Contents of GL 11:

• 2nd anniversary of the setting up of Caqueta farm
• Description of first entry into the region: avalanches, mud, rain…
• We hear of the setting up of the local Green Party and Jenny receives a letter of invitation to join..
• How Jenny came to write Green Letter No. 1
• Review of events and achievements of the first 2 years
• Louise's poem: Mother Witch

The crowded, opensided rickety bus stopped. There was a huge cleft in the unsurfaced road. The passengers groaned good-naturedly and got out, lugging their huge loads of shopping bought in Neiva. No-one thought of asking for their fare back, though we were only half the way to Rovira, Caquetá.

It was 13th July 1994. With me were my daughter Alice, whose 11th birthday present the day before had been to come on this trip with us; also Gareth, a young English friend whose mother had read about us in a New Age magazine called ‘Kindred Spirit’, and Ned who had bought the farm in Caquetá whence we were headed.

We walked all the rest of that day. I was delighted. It was cool, green mountain country, and I knew I would not return to Tolima where I had lived for six years, and that a whole new era of our lives was about to begin.

But the first thing we had to do was cross the avalanches. There were about 300 of them. Massive, sodden, orange land-slips obviously caused by cutting the road in the first place, and then carefully deforesting all the slopes above. Then the cracking of the earth during the dry season; and then the rains, which go on for months and months.

Our two men were very heavily laden; Alice and I were not, but she had her height to cope with - not very tall when you're stepping gingerly into very deep wet mud; and I had my fear: it seems the only way to cross these roadside avalanches is right on the edge where the land disappears into the valley below. If you try the 'safer' looking bit near the cliff, you disappear in deep sludge.

Spirits were high. We had half the population of this part of Caquetá travelling with us, though they quickly left us behind, as we weren't in a hurry and weren't quite as confident of our immortality as they seemed to be. Peasant shacks along the roadway sold stodgy, welcome meals and we tripped along gaily towards the night. There was no way we would reach the farm that day, but we were given an empty farm-house to stay in, with a huge earth-floored kitchen where Ned made a meal by candlelight and I played my violin, with Gareth on flute, into the night air. We then made a communal bed in a ghastly dark little room, piling anything we could find on to the bare earth and keeping all our clothes on.

Next day, as we approached Rovira, we heard that three children had died that night when one of the larger avalanches swept their house away into the valley. They were in bed asleep at the time.

Laden as we were, and having already walked for two days, it was about a four-hour climb up the mountain to the farm after leaving the road. Halfway up, we were invited into a magnificent dinner; hospitality everywhere in this region was warm.

There weren't any trees left standing on this part of the mountain until we came very near to our farm indeed; then at last, the green, muddy, shady paths and mountain streams of the world as it had once been everywhere: we had come home.

By the time I reached the farm, I was absolutely sure that the whole region was unstable: I stared aghast at the way the little farm-shack was perched on a small hard shoulder between two water-courses. I looked alarmed up at the forest above us on a steep, steep slope just 500 yards from the house and wondered what would happen if that slipped. I started making an urgent 'Jobs List' in my mind as I saw that piped water was being allowed to run unchanneled down both sides of the house, eroding the narrow strip on which we were perched. I eyed suspiciously every part of the steep fields surrounding us where recently-fallen red clay glared menacingly. And I listened to the constant rain.

In the days to come, I was further horrified to find a huge area right next to us where you couldn't walk as the land was so soft and cleaved from an enormous subsidence 10 years ago that no horse or cow would tread anywhere near it. I greeted with total cynicism Ned's assertion that the sun did actually shine for part of the year in this region. But my main feeling was excitement: I loved everything about the whole crazy project.

For four months, I never left the farm. The amount of work and the setbacks - almost exclusively caused by the bad behaviour of various members of our commune - were as enormous as the mountain-range we were living on.

Then came Halloween; Andy, a juggling friend, was living with us, as were various of the commune children. They all went down to the nearest little one-road town called 'Guayabal' for the festivities there, to participate and to entertain with clowning and singing.

When Andy came back, he told me something I couldn't believe: that a Green Party had formed in the area, and that their candidate for the local council had won! And he brought me a letter inviting me down to meet the new Green councillor to prove it. I went, and that's how the Caquetá Rainforest Campaign began.

I sat in the echoing empty hall of the INDERENA office in Guayabal - an ineffectual, supposedly environmental Government organisation. A little black man, Fernando, was chatting fast and nervously to me, hugely impressed with the presence of a 'Gringa' lady in the region who wanted to help them with their new, grassroots, definitely non-governmental environmental campaign. And I sat there, astonished, dazed with what was happening: how could it be that there were people in this stripped, wrecked area who were caring to stop the damage, replant the forests, change people's minds? I could hardly hear what he was saying: my mind was racing around trying to find a way in which I could help them. I realised I had only two weapons: my familiarity with alternative movements in Europe, and my typewriter. “Look, I'll tell the whole of Europe about you,” I said. “I absolutely cannot promise anything, but there are an awful lot of people who do care, and who don't know what to do to help. Maybe they will help you here.” And so I wrote my first Green Letter.

What resulted was not so much a Green Campaign as a Psychological Resuscitation Programme: Whilst blow after blow fell upon me in my own personal life, involving betrayal, let-down and the downright sadism of various English and Irish people surrounding me, a flood of incredible good energy started to pour in from abroad. Having thought, 'Right, there is no hope from people, I might as well turn to trees', what I discovered was that an awful lot of people who care for trees, care for people.

There are two tightly-packed files on my desk. The first, smaller one contains all the 'Green' correspondence of the first year of the campaign; the second, fatter one contains the correspondence of the next 5 months. I am on file three, and as I said in the last Green Letter, our latest enormous gift of seeds and good wishes came from CHINA. Now no matter what assails me in my personal life, I will never let down all the hundreds of people who have cared enough to write, to send gifts of information, encouragement, books, posters, money and seeds. Every time personal negativity or hopelessness assails me, shame jolts me back on to my feet. At this end of the Campaign, on our 2nd anniversary of entry into the region, these are some of the highlights of our time here:

1. The 'Greening of the FARC'. From a hostile, 'you-can't-set-up-a-green-party-in-a-red-area' stance, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have now made green policies a natural part of what they stand for: in this region specifically, they foment, support and enthusiastically participate in Green campaigns such as seed distribution and the setting up of a local agricultural college.
2. Small, dedicated and determined groups of peasants have formed themselves into local groups, always with the help of country school-teachers, to try to get 'Green Activities' moving, from humble rubbish-collection and serious indoctrination of the children on environmental matters, to reforestation projects and plans for local 'Green' industries (like sugar-cane processing, a very simple matter, but requiring much labour).
3. Logging for export from the region has ceased.
4. 'Non-green' neighbours, previously bemused by or indifferent to our work, are showing an interest; view our gardens with admiration, and request information and seeds to start their own. The social climate for green work could hardly be better.
5. The terrible news of the murder of Luis, a colleague of mine and Colombian environmentalist many days' journey from here, is something I constantly 'use' as I know he would want me to. Just yesterday, I took advantage of the fact the FARC are launching a region-wide campaign to arrest, detain, re-educate and set free corrupt local officials, to denounce once more, on paper, the suspected master-mind of my friend Luis's murder. Justice is very slow in Colombia, and mostly non-existent unless you push very hard indeed.
6. And, last but not least, I present the example of our own farm, which from producing nothing but mud and a bit of spinach two years ago, now feeds a busy commune of hungry kids and adults three superb meals daily, and has been doing so for over 18 months. We are the living example that small and intensive works - as long as you work too!

MOTHER WITCH A long time ago
When this world was a magical place
When people gathered in the meadow
To chant to mother Nature and pray

When witches were the doctors
When horses were the cars
When the earth was our goddess
And our only guides were the stars..

No aeroplanes in the skies
No rubbish in the seas
Spells to keep our spirits high
And plants to cure our bodies,

Men that feared witches' power
Put an end to their lives
Year after year
They burnt them alive.

