Contents GL 16:

• Atlantis Green Theatre goes to Guayabal..
• And the Guerrilla ban the word ‘Green’!
• Slaughter in the guinea-pig run
• Distributing free contraceptives..
• And a dozen details of our spreading campaign..

The Caqueta Rainforest Campaign
AA 895 Neiva, Huila, Colombia, S.America

I am having serious doubts about my good friend Anne's astrological predictions. She said January 18th was an 'absolutely brilliant day' for our 'Green Theatre' performed for the local community of Guayabal. Well, she was right about the theatre: it was fairly brilliant; ought to have been, the weeks of intensive work that went into it and considering the combined talents of 6 youngsters and us oldies. But read Anne's own account of what happened and judge for yourself whether you'd ever fancy putting on an environmental theatre for a Colombian peasant audience on a Saturday night. OK, so she's not responsible for the mixture of the sublime, the tragic and the ridiculous that is Colombia; however, I feel reconfirmed in my belief that the safest bet in my chosen Third World home is to remain a pessimist at all times.

Over to Anne:

"The 'Comite de la Casa Cultural' of Guayabal asked us to put on a theatre show to help them raise money to pay for the wooden building which is to house the 'green' library we have donated them and which will display environmental posters, host educational events and generally elevate the abysmal level of cultural interest in the area.

"We accepted the challenge gladly, somehow squeezing in rehearsals, costume-making and the creation of several new acts written by Jenny into our already over-full daily living routine, not to mention hand-painting a stash of posters for the area advertising the 'Teatro Verde de Atlantis' - Green Theatre of Atlantis.

"We set off for Guayabal four days before the event as we guessed there would be a few difficulties to iron out, like where to sleep, what to eat, and how to handle lights and sound on stage which we're not used to. We sent a series of very detailed lists and questions to the 'Comite' including 'did we need to bring our own spoons?' and 'was there a toilet?'

"Jenny and I set off with the two smallest girls to pave the way. The first bump was that when we got down to the road after our three-hour tramp, we were told there were no buses due to large landslides from the barren hills near Neiva. We also noted that no poster advertising the theatre had been put up in Rovira by the 'Comite'. Odd. Not to be put off by a few landslides and a mountain of luggage including hula-hoops, we started trudging philosophically down the road on the four-hour trek to Guayabal.

"An engine. A bus! The only one that managed to get through in two days, by doing a mind-boggling detour from Neiva and charging peasants $25 US instead of $3.5 for the favour. We clambered on, a little dazed at our luck, and in Guayabal confidently presented ourselves at the wooden shack of the female President of the Comite who looked at us blankly. "Are you still going to do the theatre?? she asked. 'Of course' we answered, puzzled. "Didn't you get our letter?” she continued. "No?” we answered.

"A letter had been sent cancelling the theatre because the Committee 'couldn't afford to pay for the mules' for our luggage. Jenny was relieved it was only a financial worry and not some dreadful political hassle and said of course we'd pay all our own expenses. We certainly weren't going to waste two weeks' hard work, nerves and neglected garden to haggle over the price of some mules.

"So we moved into the communal hall which became our camping place. It was full of massive tubes for road drainage and piles of bags of cement, many ripped open and spilling their contents onto the floor and into the air. The stage was occupied by the Virgin Mary, a crucified Jesus and many plastic angels. The place doubled-up as the local Catholic Church. The priest's housekeeper eyed us disapprovingly and said we'd have to wait for the 'Padre' to return to get permission to remove the statues; he was 'away'. Jenny, who as you will all know comes from a colonialist nation (I am Irish), commanded imperiously: 'Anne, please remove Jesus.' And so of course I did, trying to hide my grin, and relocated him in the Priest's house next door.

"Four days of intensive activity followed during which we had to build 'wings' on the stage, make and hang curtains, and sweep up cement. We had been told there were lights for the theatre. The town generator comes on at 7pm. A woman proudly switched the lights on. At this point the greenest item in our campaign was Jenny's face: two hideous strips of lighting lit up the audience space at the back of the hall. The stage remained in darkness. Fin, our one-man orchestra, who really needed to spend the time running through all the acts with the children, had to spend the next two days rewiring the 'Sala Comunal', plugging in eight light bulbs so that the audience would be able to see us instead of us seeing them.

Guerrilla Ban the word ‘ GREEN’

"Meanwhile Jenny organised and organised and organised in Army General style, letting slip once that we would do the next practice 'in uniform' - she meant 'in costume'. But well-organised as we were, we were but a small force against the chaos that is Colombian society. Just as we were about to get a breather from building the theatre and were about to get down to rehearsing, Jenny received a visit from the local guerrilla commander, who was new. A tiny man, he came in politely to see 'the programme' and Jenny settled down to explaining the acts to him. But he had other business. He had come to inform us that we could not call our theatre 'Green' because this was a Red area and since the local Green Party won the elections in the area two years ago (see the early Green Letters) and, according to the guerrilla 'split the region', they had decided the word GREEN must not be used in El Pato (the name of our area). Therefore, none of our beautiful posters had been put up, and no-one in the region knew of the theatre.

"I had a silent fit of mental outrage listening to him, but Jenny handled him with consummate ease and diplomacy saying, 'Yes, of course, no problem, we will change the posters'. She then had the theatre curtains drawn to reveal our lovely hand-sewn banner saying "Teatro Verde?” and 'agreeing' with the commander that of course the word 'Verde' must be blocked out. The young commander by now was hastening to make clear that the guerrilla very much agreed with 'cultura' and did not want to stop the theatre, only that the word 'green' would let in the paramilitaries and that would be the end of us all. Jenny didn't stop to argue, but called down her 15-year-old daughter Louise who came from backstage looking like a stunning young film star all made-up and dressed-up.

"It was pointed out that one of Louise's acts was to read her 'Poesias Verdes' - "Green Poems” and could we use that title? 'No' came the answer. 'Fine' said Jenny, 'and what about this?' She then had Louise recite her poem in Spanish called 'Verde' (the English version appears in an earlier Letter). The poor young commandante at this point was hypnotised by Louise who is exceptionally beautiful and has waist-length golden hair and already stands head and shoulders above him. He was transfixed and kept staring at her after she had finished. 'Is that alright?' asked Jenny. 'Yes, yes, of course,' said the commandante, obviously forgetting his Mission to Ban the Word Green. We politely kept straight faces.

"We later made a very obvious 'correction' to our banner, calling ourselves the 'teatro ecologico'; the posters were censored by scrubbing out the word 'green' and, just 24 hours before the theatre began, were finally stuck up in the various mountain hamlets.

"Meanwhile, we had one piece of luck: Ned, who runs the farm in Tolima, turned up with a sun-roasted Alice, Jenny's 13 year-old daughter. They had walked two days to get here as there were no buses. Ned then took on the vital job of feeding us all, plus quickly learning a part in one of the major mime-plays, which he managed to perform well without a single proper rehearsal.

"We wondered what the next piece of lunacy would be to come our way. We had only to wait to opening night. The hall filled and we jumped over our stage fright and began without a single full rehearsal. Everyone performed immaculately. No cues were missed, no lines fluffed; a precision job. Brilliant visually, excellent in terms of 'Message'. Only one problem. No-one heard a word nor took any notice of it. The sound system was fine. It's just that we had a serious audience problem. Babies howled, kids screamed, people yelled and talked throughout, hooligans heckled: so different from the well-mannered behaviour we'd had from our local Rovira audience 18 months previously.

"Anger is an excellent cure for nerves. We completed the whole theatre with precision and finesse - Jenny even had the audience listening for about two minutes when she told them off through the microphone for their behaviour. Afterwards all the Committee members said how wonderful it had been, that they'd made 130,000 pesos (about $130) and when would we come back to do it again?

We got brooms and started sweeping up the ankle deep pig-sty of wrappers, bottles and broken glass. 'And how was it for you?' they asked us. 'It was the most disgusting experience of our lives,' said Jenny. Sometimes she is simply not diplomatic. Must have been the stars.

Here is one of Louise's Green Poems, inspired in the first lines by Red Indian chants we have heard:

Mother Nature

I feel you Mother Nature
I feel you under my feet
I hear you Mother Nature,
I hear your heart beat;
I see you Mother Nature,
I see you in great pain
Men are destroying you, Mother Nature,
They're completely insane.

You gave them your body,
You gave them your heart
And their way of paying you
Is to tear you apart.
Yet there's hope for you
In some small places;
There's love for you
In some people's faces.

The destroyers of this world
Will kill themselves one day
And then all the badness
Will vanish away.
There will be just a few left alive
And they'll be called
The Ones That Survived.

You will have read that the civil war in Colombia is stepping up. The Army stop all buses at Balsillas, the 'border town' between guerrilla country where we live, which is also the Caqueta provincial boundary. The young soldiers are not unfriendly - one gave Louise his hat! The guerrilla have temporarily vanished from the area, they do not seek confrontation. A couple of days ago, four helicopters dived and circled for an hour over the valley below us, presumably to 'reclaim' the area without any risk to themselves. Martyn, who is 15, was half-way up the mountain leading a laden mule. A helicopter swooped right down to him, he could see the men sitting with their legs dangling viewing him through binoculars. Very brave of them. The mule didn't flinch. It was obviously used to this kind of thing.

Natural Slaughter..

One morning, I walked out to our large hen and guinea-pig enclosure to let the chickens out of their sleeping-house. A strange stillness met me in the run. No guinea-pigs. I called everyone. I couldn't bear to look. All gone or dead, except for four terrified creatures who'd squeezed themselves into holes. Some enormous creature must have come in the night and ate the lot as there were hardly any bodies. The locals say it must have been a 'tigrillo', a large wild-cat they say can kill a person or a donkey. Our guinea-pigs, apart from being loveable friends, are vital to our compost making process. Between 50 and 100 disappeared that night.

We later collected a few from neighbours - we'd previously supplied the whole region for miles around with guinea-pigs - and started again with a tribe of 9 in a safe hutch with chicken wire lining it. A few mornings later, I suddenly had an urge to look. All dead, this time their bodies lying there. I ran in to the house in horror; I'm not as brave as the children, who studied them to find just two holes in each neck. Some kind of weasel creature had made a hole in the roof, and then in the guinea pigs.

