Return to Dibulla
Abby Wasserman
Part 1 of 3
My little Ana is a grandmother. There’s white in her wiry black hair and she is missing teeth. It wrings my heart to see her so fragile. Ana was my compañerita for a year in Dibulla, La Guajira, in 1964 and 1965, when I was a PCV there.
Ana’s younger sister, my goddaughter Clea, is tall and robust. Mentally, she is still a child. She lives under the watchful eye of her mother, Ida. The last time I saw Clea she was a plump baby, light-skinned and blue-eyed. Her mother and I joked that she was my child. Now, one blue eye has migrated to the right and there’s a cavity in a front tooth. Upon seeing me, she cries, “Aquí está mi madrina! Te quiero, Madrina!” (“Here is my godmother. I love you!”)
My comadre states that Clea has been talking about me for the last three days. Since I haven’t been in touch since 1966, I figure she found out about my return to Dibulla about the time I did, a few days earlier on February 5 in Cartagena, when Haroldo and Pat Suárez told me I could visit my site. I’d been advised it was too dangerous to travel to Dibulla and had swallowed my disappointment and attended the PC-Colombia reunion anyway. So when Haroldo said, “You are going,” I burst into tears. For more than a minute I couldn’t speak. My depth of feeling surprised me.
Alba Lucía Varela of Fundehumac and Haroldo, President of The Magdalena Foundation, had arranged my visit—one day ida y regreso in the company of a TV journalist and native Dibullera named Lilibet Roca Redondo; her brother Carlos, her cameraman; the driver, Armando; and María Choles Toro, a native of La Guajira who lives in Santa Marta. A victim of violence during the recent tragic decades in Colombia, María has suffered during the last decade. Through Fundehumac, she and her family are going forward with their lives and helping others.
Ida is in her 80s but I recognize her at once: the humor in her eyes, challenge in her shoulders, determination in the set of her mouth. She utters glad cries as we embrace, and then pronounces, “Si me muero, Comadre, tu eres la mamá de Clea” (“When I die, you are Clea’s mother”). Whoa, I think. Aren’t godmother duties over when the godchild reaches 21? Clea’s twice that age. But if the child never grows up mentally? In the midst of my joy at being in Dibulla again, I’m sobered by Ida’s statement. It doesn’t help that Maria immediately challenges me within everyone’s hearing, “Qué vas a hacer para Clea?” I keep quiet. I’ve just returned, after all. I need time to digest what’s happening before making new commitments!
In my PCV days I was wary of requests for personal help. I knew that if I was generous to one family, others would hear of it, and I didn’t want to play favorites or be known as la gringa rica, either. Dibulleros were resistant to change and there were many feuds in town. I could call a meeting of mothers and girls to talk about forming a girls’ club, only to find that few attended. Some had been enthusiastic in conversation, but they wouldn’t attend a meeting if their enemy, Fulana de Tal, was going. The people were extremely resistant to working together in those days.
When I lived in La Guajira, July 1964 to November 1965, the only way to get from Dibulla to Santa Marta was by sea. From the Guajira side, a dirt road petered out at Palomino to the west. I once made the trip to Santa Marta by cayuco (motorized canoe), 10 hours, as I recall, during which a crew member bailed constantly with a coconut shell.
In our snug taxi, the five of us breeze along the highway that links the state of Magdalena to La Guajira. It’s a proud and beautiful road. Carlos, Lilibet and Armando assert that it’s the best in all Colombia. I wonder why a first-class highway has been built to one of the country’s most remote regions. Since I was here, coal has become a big industry, and daily loads of it are transported by road and rail. What else? Contraband from Venezuela? There was plenty of that when I was in residence. How about cocaine processed in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta? Is this the road that drugs built?
During one of our stops en route, near the entrance to Parque Tairona, Lilibet prepares a batch of questions and Carlos tests the light. I notice my hands clutching each other. I breathe deeply, trying not to let nerves paralyze my Spanish, which has lain largely dormant for decades. The fact that the words flow more or less correctly is a tribute to the classes I received during PC training at the University of New Mexico.