Now the earth is the witch
Her power stronger than men's
Men are still burning her,
But she'll get her revenge

Love to you all,
Jenny James

Contents of GL 12:

• Memorial poem to Luis Arenas on 1st Anniversary of his murder
• The Green Theatre
• ‘Recycling’ of logging permits by Govt. agency and other atrocities
• Anne furthers our Green work in the murky city of Bogota
• .. and visits the forest she saved with her work in Ecuador
• Schools exchange: Wakefield, Yorkshire – Chorreras, Caqueta
• 10 unexpected visitors visit our ‘eco-park’…

To all good greenfolk, Greetings!
A week and a half ago, on 5th August, it was the first anniversary of the murder of my friend Luis Arenas Hurtado, a man of 63 and a brave, lone, environmental worker in the hot regions of Caquetá. In my time of mourning, I wrote him a poem in Spanish, which was given to his wife, relatives, friends - and sent to his murderers (along with the poem translated in Green Letter No.9). Here is a literal translation of it:

Luis: After your murder, a terrible silence;
Just the echo, repeated to Eternity
Of the 19 cowardly bullets that killed you
And the cackles of your killers.

Luis: After the silence,
We awoke from the shock;
And there began a murmur:
Who? and Why?

Luis: After the murmur, a clamour:
NO! No, this murder is not going to be buried in silence;
The murder of a man who protected the Living
Is going to breed more life.

Your red blood, the red blood of a 'green' man,
Your red blood is going to make fertile
The desert that Caquetá is becoming.
Luis: After the clamour, a shout:

A shout so loud, announcing the death
Of another great tree,
Of another irreplaceable giant
Fallen to the ground;

A shout so loud, that it will reach
Even the deaf ears
Of those who thought forever
To silence you.

Luis: After the shouting, the work:
Work for the forests and the rivers,
For the animals and the children,
Work against your murderers, who
In killing you
Aggressed against Nature herself.

Luis: After the work,
Silence once again.
But the tranquil silence
That follows work well done.
This is our promise to you.

Recently, I was sorting through old letter files in preparation for writing a book on our years in Colombia, and I came across a dream my daughter Rebecca had written down in April 1992; here it is:

“I am with a group of people. We are all doctors and we're on a mission to do some healing. I'm told there is somebody in great need. I am standing in an open space with a woman. She to me: Are you aware of how big this project is? She then points over towards a very odd-looking mountain.
“Suddenly I realise that the mountain I'm looking at is an eye, and that we are standing on somebody's face. We are all very small. Then I look in another direction and see the shape of a gigantic mouth. The woman I'm with tells me that the wound this person has is a long way away and that it will take days to get there. What I'm standing on is the cheek of the body."
As I told Jenny this dream, I realised that it was about a healing journey to save Planet Earth.

And now a report from Anne:

I have recently returned from a brief trip to Chorreras (the main community we work with) and Guayabal (the nearest and only little one-street town). In Guayabal, I called at the offices of Corpoamazonia, the government body who are supposed to be caring for the ecology of the region. I wanted to ask them why it was that after the supposed logging ban, there were still so many lorries leaving the area carrying wood. Their local representative wasn't there, but members of the National Parks Committee who share the office answered my questions. Corpoamazonia issues permits to cut wood supposedly under strict terms that the loggers plant 10 trees for every tree felled and do not clear-cut. However, the permits are being issued without any follow-up work or checking and then, horror of horrors, are being recycled, as the wood yards in Neiva don't stamp them. A nightmare. And of course no-one wants to stick their neck out and intervene as they're all scared - fear is the national Colombian disease which allows a dozen murders a day while lips are sealed and eyes averted.

After I left the office, I was offered a lift in ... a wood lorry, by Martin, the head of the Guayabal Co-op. who handles the wood trade; he is also a local Communist leader. I felt rather wound up about the whole issue and got into his lorry with my hackles bristling. It was an awkward situation as he was being friendly and insisted we stop at his home for coffee and soup. When we got back into the lorry, I asked why so much wood was still being cut and what about the logging ban? I expected an argument but instead he half-groaned and complained that Corpoamazonia weren't doing their job and that the problem was 'falta de educación', - lack of education - and there was no replanting, and he very heartily agreed it was a tragedy and that we, the people, need to do something about it. On my next trip to Bogotá in a few days' time, I will try to meet the head of Corpoamazonia and politely put some pressure on them. The last time I was in Bogotá, through my astrology work, I met a 54-year-old woman who had spent most of her life running a national television corporation and who has now turned her energy towards green work and wants to buy forest to save it in our area. As we talked about the possibility of her living here some of the time, her brother (the Colombian ambassador to Iran!) said that for people of their class to move here would be to risk kidnap and robbery. She answered, “Of course, we could spend all day going through the reasons why it's impossible, but we have to begin somewhere making peace in this country, and I'm willing to die in the attempt.“

When I told her that the main cash crop around here is opium poppy, thinking this would put her off, she said with great feeling: “Tell me about it. We've lived that problem in this family through blood, sweat and tears.“
Her husband had died nine months ago of heroin addiction.

My whole fortnight's astrology trip to Bogotá to earn 'green' money, turned very green indeed: Jenny had asked me to find educational materials for the local schools. I tentatively began to ask ecological foundations and governmental organisations and suddenly found myself being swamped with materials, offers of help, moral support, appreciation and love, and all because I told people we grow our own food, try to buy forest and help local people to stop growing opium poppies. An example: I went timidly into a very posh new building of something called the 'Presidencia de la Republica'. The lady in there treated me like a V.I.P., called in all her colleagues and immediately set about collecting posters and booklets for us. When I returned to collect them, she handed me a huge bag of new medical drugs for our area. We gave them to a local doctor-friend in Guayabal, telling him to use them for people who couldn't afford to pay.

At the 'Presidencia' office, I was then bombarded with more offers of help and told to bring a taxi the next time I go back to carry all the stuff! It seems that all Colombian institutions have a press office where they give away posters and booklets, so I came home laden with boxes of material on such subjects as personal health-care and organic agriculture written especially for 'campesinos', clearly and concisely and with attractive illustrations. Because there is an almost impassable chasm between urban and rural Colombia, these well-meaning office people are delighted to hand over their posters, videos and booklets to people who are 'out there doing it', so we certainly intend to satisfy them still further in the future!

(Jenny writing now) This whole 'Bogotá dimension' of the forest campaign has been a source of amazement to me. I spent a delicious day or two feverishly reading, organising and packing into a dozen bundles the material Anne brought home, and then Mary Kelly, who had faithfully spent months working on kitchen and garden to such an extent that she's hardly known in this area, went on her maiden voyage to our campesino and political contacts to distribute the educational, visual and practical goods. Reception of such gifts is so childlike and full of wonder - even in local farmers one would normally regard as hardened and cynical - that the appetite it creates in us to do more and more is just one of the many magical marvels of this work.

When Anne returned from her exhausting months of work in Ecuador to pay for endangered forest above us, one of the first things we did was to send her up to see the land she'd just saved. This is what she wrote:

'I was eager to see what I'd bought! Orlando, the devil-may-care ex-owner collected me early in the morning and we climbed on horse-back for 40 minutes, first through our farm, and then crossed a stream that borders the new acquisition. I was in heaven. I spend so much time in the cities working to buy land that I forgot exactly what it is I'm earning for. My trip to Orlando's land reminded me: as we climbed up into the clearing which contains Orlando's shack (his 'palace’ as he calls it), all I could see around me were hectares of enormous trees, true giants. Orlando led me round what was only a tiny fraction of our boundaries, often cutting a new path through the undergrowth on near-vertical slopes of forest as I scrabbled after him. From one vantage point, I could see into the next valley, uninhabited, just rolling hills of forest. All the farms we have bought form a line of several kilometres guarding entry into that valley. There is only one gap in the line, a small path that is for sale for about £1.000. Its acquisition will complete this part of our planned protection belt.

'Orlando then led me through more virgin forest towards his 'lulo' patch (an indigenous citric fruit-plant like a gigantic thistle laden with golden balls, that make an unsurpassed fruit drink): a huge expanse he's cut and burnt to sow this very commercially-worthwhile crop, all the while swearing to the angels that he never sows 'amapola' (poppy) because he believes in God. In his lulo patch, I notice some very pretty flowers - opium poppy. “And this?“ I ask innocently. He swears they're wild. I laugh. He grins sheepishly. They are wild now, as they're on our land. We pick lulos and wild mint and climb exhausted back to his 'palace'. He shows me a 'borrugo' lair (a wild animal - translation unknown) and points out all kinds of wild birds we don't see further down the mountain at our lower, inhabited altitude. And he keeps complaining provocatively that Jenny made him leave his hunting rifle at our farm: he'd arrived in the morning brandishing it and saying he was going to kill a 'tigre'. Jenny had said smartly, “Oh no you aren't, we've just bought that land from a neighbour (him!) and now it's a wild-life sanctuary.“ “Well said,“ answered Orlando appreciatively; an Aries like Jenny, he loves a bit of confrontation!

