A little extra

Today I have a guest blogger. Her name is Patricia Cuellar; she is a beautiful and smart lady who has written a very interesting piece on how she feels about being Colombian. As a missionary, I feel honoured to be able to share with you this essay written by a native of the country where I serve.

Just in case you´re wondering, yes, she´s my wife but in this part of the world (where we are called chauvinistic, and machistas and who knows what else, our wives --well, one each of course-- don´t surrender their surnames when they marry; some of them do take the husband´s, some others just add the husband´s name and some others sometimes do and sometimes don´t...)

Were it not for...

By Patricia Cuellar

April 9, 2008

To be a Colombian from inside is something quite different to be Colombian abroad, but both circumstances are intimately related. I am 44 years old now, and I can´t remember one single day that I haven’t lived under the threat and sometimes even the reality of our internal war. When I was younger I yearned to see those spectacular places of the Colombian geography I hear about and I could not because my parents said those places were dangerous: the jungles of the east, the endless plains, the little towns along the Magdalena River, Cauca, Antioquia, the Atlantic coast, the Pacific coast... and I could name many more. This has not changed much in these last 60 years since the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the political leader who personified hope for Colombia then, a hope based on an ideology.

Only now I understand the real dimension of what I learnt in my Geography lectures at school: “Colombia is in a privileged geographical situation, in the top corner of South America, the only country in the subcontinent washed by two oceans”. But privileged for what? I ask. Five hundred years ago, this was the place where the Spanish empire accumulated all the treasures plundered from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia itself, and where the ships were loaded for their dangerous raid to European ports, therefore places like Cartagena were systematically attacked by the British, Dutch and so on, in order to steal the treasures from the ones that stole them from us... so you see:pillage and war since then. What did all that mean? It meant fortresses and castles, but also weaknesses that just as those castles, are still standing 500 years later. The forts are just tourist attractions, but those weaknesses, the conflict, the violence and the injustice prevail just the same. Privileged for what? So that along those two huge coasts so rich in fishing, fishermen can starve and sink in poverty, privileged to export the terrible drug that is so happily consumed in the rich world, privileged for weapons to easily get into the country to feed the black market that thrives in war. That’s when we understand this is not just a Colombian problem. There are and there have been so many hands constantly meddling into this problem, that once you are into it –and however good humanitarian reasons you may have had-- you cannot come now and say “it’s their problem”

This cannot be seen as a simple internal problem when there are so many external expressions that constantly remind us that we are pariahs of world society, when people abroad hear us say “I am Colombian” and do not mention my delicious coffee, or my beautiful emeralds, but cocaine and marihuana; this cannot be seen as just an internal problem when my husband is told to shut up or not to write just because of his nationality or --even worse-- because he’s married to a Colombian; this is not just an internal problem when there are countries in Latin America that would not give me a visa unless I have a US visa... and that’s not to mention other visas. To go abroad or to visit some consulates to get a Visa, as a Colombian I have to be prepared to be looked at with suspicion, to be abused verbally, to bear the eternal sensation that there is something wrong with me even though my own conscience is right.

Recently I had a nightmare: I was in a plane, heading for a European country, and we made a stopover in a country for which I only had a transit visa. As my mother and sisters lived there, I went to visit them, but then I realized that as my visa did not allow that I was an illegal alien. In my anguish I tried to explain what was going on, but “the law is the law”... how many Colombians have not seen their relatives for so many years because of this?

I had a nightmare, but with Martin Luther King, today I have a dream. I dream of not being told to shut up just because I am Colombian; I dream of a country where there is no hunger; I dream of a country that is not peppered with landmines that little children take for toys and are left maimed for life; I dream of a time when I can go to visit my brothers and sisters wherever in Colombia or in South America or in Europe or anywhere; I dream of a country where poor peasants don’t have to beg for a few coins in the corners just because he was evicted form his little plot; I dream of a time when we are not seen with suspicion, I dream of a time when there is no shame at all in saying “I am Colombian”, I dream of a country where there is justice, but specially forgiveness; I dream of a deep transformation that goes beyond the social dimension, that goes from the individual to the collective, from the material to the spiritual; I dream of a country that is capable of finding true hope in Christ. Is it possible that I dream of a Colombia full of God’s Kingdom?

Were it not for the knowledge that my real citizenship is not of this world, that my nationality is in the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of salvation, of love, and true peace and acceptance, I would feel offended for the way in which we Colombians are seen and for what others say about us and I could not have understood that the important thing for me is not that I am Colombian, but I am a daughter of God in the midst of a society of pariahs where we live the shame and the burden of having been born in the “most privileged country of South America”.