sending replacements, because I prefer not to do without real coffee, and I have a feeling I will be needing to leave them all over South America.

I had an interesting, and revealing, conversation with the family I am staying with about their attachment to Nescafe. I said I could not understand why they would drink Nescafe when they have their own, much better, Bolivian coffee. Not only that, but Nescafe is more expensive. I said that Nestle is a multinational company, and they are...they are...I couldn't come up with the right word in Spanish. Lupe jumped in with ladrones, the Spanish word for thieves.

Yup, that's the right word. How else can you describe businesspeople who pay the producers next to nothing, pay the factory workers who process it next to nothing, and keep enormous riches for themselves?

But the bottom line is Bolivians think that North American and European products are better than their own. It is this weird sense of inferiority that connects with the race issues I mentioned in my last letter.

I just finished reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, and he talks about the same thing. He says that Africans struggle with a sense of the inferiority of their own culture, and even of their own abilities, when compared to the European occupiers, and only when this is conquered can Africans really be liberated from colonial oppression. He says that he struggled with it himself, always assuming that what was British was better. I recall that Gandhi said the same thing in his autobiography.

What I say in response is, how can a culture whose main export is war, be superior?

On a lighter note, we are preparing for Carnival here. In some parts of Bolivia it is just an excuse to drink for 24 hours straight, like anywhere else. But the main Carnival festivities take place in Oruro, in the heartland of indigenous culture, and where I will be going with other language students. There the celebration is a big dance fest that depicts a battle between good and evil in a mixture of Catholic and indigenous religious symbols.

A main feature of Carnival is throwing water balloons at each other. I don't think this has much to do with religious symbolism; it is just an excuse to cut loose. The water balloon throwing started at the beginning of this month. People just randomly throw water balloons, called globos, at unsuspecting pedestrians anywhere in the city. In Cochabamba they use a Spanish verb that means to throw water balloons, globear. I have been hit a few times, but most times they miss. I am trying to have fun with it, but mostly it feels like dodging bombs in a war zone. Harmless bombs, but bombs just the same. It makes me wonder why people think this is fun.

Morales and Social Division

Today Bolivia inauguerates its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who is Aymara. The Aymara make up less than half of the indigenous majority in Bolivia; the Quechua are more numerous.

Yesterday I watched on TV as he was installed by the Aymara first, before the official government installation today. A crowd of tens of thousands of the Aymara people gathered at Tiahuonaka, an Inca holy site just south of La Paz. They believe that Tiahuonaka is a portal of the sun. They vested him with poncho and staff, and he wore a four-cornered hat to signify the four corners of the Inca empire. Such an installation has not happened in more than 500 years, since the Spanish occupation.

The family I live with is middle class with Spanish ancestors, but Lupe, the head of the household, supported Morales. Lupe explained to me that Bolivia has had 5 presidents in four years, and it seems that Morales was able to win over some of the middle class because they believe that something needs to change. Her family suffered at the hands of left-wing guerrillas, and so originally supported the right-wing dictatorship of a man whose name I cannot remember right now. She had a conversion after she left her husband and read about all the abuses of the government.

In speaking with others, it sounds like many in the middle class share her views. They are wary of Morales and his socialist ideas, but anything is better than what they have been enduring. In the last 5 years there have been several major uprisings over gas and water rights. However, I have noticed that the middle class seem to spend a lot of time worrying about how Morales dresses! They want him to wear suits and not sweaters.

In my little household live Lupe, divorced and in her fifties, her daughter, Gringa (more about that below), her daughter's two sons, Francisco (4) and Leonardo (7), Elena, the housekeeper, who is indigenous, but I don't know if she is Aymara or Quechua, and Rodrigo (13), Elena's grandson who is chief babysitter to the two boys. Elena's daughter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's two younger sons are also often at the house.

So what we have here are five grown women, including me, and five boys. Half of us have European ancestors and the other half are indigenous. None of the boys have a father in their lives. It seems that most middle class household retain servants who are indigenous. In most cases the servants go home at night and maintain a distance from the family. They do not eat at the same table, for example. In our case Elena and Rodrigo live with us and we all eat together and the boys all play together. However, in no way are Elena and Rodrigo equal to Lupe and her family. There is a hierarchy, and they are at the bottom.

Last Sunday I went to the cemetary with Lupe and her brother to visit their parents. They do this ritual every Sunday. At the gate to the cemetary stands a group of 20 or more indigenous people waiting for someone to buy flowers from them or hire them to clean up the gravesite. Lupe and her brother did both. They paid a girl a single Boliviano, about 15 cents, to sweep around the grave and pick up leaves by hand.

I was thinking that these are the same people who are desperately trying to get in to the U.S., but when they get there, they end up doing the same kinds of jobs. I think the difference must be that they get paid more in the U.S., and there is much more hope for the future of their children. Morales brings some hope that Bolivia's poorest, all indigenous, can find a sustainable future in Bolivia, because he promises to pursue policies that are in their interests.

I understand that the average salary in Cochabamba is around $200 per month, but that is for people who are working. Unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. There is a lot of begging, mostly women and children, and I have also seen many men passed out on the street from alcohol. They are just left there. There is also a problem with addiction to glue-sniffing, because there is a shoe factory and it is easy to get. This leads to a problem with homeless children, because their parents succomb to addiction.