We have started again with just two young ones. In a very safe cage in the kitchen. The miracle is that the forest's wild creatures left us alone for two whole years.

The Unmentioned Topic..

I have never noticed the issue of contraception mentioned in green literature, and yet it seems obvious that radical efforts to reduce the world's population have to be made, unless environmental concern is to be no more than a fancy pastime. Therefore we have begun to acquire large quantities of contraceptives from the offices of the European Union in Bogota which we have handed over to our local doctor friend, Mario - the only doctor in the whole region - for distribution free to local people. He was hugely grateful.

He is also at present giving our own resident nurse, Mary Kelly, weekly lessons in acupuncture and always treats us without charge because of his agreement with the work we do. I cannot get over the miracle that he exists at all in this remote region - a fully-trained acupuncturist and homeopath, as well as conventional doctor.

Small miracles do happen all the time. Recently, we had so many people staying here that even our well-stocked gardens couldn't withstand the pressure. The people working in the kitchen surrounded by our multi-coloured fruits and vegetables laughed at me as I mumbled about 'famine', but I knew the story at the other end of the production line, and was worried. Suddenly a bounteous gift arrived: a young neighbouring woman sent a huge arm-load of healthy-looking salad plants with the message 'I grew these from your seed, but I don't know what they're for, you might as well have them back'. Rocket, purslane, chicory, and many other 'exotic' plants. We planted their roots quickly and used their well-grown tops. Not quite part of my plan to help Colombian peasants become self-sufficient and stop burning trees, but very handy at the time!

Talking of 'exotic' plants, here is Mary's wish-list for seeds which she has read about and wants to try out if anyone can oblige:-

Arnica, ashwaganda, astralagus, lemon basil, bee balm, blessed thistle, burdock, catnip, celandine, roman camomile, chaste tree, chia, gypsy wort, feverfew, lion's ear, lycium, ginko, gotu kola, lobelia, mugwort, mullein, wild oregano, pennyroyal, poker-root, pyrethrum dalmatian, clary sage, salad burnet, shepherds purse, shoo-fly plant, skullcap, speedwell, St John's wort, sweet cicely, valerian, sweet flag, evening primrose. (Well, I've heard of primrose anyway!)

A while back, we had a friendly and interesting visit from the President of the local Action Committee, an elderly man called Teodoro. He talked enthusiastically about our green campaign and environmental needs in general and ended by saying, 'If only all this had been happening ten years ago.' He knew these mountains before they were stripped.

In Chorreras, the community we work most closely with, our friends Roberto and Cliomedes are still up against a lot of suspicion about us. He pointed out that our community mainly consists of women and children, but the hostile reply came back, "The gringos (Americans) train women to be spies too, you know. Only time and good work will sway these attitudes.

Magdalena, our Colombian friend who spent two years helping at our CRAC house in Ireland, now helps to run our Tolima settlement. Over there she has become deeply involved with green groups in Icononzo, the nearest country town. The secondary school there has a students' ecological group - it is a much more developed area than Caquetá - and she was invited to a meeting where she talked about our campaign here and of her experiences in Ireland.

She reports: "The students asked me lots of questions about how people lived in Europe, what is the work like and how children are educated. I told them we must never think technology can give us everything we want for a happy life, that that is a false route. They asked me to join their group permanently. Last week, we had another meeting, and I suggested the creation of an Ecological School for children. My idea was accepted and now we are working on where it can be and how to finance it. A lot of people in the Green Group of Icononzo also want to start a communal vegetable garden and have asked me for seeds, which at the moment I'm unable to give them.”

So our name of 'Caqueta' campaign needs stretching. But as long as it's Green, I don't mind where it is, do you?

Cynthia Dickinson of PO Box 10, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF4 1YX, is launching a 'CRAC Supporters Newsletter' so if any readers would like to send reports, suggestions, letters, comments, poems, please write to her.

I have long wished that I could somehow introduce to each other all the marvellous people who write to me, mainly - but certainly not only - from England. So any of you who would like to get to know each other to extend your network of friends with common interests, please contact Cynthia. I know she and my daughter Becky in Ireland are planning another CRAC Festival this year, possibly in England. I would also like everyone to know that I always answer all letters, as soon as they get to me up the mountain, so that if anyone has not received a reply, it means their letter was lost in the post - please try again!

Our work with schools is intensifying. Roberto from Chorreras is at our farm doing some work for us and he touched my heart yesterday evening by asking if we could help with exercise books and pencils, as not all the families in Chorreras can afford these items. We haven't a 'peso' ourselves, but I scoured the cabins and found a few copy-books and the children are looking out for pencils. So any of you who would like to make collections of practical items for our campaign, please add these humble things to your list!

Everyone we work with locally is always religious about mentioning where goods come from and why. And in view of our new 'profession' as green theatre artists - we're not going to let a mere audience riot put us off - we'd like all you ladies to keep the ends of your lipstick and other discarded make-up items as this is not a commodity readily available on trees, but rather essential for the more flamboyant aspect of the green message!

On a more serious level, we are always on the look-out for Atlases, maps, and inflatable globes for the school; also Spanish-teaching books as many of our helpers turn up here without a word of the language. Anne discovered a simple and excellent way of collecting materials in an office in Bogota: it is the office of a 'New Age' glossy magazine. Once in a while, they put up a big cardboard box, with a CRAC notice above it, explaining who we are and what we're trying to do and asking for practical gifts (a list is given). Amongst other useful donations, we received several roadside shovels! - very important if you saw the state of these roads.

On the level of direct forest-saving, our next big aim is some forested land several hours away in Chorreras. Roberto has told us it contains the sources of the headwaters of his village and that the owner, who would otherwise cut and burn to grow opium-poppy, is willing to sell for between 1½ and 2 million pesos ($1 US = roughly 1,000 pesos). Anne is working like mad in Bogota for us, but at the moment just to pay for extra food and the visas of people who want to stay here permanently, so it may be some time before we can help the Chorreras people with this land. Anyone like running jumble-sales?!

Dark is falling, I must end. I want to thank Irma Knittel of the Zegg community in Berlin for her recent visit, useful gifts and diligent gardening work. Also Graham Bowden of Doncaster who is still with us, busily building a beautiful structure to live in outside our hideous main shack; Eddie Duignan of Dublin who has decided to make this his home for now, and without whose strength in the garden I could never feed everyone; and, as always, our dozens of correspondents who keep my spirits up when Life has kicked me down, including Steph whose loving December card I don't think I acknowledged. Thank you all for caring and sending your energy.

With love,
Jenny James

Contents GL 17:

• Close eyewitness account of spray-planes spreading glyphosate
• Martyn listens in to the pilots’ conversation…
• More about opium poppy growing
• Malicious gossip spreads regarding our presence in the region
• First rumours of Enrique’s death
• Visiting local communities
• Landslides cut the region off (again)
• Fomenting gardens – and digging rubbish pits for Rovira village

At Easter 1961 I was sitting with several hundred other concerned people on the cold tarmac outside Wethersfield American Air Base in England, trying to sing as helicopters intimidated us just a few feet above our heads with a noise and wind so strong we were pressed nearly flat. Early in 1969 I sat, frightened, angry and bitter with 25 other people on the hot tarmac at the American airbase in Udorn, Northern Thailand, watching helplessly as huge bombers took off in pairs every few minutes to bomb peasants in Vietnam.
On March 2nd 1997, the day I sent off the last Green Letter, our breakfast was interrupted by helicopters overhead, financed by the American government and 'protecting' small acrobatic planes which dived and twisted at tremendous speeds through our valley, over and over again for about 40 minutes. Forty minutes of impotent fury, during which it would have taken a saint not to pray for a mishap. Every time the small planes dived, out came a long rectangular spray of white poison, glyphosate. No field in this valley is rectangular and, however skilled the acrobatics of the pilots, that dangerous herbicide did not fall only on the opium-poppy growing amongst other crops here.

The pilot of at least one of the spray planes was American - a fact denied in official circles. The proof is ridiculously simple and comes from 15-year-old Martyn, Mary's son. Here is his own account:

”I was walking towards our neighbour's house on an errand. Just as I got there I heard helicopters. Our neighbour was standing outside his house with another man and his wife, looking at an aeroplane fumigating on the other side of the valley. They had a small radio and could tune in to what the helicopter pilots were saying to one another. I heard one helicopter pilot say to another (in Spanish) 'Look, there goes that s.o.b. gringo (American), happy as can be. He really likes fumigating.' At another time they said 'Look, that f-ing gringo is not doing what we told him.' Then they said, 'Repeat that fumigation so we can take another photo.' ”Then the plane disappeared for about two minutes and suddenly reappeared on our side of the mountain, right by our neighbour's house, and fumigated the next farm where the owner has several hectares of poppy. The plane fumigated it all twice. We were watching it. Suddenly it dived towards Churco's house (our nearest neighbour) and fumigated a patch of lulos he has (a delicious fruit that grows on a prickly bush). In between the lulos he had a bit of poppy growing. Then we heard on the radio, 'Look, there are three so-and-so's watching us. Perhaps they want more. Fumigate again!' So they did fumigate again, and the three so-and-so's were us. “Then I had to go to the farm where they had just fumigated to collect a sack of our shopping and I asked the neighbour what he was going to do now? And he said it was very nice of them to fumigate as the poppy had got covered in weeds and now the poison will kill all the weeds and he will sow again.”

By afternoon the valley was full of smoke. Roberto of Chorreras was working here at the time and he told me that everyone would be burning the weed residue ready for replanting in a couple of days. Meanwhile the trees? The other plants? The earth and the insects and the waters and the children? And the fear we felt, so near to our poppy-growing neighbours, as the planes swooped over us - would they mistake our lovely vegetable gardens for some illicit crop? They didn't this time.

