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June 17, 2002 Journeys Far from Home It took weeks to figure out what had happened to Juanita. She couldn't tell it all at once. The story came out in pieces. Her mind kept wandering. Sometimes she cried so much we had to stop. I met her at a Return to Happiness workshop, held in La Chinita, a barrio of Apartadó in northwest Colombia, that I was running with a handful of volunteers. The volunteers were all thirteen or fourteen years old. The kids were mostly under ten, and had been forced out of their homes in the surrounding villages by the violence. It was ironic that their families looked for safety in La Chinita, where some of the biggest massacres of the war had occurred.
The Return to Happiness project was set up by UNICEF and the Catholic Church in 1997 after violence in our region forced thousands of families to flee from their homes. The project trained hundreds of teenagers and adults as volunteer "play" therapists, who ran workshops for displaced children. Each workshop followed the same basic pattern. First there were games and songs, then painting, and then we played with toys. Usually we played in groups but with kids like Juanita, the really sad ones, we played one-on-one. I sat on the floor beside her and showed her the bolsillo, the knapsack full of materials that every volunteer carries. "Look what I've got in here," I told her, but she didn't seem interested. I took out the rag dolls, the puppets, and the wooden toys-the donkey cart, the helicopter, the truck, the motorbike, and the boat. I started to play with them. I sat the man on the donkey cart and pushed him along. I flew the helicopter. I put the rag mother with the rag children, and let them hug one another. Then I offered her the rag family. She looked at them for a while, then she picked up the rag man and sat him on the donkey cart. She pushed him along, then burst into tears. "Don't worry," I told her. "We can play again later." She didn't answer but she sat quietly while I read aloud the story of "The Happy Monkey." This is about a monkey who wants to be brave and strong but the only way he knows how to do this is to be aggressive. None of the other animals like him but eventually, with the help of a wise macaw, he learns how to be a true friend, by trusting others. While I told the story I used the puppets of the monkey and the wise macaw to illustrate their roles. I introduced the macaw puppet to Juanita as a special friend that she could tell secrets to. Some of the kids find it easier to talk to a puppet than they do to a real person. That first time I don't think Juanita took in half of what I was saying, but the first lesson of doing this work is that you have to give the kids time. Afterwards, I always sat with Juanita when we held a workshop in La Chinita. At first she didn't talk at all. Then she began to mumble, speaking through the toys. She often broke down and couldn't go on. Finally, after weeks of playing, I thought I understood the painful story of what had happened to her family. The family was on the donkey cart: her father, her mother, Juanita, and her sister. A helicopter came and flew around them, making a loud whirring sound. When she flew the wooden helicopter, Juanita made the whirring sound through her teeth. Her whole face was screwed up with the effort. The family was frightened by the noise and the way the helicopter circled overhead. Her father stopped the cart and they all ran away to hide in the banana fields. She was with her mother and sister. Her father was on the other side of the road. The helicopter landed some way off. The men came and one of them found her father. Juanita and her mother and sister stayed hidden but they saw everything. She saw them drag her father out of the field. She bent the tiny rag arms of the rag doll behind his head, just the way her father's arms had been. The commander of the armed men came along and he pushed Juanita's father onto the ground, facedown. Then he took out a gun and shot him three times. Every time the rag man went "pow!" with his gun, his whole body jumped with the force of his weapon. The rest of the family watched helplessly from their hiding places. After the armed men had gone, Juanita gathered the rag dolls that stood for herself, her sister, and her mother, and ran them to the father doll. They fell on him and cried and cried until their mother said they must go, must leave, must run away. They fled, abandoning everything, and traveled first by boat and then in the back of a truck, until they came to La Chinita. There wasn't much I could do to help Juanita, aside from playing with her, paying attention to her, and encouraging her to join in with the other kids. I had been trained to keep notes on how she was playing, what she seemed to be saying, and how her mood was, and I gave this information to the project psychologist. But the psychologist was overwhelmed. So many children were affected by the war, and some were even more disturbed than Juanita. It was quite a long time before the psychologist got around to her. By that time, Juanita seemed to be improving, sometimes even joining in our games. Then one day she just disappeared with her family. Probably they went to another town or even to the city, but no one knew for sure. It happens a lot these days. People are here and then they leave and you never find out what happened to them. There is a lot about this work that is very sad. Sometimes it is hard to measure any kind of improvement in the kids. It is hard to know if we are really achieving anything. I've sometimes thought about giving it all up because I need to spend more time on my studies. My family is also poor and so I need to earn money to buy supplies for school. But I also wonder what would happen to these children if I and other young people didn't do this work. Most psychologists and sociologists don't want to come to Apartadó to work, because they say it is too dangerous. Last week, ten of us sat down and planned a children's march against kidnapping. More than three hundred children and teenagers took part. We stopped the traffic as we walked through Apartadó calling for the right to life to be respected, for children to be kept out of the war, for our right to live in peace and freedom. It was a great day. This article was taken from Sara Cameron's book, Out of War: True Stories from the Front Lines of the Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia. Cameron was invited by UNICEF to visit Colombia to conduct research on the Children's Movement for Peace. She interviewed hundreds of Colombians including 16-year-old Johemir Pérez, who relates his experiences in this excerpt. For more information on the plight of Colombia's
children, visit: This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
Copyright © 2003 Colombia Journal. All rights reserved. |
Juanita
was about seven years old, dark and plump, with tight black curls.
She was a recent arrival in La Chinita and showed many signs of
distress. When all the other kids were running around, playing games,
singing songs, and painting pictures, Juanita sat on her own, sometimes
watching the action, but mostly just staring at the dirt floor.
Her face showed no expression, no feeling. She looked numb and disconnected.