04021
January 14, 2004

Men overbored

Refugees have too much time, too little work, too few options

by Alexa Smith

At Kilometer Seven — a shantytown on the edge of Barranquilla, where more than 300 families are squatting because they have nowhere else to go — it’s a too-familiar feeling.

Many men here actually own farms, but cannot return to them because the paramilitaries or guerrillas have run them off their land and still control their home regions.

Alejandro De La Cruz in his one-room shack. Photos by Alexa Smith.

So leaving isn’t an option. That’s a grim daily realization when the residents wake to the sound of trucks rolling by on the highway and open their eyes to see canvas walls that shudder with the breeze.

There is a rumor, in fact, that one man who grew disgusted and left Kilometer Seven, intending to go home, “disappeared” within a week.

But staying here, near this sprawling Caribbean city already plagued by unemployment, is little better. There are no jobs here for farmers.

“Here, a man spends his days trying to find work, trying to get anything for the kids, for the family,” says Alejandro De La Cruz, 37. “You think, ‘Should I try to sell some fish? Or vegetables?’”

De La Cruz ponders bicycling 10 miles or more to Barranquilla’s downtown market to buy cheap produce that he can hawk on the streets.

It’s humiliating work, but even to do that, a man has to have cash to buy the goods. Not many do.

“Some people are more strong than others, but even then, there are moments …” De La Cruz says, his voice trailing off. “Every day is really stressful, because you have to figure out how to get food. You just keep trying. This is a really, really, really hard situation. And you ask yourself every day, ‘What about tomorrow?’”

De La Cruz sits on the edge of the double bed that dominates the 10-foot-square canvas shack he lives in. The only other furniture is a small television with rabbit ears, and two frayed lawn chairs. His bicycle is propped at the rear of the house, which is built campesino-style, with an aluminum roof that juts into the yard, casting the only shade. Cotton sheets are strung from the bedposts, an attempt at privacy.

Miguel Perez

With him are two friends, neighbors for the past three years at Kilometer Seven.

Miguel Perez, 50, doesn’t say a word. He just sits with his slender brown hands crossed in his lap. Raphael Avendano, 57, has put on a freshly pressed shirt for the interview, one that he bought before he became a refugee and could still afford to buy things. He alertly leans forward, listening and nodding, agreeing with what De La Cruz is saying.

Avendano, a pragmatist, joined a collective that got a small loan from the Presbyterian Church of Colombia to bring in a crop of black-eyed peas. The money came from a revolving credit program initially funded by Presbyterian Church (USA). With their profits, the growers will pay back the start-up money, then re-invest in another crop.

“It is different here in town,” Avendano says, explaining that he once lived near the same small town as De La Cruz, in the coastal state of Magdalena, where he raised his family of 10 on 50 acres. “At home, I felt freedom. I had space. I had ground to plant, and animals.

“Now, we just don’t have the best things, like before.”

Kilometer Seven is surrounded by fields, but no land is available for farming. All of it is owned by someone else.

In fact, it isn’t clear who holds title to the land at Kilometer Seven, according to an official in the office of Barranquilla’s mayor. That’s one reason the city is hesitant to invest in services such as clean water and paved roads.

Money is another problem. Services cost money and the refugees here can’t pay their bills. More than 70,000 internally displaced people have come to this state to escape violence on Colombia’s northern coast and in the state of Bolivar, south of Barranquilla.

It’s hard to say how many small farmers are refugees, because many Colombians are too afraid to register with the government as displaced persons. Estimates range from 3 million to 5 million.

These displaced people are an unwanted financial burden. Their presence causes panic in some officials, frustration in others.

Raphael Avendano.

German Zarate is a social planner by trade, and a Presbyterian lay pastor by vocation. A burly man with a wide smile, he has listened to hundreds of men like De La Cruz and Avendano, and he’s sympathetic.

This kind of predicament can break a man if he’s not careful, Zarate says. It can break up a family.

“If he decides to go out and look for work, well, the only thing he can do is farm,” he says. “So he walks and walks and walks to the city, not knowing exactly what he is looking for.”

When he isn’t out looking for work, he languishes in a little square shack.

In Colombia’s countryside, husbands go to work in the fields in the morning, then return in the afternoon to eat, listen to the radio, read a book, relax, and sleep. The wives are in charge of the house and the kids.

Displacement, Zarate says, turns everything upside-down, for a traditional-thinking man. He is out of work and lost at home.

“The house is in the hands of the woman … (and) he begins to feel he has no reason to be,” Zarate says. “He has no authority with the children; the wife does all the corrections. The children adapt to the ways of the city, and he doesn’t like the children coming home after 6 p.m. — or being out all night.”

Raphael Avendano, left and Alejandor De La Cruz, sit together in De La Cruz's one-room shack, which has little furniture except a sheet-draped bed.

Frustration affects a man’s relationships with wife, children and friends.

The bitterest pill, he says, is that women are often more employable than men. They can usually find work as maids. When a woman earns the money and runs the house, a man sometimes just leaves, feeling useless.

The situation in Kilometer Seven is familiar to millions of Colombians.

De La Cruz says his first wife left him and took their two daughters to Venezuela when they hit bottom financially and were forced to leave Magdalena. Her relatives harangued her about staying with a destitute man, and eventually she left.

“We were married 10 years. And we had no fights. No problems,” he says. “When we arrived here, the problems between us began.”

Desperation, De La Cruz points out, can change one’s personality. He says he gets angry more often now, yells more, and is sometimes violent. He doesn’t like this any more than he likes most of the other changes in his life.

Every day, he says, his son still asks why they cannot go back to the farm, where life was good. He remembers the milk, the cheese, the fresh corn, as “everything we needed.”

Facing the kids may be hardest.

“It is difficult,” agrees Avendano, who is all too well acquainted with an abrupt descent into brutal poverty. Before, he says, whenever he was away from home, he brought back gifts for his children — a pleasure now long-gone. “You just have to accept the situation that things are not like before,” he says. “Our money goes only for the necessary things: rice, oil, eggs, milk, chicken.”

What rankles him, however, is feeling helpless to do more for his kids. It hurts him to see them give up their dreams, he says, and it breaks his heart when the older ones leave in search of work. It bothers him that his own efforts to find work keep him from being around in the afternoons to talk with his children, get closer to them.

“It feels like you have lost some respect … that you can’t do anything for them,” he says, and it’s humiliating to see his children in fear and not be able to protect them as he once did.

“As a father, you are the leader of the family, but I can see the change,” he says. “Before, we were all together; now we are not complete, and it feels bad.

“I want to keep them all together, but I can’t.”

Perez fears that his own family may be irreparably broken, through no fault of his own.

Three years ago, his wife was shot by gunmen and later died. He abandoned his 30-acre farm and split up the children, leaving his youngest, a girl now 5 years old, with his sister. Twelve-year-old twin boys are with a grandmother, although his sister intends to take them in when she can. Two sons, 8 and 18, live with him at Kilometer Seven.

He’s still in shock, unable to talk about his tragedy without falling apart.

“I lost everything, everything,” he says. His friends, out of respect, stare at the cement floor and not at his tear-filled eyes. “Life has been a big tragedy since then. I haven’t been able to live like before, and I don’t see any hope for the future.

“I have no wife. No kids. No house. I don’t have anything.”

He falls silent. Talking is too painful.

Avendano is the first to speak to visitors from the Presbyterian Church of Colombia.

“The suffering has been grave,” he says, “but I have to try to forgive the past. If every day I think about the past, the bad things I have suffered, I will not find solutions.

“Every day I say (to myself), ‘You have to receive the bad things with the good.’”