The money spent in that morning's aggression could have solved the economic problems of this whole valley. And that was only the beginning. We have lost count now of how many times the planes and helicopters have returned just to this one tiny part of Colombia in this last month. And here the poppy-growing is on a very small scale - what must be happening in the rest of Colombia? And all because the United States of America would rather blame Third World peasants than look at the quality of life that causes its young to turn to drugs.

Roberto watched with us, fascinated. He had never seen such intensive fumigation before. He says in Chorreras there are only two farms with poppy. He was completely in touch with the long term effects of fumigation - how the poisons would go into the water table. Roberto is a quiet, solid, pensive man. At breakfast, after watching the air display, he said almost to himself: ”Only war can sort this country out. Some of us will have to die, but ... ” I had commented to him as we watched the planes: ”There will be a few more guerrillas created today” - that is, that such an aggression would turn more people into revolutionaries. Roberto quietly replied, ”Not a few, a lot.”

A few days ago our horse wandered off and Martyn went to look for her. He found her next door in a blackened, barren lulo patch. Even as I have been writing this another helicopter passed overhead. The Americans must be very, very determined not to look at what their 'development' has meant in terms of a worth-while, human-sized life-style, preferring to pretend the problem lies over here in poppy-growing Colombia.

A recent poem from Louise:

My sister and I ride up the lane
We run, canter, then gallop through the rain
The wind is blowing the horse's mane
As we ride through fields of sugar-cane.
I wonder how anyone prefers a train,
A car, a bus or an aeroplane?
I hate those things -
They drive me insane!

He came because the day before he'd been at a local meeting where the matter of Ricardo's forest came up - the forest we purchased just before Ricardo died. It seems that since his death a bevy of 'relatives' have appeared from all over the place, several wives and many offspring of Ricardo's deceased father, all claiming that Ricardo had no right to sell to us. I had already received visits from two of these relatives hoping that the 'stupid gringos' would hand over money to them; I had extremely politely sympathised with them and even more politely told them where to get off. (My Irish friends listened to me in disgust and awarded me a job in the British diplomatic service.)

Now Ediberto came to tell us that the priest of Guayabal had been encouraging Ricardo's relatives to demand back the land we have paid for, but that he, Ediberto, had put his foot down firmly and said, ”No way.” The President of the Junta (action committee) had previously shown us similar support. I suggested to Ediberto that we form a Green Foundation and hand over all the forests we have saved to the community. He said ”definitely not!” as the members of the Junta would change and it might fall into the hands of the 'corruptos' who would cut the forest, and that the forest was much safer with us!

Ediberto is the only man on the Rovira Junta who does not sow amapola (heroin poppy). He uses himself as an example to the people saying ”Look, I survive. I grow coffee, yucca, bananas.” He says he is always speaking locally against poppy-growing, pointing out the social degradation it brings through reliance on drug traffickers, the lack of a future for the region if it is the only crop, and its effect on teenagers abroad.

Recently we have been shocked to learn that an Evangelist neighbour, Don Carlos, who once preached so convincingly to me that he would never grow drug crops, has several hectares and, worse still, our friend Mario the doctor, whose job is to cure people and for whom we had tremendous respect, also has a crop. For most people money speaks louder than morals. And these last two mentioned are definitely not poor people, having other resources.

Ediberto is much poorer. I know: I spent a terrible night at his little shack on the road, shivering under one thin blanket and with nowhere to sit except in the open, dark, smoky, mud-floored kitchen where he listens to excellent little programmes on the radio about the medicinal value of various local plants - Colombia is always a country of surprises. When he was visiting our farm, I gave him some green literature, but first asked him if he could read - this is a sensible question here and is not taken as an insult. He answered ”Not very well” and immediately wanted me to listen to him read to show me what he could do. He told me of his trek up the muddy, de-forested pathways to our farm, how there were no animals any more - until he stepped onto our land and saw a squirrel. How do souls like Ediberto get born, and how come so many of them are collected together in this abandoned area?

I spent a week away from the farm visiting our contacts in Chorreras and elsewhere, renewing our bonds of solidarity. Ever since Enrique, the 'green' guerrilla commander, left the region last year, general attitudes on the guerrilla front have been most unpromising. Several young commanders came and went and none were interested in green projects. Ediberto reported that Victor 'the one who always speaks against you' (he's a local communist leader) had been doing his work well, casting suspicions on our motives. When running into this kind of criticism, local friends told us they always referred to Commander Enrique's tremendous support for our work - even the fact that he actually instigated the Chorreras green group. The reply from our detractors is evidently to ask for 'written proof' - an absurdity in these illiterate regions where no FARC commander would ever commit himself to paper. Ediberto mumbled that if things continue this way, we must go to the top command of the FARC who are definitely environmentally-minded.

Then, during my week's visiting, I heard two bits of information, one a great relief: that a more senior commander who had operated in the region before, was back; that he was fully in favour of environmental projects and that now presentation of a project that we had worked on, to apply for funds from the Dutch government, can sail ahead.

The other news was that Enrique is dead. Roberto and Cliomedes of the Chorreras Green Group flatly refused to believe it; so did Camilo the school teacher. I agonised all night, thinking about Enrique. And then I listened to Camilo, and he is very convincing; he says it is a ploy put out by the FARC to protect Enrique's life as there is such a huge ransom on his head, most tempting to impoverished peasants; so by saying he has been killed the hope is that no-one will look for him any more. Except those of us who love him and want him alive.

While in Chorreras I spent two days painting a huge sign for them which is now displayed proudly outside Roberto's house; it is a punning slogan, in Spanish, which translates as -

”We have already destroyed half of our environment. Let us preserve the other half” And on the newly whitewashed bridge over the river I have painted the slogan they suggested: ”Don't be dirty with our water. Don't throw your rubbish in the river.”

I am also fairly good at choosing the 'wrong time' for my trips out, if landing myself with a lot of walking is the 'wrong time'. Do the landslides see me coming? Or does my vibration cause them? Or do they happen so often I'm bound to pick a day when there are No Buses? Whatever, in El Pato we have been cut off from the Great Outside for some weeks now, beginning when I was in Chorreras ... evidently a very large hole indeed has appeared between us and the town of Neiva four hours away by bus, which, it was rumoured, would take a month to mend. So visits and post have stopped for a while and I had a lot of exercise on my trip out. Secretly I like these landslides, for I hope it will sink into the common Mind that self-sufficiency is a rather good idea.

Certainly Mary met with a mass of enthusiasm this week as she travelled around the area giving out packets of seeds - often collecting lovely flower cuttings for our own garden in return - and even helping to start dig someone's garden in Rovira, an event which evidently caused a whole bevy of women to come and watch in amazement. I often get Mary to do my 'dirty work' for me, as she doesn't suffer from that awful Englishwoman's disease, social embarrassment. Thus when I had the Good Idea - a fairly obvious one if you saw the rubbish everywhere - that the people of Rovira should dig a big pit and put their garbage in it, it was Mary who bravely suggested it to local women - and was met with great enthusiasm! We have promised added labour if they organise the where and when. I had agonised about this simple suggestion for longer than I dare admit - and yet it was so easily accepted in the end. I am still learning that Colombia isn't Europe and the 'who-do-you-think-you-are' response is foreign to their minds.

Outside visitors may not be able to get into the area, but local visitors are more and more frequently making the trek up to our farm, in fact there's hardly a day passes without someone coming. One morning at the washing-up place (out of doors in this climate) I said ”Gosh, we really could do with an extra male helper on the farm at the moment. A few minutes later Oliverio, a worker from the neighbouring farm, came cheerfully up the pathway. ”I've come to work” he said. ”What?” I answered, ”but it's Sunday.” Colombians are not very religious, but they are very religious about their day of rest. However, some of them prefer to come and work here - for food and home-made wine, fun and friendship, not money - rather than submit to the noise of the Sunday macho scene in Rovira. In so doing they share our unusual food (it comes from the garden) our unusual way of working (with Nature instead of against her) and our unusual attitudes (work is pleasure).

Our youngsters have carved a football pitch out of the mountainside in a field next to the house - some feat at this gradient - and every afternoon it's volley-ball or football with the local lads. Not my idea of relaxation, but I love the social aspect of our farm which makes our practical ecological living accessible to everyone. Women especially come for seeds and for (quite scruffy) second-hand clothes which we give away regularly. They are hugely delighted and always bring some little gift in exchange, often of crops hard to grow at this level. And they always leave with a little bunch of onion and garlic chives to replant on their land - the plants are not known here - and a sprig of parsley, also little known. As time goes on we hope to give away more and more transplants, turning the place into a regular nursery.

Mary reports that, on her travels locally, she came across flourishing little gardens started with the seeds we had donated, where the owners were so pleased with the results that they were now buying their own seed. For those of you who are keen on sending seed, we could never have enough of cilantro (coriander). I can't abide the stuff myself, but all Latin-Americans love it and are always asking for it. Also, for our own garden, I would love to try Jerusalem artichokes, and wonder if mushroom spores are a feasible item to post? Likewise fruit-bush cuttings and rhubarb root. I have also been reading how important it is to test one's soil for acidity and keep seeing a 'pH soil test' mentioned; if anyone knows how to do this, in a simple way, we'd be grateful.

On the medical front, Mary often has to stitch people up after farm accidents and she is putting out a call for any type of bandages, disinfectant, suturing threads (silk and catgut), needles, local anaesthetic, anti-septics and (possibly natural?) anti-biotics. Being able to offer these small services to local people all helps with our 'message' as it makes us very accessible and not just some aloof foreigners, descending with lofty, irrelevant messages. I am fairly impressed with how, just like working in an organic garden, one begins to reap rewards long after the original 'compost' has been spread. This New Year has brought a distinct feeling of being firmly 'rooted' in' the community , which means my political weather-eye will be out for when and how far we can push the environmental message. So far we have operated mainly by example, relatively quietly and behind the scenes. With our theatre, schools-work, seed and gardening fame and Mary's forays out weekly for her acupuncture lessons and 'stitching sessions' (Mario the doctor lets her stitch up patients so she can learn), I sense the time is arriving when it will take me less than a year to dare to suggest that local people dig a rubbish pit!