When we reached his shack, the rain kept us from going onwards, so we sat in the open-sided 'kitchen' talking. Between quizzing me about my love-life and almost crying about his young wife leaving him for the bright city lights, Orlando told me something that once and for all made my long trip to Ecuador worthwhile. After doing the land-deal with us, he had gone to the local Co-op and belatedly received a 'salvoconducto', that is: permission to cut and sell his timber. I looked at the giants surrounding us and breathed very deeply.'

“Dear friend Jenny, I hope with all my heart that you and everyone in your community are well and finding every success in all your work. My pupils and I want to thank you for the translation of our letters and for sending them abroad; the children are excited and wanting to write more.
Jenny, next week in the teachers' meeting I will be promoting the idea of seed distribution and of improving this region; I shall sow in the teachers the seed of loving our Nature and of consciousness of what we have in this region.“

I know that Mrs. Kathleen Jannaway of the Vegan Association will forgive me for pinching the following quote from her booklet 'Growing Our Own':

“Society has always had its visionaries who talked of love and beauty, peace and plenty; but somehow the “practical“ men have always been there to praise the smog as a sign of progress, to preach just wars and restrict love while giving full reign to hate. It must be one of the greatest ironies of the history of Homo Sapiens that today the only solution for the “practical“ men lies in what they regard as the dreams of idealists. The question now is, 'Can the “realists“ be persuaded to face reality in time?'
(Paul Erlich, Prof. of Biology, Stanford)“

That was the moment I had my suspicions confirmed that Anne is a witch. Without missing a beat, she converted our two humble dinners into ten for this sweating lusty crew. And then we spent a long afternoon with them showing them round the vegetable gardens, explaining the mysterious crops to them - though a couple of them were very knowledgeable - introducing them to our magic compost-producing factory (the hen and guinea-pig run), giving friendly speeches on our whys and wherefores and playing music, nervously, to be reciprocated, nervously, by the oldest of them who sang beautifully to the guitar. It was a lovely afternoon, which included giving them seeds for hot and cold country - they came from all over Colombia - and pairs of guinea-pigs for breeding. As they left, they said, “We have twenty fellow workers who would like to come up, that's alright isn't it?“

On our isolated farm, it is perfectly possible to go for several weeks without seeing a single soul from outside.

Ten minutes to sun-fall (it doesn't set, it disappears), time to go. I want to thank Cynthia Dickinson once again for all her good-natured and caring work on behalf of the Campaign, and also most especially Andreas Graf of Berlin for his constant support and practical help in making links and reproducing these Green Letters; also for the excellent several-page article he wrote and had published about us in German in the high-quality magazine of the ZEGG community in Germany. And thank you ZEGG for devoting so many pages to us.

I would like to end with a plea for my beleaguered daughter Becky in Ireland upon whose shoulders falls the willingly-performed task of co-ordinating this Campaign from Co. Donegal: would regular recipients of the Green Letters who really don't have any sustained interest in them, please let her know so she can reduce her huge mailing list; and would any enthusiastic recipients please let her have some postage stamps from time to time as I know she spends all her meagre income on postal costs. Thankyou.

Love to everyone. It's exciting isn't it?
Jenny James

Contents:

• Death of our friend Ricardo
• 2 Irish lads arrive to film us
• A meeting with the regional FARC command
• Signs of local aggression…
• The disaster of Government ‘environmental’ organizations
• Filmmakers Declan and John write a song…
• Encounter with howler monkeys

Goodbye to our friend Ricardo,
Regular readers of these Green Letters will remember the name of Ricardo, our neighbour who was felling forest near us, which two generous English people enabled us to save eventually with their donation.

After our brush with Ricardo over the forest cutting, and after we had secured the rest of his beautiful mountainside, he became a closer and closer friend. He started putting up lovely maps I gave him of the Amazon basin, accepting with interest environmental literature, considering seriously converting his horrible noisy discotheque in Rovira into a 'green' cultural centre, and supporting us hugely during the difficult time of making a video on 'CRAC' - details further on. He also became Anne's companion as he had recently divorced, and in every way was a good neighbour, friend and helper.

Ricardo was found dead in his farm next to ours on 18th September. For once - unusual in Colombia - it was not a murder. Ricardo had been fainting a lot recently, though a huge strong young man of 35, and he died of a brain haemorrhage. I was in Bogotá at the time - the first time for 8 years, a hellpit of environmental pollution - trying to get treatment for a muscular seize-up that seems to be taking over my body. The news was unreal. I came home immediately. Rovira is a very desolate place without him, no way of replacing him, no 'home' to arrive at, hot and tired from long journeys. A massive display of funeral flowers, and no Ricardo. Another year, another death - barely time to recover from Luis's murder. This time, nearer to home and felt daily, and no political significance to impart energy as in an assassination, the blow is very deadening.

A Film gets made of our campaign

We have Ricardo on video, talking about the environmental and social problems of the region. This is how the film happened. Washing up one day (outdoors), I looked up to our entry-path to see two very tall, bare-chested luggage-less Europeans cantering along the track. As they came marching up towards me, one of them said, 'Hello, we took the wrong turning for Inishfree' - that's the island our community lived on in Ireland in the '70s and '80s. The lads were young and Irish and soon admitted they had come to make a film of the Rainforest Campaign - they had read about us in a visitor's book in a 'gringo' boarding house in Bogotá, met Mary Kelly who was visiting Government and other institutions for us at the time, read the Green Letters, and decided to take the plunge.

After a month of technical disasters, every conceivable mishap from no-one wanting to lend mules to none of them knowing how to run the generator so laboriously brought up here, I asked John and Declan: are you still glad about your decision? They are both incurable optimists - they needed to be - and grinned with great enthusiasm that it had been wonderful. The Colombian television crew they hired to make the film would not, I think, agree. Their rather corpulent young sound man had obviously never seen mud or vegetarian food before, and although he smiled obligingly throughout their time here, he reported to the restaurant lady in Rovira that it had been a 'nightmare'. The only thing - and the most important thing - that never went wrong was human relations and tempers, which remained astonishingly good throughout. As I said to John one day: Anyone sensitive working near you two is forced to have a nervous breakdown as both of you refuse to!

They say they are delighted with the material collected, which included interviews with Cliomedes, Camilo the teacher and Roberto of Chorreras, and a surprise addition to our campaign: the police inspector (a bureaucratic position, not wielding anything like the power this would imply in England) of Balsillas, the 'border settlement' as you enter Caquetá from Neiva, who insisted on being interviewed and told the horror story of the deforestation of Balsillas: now an immense treeless cattle-feeding plain.

Our personal nightmare brought about by the film was quite different: it was nerve-wracking and harrowing to witness at close quarters how technology definitely doesn't work unless pampered and molly-cuddled - luxuries not available in the rainforest - but the social problems caused, or rather brought to light, were what affected us.

I believe the peasant uprisings in Caquetá have become world news recently. Shall we say, it was an interesting time to bring in a television crew whose aims included filming and referring to opium-poppy growing as part of the environmental problem....

We are ordered to a meeting with the FARC regional command -

John and Declan came stumbling up the dark muddy mountainside after one of the usual technical breakdowns they'd had to sort out, arriving exhausted to wake me near midnight with the news:
'Jenny, the regional commander of the FARC wants to see us, we have to leave before dawn.'
I had sworn I'd never go down that track again, my health being poor and my tolerance for involvement in modern civilisation nil, but this was a situation I had to handle. I had noticed that our new local commander was exceptionally offhand, 'busy' and unfriendly when I'd tried to talk to him about the film on several occasions and I'd longed for the days of Commander Enrique.

