Colombia

Here is the best house in a village in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. Look carefully and you can see the baby sleeping on a cot, dogs near by. I was so charmed by the amazing saturated colors of the houses in the cities and the villages. It was in this village that the women had a business of making wallets and bags out of recycled potato chip bags. (I hear they sell for big bucks in a boutique in Miami)

We went on a nine day trip to Colombia. People were surprised that we would go to this known dangerous place. We went to do the work of The Nature Conservancy, a huge non-profit organization that buys land, or the rights to it, all over the globe. The idea is to preserve natural spaces, and depending on the place, this means that the Conservancy protects land, forests, water, and indigenous peoples.

In Colombia, we were here to partner with this country on a program to protect water. The Colombians need to have clean water for fisheries and for drinking. We North Americans cannot imagine what it means not to have clean water because we think of it as a given. In the bay of Cartagena, the water is so polluted, it looks gray. One wonders about the fish they catch there. The lobster fisheries are all but dead, coral reefs are bleached, the forests are decimated for the most part. "Green" is not in vogue here in Colombia.

In the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, miles north of Cartagena, there are four indigenous peoples living on various levels of the mountains. Each of these tribes has a population of twenty thousand, give or take, and they speak different languages. We spoke to a leader from the Gogi community. This was a short brown man with long wavy hair who wore a compact straw hat and loose linen clothes. He seemed completely at ease with this bunch of gringo tourists. I immediately loved him.

His people live simply; they are self sustaining. They believe that people on earth must compensate for the damage they do to nature. So they, the Gogis make compensation in the way of ceremonial stones they place here and there. The Nature Conservancy employs anthropologists to help us understand these indigenous people, because, after all, it is these people who are so important to conserving nature (if we can only listen)

We are working together. It was an amazing time and I will be forever changed for it.

If you want to see more photos, let me know. You can comment.