When I speak of celebrating life here, I mean celebrating life in the midst of a culture where death is present everyday. And when I say death I really mean murder. And murder can mean domestic violence and other crimes, but most often, it means gang violence.
Every week I accompany families in Mariona through my Praxis site experience. I ask questions. I listen. I ask more questions. I listen again and I hold with me the stories that these families share. I love these families. I feel this weight, this paralyzing weight in my body when I remember their stories, when I retell them. In sharing their stories, in sharing what I know of the reality of insecurity and violence in Mariona, I carry that weight with me.
To talk about these stories is delicate. Delicate because these stories are of real people, people I have spent time with, playing with their kids and sharing meals, listening to their love stories, the stories of their weddings. I know their identity; they are not statistics nor case studies. They are my family here as well. And together, in sharing their stories, I begin to carry the weight of being connected to the reality of insecurity and violence in Mariona.
I am entrenched in their reality primarily as an observer, as someone who accompanies them. However, coming from my home in the United States, I accompany these families from a position of wealth and security. My experience of accompaniment and therefore my perspective and analysis of the reality in Mariona is affected by the utter lack of violence that I have experienced in my life. My experience of security rests in stark contrast to the insecurity and violence that exists in the lives of these families.
Not far away from where one family in Mariona lives, there once lived an abusive husband. Just a block away, that abusive husband killed his wife. She was left in the house dead, some even say hanging, her body mutilated, breasts cut off, skin bleeding, not unlike the torture stories people tell from the civil war in this country. The husband who murdered her told the police it had been a crime of delinquency, essentially blaming it on the gangs. He was not punished. That man moved and is now an evangelical pastor in different neighborhood.
And sometimes, for this family in Mariona, the violence is even closer than a story, closer than a block away from their home. Just a few days ago the mother in this family passed by the location of a fresh murder, noting it for the way the blood still smelled. Everyday after picking up her daughters from school, she calls her husband to let him know that they made it home safe. And when it is her husband’s turn to pick up the girls, sometimes he sees dead bodies too. Twice in the last month he has seen men murdered.
And the daughters in this family own bicycles. They rarely ride them. Those bicycles sit by their front door. Their older daughter asks her dad to play outside. She wants to go the park. She wants to ride that bicycle. She is seven years old. One day, after a long while of begging her dad, he took them to the park; he decided to let them play outside. Together with her dad and her little sister, they walked to the park, towing their bicycles. Once they arrived at the park, her dad found what he feared. A man with tattoos was holding a box. Another man was counting out twenty-dollar bills. The man with the box took the money. The man with the money took the box. Her dad told her they had to turn around. As soon as they had arrived, they needed to leave. It became a game for her little sister, making one big circle with their bikes. But the older daughter knew better. She wanted to know more about that box. She wanted to know what that money was buying. She asked her dad. Her dad told her, “I don’t know, my love.” He knew. He wasn’t smiling anymore. So she didn’t ask again. They went back to playing inside.
And this same family has a house made of mostly cement, the floors, the thick walls, and the stairs. One night a few years ago, their youngest daughter fell and broke her head. She began to bleed, a lot. Her parents were worried, she needed help, she needed to go to the hospital. But there was an enforced curfew then, after dark the gangs wouldn’t allow anyone to enter or leave Mariona. Her mom and dad try to stay far away from the gang leaders. They stay inside when they can. But this time they couldn’t stay inside, her dad called their neighbor. And their neighbor called the gang leader. The situation was explained to the gang leader. “There was this girl, you see, less than five years old, who was seriously injured. She needed to go to the hospital.” The gang leader let her mom and dad take her to the hospital. For the next three days while their little girl remained in the hospital, her mom and dad never went home. It was hard enough to leave once.
Physical, mental and emotional insecurity and violence are an integral part of the reality in Mariona. It seems to be everywhere people turn. The smell of blood on street corners. The sound of bullets down the block. The presence of bodies. The horror and the trauma of hearing stories of murders and domestic violence almost daily. On the bus, on the sidewalk, in their neighbor’s houses, the people by the playground, the cars in the street-violence is part of their life. Gangs are the face of that violence.
After we had the opportunity to speak to the head of Catholic Relief Services in Latin America, I better understand this reality. The gang situation has increased in the past twenty years. The aftermath of the civil war favored impunity over reconciliation. The traumas of the war created a culture of fear that has yet to be remedied in many parts of the country. Those traumas and that fear eat away at social cohesion thus destroying the sense of community necessary to combat the spread of the gangs. In Mariona, an area that was once rural and become largely urban during and after the war, lack of sufficient social cohesion contributes to the fear and insecurity, which makes it ripe for the infiltration of the gangs.
Money is intertwined in all of this violence, but it is not the cause. The cause of the insecurity and violence has more to do with the lack of social cohesion in Mariona than it does with the reality of poverty. The gangs share money fairly amongst members, needs are generally met. The appeal of gangs is not wealth but the identity, protection and empowering social inclusion that they can offer to alienated youth.
The gangs make the decisions in Mariona, not the police. If something changes, the gangs are involved. If someone dies, the police sweep up the body, promise to investigate and rarely does anything come of it. People who witness murders do not dare share what they know with anyone in authority for fear that their identity may get back to those responsible for the murder. The police and the general population in Mariona do not make the important decisions because they do not have the power or the control; instead they are ruled by fear of the gangs.
For some, gangs offer security. For others, gangs affect the lack of security in their homes; security means maintaining as much distance as possible from the gangs. It means whispering whenever they talk about the gangs or the police, even within their home, because people are often walking by their doors, listening and watching.
This is the reality that I am accompanying with the families in Mariona. It is not my reality, I am not unsafe in Mariona. I am not threatened by the reality of violence nor am I directly affected by the violence, but I am connected to it through the stories that I hear. It is the reality of these families, and when I leave they will still be living in Mariona. They will still be hearing about and seeing murders as often as I fill up my gas tank back in the United States. This is the weight that I will carry with me. Knowing that their little girls hardly ever play outside. That their parents sometimes lay awake at night wrestling with the fear of gangs. Resting myself with the knowledge that the civil war in this country, that our country largely funded, is tied up in this mess, is tied up in this new war today. I will walk with the memory of what it means to accompany a violent reality, even for only four months. In this short time I know the fear that I have felt with them, the deep sadness, at times the hopelessness, and most certainly the weight, the heavy weight of living in the midst of that darkness, of carrying that darkness together as we chose, as a bold act of resistance, to keep living everyday.
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