We arrived in Rovira before hardly anyone was up, but Ricardo had been there to greet us. He took me aside and said, 'Jenny, could I come too?'
'Of course!' I was delighted to have his support. We picked up more people on the way - a contact in Guayabal, then my own beloved 'Family' in Chorreras, Camilo, Cliomedes and Roberto, all of whom gave up a day's vital work to come and support us. We arrived at the appointed meeting place and had to wait several hours; I noted the priest and several other key community members were there. I tried talking to Edwin, the new Commander, again, and got the same eyes-to-the-floor mumbled response. But my body registered no alarm whatsoever.

The meeting was very formal. I was invited to speak first and did so, explaining our intentions and aims. The regional commander, a small, polite, dark-skinned, extremely unaggressive man, then gave a speech which was absolutely nothing whatever to do with what I had said and was simply a very elementary introduction to their political philosophy and policy. I immediately understood that the meeting was simply to re-establish who's who in the region, i.e. they are in charge, and there was no conflict. But then a local man I'd heard of when we first lived here as saying, 'we were not to be trusted because we were gringos and gringos only come to dig for gold and emeralds and steal them', and whom I had subsequently sought out and spoken to and explained our raison d'être in the region, and who had seen me at environmental meetings and knew jolly well what I was doing here, spoke up with a load of baloney about us being here to steal 'resources.' The 'resources' we were stealing this time were evidently the 'beauty of the region' by putting it on film, which would ‘earn us loads of money’. Having had to lend Declan and John the money for their cameraman's fare to Neiva, this didn't go down too well with me at the time. I answered back clearly and well, but the encounter did not raise my love quotient for the man, and left me in a bad mood for some days to come, until I wrote a long and detailed political document to the FARC, explaining my position and attitudes and experience in detail, and sending a copy to Victor, my opponent. I think I passed my bad mood on, as I felt better after that.

Signs of local aggression and discontent -

The film was over, and Declan and John and their culture-shocked crew were safely back in Bogotá - if 'safe' is a term you can use for living in poisoned air - and I returned to the farm after Ricardo's death, sad and ill. Then our hand-painted signs all the way along the 3 hour track to the farm started getting damaged, disappearing, or being covered with mud. At first we suspected my daughter's very angry ex-boyfriend, and indeed he was one of the culprits, but when I asked an elderly evangelist neighbour, Don Carlos, for help in the matter, I was met with an extraordinary blast of: 'the people' are doing it because those signs could show the way to spies and police and army because you have filmed the poppy-growing’. Well, that's a synopsis of an intense half-hour discussion in which I mentioned that the whole world knew that opium-poppy was being grown in Colombia and that our interest was to explain why so that the Americans couldn't get away with pointing their fingers - and their aeroplanes - at Colombian peasants and calling them 'narcotraffickers' and blaming them for the urban world's ills. I'm not sure how much went in, but our signs aren't being destroyed any more. It feels like a very uphill month.

Declan and John are translating the film into English, Spanish and Irish, so it should be widely available. They have promised to send us a copy; I hope it will create a little understanding as to what we are trying to do. So far it has served to unearth semi-dormant aggressive theories about us - and also a lot of friendship we didn't know we had.

News of our Irish support branch -

Meanwhile at our support-branch in Ireland, my eldest daughter Becky ran the Caquetá Rainforest Festival between 10th and 17th August. Several people who attended have sent me detailed reports, leaving the impression that it was well-attended, including by many people from mainland Europe, with lots of music, talks, films, dance and discussion. About $1,900 USD was collected for the campaign, shortly to be brought here by Magdalena, our returning Colombian helper who has been in Ireland for over two years. The only problem is continuity after the fun is over;
Becky badly needs regular live-in help at our house in Burtonport, a lovely place to live for anyone who wants to get away from the towns.

The Disaster of Official Environmental Organizations -

In the last Green Letter, Anne talked of how the wood lorries are trundling out of this region once more. I hoped she was wrong. Then I heard them in the night - the sound travels right up to our farm through the clear mountain air. And then when we were down in Chorreras filming, there they were, loading up. It seems the net result of the entry of 'Corpoamazonia', the Government environmental organisation, into this area, has been to reintroduce logging - with 'permits': as if the monkeys and the birds and the trees will feel better about it for that. Then on 5th September, this report appeared in 'El Espectador', the national liberal daily paper:

'Environment of Catastrophe in the Regional Environmental Institutions.'

'A document on forestry policy was described in the House of Representatives yesterday as a 'pretty document without any chance of becoming reality' by the directors of the regional environmental corporations. '

'Each director gave account of the situation in his region and expounded upon the forest problem; day after day, they said, they were losing battles in the face of deforestation or simply hadn't even been able to begin work. The common denominator was the scarcity of funding...

'No programme seems to have functioned, for which reason it was concluded that environmental legislation needed 'reforesting'.

'The debate confirmed that there is an environmental catastrophe. “With the cut-backs in spending - another of 6,000 million pesos has been announced - the Government is not seriously thinking about Life and with the environmental corporations in danger, inevitably the whole national environmental system is as well.”

Wind-up from the British Embassy -

And here's another: a few months ago, Anne was astonished when in Bogotá to have the British Embassy phone her up - somehow they'd heard of our work - and offer funding for local projects 'tending to substitute illegal crops and protect the environment.' She got the forms and Cliomedes wrote out a fairly modest project for Chorreras. We tried not to raise their hopes, but everyone's human. The project was reviewed at the Embassy, but meanwhile the consul Anne had been dealing with had changed. The answer came back:
'There's no funding available.' Anne has taken the project to another Embassy.

A Song from our Irish film-makers -

One of the days when Declan and John were here, and their camera crew were elsewhere chasing batteries and generator parts, we decided to put on a rehash of the 3 hour theatre we once did in Rovira. It was John's 26th birthday. He and Declan surprised us by providing several skits and songs themselves. Here are some excerpts from a song they performed called “Dying to Do a Documentary” - you have to imagine it in a lovely Irish accent.

There's scorpions in me sleepin' bag
Guerrillas in the night
I should have listened to my mother
Y’ know she's always right...
When your van breaks down in Neiva
When there's no mules left in sight
When the landslides gettin' nearer
And you're runnin' outa light
When the mosquitoes are gettin' hungry
And the guerrilla runs the show
When there's scorpions in your sleeping bag
And there's nowhere left to go
When the battery belt is running out
And you're feelin' that way too
When the generator's packed it in
And you've gone an' caught the 'flu
When the locals all have machetes
When you go where men don't go
When the FARC-EP want to see ye
And you're sure you can't say no
When your sound man's done a runner
And the keys are locked in the van
When you're feelin' like a gonner
And things won't go to plan
When your Visa card is briste* (Irish for broken)
And your travellers' cheques are through
When you don't know what day it is
An' you haven't got a clue
When the gods are all agin ye
And nature takes the piss
When the odds are stacked above ye
Lie back and think of this:
You should have listened to your mother,
You know she's always right ...

Sometimes in the mornings here, an unearthly chorus starts up in the forest. It is the howler monkeys. The children had been to see them several times and reported they were huge red-haired, unafraid creatures who stared at the little white ‘monkeys’ beneath them. Recently the noise came again and the children rushed off - the very steep hill between us and the forest had always put me off, but this time, my little Katie came signalling out of the forest that they were still there and we should come. Mary and I ran up, further and further into the forest where my grandson stood silently 'guarding' the monkeys who were unconcernedly getting on with their lives over 50 foot up in the giant trees. We stayed there a long time that morning, our necks aching watching them. There in the forest, it seemed like the only reality, yet when we came home, it took only a few minutes to reach the edge of that world, where the forests end forever.

If any of you would like to come out and help to slow down the destruction of that forest world, there is endless space here and no end of practical things to do. We could particularly use people versed in the physical healing arts at the moment - and robust mortals to take on farmwork as the older of us fall by the wayside.. And if you ever go across the sea to Ireland ... please remember a little place called Burtonport in Co. Donegal where there is a half-Spanish lady needing help and company in her work for CRAC.

All of you who have written and sent helpful books and loving encouragement - thankyou! and goodbye for now,
Jenny James

Contents:

• Luis’s Murderer implicated in another killing
• Jenny declares all to Govt. detectives
• 'Talk to Me, Old Tree' - poem by Louise
• Andreas visits from Germany and loses a bit of his thumb..
• Magdalena visits from Ireland
• Local FARC justice for a rapist
• More neighbours felling trees and sowing heroin poppies
• Campaign extends on all fronts
• Visitors from Outer Space?!

