Years of conflict and struggle have riddled many in Colombia with fear and isolation from realizing a sustainable life. To the average Colombian citizen, nothing is wrong. But to the people fighting for their lives in the jungles and on the coast of this beautiful country, the gravity of the situation keeps pulling them down. Guerrilla groups and drug trafficking organizations are taking land that has long belonged to people who hold it as a part of their identity and heritage. This causes them to become refugees within their own country, known as Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs). As we went through various communities, each one held some sense of hope that propelled them through the muck of a struggle they were forced into. No matter how long they’d been displaced, from three months to over a decade, they were still smiling, dancing, and laughing. They were still willing to feed us a feast of delicious food, although they could not feed their own children. This was a new kind of communion— the real kind of communion where love multiplies and there is always more room. There was no limitation to the kind or the amount of person you had to be.
Organizations like CORSOC are fighting the good fight in providing housing, fighting for land rights, building schools, and organizing other kinds of humanitarian aid. They work as prime advocates for those whose voices have been silenced or hushed into the background. Their work is imperative in changing the lives of those affected by this immense violence. When asked what we could do their answer was simple, “Tell your people.” Spreading awareness and telling the stories we had been told helps raise solidarity and challenge the oppressors. It shifts the narrative of victim to oppressed. It exposes the systemic issues that continually impoverish them.
Colombia is one of the most beautiful and diverse countries I’ve ever been to. The people’s beauty radiates through their incessant hope for change. As we drove on dirt roads through fragile wooden villages, we heard music, laughter, and saw children still playing despite the chaos all around them. And I as I come back to the United States and begin to process some of the things I witnessed in Colombia, I am reminded that peace meets you where you are. That it has the tendency to find you in the most unsuspected places. Determination manifests in many forms. For those we met, it became an unbridled sense that change was just merely waiting on the horizon for the perfect moment to enter. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s final words in “Ulysses” describe this kind of peace well, “Though much is taken, much abides; and though / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”