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March 14, 2005
"I may have nothing, but my home is close to the stars."
I heard that from Maria, a woman who gathered three of her eight children one night six years ago and escaped the bloody war that has torn apart her hometown, a place tucked in the jungles of southern Colombia, close to the border with Brazil and Peru. Maria and what's left of her family live in a shack built out of discarded wood and plastic sheets, perched high up a mountain that affords them a prized view of Bogota. They have no sewage and water arrives only once a week, brought by tanker trucks that slowly climb the unpaved hills of Ciudad Bolivar to fill the blue plastic barrels that sit outside Maria's shack and the 32 neighboring shacks that belong to families also displaced by violence.
Ciudad Bolivar is a neighborhood of 800,000 residents that barely existed 20 years ago. Now, it absorbs most of the 150,000 people who arrive in Bogota every month from Colombia's war-torn countryside. It's a neighborhood that most would consider dangerous, for it's said to be peppered with militias partnered with guerrilla and paramilitary groups. A TV reporter warned me not to venture in on my own because I may not come out alive, so I enlisted the help of Oscar Baron, a community organizer who moved to Ciudad Bolivar when it was only a cluster of humble homes off Avenida Boyaca, in southern Bogota. Oscar introduced me as "la periodista," or the reporter, and that was enough for people to open their hearts and their homes to me.
I found no danger in Ciudad Bolivar. What I found were people who had nothing, but didn't mind splitting a chicken breast with a stranger who showed up unnanounced to explore the other side of Bogota.
Posted by Fernanda Santos at March 14, 2005 02:25 PM
Comments
Hey Fernanda -- what wonderful glimpses you're giving us of Bogota! Love it!
Posted by: Cathryn at March 14, 2005 03:09 PM