I would forgive my readers for thinking I've made the next bit of this story up...

On 6th November, I went down to the horrid hot town of Neiva: I never do this unless I absolutely have to; my gum had swollen up badly and I assumed I needed a dentist. Leaving the house of the friend I stay with early next morning to find a surgery, I was stopped in my tracks by the headline in the local Neiva newspaper: “Alcalde Implicado en Muerte de Gobernador” which means: Mayor implicated in Death of Governor. I rushed over to read the small print, but I already knew: it was the Alcalde of Milan, Ricardo Leyva, who, readers of Green Letter No. 6 may remember, was also highly suspected of being the murderer of my environmentalist friend, Luis Arenas of Milan, Caquetá.

I have also mentioned on occasion that I am an atheist, and I make feeble attempts to cling to a scientific explanation of the universe. Would anyone like to try a rational explanation as to why I, who perhaps once a year leave my farm for the city, should land myself in Neiva the day my sworn enemy, the Alcalde of Milan, is taken into custody by the Public Prosecutor of Bogotá for questioning in connection with the murder of a much more “important” person than my friend Luis?

I did not go to the dentist, and the swelling disappeared. I took a taxi in the opposite direction: to the head office of the newspaper “La Nacion”. I quietly but insistently told their chief everything I knew about Luis's murder. He was totally receptive and taped everything I said. He knew not only the Alcalde (Mayor) of Milian, but also Diogenes, Luis's brother-in-law, who wrote a moving letter to Amnesty International (sent out with Green Letter No. 6) at the time of Luis's murder.

Then the newspaper director took me to Caracol, one of Colombia's TV and radio news services, and I repeated all I knew. Then they gave me the phone and let me phone Luis's sister Betty in Florencia. “Have you seen the news” I said. “Of course!” she answered. “What is the attitude of Luis's family now to talking?” I asked - they had literally been frightened to death before to talk to the police. “We are thinking of talking.” - “Will you give me permission to talk?” I asked. “YES!” came the answer. The newspaper head man wanted me to go to the Fiscalia with him that afternoon - that's the Public Prosecutor. Betty also told me that after the Mayor of Milan had received my two poems, 'To Luis's Assassins' (published in Green Letters 9 &12), he had threatened that 'if anything happened to him, not one but several of Luis's family would die'. “Oh my god!” I said, “So are you against what I did?” - “No” she said. What a strange mixture of understandable fearfulness and extraordinary bravery Colombians are.

I was worried my purely 'hearsay' evidence would appear absurd. That I was making y fool of myself. That my dubious legal status, living in guerrilla territory, would be uncovered. But I went to the Fiscalia (Public Prosecutor) with the newsman. The first Fiscal said: ‘Oh, we thought she had information in connection with the Governor's murder.’ So, it's not to be, I thought. But they took me to a man higher up. He was more interested, and took me to a third. In the end I was sitting with a whole bevy of them. They were all debating the pros and cons of me making a statement, at least that's what I thought. Finally I said: “Look, am I wasting your time?” - “No!” they all said. They'd simply been discussing when, how, and under what auspices I should speak. We agreed on 9 o'clock next morning.

It was evening. At home, far away on the farm, I had a handful of papers, letters, notes that would be so useful now. No way to get them before morning. Then I remembered that Anne had copies of most of the material in Bogota - but I didn't know her address or telephone number, as she had just moved. I tried a hunch: a 'gringo' lodging house in the only bearable quarter of Bogotá, Candelaria, - I knew the owner often knew where Anne was. He wasn't in. With extreme urgency, I begged the woman at the other end of the phone to do anything she could to get Anne in touch with me. Then I prepared to sink into a depression, knowing I wouldn't get those papers by morning.

“Jenny - phone!” It was all of 3 minutes later. “How the hell did you know to phone me?” I asked Anne. “I was somewhere working and felt the urge to phone the flat - and your message was there”, she said. Sometimes having witches as friends is exceptionally useful.

Anne was with me by morning, with Luis's last letter to me, written 3 hours before he died; with his letter to the Mayor of Florencia written 2 weeks before he was killed, saying he feared for his life; with copies of my poems 'To his assassins'; with letters to me from his family; and with photos of Luis. I was about to risk all to get justice for him. I prayed that it was not his family I was risking.

Again, nerves and doubt that my testimony was absurd, meaningless: I had never even met the Mayor of Milan, and here was I trying to make sure he stayed in prison. I spoke for over an hour into a recorder. The Prosecutors couldn't have treated me better. For the first time since I came to Colombia eight years ago, I gained some respect for Colombian justice: that there are people trying to make the system work. They told me that each of the members of Luis's family that I mentioned would be approached to give testimony, and that if they refused, matters would rest there. They said that my evidence could help enormously in nailing the accused in his other offence. Then I asked if the day would ever come when Ricardo Leyva had to know of my existence and identity. The man's eyes fell. “Oh,” I said, “he will have to know, then.” - “Yes”, he looked at me straight, “that is Colombian law.” - “Fine, then so be it.”
I left, completely satisfied that for now, I had done everything in my power to get justice for Luis Erasmo Arenas, murdered 5th August 1995 for his environmental work.

A poem from Louise, 15:

Talk To Me, Old Tree
Tall and broad tree
That gives me so much shade
You are much older than me
Yet you don't look afraid.

But deep in your heart
You listen to that sound
You know it is not too far
Where trees are falling to the ground.

That man could come and kill you
I hear the chainsaw clear
I don't care what I have to do
I won't let that man come near.

With your roots deep in the earth
And your leaves high in the sky
Since the minute of your birth
You've listened to Mother Earth cry.

You keep all her secrets,
You feel all her pain:
Tell me more about her, old tree,
Or tell me the same things again.

A Visitor from Germany doesn’t like us much..

We had a visitor from Europe last week, a supporter from Germany who has helped us by reproducing and distributing Green Letters in his part of the world as he is a computer expert. I found him on the farm when I returned from my interview with the Prosecutor in Neiva, and I found him ready to leave. Andreas did not like it here. I asked him to write a 'Warning' to all future visitors from his point of view. Here are the relevant points! -

“I'm sure you won't like this place:

1. if you place more value on scientific and technological than on practical work,
2. if you are not going to talk about your emotions, and
3. if you are not used to chopping firewood with a big axe. This is extremely dangerous. You might loose the top of your thumb.”
( He did.) He added that “you would like it here if :
1. you are looking for a place that is really far, far away from modern society and
2. if you want to experience a lifestyle that is based on hard physical and emotional work.”

But a Colombian Visitor Does…
Someone else in their 30s came from Europe too: Magdalena Lasprilla, who had spent two years helping Becky run the campaign in Ireland. Magda is Colombian and has lived with us for many years. She came home with a 5 month old baby and climbed the mountain happily, also went down it again with Louise to visit all the people we work with in the local communities of Chorreras and Guayabal, who listened fascinated to her as she gave impressions of Ireland and what it feels like to live in Europe - not a very positive picture.

While Magda was in Guayabal, she chanced to witness a rather dramatic local scene, which I asked her to write up. Although it is not a 'Green' issue, I thought it very significant as it pertains to local guerrilla management of a criminal act, and as, for the moment, they are the authority around here, continuance of our work depends on their attitudes and ways of operating. Here is a translation of Magda's account:

Local FARC Justice

“I witnessed personally how the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) brought to justice a man of 32 who had raped and threatened with a rifle a girl of 11 in the hamlet of La Unión (near Chorreras). All the people met in a football field in Guayabal, about 200 people, men, women and children. A female guerrilla commander presided over the matter. In front of everyone they placed the man, tied in chains, with a big notice pinned to him which said: “I am a violator of minors.”