On the natural pest control front, I can report two successes and some mighty failures. Leaf-cutter ants and the damage they cause have to be seen to be believed. Run by computer, these creatures cannot see the sense of taking just a few bites from plants at random, so they strip blackberry bushes, lemon and apple trees, cabbage - travelling great distances and ignoring all the succulent greenery around them to do so. When I saw the bare ribs of some newly planted and greatly treasured rhubarb (who said the leaves were poisonous? Colombian insects love them), I got cruel. I called for my 14 year-old grandson, Tristan; he is a great tracker. First he cleverly sprinkled the determined marching creatures - each with its green banner, our rhubarb - with lime so they showed up more. Then he dug where they disappeared into the earth - and found an old hollow tree root. On a hunch he ran down to a wild part of the garden and started hacking away at a rotting tree stump. Bingo! A beautiful compost heap of a year's nicked fruit and veg leaves and Goodbye ants. I'm sorry but sometimes to be a vegetarian one has to employ carnivorous chickens.

Success No. 2: mice nicked Tristan's newly planted maize before it could sprout. Our greenhouse grows excellent hot peppers (which we give away as our delicate palates can't stand them!): we soaked the maize seed in a concoction of this hot solution overnight and this time the mice left the maize to sprout. But cucumbers: I've given up and given all our seed away. They get mildew and die overnight. And beans! Beautiful, gorgeous essential beans; we can't grow one in this bean-growing area. Everyone else sprays - we don't; so guess where the armies of bean-hungry beetles go? Spraying with chilli-pepper did not work: the beans shrivelled up and died and the beetles loved the stuff! Any bright ideas on a postcard please!

We would like to thank Esotera magazine in Germany for printing an excellent article about our campaign written by Leila Dregger of the Zegg community, Berlin. Although the title, ”Retterin des Regenwaldes” (Saviour of the Rainforests) had me squirming - would that it were true - the contents were so positive and helpful that almost immediately a German lady wrote offering help.

Around the same time, Notas de Luz, a Bogotá New-Age magazine, published an article about our community, 'Atlantis', with some lovely photos of the area and the farm, under the heading ”An experiment for a Different Sort of Colombia”. These are very heartening events although I always cringe a little as what we do is painfully, tragically little in relation to even this small area of scarred and burnt hillsides and degraded lifestyles. On hot days, when all the neighbours burn their fields and the edges of the forest, all I can do is grit my teeth, remember how small I am, and feel like some kind of crazy 20th century 'King Canute' trying to stem the tide of burning and felling all around.

I think I will end on a lighter note; in the middle of a drought last week, Tristan was digging near a palm when suddenly water started bubbling up from the parched ground. ”Look, a fountain!” he said. Everyone crowded round. He hacked again, and water started spurting. But I was suspicious and sent Fin to check whether our irrigation system wasn't building up dangerously in some underground channel. Tristan hacked again and the bubble of magic burst as a very ordinary piece of pink hosepipe revealed its damaged self - laid underground a year ago by a visiting friend to supply my wash-place.

In spite of which, magic does happen and is happening daily as we continue with this rewarding work. The American Book Centre in Amsterdam, who were evidently contacted by an unknown well-wisher, sent us several gift-books, one of which is a gem I want to recommend to everyone. It is called 'Ecotopia' and is written by Ernest Callencach, published in 1975, and gives a marvellous vision of a very possible future, written in novel form. I hated 'waking up' after finishing the book, it felt so real and true; but the very fact that type of society can be visualised means we all have it in us to make it happen.

I would like to thank Crofton Junior School in Wakefield, Yorkshire, for the seeds they sent and wish everyone on the other side of the hole-in-the-road good energy for your own environmental work!

With thanks to all our correspondents and helpers,
Jenny James
AA 895
Neiva, Huila
COLOMBIA
South America

Contents GL 18:

• Nightmare river crossing on a wire
• Guayabas with maggots..
• A Tree’s Prayer
• Illegal tree-felling nipped in the bud
• Green Theatre in Chorreras
• What are People For?
• Help for Campaign floods in to Anne in Bogota

Then I received a visit from three men, one of them 68 years old, from a distant hamlet called Vista Hermosa (Beautiful View) who came to ask us for help. They said they lived on the left-hand bank of the River Pato - which makes them an illegal settlement inside the National Park of Los Picachos (The Peaks) and had no bridge, and would we go and view their situation? They were extremely nice, simple men and stayed with us overnight as they lived so far away; we performed a couple of acts of our theatre for them, and I left with them at first light the next morning with my youngest daughter Katie (11) to see their living situation as they requested. The oldest man was a bit of a prankster, full of jokes, a reciter of poems and a teller of tales. He described the method for getting across the river to their hamlet by putting a piece of rope round his rear side, and 'hanging' it to an imaginary cable. It sounded ghastly.

But it was much worse than that. Katie and I were getting more and more nervous, wondering if they were exaggerating about the way we had to get across the river, as the bus trundled its long slow way down the only road in El Pato, past Chorreras, past Los Andes, till my companions called for it to stop by a gate to a field. No houses in sight. At Los Andes, one of the men had jumped off the bus and collected two ropes with hooks attached. That didn’t look too good and Katie and I got more nervous.

I hardly noticed the walk down to the river, I was so scared. When we got there, it was worse than I could have imagined. A thin wire cable stretched from a tree on each side of the river, while fifteen feet below, the turbulent water crashed over rocks. The old man (who called himself an 'Indio', though he wasn't, tied himself on to the cable in a jiffy, and then with the agility of the pet monkey we used to have, took himself at great speed across the 100 foot river by lying parallel to the wire and moving by passing one hand over the other. The hook he was hanging on had two prongs. On the other was his considerable baggage - we had donated books and clothes to his community.

I sat sulking in silent panic on a rock sending out the general vibration that if anyone tried to move me, they would have Trouble on their hands. I was not in any mood to be brave, didn't give a damn for my hardy reputation, and was quite satisfied already that the hamlet of Vista Hermosa most definitely needed a bridge. Then the second man went across; grinning. My mood got fouler as panic rose; I told Katie threateningly that I was not going across and nor was she. I think she was a little grateful for a bit of maternal authoritarianism that day; normally she is insanely brave.

The third man, Urbano by name, was a quiet, gentle soul, and very instinctual. He didn't bother to try and persuade me, but indicated a second cable nearby that I'd hardly noticed. On it hung an old fish box. Well, that's what it looked like to me. He said they used to use it to bring blocks of wood across the river in the bad old days of heavy forest-felling. Would we like to sit in it and he would 'ferry' us across - that is, provide the hand-power on the cable to transport his swinging, terrified human cargo from one side to the other. We climbed in, myself in a state of shock. Katie said it wasn't nearly as bad as she'd imagined - she'd pictured the river much wider. I didn't like to mention that the width wouldn't matter a damn if we fell.

The worst bit was when we were nearly across and our 'ferry-man' couldn't possibly muster the strength to move our box the last couple of yards, as the wire now stretched upwards. The man on the bank threw a rope (still grinning) and hauled us in.

It was afternoon, the climate was much hotter than where we live, I'd been up since 5 am, done the three hour trek down our mountain, the long bus-journey, had no breakfast - and now this. When we landed on the opposite river bank, I crumpled up. I had no bones in my legs and felt the pains of hunger. The men were polite. And delighted. They had made their point about the bridge. They were extremely kindly to me, carried my bag, walked slowly. I asked them to watch out for fruit of any kind as I was seriously hungry.

Guayabas - guavas - grow everywhere in this part of Colombia. Neither the children nor I ever eat them as they are full of little white maggots as soon as they ripen. This time I didn't care. And so I fulfilled another of my long-ago fantasies: of being so hungry I'd have to eat maggots like the Indians. Even Katie ate some. For a while, I simply had to lie down on the plastic grass (that’s what I call a special animal-fodder that doesn't rot, that doesn't let any normal weeds grow, and is covering Colombia where forests used to be.) I heaved like a wounded animal: fear is a great debilitator, and the 'bridge' had seriously shocked me.

We spent the night at the first farmhouse, and all the next day, an extremely boring day - the sort I would never normally put up with. If there had been a way home, that is. Memory of The Cable kept me rooted. I drew an impression of their crossing-system in cartoon form with a dozen jokes emitting from the mouths of the people and animals in the drawing. The men were delighted and said it was very 'bonito' - pretty. I didn't think so.

Their settlement was certainly very beautiful as its name implied; also very deforested. But to the back of us were near sheer forested mountain rocks, massive waterfalls - and the peasants told me they had made a commitment never to cut any more forest; also it was an area completely devoid of drug crops. And to my amazement, they were nearly self-sufficient in food, though very carnivorous. Huge pineapples, cocoa, maize, sugar-cane, lemons, gallons of milk, 'rubber' cheese (that's what it tastes like after it's been overboiled and had far too much rennet put in it - the custom here), eggs, plantains, bananas - and many dead animals, which we wouldn't touch. Only one problem: no way of taking their produce to market except by 'cable-car'; and no way for any of their children to go to school in Los Andes.

I promised to tell 'the people in Europe' about their situation. Mission accomplished.

Don Guillermo, the 68-year-old of that group, handed me duplicated copies of many little songs and poems and stories of this region. One was typed in the shape of a tree, no author's name given. Here is my translation of it:

The Tree's Prayer

Traveller: listen!
I am the wood of your cradle,
the planks of your boat,
the top of your table,
the door of your house,
the handle of your tools,
and the walking-stick of your old age.
I am the fruit that nourishes you
the shade that protects you against the fierce sun,
the refuge of birds that bring joy to your life
and keep your field clear of insects.

I am the beauty of the countryside,
the charm of your garden,
the majesty of your mountains,
the edging of your roads.
I am the firewood that warms you in winter,
the aroma that delights you
and perfumes the air,

I am the health of your body,
the joy of your soul,
and finally, I am the wood of your coffin.

So, Traveller:
look at me, revel in my beauty,
But don't hurt me.

Recently, a young neighbour had been visiting me for what I can only call 'counselling', as his marriage was on the rocks. I did what I could, and he repaid me by breaking a Colombian taboo: no-one ever 'tells' on anyone else, for fear of reprisals. With great trepidation, he took me aside, and said, 'Jenny, you must not mention my name, but someone is cutting the forest you bought from Orlando.'