Gringa, Lupe's daughter, sells overpriced and overrated vitamins to rich people and seems to do well. Lupe told me that the job requires long hours and travel, but that jobs are scarce, even for people with European ancestors, so she had to take what she could get. Gringa's real name is Luz Maria. They nicknamed her Gringa at birth because she has blue eyes, reddish hair, and fair skin. Gringa loves the name and will go by no other. In short, Gringa loves being white and chooses to advertise it as best she can. Her kids are also white. She is very right wing and wants nothing to do with Morales. Somehow, it seems to go with the whiteness!

Olive Trees, Russian Soldiers, and a Bulldozer

I went back to Palestine on Wednesday, and after the usual hours-long ordeal at the border while they checked and rechecked me, I got in. I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Hebron and went down to Tuwani on Friday. It seems that I cannot be in Tuwani without something happening. Or maybe it is just that something is always happening in Tuwani.

The service van--public transportation in Palestine--dropped us at the bottom of the hill coming down from Yatta. From there we had to cross the bypass road (route 317--open only to Jewish settlers) and walk up the hill to Tuwani. When we got out of the van we noticed a group of people crowded around an olive grove off to the left, before crossing the bypass road and across from the Maon settlement. When we got there we saw that all of the trees had been destroyed. The branches were cut off, leaving only the stumps. They were 102 olive trees planted in 1974. Israeli soldiers were already there when we arrived. CPTers called the police and the media, as well as other human rights groups.

One of my CPT colleagues told me that as she was approaching the devastation early that morning, she saw a group of settlers on the hill overlooking the grove, singing "Happy Days are Here Again." Palestinians told us that the night before the settlers were celebrating the demise of Sharon, and as part of the celebration they destroyed the trees. We learned from another human rights group that the police had found footprints leading from the destroyed grove into Ma'on settlement.

Palestinians tell us that the trees will produce again, but it will take five years, minimum. The trees provide a livelihood for an entire family of Palestinians.

Later that day children ran into our yard in Tuwani, saying that the army was there and they had a bulldozer. I didn't know the word for bulldozer but I understood the rest! In my last email about Tuwani I wrote about new roadblocks due to the murder of a settler in the area. When I returned this time Palestinians had opened all the roadblocks with tractors and shovels. You still have to drive over a big dirt bump, but the rocks were removed. This is important, because people from Tuwani and surrounding villages have to get to Yatta for work, school, food, and medical traetment. Some of them have cars that were bulldozed in by the closures. My admiration for the Palestinians grows as they persevere in this form of nonviolent resistence to clear violations of international human rights law.

Anyway, when we got to the bypass road, we saw Israeli soldiers bulldozing closed the openings that Palestinians had made. These openings enabled them to cross the bypass road and get to Yatta by vehicle (as opposed to donkey). Kristy and I filmed it and then started talking to the soldiers. All but one of them were Russians, so I had a long conversation in Russian with several of them. Really, Russian Jews ought to know about what it feels like to be oppressed. They also know what it means to be occupied, and what it means to be subject to massive human rights violations. But it didn't seem to bother these guys. They said they were only following orders and we should take it up with their commanders. I didn't say, because I was afraid of their very large machine guns, that soldiers serving under Nazi Germany said the same thing in the Nuremburg trials.

We explained that blocking the road prevented movement to work, hospitals, etc. They said that everyone from Yatta is a terrorist and they have to prevent them from killing Jewish civilians. We said that the Palestinians are civilians and that these actions of the Israeli army are creating more terrorism. They said that the lives of Jewish civilians are more important than disrupting the lives of Palestinians. They said they also wanted peace. I said that they don't treat Palestinians the same as they treat Jews, and that they will have peace when they treat Palestinians as their brothers and sisters. They laughed at me; they said that Palestinians are not their brothers and sisters. Only Jews are.

Then we pointed to the destroyed olive grove and asked why the soldiers had not been on patrol the night before, as they typically are. They said they knew nothing about it. We asked why, since the settlers had committed a crime, the army did not bulldoze closed the road into the settlement and destroy all their houses, as they do with Palestinian villages when one person is suspected of a crime. Suspected, not convicted. They replied that the olive trees are not important---the Palestinians don't need those trees because they all have 2 Mercedes. This in a village where most families struggle to put food on the table. In fact, most Palestinians struggle to put food on the table. But the soldiers claimed they know more about it than me.

It went on like that. They wanted us to take their pictures and put them on our website. They all knew who we were and the address of our website. They say they look at the pictures all the time and like to find themselves there. Later we checked out our website and sure enough, the albums with soldiers in them all have more than a thousand hits, whereas the others have only a few hundred.

I learned later that the army is planning to build a concrete wall along the bypass road, permanently separating the Tuwani side of the road from Yatta. It would destroy the communities on that side of the road, which is, I'm sure, what they want. The Ma'on settlement would then get the land by default. The Palestinians are fighting it in court.

I returned to Hebron yesterday morning. Getting back was an ordeal. Israeli soldiers had occupied a house in Kirmil, a village between Yatta and Tuwani, and were doing flying checkpoints on the road to Yatta. Also, a large checkpoint between Yatta and Hebron which is usually closed had been opened. So it took forever. It is the ordeal that Palestinians endure daily, just to survive.