The guerrillera then made a series of proposals: The first was that it was wrong to exile the man from the region as he would continue to commit the same offence elsewhere; Secondly, that if the people decided he should receive the death penalty, then this would be carried out; And thirdly, that if they decided against the death penalty, then they should decide what alternative punishment would be imposed. Some people thought he should be killed, but the majority wanted another rigorous penalty imposed. So the guerrillera ordered the formation of a group of six people who would sign a document representing the decision of the people. Then proposals were heard regarding the punishment. It was finally decided that the man should pay with two months' hard labour for the community, working on road drainage. The work had to correspond to one million pesos (1,000 US $). A document stating this was written out and signed by the six representatives. Then the individual was released from his chains and handed over to the people.” The (outgoing) FARC commander Edwin was heard to say that if the man repeated the offence, he would be killed. ..And Injustice Unfortunately people suspected of being informants for the Army do not seem to get any chance of a trial and as far as I know at the moment, are executed without warning. I fear that injustices occur in the heat of the growing civil war; two men whom I did not know were killed in this manner recently near here. If we get a chance to talk to the new female commander, we intend to ask for more information on this. Having heard recently from our friend Cliomedes that one of the rumours that circulates about us is that we are buying land, not to save trees, but to 'form a military base for the future Yankee invasion', the situation is of some concern to us!

I would like to recommend to anyone who is confused about the cocaine trade in Colombia to read a short, excellent, factual booklet produced by the CIIR (Catholic Institute for International Relations), Unit 3, Canonbury Yard, 190a, New North Road, London N1 7BJ, England, called “Coca, Cocaine and The War on Drugs” (published 1993 but perfectly up-to-date, price L1.20). I was so relieved to see the truth told so succinctly and objectively, especially regarding the fact that it is the 'First World' that reaps most profits out of this very dirty trade. If ever you find yourself leaning on the comfortable theory that Colombia (and other countries) are responsible for the 'drug problem' in Northern cities, please ask: What is it about the life style in the rich world that makes people turn to drugs? I have before me a Colombian cartoon: it shows one large nose sniffing 'cocaine' - but the cocaine is the Amazon jungle with all its creatures and forests, leaving a desert in its wake.

Yesterday we were horrified to hear chainsaw sounds and the terrible thud of trees coming from above us, which we thought impossible. We sent youngsters running in all directions to discover what was going on .... followed by us older slower ones. Incredibly, it was exceptional wind conditions - high winds for days reminiscent of Ireland and unknown here - that made the sound seem as if it was in 'our' saved forest. In fact it turned out to be very far up on the 'flat' top of our mountain range to the left - neighbours we know are growing poppy and other crops up there, and cutting forest to do so. So this is our next objective; first we must talk to the neighbours, as they may be completely unwilling to sell; a lengthy, delicate process.

Meanwhile, this is what we have decided to do with recent donations that arrived from the CRAC Festival in Donegal and other sources, amounting to a little over $2,000 USD: rather than let the money 'rot' - inflation will eat it up if we leave it standing still - , or give it to some horrid bank to use for something nasty, we have worked out a way to circulate it usefully and make it work, whilst we sort out the next forest deal. Essential people to the Campaign like Cliomedes and Roberto of Chorreras are always - like most Colombian peasants - paralysed for lack of everyday living funds, so we decided to give them immediate work and support. So far, we like the feel of what has happened very much: we needed our small fields cut (for our 'transport' - horses, - and our one milking cow), and Cliomedes has a 'strimmer'. He stayed a week with us, worked all day and conversed half the night, learnt loads (so did we), we paid him well, he went away delighted - and left us his machine as a bonus on loan. We have lived for 20 years without a single machine - but, it seems it was either let the fields go back - rapidly - to scrub, or wobble a little on our principles. The money we paid Cliomedes will be put back by us into the Green fund as Anne continues to work, ever more successfully, as an astrologer, always with the bonus that as she tells people what she is working for, she receives mountains of material gear for the region as well as her fee.

To help Anne explain to people what we are doing, I created for her a thick file of photos, children's paintings, poems, plus a simple narrative in Spanish telling the history of the ecological aspect of our community. She reports that the folder is devoured by all and sundry in Bogotá.

In a few days' time, Roberto, who has worked with a chainsaw all his life, will be bringing his machine here. This took a lot of thinking about. Our accommodation is awful (Andreas of Germany will enthusiastically confirm this) and as we get more and more visitors and the gardens are beautiful, it is time to start building more adequate cabins. One thing I never knew about forests until I lived next to one is how many trees fall naturally, all the time. Sometimes several in a day, often an alarming noise. We are going to let a now very 'green' Roberto loose in our forests as he knows everything there is to know about wood and we know very little. His job will be to provide us with building wood from the naturally-fallen trees so that we can improve, extend and increase our accommodation. Again, his wages will be returned to the Tree Fund by us, kept up to date with inflation. Thus, Roberto will get a much-desired chance to spend time with us learning and teaching, he will be paid well, and our settlement will be more attractive to visitors.

More and more local people are making the arduous trek up the mountain to see us; they always go away well-satisfied, armed with vegetables, seeds, homemade wine, a pair of guinea-pigs for mating, cuttings and baby plants for transplanting, Irish music ringing in their ears, and a vision of a simple, lively life-style, impressive 'edible gardens' and excellent cuisine, plus conversations with odd but educated foreigners who see a lot of very good and beautiful things about the Colombia they had taken for granted. In return, we ask them to save all their bottles and jars to bring us, their plastic bags for our next load of gifts to people; their second-grade coffee (unsellable), unwanted fruit for us to make jam and wine and drinks; or to help shoe a horse, bring luggage up the hill - or send a couple of spare unattached men if they know of any! Contact is always excellent, if a little exhausting for us at times - Mary might be in the middle of carrying a sack of compost and covered in muck, or I might be about to collapse into my under-used hammock after a morning's gardening.

Visitors from Outer Space?

On 6th November, my children Alice and Katie (13 and 11 years old) also had some visitors. But they were invisible. It was the night I spent in Neiva thinking I was going to the dentist. The girls were in bed in their own little house, chatting before falling asleep. It was about 9.0 p.m. Suddenly, they say, the ‘house’, made of wood, plastic and corrugated roofing-felt , began to rattle and shake. This in itself is not unknown here as earth tremors are not uncommon. But this was no earth tremor: the whole house lit up (it was a dark night) very brightly indeed, so they could see every detail of the roof. “It was as if the light was shining out of the floor,” they reported. There was no sound except for the rattling of the house, and it lasted 'about 15 minutes'. They were petrified, held hands and waited. Katie reports she 'fell asleep' with the 'light still shining'. They were too scared to call out for Mary or leave the cabin.

A hundred yards down the garden, Mary was in bed in the main cabin, feeling anxious, not knowing why, and says she had a ’sensation of light shining' and got up to stand outside the cabin to see what was going on. Unfortunately, my girls’ cabin was too far away for her to know what they were going through. In the next room to her was Alan, deep in a feverish sleep, very ill with a high temperature and bad staphylococcus infection; he is a 39 year old Irishman recently-returned to our community after a long absence, extremely psychic and noted for his exceptional ‘lucid dreaming’. He dreamt a UFO had crash-landed nearby and that there was only one survivor, a small fellow with whom he communicated mentally to say: 'It's OK, you'll be OK here, we won't let anyone find you' and the UFO man then proceeded “to call me to get me to cut lots of vegetation to cover up and camouflage the crashed vehicle.”

Supplying the Colombian Government with Chinese Cabbage…

On that odd note, I think I'd better end by coming right back down to earth to report that we have finally found a home for our 5 kilos of Chinese hot-country seeds, distribution of which had been a worry for some time: the Colombian government environmental organisation Corpoamazonia has taken them, very gratefully indeed. When Anne was organising this with them at their Bogotá office, they asked if we could acquire 'tree seeds'. “What?” she said, amazed, “But don't the Government supply them?” Eyes to heaven, a shrug and, “the seeds are always useless”. So I have written to the Henry Doubleday Foundation to see if they can help ... No wonder the wood lorries are still trundling out of this region. With an environmental organisation like that, who needs chainsaws? In the '60s I used to leaflet door to door for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Now we 'leaflet' with plants and seeds. Balsillas is a huge, flat, deforested plain that you pass through as you cross the department boundary between Huila and Caquetá on the way up from Neiva. I noticed that each ugly little shack there had exquisite flowers all around it. So Mary went off there two days ago armed with chive and garlic-chive transplants (the herb is unknown here), sunflower and salsify seeds - and a bag to bring home an Eden of glorious flower-cuttings. She will return there soon to make further contacts; but after the children have done their tour of the local schools taking the pencils, chalk, rubbers and set-squares Anne has squeezed out of the Ministry for Education in Bogotá.

