Newsletters

Date: May 19th 2008

A City of Many Surprises, by Cathy Surgenor

Barranquilla is a city of two million people who live in the modern world and in the old ways as well. Taxis and buses are everywhere but on the side streets you might see horse drawn carts whose drivers are selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Women walk through the neighborhoods with a large tray of sweets balanced on their heads. The very poor knock on the door of the missionaries I stayed with for the first few days. Usually they are given a small bag of rice.

If you can afford air conditioning the extreme heat and humidity of mid day can be avoided. Ceiling fans do what they can to move the air around. There is a mall as nice as those in the USA with a beautiful grocery store and a small but very nice movie theater. Many people walk around the mall but most are not carrying any packages.

Last Saturday we attended an ecumenical gathering of women leaders at a small Pentecostal church in a poorer section of the city. We gathered under an open air shelter with overhead fans. Apparently this church also hosts both some young men who have been in a drug rehab program and a day program for the elderly. The young men seemed very responsible. Two of them were helping set up chairs and a screen for a power point presentation. But since there was too much light to see the words on the screen, the young men helped to remove the furniture from the living room of the neighboring house and set up some 25 chairs in the living room. (The house belonged to the grandmother of one of the church leaders.)

When we had gathered, one of the leaders welcomed the women and introduced the presenter – a young woman who was a lawyer. Her presentation was on women's rights and especially rights pertaining to reproduction and sexuality.
Among the rights she listed were the right to not be tortured, the right to receive health care (especially during pregnancy), the right to access information about her health and her options, the right to decide on the number of children and the spacing of the pregnancies. Women should have the right to decide about marriage – they should be able to say yes or no. They should have the right to divorce. They should have the right to employment and to social security. They have the right to work in an environment free of sexual harassment and the right to not be fired if they become pregnant.

Repeatedly the presenter stopped and asked for comments. Women would then tell of their own experiences. Then the lawyer passed out slips of paper which each contained an individual case. I kept one of cases. It described a chilling situation reported by a young girl who had been "demobilized" from a guerrilla unit. She described a forced abortion.

The young lawyer ended her power point presentation with a page entitled simply "It Is Necessary." Underneath it said, "We need to make visible, to denounce, to resist, to repair, to talk. Nothing is more important."

After the meeting we drove past the mural that Kori and Kirk, the accompaniers for April, had painted with some seventy children. The murals were of children holding hands in a circle of peace.

Lord, let it be so.