Anne went up to look. That sentence didn't take very long to write: the trip is in fact several very wet, muddy, hungry hours long. Yes, the forest was being cut. And there was only one neighbour it could possibly be. Mary told the Junta (local community action group) and within days, they made the massive trek up from the village to the forest above us - about five hours one way, collecting Anne and the offending neighbour along the way. The meeting was amicable, with Anne conceding maybe she had mistake the boundaries Orlando had shown her (with the members of the Junta exchanging winks with her), and the two 'green' members, Teodoro and Edilberto, delivering a lecture to the possible culprit about the amount of forest he had cut, whoever's it was, and about the fact he had cut right up to the edges of a stream - definitely out of order - and, worse, around the spring where a river began.

Sometimes, to be true to our guardianship of the forest, we have to be perceived as fierce women, else we might as well not purchase forest in the first place.

Green Theatre in Chorreras

I mentioned in the last Green Letter that we were to do a theatre performance in Chorreras. We did, on 26th April, and it was a perfectly delightful experience, with an immaculately behaved audience, tremendous appreciation, and a small collection for our bus-fare home as we hadn't a peso! We lived in Chorreras, all 10 of us, in a little wooden shack for four days previous to the theatre, erecting curtains, organising, practising - and teaching Camilo the teacher his part in an 'Irish' play I had written from the story of Cuchulainn and Finn MacCool! He was a giant who has to be dressed as a baby to fool his rival. His school-pupils loved it! There were several 'green' plays, and I checked carefully afterwards to discover it they had been understood. They had - not only that, but I was informed of the 'message' in one play that I had definitely not put there, and I was most puzzled: Roberto said the message was we mustn't kill animals, as we are part animal. It took me a long time to ponder this, as my play was about the possible beginnings of the world - with a 'sky-woman' (me) coming down in a space-ship to cross-breed with a Neanderthal man (Ned!). I finally realised that Ned had played his part so well that he had been seen to be a 'monkey' - so of course we mustn't kill monkeys.

Camilo has asked for the text of Louise's green poems in Spanish and the plays with an environmental message - he wants to teach them to his children so that they can perform them. Also he is getting the children to learn a verse each of a long 'green' poem I wrote some time ago, which takes a message from each of several animals, and to illustrate it. What a gem that man is.

After the theatre, Fin (our one-man orchestra) and Louise formed a posse to bring me a complaint: why did we go to all this effort to bring the theatre to only one village at a time, and why couldn't' we do several performances in a row? As the sweat was still wet on my brow, I was getting a huge Grumble together at this suggestion when the crowded local bus swaggered to a stop outside our open-fronted shack and Angel (a common Spanish name), a teacher-friend of mine, hopped off while the driver waited to say, 'Jenny, the community of Las Morras where I work wants to invite you to show your theatre down there (four hours from Rovira). 'Fine', I said, 'Fix me up some arrangements with three other settlements within reasonable distance, and we'll do all of them at once.'

It is now three weeks since the Chorreras theatre and we have received yet another request for theatre, but my garden is getting hairy round the edges, Fin is getting balder with all the work, Mary has left us to go and help Becky with the campaign in Ireland, and Anne is just catching her breath before taking off on her next money-making tour (we pay our bus-fares in school-books at the moment); Irish Eddie is away getting his immigration legalised, and I am still recovering from a brush I had with a Cable-car across a river... However, the theatre is very beautiful, and is a wonderful way of getting the Green message across, so no doubt we'll be getting the show on the road (or mule-track) again soon. In another Letter I will tell some of the environmental plays in more detail (that is, the ones I have fully understood!).

A Moan – What are People For?!

Although I feel very happy and optimistic today, I must pay homage to yesterday's mood: I arrived home from my Vista Hermosa trip practically soul-dead and asked Anne's permission to lay funeral-vibes all over her for a couple of hours. My main them was What are People For, What Are We Doing? and why didn't we just give up, live private middle-class lives, never go out, and grow lots of roses? Anne listened to me patiently and explained that several days away without eating any vegetables was bound to depress me. I thought the explanation absurd and continued to explain to her that the World had Ended, there weren't any trees left, and that people's standard of living - that is, nothing to do with their income, but their cock-fighting, drinking, drug-growing, animal-slaughtering, lollipop-licking, fashion-aping, cigarette-smoking, deafening music and fume-creating life-style was not one we should do anything to help, and why didn't we just admit defeat and pack up and it wasn't fair writing to all those kind people in England a stream of Green Letters giving them hope when there wasn't any. Meanwhile, Fin brought me a hot-water-bottle (it's cold up here compared to where I'd been) and a vegetarian supper and Anne said she felt ready and strong enough to go out on the next journey (other communities have asked us to visit them) and I was doing a Good Job just holding the fort, growing the food and writing the letters; and that I'd feel better in the morning. Anyway, would I really feel alright just growing roses with the world falling to pieces? Well....no.

Here now is a recent report of Anne's on some of her travels:

"My Bogota trips have turned into something much more than income-earning from astrology work. The level of help and co-operation from my 'clients', all of whom know I am earning money to keep our 'green' work going, makes me flounder with embarrassed gratitude. Claudio let me do endless photocopying of Green Letters in his office; Luz Marina has kept me in her apartment for months, getting annoyed with me when I dared to buy food, and delighted when I filled her little living-room with all kinds of odd visitors like Ecuadorean street-musicians, Irish cameramen and Caqueta peasants! Myriam has fixed my teeth and all the kids' teeth for free; Leticia receives phone-calls and makes appointments for me when I'm out; Jeremy receives and sends e-mails to Europe, Meredith develops photos for us of the region we live in to show townspeople; Guy and German allow me to pile their houses high with the goods we are donated - dozens of people give me huge bags of second-hand clothes that they insist on washing and ironing first.

On my most recent trip, I called on a friend, Maria Clara, who is Director of the Bogota section of a national poverty programme, and she said, "Thank goodness you've come; I've been hoping you would for the last week - we've been given a mountain of contraband clothes confiscated by the Customs, for distribution to poor people.” Her driver drove me to Luz Marina's flat - and it so happens she owns two city buses, so she contacted one of her drivers to divert the bus to take me to the lorry terminal. A lorry company hires its vehicles out to 'Carulla', the largest supermarket chain in Colombia. One of its directors, Octavio, has become a friend and he regularly lets us take our mountains of give-away gear to Neiva for free. At the Neiva bus-terminal, I was assured that in spite of the imminent transport strike, I would be able to get one of the last buses, complete with my 28 bags and boxes.

The last bus arrived, with people hanging off every part of it. I was nearly in tears as I pleaded with the bus-man, who eventually started chucking all my bags on to the roof. I climbed up too and squeezed myself into a corner and we set off out of the heat and dust of Neiva for the cool green mountains. Everyone wanted to know what the bags contained, except the fare-collector who only wanted to know how much I was going to pay him for carrying them. He wanted to charge me 30 dollars, an outrageous price, and tried to bully me by threatening to keep some of my bags as payment. I explained loudly to all the passengers that the goods were for poor people in the area and refused to negotiate until we arrived safely in Rovira.

The bus only broke down twice and we only got searched twice by soldiers, finally arriving at 10 pm (instead of 6.00 pm) in pitch blackness. All the friends I had made on the roof-top helped me unload and Gladys the local teacher came out in the rain with candles to help me store the gear in the school-house. She gave out roundly to the bus-man who deflated and asked contritely for 10 dollars instead.

Next day, I climbed the mountain to home. As I got near the house, I found myself walking through a whole new flower garden that had been rough pasture when I left only three weeks earlier. Jenny and Mary came out to meet me looking healthy and rosy and full of news. Part of the news delivered by Jenny was that we were officially suffering a 'famine' because of having several new people to feed and too much rain. Next day when I took over the cooking to give Mary a break, I couldn't find the space on our 6-ring wood stove to cook the incredible variety and quantity of foods, not to mention all the herbs, salads, tomatoes and peppers - some famine!

And then I began to catch up on the correspondence in the ever-more-quickly growing Green files in Jenny's 'office' and once again I became completely submerged in the waves of love and support and appreciation that flowed over me.”

On Anne's last trip, she brought home over 1,000 school-books, many of which now by law have an environmental content. These have been delivered, together with the pencils - factory 'seconds' which she acquired, - to many of the country schools in the area. When I was sitting on the bus in Guayabal after my cable-bridge expedition, a lady I didn't know came up to me and said, 'Jenny, I am the President of the Action Committee in Los Andes. I want to thank you on behalf of my community and that of La Libertad (another hamlet) for the wonderful school-books.' Well, maybe it is worth carrying on after all.

Sometimes I worry about what we have started. It is now impossible to travel in our region without people coming up and asking for seeds. And we have run out of seeds, for the first time since we began the Campaign. So vegetable seeds are top priority on our 'wish-list.' Here are other needs, for those of you who feel able to help in a practical manner:

*Translators who are completely fluent in Spanish to translate the Green Letters into Spanish: I simply can't afford the time, and many local people of course want to know what I write about them;

*A fluent German-Spanish translator to translate an excellent article about us written by Leila Dregger of Zegg Community so I can show local people;

*Scraps of material that would do for making curtains and costumes for our theatre, also any makeup. We also need offers of collection points for bulky material goods - please send addresses to Becky at An Droichead Beo, Burtonport, Co. Donegal, Ireland;

*HELP for Becky at same address, particularly in sending out Green Letters, and other practical help at the house; and money for postage - it's becoming a heavy drain on her scant resources; also, a note if you don't want Green Letters any more would be a help. Thankyou.

*Old files, especially big 'box' files;

*Letters from school-children who would like penpals amongst the peasant children here;

*Old gardening tools, any condition;

*And lots of visitors who can: dance, juggle, teach drama and music; language teachers, puppet theatre experts, musical instrument menders and makers, and people who love digging and carrying compost!

