Driving toward Zambrano, we passed one sandbagged installation after another. At each one there were young men -- kids -- in uniform, looking terrified. So much of the land we drove through looked beautiful, like productive land, but there were few farms and few people. So much of the land in that area is mined. In every little town there were abandoned houses and schools. Whole towns abandoned. You'd see a sign on the road pointing toward a town and then once you got there there'd be nothing there. The conflict is still very active in the region.
As if all the conflict weren't bad enough, last year they had a huge natural disaster, a flood. The river now covers what was main street.
The church seats about 50-75 people. The pastors' family lives at the church -- very humble conditions.
The church's teen group takes care of a fish pond the church has. It's a one-and-a-half hour walk each way for them to go take care of the fish. The church also has a community bakery, where they teach baking skills. And a few small fields for crops. They provide food to elderly people and kids -- not just members of their church but anyone from the town who's in need. Employment is so hard to find in the town -- and it's so dangerous because of the mines and violence to go into the country -- that hunger is a very serious problem in Zambrano. So the church's food programs are really important.
They're hoping to rent a building on the same street as the church, to use it as an after-school center for the young people and also to run their food programs for the elderly and children there. Another activity the church is involved in is preparing young people to become conscientious objectors.
We had conversations with three survivors of violence: a young mother, an older woman, and an older man.
The older woman's son had worked for an agricultural company and the guerrillas accused him of being a paramilitary. He was taken from his car one day in broad daylight and nothing has been heard from him or about him since. "Literally, my life stopped on that day," she said. "And I haven't lived since." She is now raising her son's child, her grandson. "It's not for me to say what the retribution should be for these people," she said of his killers. "God will decide how they need to be punished."
The young mother told of the paramilitaries taking control of homes, of everything, in the small farming community she was from. They stayed in the community for one year. "Every night you heard killings, torture." Everyone in town could hear the paras bringing people in -- and never know who it was. "Could it be a friend? A neighbor?" When the paras finally left, they took absolutely everything with them.
The young mother was the most emotional of the three people they talked of violence with. She said, "The Church is helping me be less violent."
The older man said that when he and his family first arrived in Zambrano, having fled violence in another part of the country, there was fighting going on in the streets in Zambrano.
Finally, the pastors' daughter -- about 15 years old -- heard some of these conversations and said she wanted to say something as well. Her parents, the pastors, don't make enough money to send her to a school in a nearby city, she said. They were able to gather together enough money for her to attend a half-year of school in the city. But she said it was difficult for he to be way, because "then I couldn't protect my parents." "Every time someone knocks on the door with a crisis in the middle of the night, we kids think 'That's it. They've come to kill our dad.'"
* Names have been changed for security reasons.
