my saturday afternoon

This afternoon (Saturday 14/10/06) provided what was both the most confronting and the most positive experience that I've had since I've been away.

One of the girls who works for AIESEC in Bucaramanga also does some work for a local church that works a lot with marginalised communities in the area, so I went along with her to see what they do. Monday (now today as I type this into the blog) is the international day of 'no hunger', so I went with Natalia and her group of volunteers to a poor (and I mean REALLY poor) community to deliver meals to the families and their children in honour of it being 'no hunger day' on the Monday. The community is only 20 minutes out of Bucaramanga (which is itself only a small city), but it could have been on another planet. The cluster of homes is tucked in behind an industrial estate and a truck depot, and fits all the stereotypes that come to mind when you try to visualise total poverty - houses made out of scraps of discarded wood and corrugated iron; narrow, unpaved, potholed streets; mangy, stray dogs wandering around or asleep under whatever shelter they can find; the ever-present smell of unnfiltered diesel fumes mixed in with mud; more people than there seems to be space; and more children than there seem to be parents. Of course, a lot of the parents aren't there because they're dead or missing, as many of these people are internally displaced - victims of the ongoing armed conflict between government forces (including the national police and the armed forces), guerilla groups, paramilitaries, and private secirity forces. What remains of the families (usually the women, the elderly and the children) flee the violence in the countryside to seek refuge in the big cities, only to end up living in squalor on the periphery of a society that has little room for them, and find themselves at odds with an increasingly industrialised and commercialised economy that has limited need for their skills, which are primarily in agriculture and domestic work. Some do find work; some try to sell newspapers and lollies on footpaths and at traffic lights; some become beggars; others... I'm not sure.

There is so much to be done, and so many people are affected by this problem, but what the church is doing - reaching out to people in need, and trying to work with them on their own terms (I could launch into a diatribe about the paternalistic nature of welfare, but I won't) - is a positive step, because at least it acknowledges that there is a problem. This experience really forced me to confront the situation that I am here to understand, and made me realise that, no matter how small what you do may seem, something is better than nothing - in this sense, despite the confronting nature of seeing such extreme poverty with my own eyes, today was indeed a positive experience.