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Note #8063 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Home sweat home
04011
January 12, 2004

Home sweat home

Woman and family are behind the 8 ball in Kilometer Seven

by Alexa Smith

BARRANQUILA, Colombia - Sitting outside the canvas-walled shack that she will
never call home, Lucy De Avila begins crying, not making a sound.

	She is accustomed to not being heard. Why not cry silently, too?

	"I will answer all of your questions," she says, big tears rolling
down her cheeks, "but alone, inside."

	Lucy crooks her neck toward the women who have been inching closer to
her ever since she started talking. She sits in a cheap, white plastic chair
that could be found in any Wal-Mart in the United States, legs crossed at the
ankles. One neighbor is now sitting at her feet; another gently runs her
fingers through Lucy's straight brown hair. An older woman with a face full
of creases leans over her right shoulder, while her 6-year-old daughter,
Adriana, a cotton string dangling from each pierced ear, sidles up and leans
against her mother's thin, brown legs.

	Privacy is only one of a million things that abruptly went missing
three years ago last June, when unidentified gunmen forced Lucy, four of her
children and her then-husband to lie face-down in the grass outside her tiny
Ovejas home, threatening to blow them all to kingdom come.

	Instead, they wound up at Kilometer Seven, the name attached to a
cluster of ramshackle sheds plopped down in a field by the road that runs
seven kilometers from the edge of Barranquilla. The camp roughly shelters
about 300 of the approximately five million families made homeless by the
spasms of violence that have convulsed Colombia. Thousands of people like
Lucy have been killed, most of them unsure who wanted them dead or why.

	There is no grass at Kilometer Seven. No running water. No paved
roads. No shade. No telephones. No windows. No trees. No cars. No jobs. No
money. No way to go back home. No place else to go.

	What Kilometer Seven has is dirt, tons of dirt. It is a cruel parody
of the phrase "dirt-poor," because dirt is, literally, everywhere, the one
thing everyone here has too much of.

	A thin layer of grit, all but invisible, coats everything - the
sheets on the one double bed where Lucy's five children sleep, the cement
floor, the plastic trucks tossed under the sagging mattress. It is more felt
than seen. Except when it mixes with sweat and sticks to the skin of every
barefoot kid here. There are about 800, and the grime coats their knees,
their elbows, their toenails, the underpants that are all the littlest ones
wear. It also is under the fingernails of all the adults. And the flip-flops
that seem to be standard-issue footwear here all have a beige coating that
masks their original colors.

	When one sits in the sun talking, dust adheres to the tongue, leaving
a dry, bitter taste.

	Even the scrawny dogs at Kilometer Seven seem defeated by the dust.
They are reluctant to move, burying themselves in thick piles of the stuff as
the heat slams relentlessly down.

	"The thing that hurts is that I worked really, really, really hard
for the kids. Displacement finished those dreams," Lucy says, recalling her
long-ago life on a farm that from here looks like Eden. "Life was easy. We
had a cow for milk. Hens for eggs. There was plenty of corn and yucca. There
was watermelon. Mango. ...

	"It is so different now, here. I go to bed thinking of food, how to
get food for the kids. It is worry. ... It is really difficult to find money
to buy food."

	Lucy, 28, speaks in the low monotone of someone in shock.

	What she is able to buy - sometimes on credit, at little store at
Kilometer Seven - she doesn't like. It isn't fresh. Potatoes from a can.
Sometimes soup. A little rice.

	She opens the door of the 4-foot-square kitchen that a relief group
built a few yards from her open back door. Inside there is a hot plate, a
single bulb, a teeny dish rack with a few plates askew, a few cans of food. A
banged-up pot rests on the hot plate.

	There is a hole where the sink should be. There is no running water.

	"On the farm," she says, "there were woods. Trees. Water." And she
never had to worry whether the water was safe. Now she must boil it in pans
on the little hot plate. "We have just electricity here," she says. "The
water is brought by a man on a wagon. I get three small cartons that have to
last for eight days. It costs 400 pesos (per carton)."

	As if Lucy has conjured him up, a donkey plods by. Gallons of plastic
containers, muddy handprints on the sides, are strapped together in a
rickety, wooden wagon that is grayed by overexposure to the hot sun. Its
driver has pulled his shirt up over his head to shield his neck from the
heat. Lucy doesn't move. Her eight days aren't up.

	She stayy in her chair on the little wooden stoop outside the
kitchen, away from the neighbors. Adrianna - one of the little ones, said to
be tall for her age - runs in and out, lolling briefly in the doorway while
her mother talks. Lucy's oldest child, a 10-year-old boy named Luis Fernando,
sits by his mother's chair. He is the one who remembers the feel of a gun
pressed to his skull, who remembers the eight days the family spent in a car,
frantically trying to think of a safe place to go. He still jumps when a
helicopter passes overhead.

	Arnoldo Echeverria, 33, one of the people Lucy banished from this
telling of her story, is standing in front of her shack, talking with a group
of men. Whatever she is saying, he has heard it before, probably a million
times.

	Echeverria, himself a displaced man, believes Colombia's internal
refugees will never have basic services like water and electricity in their
makeshift neighborhoods unless they organize themselves. Five million voices,
he figures, ought to carry some political clout. Otherwise, he says, they
don't stand a chance.