I was the first female PCV in La Guajira, joining Howard Converse and David Fletcher of Colombia XV who had gone a few months earlier to identify possible sites for acción comunal. We had trained together in Albuquerque, and after talking with them about opportunities in La Guajira, I requested a transfer to RCD from ETV. My six months in Bogotá working in elementary schools to help teachers utilize the new ETV programs had been productive, but I didn’t like city life and longed for a “classic” Peace Corps experience—a rural one. In those days, CARE was administering the urban and rural community development programs for Peace Corps. The new CARE-PC director, William Rayman, after getting country director Chris Sheldon’s approval, okayed my reassignment.
I was sent to train with Faye Hooker and Joan Mansfield in Usiacurí for some weeks before embarking for Riohacha, a hot, dry outpost with a newspaper, a gorgeous beach, a working pier, and an uneasy and unequal relationship between the costeños and the native Guajiran (Wayuu) Indians. Howard decided a male-female team would be effective in Dibulla, while Dave moved to Barrancas in the interior of La Guajira. I made contact with the teachers and started forming relationships with women and girls, and we both consulted with town leaders. The beginning was promising and I relied on Howard’s experience to guide me—but soon he was made a Volunteer Leader and left the Guajira, and I was alone in Dibulla for six months before another PCV, Willie Dow, was assigned to the site.
Our taxi crosses from Magdalena into La Guajira. The day is warm and fragrant through our open windows, the foliage on either side is lushly green. We get our first glimpse of polychrome sea—greens, blues, a touch of turquoise. I feel so happy, like I’m coming home. Along the road there are hectares of banana trees, clusters of fruit covered with blue or white plastic, like bagged, hanged men; and many cattle, thin and hardy, with a Brahma-like hump behind the head.
We pull into Rio Ancho, where I used to go nearly every week to do acción comunal. The bucolic village I knew is gone. In its place, sprawled on both sides of the highway and along the river that gave it its name, there’s a chaos of lean-tos and dilapidated stucco buildings, the paint worn or pocked with bullet holes. We turn to the right onto a road of deep ruts but don’t drive more than 20 or 30 yards before it peters out.
Rio Ancho in 1965 was a settlement of a dozen or so new wood and palm huts, rudimentary but practical, sides open to catch the breezes. The site suffered from biting sancudos (biting flies), and all the girls and women wore trousers underneath their dresses. There were no latrines, no infrastructure, but there were a general store, a small junta, and a nascent sense of community.
Unlike Dibulla, a stable town built on a grid with its own church and police station, where people were born, grew up, and stayed to raise families, Rio Ancho was a new place mixing refugees and fugitives from La Violencia. The best house in the village belonged to Manuel Martín, nicknamed El Martillo, The Hammer. A formidable, silent man who never smiled, he was from Antioquia, where he had been (people said) a bandit. This did not frighten me away, but I treated him with respect. I came by bus to Rio Ancho once every week or two, and though I hung my hammock in the home of Clara and Berto, a kind and generous couple, I usually ate breakfast at El Martillo’s house. His wife made oatmeal with milk, lemon peel and a cinnamon stick, and she and her daughters generally sat around watching me as I ate, talking companionably. The fields were planted with pineapples. Clara and Berto once took me on a horseback trip through the jungle to the sea, during which we had a quick, magical glimpse of a jaguar.
In the old Rio Ancho you could sit outside with other women making blood sausage—packing rice and blood into cleaned intestine—and watch the world go by. Aside from swarms of the tiny, vicious sancudos, Rio Ancho was a kind of Eden. Some of the people were even willing to work for the good of the community, having come from cooperative communities in the interior. José de la Paz García, for example, took a leadership role, helping me and a few others organize a school.
As Armando turns the taxi around to leave, Lilibet and Carlos tell me that the people of Rio Ancho were vulnerable when the violence began in La Guajira because their village lay right on the path from the Sierra Nevada. Their relationships were loosely woven, so paramilitaries and drug lords could divide and conquer. There were killings and kidnappings and stolen land. I would like to ask someone if José, Clara and Berto survived, and what happened to El Martillo and his family. But the ghost of recent violence, and the knowledge that we will have only a few hours in Dibulla, hasten us along. We have been told to return to Santa Marta by nightfall. So we bump back on to the highway. There’s a sense of unease in Rio Ancho, as though violent men have only moments before passed through and will soon return.