Thankyou so much for all your warm and helpful letters, your books, pamphlets, seeds, information, educational materials - even the stamps on your letters are recycled. Keep writing!

with love to you all,
Jenny James

Contents:

• Buying more forest
• A visitor from Israel asks for a TAXI to our farm..
• Preparation for big Green Theatre performance
• ‘Planet Song’ by Fin Costello
• Appreciation from the Irish film-makers
• FARC puts its foot down re ‘recycling’ logging permits
• Anne makes friends with local Enemy No. 1
• Tarot reading for the female FARC commander…
• Caquetá Rainforest Campaign

1996 has ended in a manner most fitting for a campaign dedicated to saving forests: Roberto, our chain-saw-man-turned-green from the hamlet of Chorreras, turned up just before the full moon at the end of November to tell us that a very large extent of forest bordering on our rescued woodlands was about to be sold at an absurdly low price and that large parts would certainly be cleared.

Low the price was indeed, £1,000 for goodness-knows-how-many acres, but any price was too high as we had just allocated most of our funds for various projects. We sent messengers and the messages whizzing: to Anne in Bogota, to Becky in Burtonport, Ireland, to our friends and supporters in Germany and England. It was nerve-wracking. The owner of the land was mad keen for a quick sale and would sell to anyone who came up with the cash. Roberto rushed back to Chorreras and collected $200 from the Chorreras fund (money we'd originally given them); Alan McGrath of Ireland who was staying with us gave us $350 of his own money; we still had a little in our fund as long as we didn't need to buy food or postage stamps for a while ..

I fell ill, badly ill. I lived on painkillers for 10 days so as not to compete with the howler monkeys with my screams as some invisible force bayoneted my head every two seconds. Mary rushed up and down to Neiva trying to keep in touch with Anne - no mean journey, three hours each way of steep mountain track, four hours each way in a dusty, unreliable open-sided bus. Then the stifling heat of Neiva which numbs your brain-cells, if you've any left after being shaken around on the dusty winding track with the abyss on one side and never a tree in sight - that's the Department of Huila where the Green movement arrived too late. It is turning to desert before our eyes. Roberto paid Arnelo, the owner, in small amounts of money and large amounts of chat-up as the money came in. We gave up trying to trace Anne and thought she must have died. Then one day she arrived in Neiva with $1,800, fruit of the magnificent responses of Cynthia Dickinson of Yorkshire and all the people whose names I don't know who helped her, and our friends of the ZEGG community in Germany. Half an hour after arriving, Anne bumped into Roberto in the street; he was accompanied by the owner of the land, one of those little events we cope with mentally by saying it was 'meant'. The rest of the money was paid, along with what had been borrowed from Chorreras and what was owing to Roberto for recent work. The forest was saved, the Campaign solvent again, and we could all breathe. Anne had even earned some money from her astrology so we could buy some food, household goods and much needed hardware, not to mention fares for the kids so they could get a break from their very hard work on the farm and go dancing for Christmas.

It seems that once you start a Campaign like this, you can't decide the pace at which things move. It has a life and mind of its own. We ask for help and visitors; and so they arrive, as did Amiram, a 61 year old Israeli gentleman who read a letter of mine in 'Positive News', that excellent newspaper with the no-bad-news rule. He turned up in Neiva with only our 'post-box' address in his hand and not a word of Spanish. Not surprisingly, no-one had heard of us. But as the word 'Caquetá' is in our name, he was sent to Florencia, capital of the province of Caquetá, a plane-journey away. And arriving in Florencia, even farther from here than Neiva, naturally no-one had heard of us. But - it was obviously 'meant' - he found someone who spoke English and who said, 'Wait, I'll find out for you.' We still don't know how, but they did find out; and back he came to Neiva, and out to Rovira. In Rovira, Amiram asked for a 'taxi' to our farm. This has become the joke of the decade amongst the peasants of Rovira. One of our neighbours, Pardo, pointed at his mules and said, in stitches, - 'Here's your taxi', and put Amiram's heavy luggage on it. Our Israeli friend had to walk. He arrived in the pitch-darkness with some local labourers and settled in happily.

His visit, along with the increasing number of local people who need accommodating for the night, and the letters I am receiving announcing intended visits, has made it more urgent to improve and extend our little cabins and shacks. So Roberto is coming back next month with his chainsaw, now used for more peaceful, if not less noisy, purposes, to make planks out of one or two of the several million trees surrounding us. Even so, my well-indoctrinated children stare accusingly at me when the saw starts up its terrible racket and stand in reverence and mourning at the sacrilege of utilising trees which they have come to regard as holy. I gently point out that Nature herself clears out a several dozen a week just in our hearing-distance and that it's a bit too chilly to sleep under the stars at night, even for European visitors...

I went with Roberto to see the forest we'd purchased; my grandson Tristan, aged 14, came too. Roberto tells us he was one of the first pioneers of this bit of forest, which means he took out the valuable wood in those days, and made the log paths through the forest jungle. There was no clear-cutting in those days, and without his keen eyes leading us, you'd never know man had set foot there before; with his machete he cut 10 years of undergrowth for hour upon hour, re-finding an invisible track he had once known and eventually, when we were stumbling with tiredness, brought us triumphantly to a stream and said, “There! That forest up there and that clearing is what we've just saved!”

We could see the forest all right: an endless ocean of gently swaying giants. But a clearing? Tristan and I looked at each other puzzled.

“Look!” insisted Roberto, pointing to a forest of tall trees near us. Our eyes slowly tuned in to the fact that it was new-growth forest. The good news that all the doom-reports don't reflect is that in these parts, in just a decade, cut forest renews itself with almost unimaginable speed if left to its own devices. And so, to our innocent eyes, there was no ‘clearing’.

Apart from running the farm, our time at the moment is taken up with preparation for the Green Theatre we are to perform in Guayabal, the nearest country centre (hardly a 'town') on 18th January. From shy and tentative beginnings a year ago, we are now branching out brazenly to include unashamed 'Green' messages in many poems, songs, plays, skits and comedies, mostly enacted by the children. This song by Fin Costello, one of the Irishmen living here, I have translated into Spanish to be rendered by him (with his hair-raising accent which the Colombians find charming!).

Planet Song

I am a wooded mountainside, peaceful in the morning sun
I am shelter to forest creatures, I nurture every one
I am old, so very old, here since time begun
But now I cry in pain and anger, anger at what's being done...

'Cause men burn me! On hot dry afternoons
Men burn me! Smell the smoke, black the ruin
Men burn me! Destroying the homes of birds and monkeys
And all in the name of heroin production for American junkies
Men burn me!
They burn me with gasoline and poison sprayed from aeroplanes
That falls on insect, plant and animal and running mountain streams

I am the skin that covers this planet, know me by my scars
I've been ripped and deeply punctured, so you can drive your cars
And you cover me, until I choke, on the waste that you discard:
But take warning that the day is near, the day you'll go too far!

Then I'll burn you! When my mountains will explode!
I'll burn you! And you'll reap the seed you sowed!
I'll drown you, put your cities under sea -
And leave once again, Those left alive, To figure out
How to live at peace with me.

I am the spirit of the Earth, I know I will survive,
As long as I circle the sun,
But it brings me no great joy
For if my body's wounded, well time can heal,
But who will heal my heart?
Of longing for a different ending,
I can't face another start ...

And I could weep if I had eyes to cry,
'Cause I don't know, I don't know the reason why
It has to be that I dance this dance alone
When all I want is to share my beauty,
My land and water, with people who will make it their home,
And not burn me!

Our young Irish film-making friends, Declan and John, have now returned to Ireland to edit the material they videoed in Caquetá. Before leaving, they sent me this piece of writing 'for the next Green Letter'.

“To say that 'Atlantis' in Caquetá is a farm on the top of a mountain, by a jungle, is an under statement and undervalues what is in fact a wonder of human good intention, sheer hard physical work and ongoing tenacity. Speaking from the point of view of first-time documentary artists, we tried to maintain, as would be expected, a position of objectivity and impartiality. Yet, faced with brick wall technical breakdowns and seeming total and omnipresent catastrophes, our impartiality waned.

