“When a peasant’s land is taken away, it feels like they’re taking away your soul and your heart” – a poignant reflection from the El Guayabo Peasant Community, 2024.
A few months ago, while one of our partners was visiting Barrancabermeja, with the context becoming increasingly insecure for the people we accompany, navigating a not-very optimistic uncertainty about the future, the following words suddenly resonated: “Promise me that if something happens to me, you will take care of my family.” A solemn silence took over the space. What do you answer when someone says something like that?
Having overcome the silence, the question now was: And where do I get a bit of this? What do you cling to to keep trying? The answer came months later. Walking along the banks of the Magdalena River, two smiles were waiting to say goodbye to us on the next boat back to Barrancabermeja after two days of accompaniment. And it was there that the power of the collective was revealed to us through a hug because therein lay the answer: everything in the collective is transformed, everything in the collective empowers, and everything in the collective becomes hopeful. What would our answer be now? It would be to cling to the genuine work that exists in the collective, to believe that only the collective can save us and that there we will find that hope that keeps alive the illusion of transforming the processes of which we are a part and that there is a giant power in what mutual care means.
Today, our call for this prayer is for peace workers to turn to the collective, a call to this collective of support for CPT so that we may hold our partners in our thoughts and prayers, so that together we may sustain the hope that things can and will change because those same smiles that help us to sustain ourselves are also sustained by the powerful thing that it is to walk in a collective. And what other forms of hope do you know of?