Also, if anyone tunes into the need to help marginal communities on the edge of forest-land, we ourselves are definitely intending to use any privately-earned income we can spare to help the people of Vista Hermosa to build their bridge! If any donors have no objection to their contributions going to this project, please say so. We feel that every time we respond to pleas like this from local people, we give our own environmental stand greater weight. We have noticed that there is never an argument as to whether the green message is correct - everyone sees that it is; the cry is always: but how else can we live if the government doesn't help us? We hope little by little to be able to answer this question in a practical way.

Our best wishes to all of you, and most especially to those of you who write letters of love and encouragement. I want particularly to mention Christine Farmer who sent me the extraordinary gift of a psychometric reading of great value in a difficult moment; and the Ditchling Society of Friends (Quakers) for your love and tolerance of an atheist!

With love,
Jenny

Contents of GL 19, 12 June 1997:

• FARC Green Laws
• Col. Govt. bombs National Park
• Tree-felling accidents
• Poem by Louise, ‘City Man’
• Some not-so-welcome visitors...
• ‘The Great Drug-Addict: a ‘Green’ play about the USA
• Suggestions - how drug addicts should pay back to the environment
• ASSASSINATION OF EDUARD RINCON, Green Councillor and friend

I have before me something I have longed to see ever since this Campaign began. It is a small duplicated sheet in Spanish called ‘Resistencia’ distributed in rural Colombia by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and dated April 1997. It carries the title ‘Ecological Bulletin’ and I am going to translate the whole thing for you. It is of huge significance for this reason: the Colombian Govt. can spout fine-sounding ecological principles (to secure foreign funding), but it is largely hot air. However, whatever the colour of your politics, the fact remains that what the FARC says, goes, as far as the countryside is concerned. And when the red FARC goes Green, there is a glimmer of hope for the environments. Here is the translation:

“It is a fact that the INDISCRIMINATE FELLING OF FORESTS for illegal (drug) crops and for logging has never been of benefit to those who do the work, because to this day, no chainsaw-man or cultivator of narcotic plants has managed to stabilize the economic situation of his family. These practices have only served to fill the pockets of the big timber and narcotics merchants and all we are left with is an ECOLOGICAL IMBALANCE which is very difficult to repair.

“Because DEFORESTATION does not guarantee social or economic security, we propose to local communities that they SUBSTITUTE ILLEGAL CROPS for legal ones, and use only land which has already been deforested.

“Desiring to help conserve the natural resources of FLORA AND FAUNA which are the guarantee of life for the generations of today and tomorrow, the FARC informs of the following:-

1. IT IS ONLY PERMITTED TO FELL trees for wood when it is a question of building a house, a fence, a bridge, furniture or other necessities connected with the work of the farm. IT IS PROHIBITED to feel for marketing the timber.

2. TREES WHICH ARE FELLED must be more than 20 years old, and MUST NOT BE LESS than 100 metres distant from water-sources, or 50 metres from waterways and streams, nor must they be taken from AREAS WHERE EROSION IS PREVALENT.

3. THE TREES FOR FELLING MUST NOT BE THE ONLY ONES IN THE AREA, that is, the principal sources of guaranteeing humidity of the surrounding land.

4. THE ONLY TIMER THAT CAN BE COMMERCIALIZED is wood that is taken out when a farm is established or when through force majeure, trees fall down naturally in cultivated land.

5. FOR EVERY TREE WHICH IS CUT, a minimum of three must be planted and these must be suitable for the type of soil and climate.

6. LIKEWISE IT IS PROHIBITED to contaminate any waterways, and it is the responsibility of each farm-owner to channel dirty water from his household or toilets in such a way that it does not reach other living accommodation, schools or rivers.

7. BURNING MAY ONLY BE CARRIED OUT when fields are being cleared for crops, and only with the necessary security measures, namely: checking on all sides to make sure the fire doesn’t spread and informing neighbours so they can take safety precautions. BURNING IS NOT PERMITTED FOR ANY OTHER REASON OR IN ANY OTHER MANNER.

8. FISHING IS ALLOWED ONLY FOR FAMILY CONSUMPTION and only using fish-hooks. IT IS ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITED to use any other sort of instruments, poisons, explosives or other contaminatory substances.

9. THE HUNTING OF ANY TYPE OF ANIMAL, WHETHER FUR OR FEATHER IS ABSOLUTELY BANNED, even under pretext of defending crops: other methods of scaring pest-animals away must be used.

10. WHEN THERE IS ANY INTENTION OF FELLING FOREST OR CUTTING TREES for any reason whatever, prior notice must be given so that the real necessity for this can be verified.

NOTE: THESE NORMS WILL BE RIGIDLY APPLIED FROM 1ST MAY 1997. FAILING TO COMPLY WITH OR VIOLATING SAME WILL BE PUNISHED IN PROPORTION TO THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE OFFENCE WITH FINES OF BETWEEN 100,000 AND 1,000,000 PESOS WHICH WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE LOCAL COMMUNITY ACTION GROUPS FOR WORKS OF BENEFIT TO THE WHOLE COMMUNITY.

The local Community Action Groups, in co-ordination with our movement (FARC) will be authorized to carry out, and responsible for, vigilance and seeing that these rules are complied with.

Signed: (FARC High Command)

Against such a background, our Campaign feels more meaningful than ever. It must also be pointed out that there is a tremendous movement amongst the right-wing military at the moment to ‘reclaim’ the ‘lost’ areas of Colombia – lost, that is, to the left-wing guerrilla forces. I expect that news of the tragedy of the Northern Colombian province of Uraba may have reached the foreign press, where paramilitaries in cahoots with the Army have massacred and terrorized whole peasant populations simply because in legal elections, the left-wing movements held sway. There is now a huge internal refugee problem in Colombia. There is much talk in the military of ‘reclaiming’ Caqueta and our neighbouring province, Putumayo. Colombia is in a state of unacknowledged civil war, with a weak government and increasing military strength on both left and right, so the situation can only get worse.

We invite you to read this factual link -

I have been told by reliable local people in many areas near here that in the year preceding our arrival in Caqueta (1993), the Colombian Army intensively bombed the huge National Park of Picacachos on the borders of which we live, with the intent of flushing out the guerrillas. Massive damage was done to trees and wild-life and local populations were terrorized. This is one of the many reasons why government exhortations to peasants to ‘protect the environment’ are met with cynicism.

Tree Revenge

Today is Martyn’s birthday, he is 16 and is one of the young people born into this community. A short while back, I feared for his life. He was out cutting firewood alone and suddenly we heard a tremendous cracking and falling of a tree near the house. I grabbed Mary Kelly, his mother, in horror. Then I heard groaning. I stood paralyzed, picturing a fatally wounded boy. The others rushed down to him. Martyn was hurt, but not permanently. His teeth were loose and he was very shocked. He had been cutting a dead tree and its branches, tangled with overhead creepers, had fallen directly on his head.

I told the story to a neighbour who was visiting and he said, ‘Yes, that’s what happened to Ricardo.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked horrified. Ricardo was our neighbour who had died of a brain haemorrhage a few months ago. ‘A tree fell on him when he was cutting it down next door to you,’ said the neighbour, ‘and he was always ill after that. That’s why he died.’ I was doubly shocked: while Ricardo was chain-sawing those trees next door, my young daughter Louise was sitting quietly beside me, praying powerfully for retribution from Nature as we were all so upset at what Ricardo was doing. We lost the trees. And we lost a really good friend.

A poem from Louise:

CITY MAN

Hey, city man, what are you doing?
Don’t you realize whose life you’re destroying?
Don’t you see that the things you invent
Are not only killing you, but your environment too?

Maybe you do, but you don’t worry,
I’m telling you, city man, one day you’ll be sorry:
Where will you run to when your city explodes?
There’ll be no more countryside, just desert and roads.

What will you eat, when there’s nothing but plastic?
What will you drink, when the water’s all poisoned?
What will you breathe, when there’s nothing but smoke?
You better change your ways, city man, this isn’t a joke.

You’ve worked so hard and come so far,
Building space ships, tankers, bombs and cars,
But I don’t appreciate the things you make,
And think it’s time you put on the brake.

Turn around and open your eyes,
Look at the earth, the sea and the skies,
The plants and animals are no longer alive,
Oh city man, don’t you realize, if you go on like this, the world will die?

A group of students recently showed interest in our project and it wasn’t the most pleasurable experience of our lives. I was just staggering down the garden path after a morning’s work, looking forward to a shower, dinner and staring at the trees from my hammock, when an alarmed Irishman, Fin, came panting up to me saying, ‘Jenny, look at this.’ I glanced upwards to see a lad just leaving on horseback and read the note Fin brought me: “We are 31 students from the University. We study ecological agro-engineering (or some such mouthful) and we are arriving this afternoon. Greetings.”

I have always like to think of myself as an hospitable, expansive person who can make people welcome under any circumstances. Funny how one’s self image can collapse under stress.

The thing about self-sufficiency is that it doesn’t work if for three-quarters of the year you are gardening with just two women, one overworked man and some kids, and then suddenly your living group expands to a dozen, on top of which 31 large teenagers and three adults suddenly fall upon you. Naturally, I assumed they would have brought some food. They didn’t. I also kind of expected a certain amount of apology or reticence or helpfulness or... well, middle-class English manners. No chance.

At 5.0 a.m. on the morning of the second day of their visit – yes, they had stayed the night, I called Anne with controlled hysteria in my voice. “Anne, would you come into my room, I need to have a fit.” She came, and we looked at each other: ‘OK, what are we going to do with this lot?’ It wasn’t a course in ecology they needed but a finishing school in comportment and manners. We had not a single room that could house the whole group for a meeting or the theatre we had promised and it was raining. Pressure creates solutions: ‘We’ll take the wall down’ I said, and felt better immediately. So, stepping over piles of sleeping bodies, I said gaily in Spanish, ‘Don’t worry if you hear banging, we’re just dismantling the house.’

It worked a treat. Suddenly it felt like our farm again. One or two of them (not many) even offered to help. By the time the tent contingent had come up from the kids’ football field to demand breakfast (and coffee) (and more bread) (and jam to take home), we had amalgamated our rustic kitchen and sleeping room, organized a question-and-answer meeting, and a production of the greenest items in our theatre.

