Colombia Journal

Boats, horses, motorcycles ... and lots of mud. Watch how Mercy Corps staff travel in the rugged and remote Darién region of Colombia.

Traveling in the department of Choco, Colombia, is not easy. This is a look at how Mercy Corps' staff get around when traveling to visit beneficiaries in this remote part of the country.

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Part of our assistance to newly displaced families in Colombia's Putumayo department includes skills training so they can earn a living.

Here, women learn how to make handbags that can fetch a good price locally.

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See how we're helping an Afro-Colombian fishing community along Colombia's northern coast conserve mangrove forests that protect their homes, secure their livelihoods and sustain the region's biodiversity.

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Start with a nationwide war fought largely to acquire land. Then add overlapping titles, valuable natural resources, a sparsely populated region and an inefficient government, and you've got all the ingredients for boundary disputes.

In Colombia's rugged Darién region, Mercy Corps is offering an alternative to the traditional forms of justice and the threat of violence. Our land-conflict resolution program is training communities how to solve their disputes over land peacefully. In most cases, we're giving marginalized indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities the training they need to defend their titled lands.

Our local partner, Fundación Darien, has assembled a team of a dozen mediators, lawyers, topographers and GPS specialists. We're also getting counsel and support from Mercy Corps staff in Guatemala, who've successfully mediated hundreds of land conflicts between indigenous communities and large landholders.

On Sunday we visited the indigenous Embera Katio Chidima, whose leaders believe our program can help them protect their sacred lands from encroachment by coca growers, cattle ranchers and timber interests.

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The youngest, 40-year-old Nancy, was first to arrive in 2007. She was squeezed out by intensifying fighting between guerrillas and paramilitaries and a death threat she couldn't ignore.

Giovorny, 52, followed after her family was robbed and threatened off their bountiful farm by guerrillas.

Last came 42-year-old Nubia, from Cauca, after her husband was kidnapped and killed.

Ever since, Nubia said, "We've relied on each other to survive."

It hasn't been easy. Each has two young ones in her care: daughters, nieces, grandkids. All 12 share the same space: a cramped rental house with no land.

Giovorny has to care for an epileptic niece and cope with being apart from her 64-year-old husband, who earns money farming land that's several hours away. "He's from the country, so he needs his liberty" Giovorny said with resignation. "He feels trapped in this small house."

Nancy's husband sells cell-phone minutes on the streets from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. He makes about $3 a day. The bulk of the sisters' income comes from the small-goods store they run out of the front of their home. It offers packaged food and sundries ranging from chips and bread to toilet paper and diapers. The income isn't sufficient: They're sometimes so low on food that they take from the store to fill their bellies.

Mercy Corps helped them open the tienda with a grant of nearly $200, and gave them pots and pans, bedsheets, hygiene kits and more than two months' worth of food.

We've also helped restore their sense of dignity. The trio faithfully attended weekly trainings to learn how to assess and respond to family violence. Giovorny, whose formal schooling didn't go beyond first grade, proudly showed me her graduation certificate. "As displaced people, we are sin honrado," or disrespected, she explained. "But this shows that we are learning and that we can go forward, that we are capable of more."

Miguel shot and edited this video of the sisters and their families as they went about their lives:

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Mercy Corps outfitted a rehabilitation center in southern Colombia with the latest technology as part of a holistic program to reintegrate land mine survivors back into their communities.

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Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

At the end of our day in Putumayo's capital, we stopped by a graduation celebration of sorts. More than 30 people displaced by the armed conflict were marking the end of an 80-hour course in gastronomy with food, music and a dip in the river.

Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

The course was sponsored by Mercy Corps' partner organization, Fundacion Diosésis, and Colombia's technical training institute. The teacher, Lia Caicedo (who's not pictured), explained to me that her students had learned the basics of everything from proper food hygiene to preparing all sorts of meats, salsas, snacks and desserts.

"The idea is to give them the skills so they can start their own microenterprise," she said, "even if it's just selling empanadas, tamales or other snacks. It's so they can earn an income."

The class also offered a chance at solidarity and friendship for people who, in most cases, had recently been forced to leave behind the only life they'd ever known.

Sandra, a 33-year-old single mom threatened from her home in January, hopes to put what she's learned in a Mercy Corps-sponsored cooking class selling homemade meals door-to-door. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

Skills trainings like these complement the income-generation component of the program we offer to displaced families. There, they learn the basics of running a business, from surveying the market to setting prices and coming up with a business plan. At the end of those trainings, they receive a small amount of seed capital — about $200 — followed by a grant for capital purchases.

The gastronomy students included men and women mostly in their 30s and 40s. They were eager to tell me what they'd learned — like how to correctly carve a chicken, cook three types of rice, or concoct a sweet milk-based dessert.

One 33-year-old woman named Sandra told me she learned how to make an "American salad," a dish which resembled a pasta salad and that she described as "muy rico."

Sandra was typical of most graduates in that she aspires to run her own food business. She'd like to team up with her mom and go door-to-door sellling suprema reina — a chicken breast filled with sausage and cheese with sides of sauteed vegetables and eggs.

Another graduate, Alexander, who we'd spent time with earlier in the day, had a more humble aim: "to surprise my wife with good food," he said, to which both he and his wife, Merly, had a good laugh.

Alexander demonstrates in his home kitchen how he learned to chop onions in a Mercy Corps-sponsored gastronomy class designed to give people who've been displaced the skills to make a living. Currently he and his wife make and sell a peanut-flavored caramel on a stick in the streets of Mocoa, Putumayo. "Life continues, and while we are living, we have to struggle." Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

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In Colombia, Mercy Corps uses sports as a way to teach youth values such as teamwork and respect. At the beginning and end of each session, the youth do yoga poses to help them relax and concentrate.

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Young people in the southern Colombian city of Ipiales are learning respect for each other through Mercy Corps' sports for change program, "Vivo Jugando." It's part of our effort to prevent gender-based violence, a growing concern in a region severely affected by the country's armed conflict.

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