04105
February 25, 2004

Cultivating a future for Colombian villagers

Tiny ‘farm’ may be the beginning of the end of the lean years

by Alexa Smith

PITAL, Colombia — Sidney de la Sala leans back in his chair as he talks, often staring up at the whirling ceiling fans as if to pluck his words from the air.

“When we diagnosed the needs of the community … they are socio-economic,” he says. “There are no resources here for people to earn money; they don’t exist.”

Looking at the fan, he continues: “So, we asked ourselves, ‘What can we do with the resources that are here? What is here is the ground; so, what can we possibly do with this?’”

De la Sala, a teacher, works in metropolitan Barranquilla, 30 minutes by car and a world away from this little village.

His chair is in a corner of the God Is Love Presbyterian Church, a peach-colored sanctuary on one of Pital’s main drags. Out back is a bathtub-sized cement pool where rainwater is collected in the months when it does rain. (Pital has running water for only one hour each morning.) Just over the concrete-block fence is a neighbor’s tangled garden, where vines weave themselves along poles and trellises, separated by winding dirt paths.

Across from de la Sala sits 65-year-old Hilda San Juan, her gray hair pulled back in a tidy bun. Next to her is Augusta Villanueva, a lean and sturdy younger woman whose hand moves occasionally to her chin as she listens to the conversation. Also present for this sunset meeting is Dianna Socarras, the youngest of the church’s elders.

This is the steering committee for Seeds of Hope — a church-planting project that has its

Hilda San Juan
Photos by Alexa Smith

They decided to use the ground to feed the community. They have even put a few men to work, weeding and plowing to pick up a few extra bucks.

The committee is here to hear an agronomist talk about how to create a self-sustaining farm. He suggests raising fruit on one portion; bees and honey on another; goats, for milk, on another — maybe even fish. They’re here to learn and to see whether what he says will be useful for Seeds of Hope.

“The goal is to improve the lives of the people in this community,” says de la Sala. “If we plant the land, the people can have food more cheaply. We want to have a market to sell … here, and in other towns, too.”

All in good time. Right now the church is working a tiny piece of land they have on loan. They’re starting small but dreaming big — hoping to someday buy a substantial tract and farm it organically, to feed and employ some of the more than 60 percent of Pital residents who don’t have work or any prospect of it.

Chronic unemployment has created other woes, most of them the predictable consequences of poverty, de la Sala says, especially among the kids, like those wrestling and laughing on the church’s wide porch. There is no money to buy healthy food, so they suffer from malnutrition. You can see the signs of it. Malnutrition. Protruding ribs. Bad color. Inability to concentrate. Recurrent illnesses. One thing leads to another.

Dianna Socarras

Pital is on Colombia’s northern coast, where for five months of the year there is no rain at all. There is no way to water the fields when the sky stays dry.

To a casual observer, Pital seems downright quaint, almost Mayberry, Colombia-style. Neighbors with little else to do sit on their porches talking. The centerpiece of the town is the Catholic church, which is encircled by a dusty park with swings for the kids. Little shops painted in brilliant greens, reds and blues line the main thoroughfare. Children play unattended; in a town of 4,200 people, many of them kin, everyone knows where every kid belongs. In the evenings, cows plod along the paved streets, walking home from grazing.

The town itself is completely surrounded by other people’s property.

It wasn’t always this way. San Juan remembers when the land was owned and farmed by people who lived here. But that generation died out and the land was sold off, cheap. But there was nothing to take the place of agriculture. San Juan says her husband plants a few rented plots, having sold his 30 acres years ago, for a pair of shoes that to his dismay didn’t even fit.

“I always remember that, and I want to cry,” San Juan says as her neighbors smile sympathetically and roll their eyes. This clearly is a story they have heard many times before. “When I was a kid here,” San Juan says, “we didn’t have many things. But we lived OK. We weren’t worried about having what we needed.”

Villanueva’s memory doesn’t go back that far. But she remembers hearing from her parents that life here wasn’t always so poor. “My parents told me there was a good life here, when they could plant a lot of things,” she says. “I can’t remember that; my parents just told me.”

Outsiders came in and bought up the land, at bargain prices, from people who desperately needed money to survive.

That was the state of things a few years back when the Rev. Gloria Ulloa, 44, herself a farmer’s daughter, arrived. She now lives in Barranquilla and works in Pital about five days a week. Her wish is that the people’s basic needs could be met.

Ulloa has a three-step approach to the study of the Gospels: understand the context; comprehend what the scripture actually says; and apply what it says in your context, giving the words flesh. In Pital, she says, that means growing food to feed people and give them purpose.

The Rev. Gloria Ulloa

That’s a mundane task, but it has theological meaning: Working with the earth means understanding the responsibility God has placed in human hands to care for the planet and its people, Ulloa says; the theological and the practical are entwined.

The people of Pital are slowly recovering an identity that they lost.

“People are planting the ground again,” Ulloa says, sitting in a tiny sanctuary whose chancel was repainted recently with images of farmers, tools and crops.

Asked whether Seeds of Hope is energizing people, Ulloa nods and smiles. De la Sala grins. But it is San Juan, a mother of nine grown kids, who speaks: “I think that life comes to the people when there is a plan, when they know what they have to do and are able to do it.”

Ulloa says few of the people of Pital could afford to buy property, but a community can do what an individual cannot. She is keeping her eyes open for “for sale” signs.

The synod council of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (PCC) is deciding whether this project is successful enough to warrant the purchase of more land.

When PC(USA) Moderator Susan Andrews visited Colombia last month, one of the gifts she received from the PCC was a communion cup carved by hand from a gourd grown in Pital, filled with fresh fruit and vegetables grown in the soil of Pital.