One of the questions in the meeting was, ‘Why do you let so many weeds grow round your farm?’ This puzzled me, as we spend half our walking lives tending our rather lovely flower and vegetable gardens and house-surrounds. Our children, used to the way Colombians view things, enlightened me: the man evidently meant, ‘Why do you let anything grow at all anywhere near you, tree or bush or shrub or grass?’ Colombians have a Nature-phobia and strip every blade of greenery for yards around their settlements, sit in a patch of mud and call it ‘bonito’ – pretty. We don’t.

The Great Drug-Addict

But they were a superb audience for our theatre. I will describe here just one of the plays. It lasts about 15 minutes, has three scenes, is a comedy with a serious message and is called, ‘The Great Drug-Addict’. This refers to the USA as represented by Clinton, or rather a bald Finbar with a straw-coloured wig.

The opening scene has Clinton at his desk in Washington and a Colombian reporter (Louise) interviewing him for TV on the drug problem in the US, which of course he blames entirely on Colombian peasants, threatening invasion if they don’t stop growing drug-crops.

Second scene: a Colombian village with two peasants (Martyn and Tristan) grumbling about their economic situation, when their wives (Katie and Laura, both 11 years old), rush in to announce that fumigations are taking place from the air. One peasant (Tristan) then takes up the position that we must become self-sufficient in food and stop growing opium-poppies so as not to invite this kind of attack, whilst a ‘clown’ peasant, Martyn, makes fun of this noble stand and insists on re-sowing the fumigated land with poppy. Both of the little women want to grown their own vegetables.

Scene Three: Back in Washington, one year later, Louise interviews Clinton who is having a nervous breakdown on his desk. She announces that, due to a new wave of self-sufficiency in Colombia, drug-export to the US has considerably diminished and would Clinton like to tell the world how happy he is about the new situation. Then follows a hilarious fit by ‘Clinton’ saying how his whole society is falling to pieces, the asylums are full of drug-addicts who can’t get their fix, the cities are in chaos, he chemical factories are up in arms about lost trade, the black population is rioting and demanding a black president ... and of course it is all the fault of the Colombian peasants for not producing drug crops. ‘But Mr. Clinton, I thought you wanted to end the drug-trade?’ says the interviewer. ‘Idiot!’ screams the beleaguered President, ‘I didn’t mean it! How do you think I’m going to keep the population under control if all Colombia produces is a load of damn CARROTS?!’ He collapses crying on the floor. Curtains. The Colombian peasants in the audience love it, and the message gets through.

Pleas for help from abroad for local communities continue to arrive in response to our Campaign. An article in a German magazine about us has been particularly productive: one German lady sent some much-needed financial help; and Marc, a new German friend, has arrived here without announcement and immediately made himself a helpful member of our building and carpentry team. Books, maps, seeds, medical items and, most important of all, warm encouraging and loving letters continue to arrive through the post. Anne is off once again earning money through her astrology amongst the high Bogota bourgeoisie as we are out of candles, matches and nails; and our postmaster in Burtonport, Ireland, lets my daughter Becky send out mountains of ‘Green’ post ‘on tick’ when she runs out of money for postage – thank you John! We have Colombians from near and distant communities come and work with us without pay, just because they like being here – oh, and professor who brought the 31 students says he wants to come back once every 6 months with 31 more. I smiled and breathed and said, ‘Fine, but would you mind giving me a little notice next time?’ as I plotted to send a polite list of requirements, like no smoking marijuana on the football pitch, and could they please bring some rice and porridge.

A lady from Donegal called Judith Hoad has sent us a lovely book of hers called ‘Healing with Herbs’, and for those of you wanting to know more about the fascinating, tragic and ever-changing situation in Colombia, I would highly recommend you write to Mike Simpson for his regular bulletin ‘Colombia Forum’, Las Casas Office, 16, Wellington Road, Nantwich, Cheshire CW5 7 BH, England. And for anyone who would like to know exactly where we are, here is the Sat-nav. info! 2 degrees 45’02.4 N., 74 degrees 56’31.6 S., 1705 metres above sea level. OK?!

Our list of needs this week includes: second-hand parachutes. Not joking: if you know where to get one, it’s a brilliant way of making a quick, sun-free and lovely-looking outdoor theatre or meeting-place. Also any magic cures for warts: the children have an infestation, and we’ll try anything, reasonable or unreasonable.

I would like to end with the very serious suggestion that anyone who has any contact with people working to rehabilitate drug-users should push for the inclusion in any such programme of information regarding the damage to the environment caused by the demand for drug-crops; and that people who really want to alter their drug-based lifestyle should be encouraged to join overseas environmental projects such as this one to experience first hand the effects on the ‘Third’ World of their habit. To become busily involved in helping others in this way would go a long way towards creating a worth-while life that would obviate the need for artificial props. I feel that such paying-back of a global debt should be a required part of any publicly-funded drug rehabilitation programme.

The multi-lingual theatre in the main shack (not yet a house) is about to begin, so with loving thanks to all our correspondents and helpers, I take my leave.

Love to you all!
Jenny James

URGENT ADDITION TO GREEN LETTER No. 19, 20th June 1997

"EDUARDO RINCON MURDERED"

Regular readers will know that this Green Movement had its unlikely beginnings in the formation of a tiny Green Party in the forsaken wilds of El Pato, Caqueta, and that it was started by Eduardo Rincon, who was elected as the first and only Green councillor on the municipal council of San Vicente del Caguan two and a half years ago.

Since then, Eduardo did so much work for the whole enormous region of San Vicente that people were already greeting him, ‘Hallo, Alcalde’, which means ‘Mayor’, and there was no doubt who would become the next Mayor of San Vicente in elections later this year.

But Eduardo is dead. Murdered the day after he attended the handing-over of the 70 soldiers held by the FARC in Caqueta. Shot dead on 16th June 1997 after being tricked into travelling a long distance on a country road by scooter to a phoney meeting with the FARC. He died slowly, bleeding to death from his wounds, a slit throat.

The news has just come to us, and I feel numb. In the first year of Eduardo’s green campaign, I often feared for his life, and he talked about the possibility of assassination with us. In those days, it was the FARC we feared. But political differences with the armed movement were ironed out. Eduardo’s death is almost certainly the result of political rivalries as he was so immensely popular, completely dedicated to his work, full of energy, in the prime of his life (early 40s) and very charismatic.

Our personal closeness with Eduardo had ended as his work took him ever farther afield and he had little time for his early contacts. But when I knew him, I knew him very well indeed; he spent much time at our farm talking about the future of the Green movement, and I spent several days on end with him in San Vicente and travelling long distances with him on the back of his scooter. He was a delightful companion and an unashamed ‘preacher’ for the Green cause. Recently when he visited El Pato, he was accompanied by five bodyguards. In San Vicente, he felt safe and travelled alone...

I could never understand the Colombians, how they accepted each new murder so stoically. Had they stopped caring? I would rage at each death, or wave of deaths, of people I never knew. Now I understand. I think of Eduardo night and day, remember every detail of our brief lives together. But I cannot even cry. It is too near to home, too big, too inevitable. It is Colombia.

To those of you who are not paralyzed by the closeness, please let the Colombian Government know that it is not alright. There are hundreds being killed in Uraba in the North, and Eduardo is just one. Just one incredibly active, determined, super-energetic very ‘Green’ man. And he began this movement of ours in El Pato. That means the pain can never go away. Every step we take is in his footsteps and his shadow is everywhere.

Please send copies of anything you write to the Colombian Embassy or Government to us here. Eduardo was not a family man. We, and thousands of other people in this part of Caqueta, are his family.

Thank you,
Jenny James

Contents GL 20

• More on Eduardo Rincon’s murder
• Cut off by landslides
• Spray planes swoop low
• Opium poppies next door...

I was on overload. I needed the three-hour stumble down the muddy mountain track. My brain was raging. The big question on everyone’s mind was: who now would ever dare take on the job of representing El Pato on the council of San Vicente? Eduardo lasted just two years, and no-one could ever be as good as him. Alone for hours on the path, I thought: well if no-one else will do it, I will, or Anne will (South Americans seem to have a penchant for trusting foreigners rather than their own people as a look at the surnames of South American presidents over the last few decades will show).

I walked to La Abeja, the next hamlet from Rovira, to find Edilberto, the greenest man on Rovira’s Action Group, and asked him The Question: Who killed Eduardo? He also seemed to think it was the FARC. By this time, my brain had burned out and I was hugely depressed; it got to the stage when I felt disgusted every time I saw a FARC slogan along the roadway.

Edilberto accompanied me walking on an hour or more into the pitch-black night. Louise and Katie, my daughters, were somewhere down here, talking to people about our next theatre performance in the school of La Abeja. We eventually found them and I stayed the horrid, cold, unhappy night with them. Next day I walked on, all the way to Guayabal (about three hours), getting there just before the bus. I had walked into a deep hole inside myself. I then travelled by bus to Chorreras, another little hamlet, to find my closest green friends, Roberto and Cliomedes: I just wanted someone to tell me it wasn’t true, that Eduardo had not been murdered by the FARC; his death was huge enough, we didn’t need the double blow.

Roberto and Cliomedes were away walking the mountains with one of the Government bodies who spend millions of pesos ‘analyzing the flora and fauna and assessing the environmental value of the region.’ My friends had been paid 300 dollars per month to act as guides and the job was to last two months. I am glad for them they got the opportunity to earn a little rare cash, but I feel extremely sick about such Government surveys. All you need is a five dollar bus-ride to see the state of the region and its environmental importance.

And still no-one to talk to. Roberto’s motherly wife fed me and I caught the bus back to Guayabal, spotted an old guerrilla man I knew and went straight up to him. “Please tell me why Eduardo died,” I said. I was in no mood to pay lip service to the Colombian habit of talking about everything under the sun before coming to the point.

