Incredible news came out of Colombia on 9 June, where, after being lost for 40 days in the jungle, three girls and one boy belonging to the Huitoto Indigenous people were found alive after a long search process. The news gave us hope; it was a miracle that they were found, and encouraging to see them again. Mother Earth and ancestral knowledge protected them, their resilience, and the love and care of the older sister towards her sisters and her brother allowed them to survive while help was on the way.
And today, through this story, we want to highlight the importance of children in Colombia. In the territories and communities that we accompany, childhood represents the present, the transformation of a world that offers hope despite the circumstances.
Today we want to uphold the children who live in communities like El Guayabo or in the Northeast Antioquia region that CPT Colombia accompanies because of an alarming increase in the number of girls and boys recruited in these territories and other regions of Colombia. We call on you, our great support network, to hold the children in your prayer; children that deserve to live in freedom, grow up in territories of peace, children living a childhood that has often been overshadowed by adult-centrism and that deserves the recognition of what it represents, because more than a future, childhood is the present and now, childhood has a lot to teach us, starting from the genuine and loving way in which they see the world.
May the children of small farming communities of Colombia always be in our prayers, the children who cross a checkpoint every day in Palestine to go to school, the children who live in the middle of the bombings in Kurdistan, the children who cross the sea with their family in Lesbos, the children who defend the indigenous territories in Canada, the migrant children on the border of Mexico and the United States, the children of the present world!