“Our project began to envelop a crew that included all five 'Atlanteans', as well as the miscellaneous local green consciences that we came in contact with. Blood, sweat and tears, Guerrilla intransigence and snakes, scorpions and spiders, camera failure and generator blow-outs and some twenty-three hour mud-soaked stomps up and down the mountain has had a bonding effect upon all involved from the Bogotoan production crew right down to the school children in nearby (a 2 hour journey) Chorreras who can't point to Colombia on a map of South America.

“To place the 'Atlantis' project in its present context: the Colombian army have made an incursion into this guerrilla-controlled province reaching Balsillas (by bus, 45 minutes) by last reports. The feeling locally and in Bogota is that this is a direct repercussion (some speak of retribution) of a nation-wide guerrilla assault during which in excess of one hundred police/army were killed and many more injured, one incident taking place in the suburbs of Bogota. With relevance to 'Atlantis', the issue at the source of this regional and national unrest is the continuation of government fumigation of farm land mostly in the lowlands of the south eastern provinces. This is where 'coca' (of which cocaine is a derivative) is cultivated as the major crop. Though dealing with a different, and more lethal, narco-crop (amapola), the embryo of a solution is being nurtured by Jenny through her influence upon and co-operation with locals (not forgetting the all-important endorsement of the guerrilla) such as Roberto, Cliomedes and Camilo who spoke in interview of the difficulty of trying to subsist by the use of conventional and legal crops. Using the 'Atlantis' farm as a model of what can be produced on this poor clay soil, the frequent visitors take inspiration and also receive education on how to produce for their own table, as well as getting an insight into the potential for commercial vegetable cultivation.

“Before we came to Colombia, we were unaware that the communist guerrilla controlled the most sparsely populated regions of the country. We were unaware of the vast scale of Colombia's primary, virgin forest and depressed by the short-sighted attitude towards its elimination (“but the forest goes on forever”). Foremostly, we were unaware of a European commune tucked away under the petticoat of the jungle in Caquetá trying to conserve and spread a little enlightenment. As a businessman in Bogota said to us recently: “I am really surprised that there are gringos in Caquetá and that they are still alive.” In this haven of altruism, despite the latest setback to our schedule, the filming continues.”
Slan (Irish for 'Greetings')
John Oliver Coffey & Declan Lynch

Recently in a Green Letter, we reported that permits for taking wood out of this region were being 'recycled'. On 1st December, Louise (15) was in Guayabal, sitting on the bus ready to come home. She reports that the Guerrilla called everyone off the bus, and everyone from all over Guayabal, assembled them in the 'town-square' - the football pitch - and, in her own words, “The guerrilla man began speaking to the people about a lot of things. One of the things was about the wood that is being taken out of this region. He said that people were playing dirty games in order to get more wood than they are allowed out of the region and that if they went on, the guerrilla would have to ban all the wood from going out.”

And the next items of local news I will entitle -

“How Anne made friends with an Enemy and got to know the new local guerrilla commander”:

Ever since the Green movement began in this area in the autumn of 1994, we had heard stories of a man called Victor who spread obnoxious rumours about us and anyone else who tried to do any kind of social or ecological work. I had gone out of my way to make contact with him over a year ago, and found him dismissive in quite a childish way (example: 'the seeds don't sprout', referring to the hundreds of packets of seeds I'd distributed: maybe one or two didn't sprout!). His opposition got heavier - one might say more desperate - at the time of the video-filming when he tried some fairly convoluted tacks in front of the regional guerrilla commander (we shouldn't mention poppy-growing, wood-cutting or do the film at all, it seemed). The 'military base' theory of our raison d'être here, mentioned in the last Green Letter, also emanated from him.

Anne ran in to Victor at the house of a friend, Edgar, in Guayabal a few days ago. She was running through the programme of the theatre we will be performing. Victor was unable to resist his curiosity and sat with them. Edgar, well aware of the 'war' Victor had been waging against us, starting praising our farm. Victor asked - could he have two pairs of our guinea-pigs for breeding?... then started boasting about a project he'd started to grow native tree species ... but then spoilt his boast by asking Anne - could we get the seeds for him? In Anne's words, “I smiled inwardly at the neediness of this self-styled enemy of ours and said, Yes of course, we'd try.

Anne’s report continues: ”Then Edgar and Victor began a discussion on how to dispose of the rubbish in Guayabal. Victor said they shouldn't just throw it away but sort and select and sell whatever useful materials were in it. I agreed enthusiastically with him and, turning to Edgar, said that Victor's idea was 'very wise', at which Victor swelled visibly with pride. When I left, I forced Victor to shake hands with me and said, 'Well, what a surprise, so we're all on the same side after all.' 'Yes,' he said, 'at last you're beginning to understand me,' which was a bit of a cheek considering the dangerous rumours he's been spreading! I answered 'And perhaps you're beginning to understand who we are,' grinning at him. He was struck dumb for a moment, then burst out laughing. I went off giggling to myself.”

Tarot for the Guerrilla Commander -

“Later in Rovira, I ran into Liliana, the new local guerrilla commander, a very elegant young lady with waist-length black hair, long nails and perfect eye-makeup. Even her welly-boots looked elegant. I began to talk about the green projects we are trying to foment in the area, but she kind of stared through me, waited for me to pause, and then butted in saying, 'I hear you read Tarot cards - will you read mine?' 'Of course', I said astonished. When we had finished, she offered to pay me. 'No,' I said, ’the rich people in Bogota pay me so I can work here for free.’ She laughed appreciatively.”

One day when Mary was returning up our mountain she saw, coming down towards her, a group of people carrying bunches of Chinese cabbages tied together with string and slung over their shoulders. “I assumed they'd just come from our farm,” says Mary, “and asked the how they liked the place. They looked puzzled and said they'd never been there. 'But where did you get those big Chinese cabbages?' I asked. I could see that they had been grown with care and good compost. 'Up at Mrs So-and-So's farm,' they answered, adding that we had given this lady seeds and that she provided her family and friends with delicious vegetables. I was delighted and very moved.”

News from our Tolima Farm -

In the Department of Tolima we have another huge farm where we lived for six years before coming to Caquetá and which is still being run by members of our commune. When we were there, we purchased hundreds of hectares of scrub-land and secondary forest - and tiny pockets of grand old trees - until an 'island' was formed in an area otherwise totally devoted to agriculture and devoid of forest. There were times when the neighbours complained that the 'bears' would come back if we didn't clear our land. We hoped fervently that they would and fought battles against people hunting on our land.

A few days ago, I asked for, and received, a 'Reference' from a local people's leader in the area I had been living in. His name is Juvencio, a great friend of mine. I was horrified to hear he is on a paramilitary death list, and proud and delighted to read one of the paragraphs in his letter praising our previous ecological work. He says that, through us caring for the woodland and thus also the waterways on our land, we had (without knowing it) facilitated the construction of an aqueduct serving 100 families in his village further down the mountain. I was particularly surprised to read this and the other glowing terms in which he praised our work as he is a hunter himself, and often joked about going up to the 'jungle' – our farm - when he visited us. He had shown no interest in any green issues at the time. Ned, who runs the Tolima settlement, recently asked if it would be legitimate to let him have some of our seeds as neighbours are always asking him; and Magdalena, our Colombian member recently returned from two years in Ireland with Becky, reports that there is a thriving Green group in Icononzo, the nearest country town, which she attends and speaks at. I hope all our helpers agree that the whole planet is a 'legitimate' area to assist whenever we possibly can!

Howler Monkeys Guard Forest -

I will end once again with a mention of the howler monkeys - Davey of Belfast even sent Christmas greetings to them! Well, my grandson Tristan reports that they are definitely doing their bit to guard the forest: he and a young friend from Bogota were swinging on the (terrifyingly high) creepers in the forest above our farm when - in Tristan's words - “Suddenly I heard a noise that sounded like a big bird landing. I looked up and saw eight big auburn monkeys jumping down towards us. They looked very angry and came near us. We stayed there looking at them, so very slowly they moved away from us.” Obviously a territorial dispute ending in uneasy truce.

A big thank you now to Unwins Seed Co. Of Chester, to Abundant Life Seeds of America and to the person who sent me Marshall's 'Fen Bred' seeds; also to Cynthia Thompson for your exquisite English-teaching aids, and to the many many people who keep this Campaign alive with your loving and helpful letters and your practical and monetary gifts. A very green and fertile New Year to you all!

Love,
Jenny James

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