Asakiyume mita

Back in one of my Egipto entries, I said in a comment,

I've been thinking that rather than focusing so much on Nazi Germany and how things fall apart, we ought to be looking at how places recover. No two situations are the same, and we might not be able to put into practice anything of what we see, but just for the sake of remembering.

Because descent into awfulness is one story, but recovery from awfulness in another.

Here's an example of working to recover from awfulness--it's an exhibit called Rostros del Pacífico Sur (Faces of the South Pacific--meaning, in this context, Colombia's southern Pacific Coast) that we came across at the Gabriel Garcia Márquez Cultural Center. It's was part of a campaign that's been ongoing since 2010 called "No Es Hora de Callar" ("Now is not the time for silence"), which aims to give a voice to survivors of sexual violence.

The photographer Juan Manuel Vargas spent a year getting to know women in the Tumaco region of Colombia, one of the poorest parts of the country, and one that suffered a lot during the guerrilla conflict. The exhibition features his portraits and quotes from the women. (Here is a Spanish-language article about the exhibit in El Tiempo)

Here are some of the photos:



"Tumaco has a new generation, which dreams with hope"


"Society makes us believe that a group of women, poor and Black women, we don't have a right to be heard. Today we are telling them that they were wrong."


"We work for a better country," this barrier announces. The Rostros del Pacífico Sur exhibition is one way Colombians are doing that.



And here's another way--"Let's go vote!"
Simón Bolívar's house was not the only tourist spot closed for the first round of the presidential elections. (This photo is Waka's, not mine.)

I was waiting at a park that I had gradually intuited was the place a protest against family separation had been moved to. It was about ten minutes before the protest was scheduled to begin, and not all that much was happening. There was a banner, though, with an Audre Lorde quote ("Your silence will not protect you"), and a few people hanging around, including about five very buff cyclists, clustered together on their bikes.

A woman, slightly older than me, came up to me. "Is this where the protest is?" I said I thought so and made some joke about wandering around the original location in confusion.

She nodded, moved off, and then came back, remarking that it was too bad the cyclists were in the way.

"Maybe they're here for the protest," I said.

"No, they gather here every Thursday. I told them they should leave."

She said it without rancor, as if it was normal to tell people to leave a public park.

"Oh I don't know--I think they're good. They swell the crowd," I said, trying to make light of the whole thing.

"It's a problem every Thursday," she said.

Then a friend of mine showed up, and my attention went to my friend--but next to me, I heard the woman trying her anti-cyclist gambit on another person.

"I'm a cyclist," the new person said.

"But you don't understand; this is a problem every Thursday," the anti-cyclist insisted.

Annnd.... then the the leader of the cyclist group, I guess having figured that his gang were all there, announced the route they'd be riding, and off they went. They honestly could not have been more innocuous. They weren't riding around terrorizing people. They were meeting up in a public park--and then they left! The one woman's animus was so strange!

There were some good speakers at the demonstration, and some people with very good signs. I was somewhat depressed by the turnout--it was hundreds and I'd thought there might be thousands, but maybe this just means I'm out of touch. ... Anyway, onward and upward, keep trying, etc.