	Echeverria is the national treasurer of an relatively new
organization, the National Association of the Displaced in Colombia, called
ANDESCOL. Its leaders claim that the plight of men and women like Lucy ought
to be addressed by Colombia's government, rather than by the international
non-governmental organizations like those that put up the school, the
kitchens and the bathrooms at Kilometer Seven.

	  ANDESCOL blames the government for abetting, if not directly
causing, the violence that has turned millions of this nation's small farmers
into refugees living on the fringes of unsympathetic cities already wracked
by rampant unemployment. In from the countryside, they are seen as an
unwanted burden on the budgets of cities and towns. Some even accuse them of
being guerrillas in disguise, waiting for a chance to infiltrate the cities.

	Echeverria estimates that nearby Barranquilla has 100,000 displaced
people, all struggling to adapt to their new reality.

Most have been terrorized and run off the land they once owned, either by
paramilitaries supported by the Colombian army or by big land-owners who want
to control resources such as the oil reserves in central Colombia. Others
were pushed out violently because the land is more desirable than when they
settled it. There is talk of a highway that will cut through southern
Colombia, running from Brazil to the sea, and astronomically increasing the
value of the land it will cross. In the north, there is debate about building
another Atlantic-Pacific passage, an alternative to the canal the United
States has returned to Panama - so a scramble is under way for the ground
that would have to be removed to make a new canal.

	ANDESCOL says the prevailing opinion is that small farmers are just
in the way. Those who haven't been killed can't get the help they need to
rebuild their lives far from home. Returning is out of the question because
of the continuing violence.

	"These people just want to live with dignity. ... They want to return
home where they can live with dignity," Echeverria says. "They know the city
is not for the campesino.

	But Lucy has little hope of returning home. Certainly not soon; maybe
not ever.

	For now, she is washing her kids in a stream and walking them back to
the house through the dust. In the rainy season she collects water in buckets
and pans and washes them and her laundry in tubs in the middle of their one
room, while the ground outside becomes a mud pit.

	She saves the few pesos she can get her hands on to buy water for
drinking and cooking.

	ANDESCOL wants the people of Kilometer Seven to protest, and they
have done so on a small scale. But folks here are scared. In 2002 - one year
after most of them arrived - gunmen shot and killed four community leaders
who were working for change. The lesson was taken to heart by these people,
who have already seen too much bloodshed.

	The Rev. Milton Mejia, executive of the Presbyterian Church of
Colombia, is scheduling meetings with city officials to try to solve
Kilometer Seven's water-supply problem. For a while, he said, Barranquilla
raised its residents' fees to help pay for the cost of trucking water to
Kilometer Seven and other, similar neighborhoods. But that didn't last.

	The Spanish-owned multinational, Triple A, Barranquilla's water
company, was carrying the water to the ramshackle towns, but when residents
couldn't pay, it stopped. "If you don't pay, with Triple A, there's no
service," Mejia says, sitting in his Barranquilla office, whose dicor
includes a mural of John Calvin.

	He's waiting to see what the new mayor will do.

	"The protests they make will help," he says, nodding. In the
meantime, he says, the church is developing a revolving credit system to help
the residents of the refugee towns earn money to pay for water, food,
clothing and medicine.

	The money comes from a Presbyterian Church (USA) Extra Commitment
Opportunity called Displaced Communities/Agricultural/Pig Farm (Hunger
Program), ECO #047871.

	The money goes to groups, not individuals. Since the program began,
Kilometer Seven residents have used a loan to make a crop of beans, paid back
the money and re-invested it. The most recent cash crop was 700 chickens
raised for 40 days and sold to Barranquilla restaurants last month.

	Lucy got a share of that money just after Christmas. She hopes to
collaborate with her neighbors in other projects.

	"I couldn't bring most things with me," she says. "We brought the
bed, some clothes, just that."

	Lucy and her boyfriend sleep on the floor on a thin foam mattress
that she puts by the bedful of children. He keeps food on the table by doing
odd jobs and working on camp projects. She met him here, after her husband
left more than a year ago.

	Although her husband beat her, she loved him, she says. And when he
left her for another woman, she felt more alone than she'd ever felt in her
life. Without her extended family nearby. Without work. Without money.
Without a plot of ground on which to grow food, one thing she knows how to
do.

	Still, she hasn't lost her green thumb,

	She has trained a leafy lettuce to grow up the wobbly fence of sticks
out back. It covers the spaces in between the spindly slats of wood,
providing a little privacy. A bit of basil grows along the fenceline.

	After her husband left, she says, "Sometimes three days went by when
the kids didn't eat."

	Such is life in Kilometer Seven.

	Going home isn't an option, Lucy says, recalling the threatening
letters and the gun to her head. The area is under the control of the people
who wanted her gone, wanted her gone for reasons she doesn't understand. "We
cannot go back. Displaced people cannot go back," she says matter-of-factly.

	She's not sure she'll ever get out of Kilometer Seven. She can't
imagine that she will ever move to a better neighborhood with clean, running
water, paved streets, electricity and a telephone. Or earn enough to afford
another two-room house somewhere, on a plot of ground where she can do what
she does best - grow her plants, animals and kids.

	"All the time I remember the past," she says. "I wish for the future
the life I had in the past. But sometimes I think that is impossible."

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