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.

Lucy De Avila sits outside her ramshackle home in Kilometer Seven, a town for refugees from the violence in Colombia. Photos by Alexa Smith.

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.

An older neighbor listens while Lucy talks.

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.

Luis Fernando, Lucy’s 10-year-old son, crouches in the doorway of the house.

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.

Dirt is piled along the dusty, unpaved streets of Kilometer Seven.

“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 décor 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.”