I talked to the old fellow for 20 minutes and the conversation saved my life, if not Eduardo’s. I got the next bus home having a thread of hope to hang on to. My contact said that they, the local FARC, were also still waiting for information, that so far they knew nothing; that they knew the people were saying they had killed Eduardo, that he did not think this was true; that if it was true, then Eduardo must definitely have been working with the paramilitaries; and that whichever way it went, when they had information, there would be a meeting with the people to clarify everything. I begged him to send a message to me so I could be present.

He was absolutely lovely to talk to. He saw how upset I was and ‘told me off’ about it, saying everyone had to die, he lost companions all the time, and that we simply had to pick up our tools and continue work, we must not let ourselves be got down. Whatever about Eduardo’s fate, this was a good man with his heart in the right place; he had been a guerrillero since he was 14, before the FARC was even called the FARC.

It takes only moments to murder someone: sometimes it takes months, even years, in Colombia to find out what really happened. And now there is another reason to prevent information travelling: we are entirely cut off from the outside world. Not just cut off like when there was a hole in the road between here and Neiva, the nearest big town, but seriously so. It is an act of pure faith to write this Letter: there is no way in the foreseeable future of posting it out. ...

Besieged by Landslides

It has been raining for so many days and nights without cease, that we have lost count. We can’t remember sky or sun or dry clothes. It is July: the month we moved to Caqueta three years ago when we had to cross several hundred avalanches to get here. The once-tiny stream near us roars night and day; it sounds like the Western shore of our Irish island, Inishfree, in a storm. Our young chicks have to be allowed to wander about the kitchen, else they’d shiver to death. A calf got born on one of the worst nights and had to be hauled out of a ditch. The children take the horse meals-on-wheels to remind her that all is not lost: we still care. The grown-up chickens have stopped laying and stand around philosophically in their shelter all day. We are running out of maize for them. And oil for us. We already ran out of matches weeks ago: we have to keep the fire in all night. Marc, our German visitor, is stuck here with us, in great spirits; he keeps building us beds and chairs and houses and making models of our future theatre; and planning to build the bridge at Vista Hermosa... Meanwhile, his visa will be running out soon, and he can’t get out.

There is no bridge in Rovira. It was only ever a tree-trunk, and now it is sunk, dozens of other trees have come down the swollen river and piled up behind it and there is no way across. Everyone is running out of food: we at least have the remains of a garden (some is under water) to help us survive. People who only had opium poppy planted are in a really bad way. There are landslides all the way down the track to Rovira; no mule could possibly pass by and it is dangerous for humans to walk. 16-year old Martyn has gone off today scouting to discover exactly how bad it all is: with him is a teenage Colombian boy from the towns who had never swung an axe in his life and didn’t know what ‘arracacha’ was (it is one of the commonest country vegetables, a kind of self-propagating parsnip-tasting tuber). This lad is getting a crash-course in country life as well as the English lessons he came for. He is a choir-boy (literally! He sings in a huge choir) and this break in his routine is developing him enormously.

The first warning we had that this is no ordinary rain was one morning when I was informed: “Er, there’s been a landslide just by the house.” I looked down the ravine, where once our cesspits, much greenery and several trees had been. There is now just a two-foot wide path between our central shack and a sheer, unstable drop. On the other side of the house, there is no path at all: that landslip had to be shored up by all the men working together to make an artificial bank of earth held up by poles. “Er, Jenny, we’ve lost a bit of the garden below too,” said Fin one morning. I went down to see: just below the compost heap was a knee-trembling vertical orange gash. Trees had gone down and now there was a beautiful view to the little stream below.... I returned to the house and tried to write: but a sickening roar jolted me out of my cabin to stare at the forest to one side of us. Everyone else was standing outside the main house looking at the same spot. Another landslide, this one hidden by trees. Shaking inside, I looked at the steep forest above us. And the deforested slope we had inherited just below it. “If that lot moves, which would be the best way to run, because we must all go the same way, so we know if anyone is lost,” I said, trying to sound calm and practical. We decided on the most sensible direction, and I instructed the girls not to sleep in their own cabin, which is on the edge of a small cliff, but down in the main shack.

One night, I spent most of the time standing silently in my doorway, listening to the rain, the river, and the trees crashing down in the forest. I thought of Armero: the Colombian city of 22,000 people that disappeared in a few minutes beneath lava from a volcano 45 km. away in the mid-80s.

Anne was due back from her latest money-earning trip ages ago. There is no way she can get here: the road below must be a joke; no buses have run for a couple of weeks and it may be ages before the bulldozers from Neiva can shovel away the mountains of mud that will have fallen on the road. And until the rains stop, the work is a waste of time, as the mud-mountains, all caused by tree-cutting, will move again the next day.

In the rare few seconds per day that the thick white blanket of cloud shifts and we can see the mountains on the other side of the valley, the sight is somewhat alarming: dozens of orange gashes on the deforested fields, each one a frightening landslide. One farmhouse where their main crop must be amapola (heroin poppy), judging by the attention they merit when the helicopters and spray-planes come over, is surrounded by such orange marks.

It seems the aerial crop-spraying brigade must not have very good meteorologists working for them: in the last few days of sun preceding the deluge, they ripped asunder the peace of the valley every morning, swooping and spraying over and over again, poisons that will all have been washed away, down into the rivers. At one point, Ned and I were bending down in the garden weeding and digging when a plane suddenly swooped so low over us, we could see the pilot. I have seldom seen Ned frightened, he is a fairly unmoveable person; but he was bright red with shock, a memorable sight; he was visiting us from the Tolima farm and was not accustomed to such aerial activity. For me, it has become almost like the bees buzzing, though my rage never subsides at what they are doing: pretending to care about the drug-addicts, whilst wrecking the Colombian rainforests, what’s left of them. The hypocrisy stuns me.

Two weeks later, 22nd July 1997

The Heavens didn’t. Still no Anne; and the rain hasn’t stopped day and night for over a month. Whoever wrote the bit in the Bible about the Flood obviously didn’t know the Colombian rainforest. Forty days and nights? Pah! peanuts! However, there are buses, sometimes, some of the way, always accompanied by a bulldozer. Martyn reported a two-hour bus journey to Guayabal (it only takes me three hours to walk it). Food had got into the region, and some of our children have got out, for a break. Marc is still building us a house, and he even went down to Vista Hermosa to assess the possibilities of helping the people there to build a bridge. He reports that part of the journey was on foot: at one point, he had difficulty extricating himself from the mud of a landslide on the road, sinking up to his knees; elsewhere, he and Martyn were lent horses; sometimes an enmired jeep would chug along taking paying passengers. Marc also bravely volunteered for a Rovira bridge-rehabilitation scheme: the men of Rovira planned to lift the sunken tree-trunk to re-form a bridge. You don’t need to be a German engineer to know this idea was foolhardy. “Marc,” I said, “take some paper and a pen to do some writing; you are going to be bored down there, this team-work isn’t going to happen.” Marc was bored. And it didn’t.

More on Eduardo

Camilo, my teacher-friend from Chorreras, wrote me a long list of theories surrounding Eduardo Rincon’s death, none confirmed. He also sent me a fairly sober newspaper report of the assassination, with a central photo of Eduardo who now stares at me mournfully all day long. The report says Eduardo died of a shot to the neck after having his throat cut, and that no-one knows why he went where he went for his date with death unless he was responding to a call. A shot in the neck and a summons sound like guerrilla work to me. I have written to the local command demanding, as politely as an outraged European can, an explanation for the people of this region as to why their representative was slaughtered. It will be a long, long time before any response filters through.

Shots from Helicopters

When the helicopters and spray planes passed over here just before the rains began, several people heard shooting from one of them. We have now heard via our messenger-lad Martyn that the shooting was uncomfortably near to the Government ‘environmentalists’ roaming the forests – mistaken for a guerrilla unit!

The opium poppies next door

Yesterday in the jungle rain, I was tramping through our secondary woodland growth, looking for a grassy clearing for our cow, when I stopped, shocked, at the edge of our land to see before me a huge hillside sown thickly with very pretty flowers – opium poppies – and a huge makeshift shelter for workers. I had known that one of our neighbours was up to no good near us – cutting and burning forest in the dry season. I had never wanted the misery of seeing what he had done. Now I had to see. This is a doubly aggressive act as the land in question is an hour from his farmhouse down the mountain, but only five minutes from our central cabin: therefore from the air, it must seem obvious that we are the poppy-growers. No wonder that plane swooped so threateningly over our garden one day. Our neighbour knows what he is doing: he knows how much we will hate this situation; it is his way of forcing us to buy his land, no doubt at some Very Special Price for stupid foreigners who care about forest...

The irony of the situation is that all tree-felling and cultivation work counts as a ‘mejora’ – an ‘improvement’ – and so the price he will be able to ask swoops upwards. If we were to set our sights, as I originally did, on the purely practical task of ‘saving rainforest’ by buying it, I think we might as well pack up: after three years of this rainforest campaign, I now see that the propaganda value of our life-style, the educational work we are able to do and the living example we try to set, are even more important – an angle I had somewhat pooh-poohed when we began. I also can’t help thinking that if I were a Colombian campesino and some odd, idealistic foreigners came to live on my doorstep, I’d probably do the same thing as the neighbour I’m cursing. He is, by the way, one of our friendliest friends and a regular visitor with all his huge tribe and has watched, with enormous appreciation, the children’s very beautiful pieces of Green theatre..... I do hope my readers don’t expect the story of Colombia to be a simple one!

Green Letters in ‘New Internationalist’ magazine

Some of you may be interested to subscribe to a monthly political news magazine called ‘New Internationalist’ (55 Rectory Road, Oxford, OX4 1BW), which from August onwards will be publishing a series of ‘Letters from Colombia’ by Yours Truly, JJ: some of these stories will deal with events described in the Green Letters, others touch upon entirely different aspects of jungle life in Colombia.

Also I would like to give encouragement to those of you who don’t already subscribe to get ‘Green World’, the paper of the Green Party in England. Although some of the items shock me (like people still arguing over whether it is a good idea to control population growth?!), I am much heartened to read of active green campaigning in the little island I was born on... (1a Waterlow Road, London N19 5NJ)

And for those of you who read Spanish, there is an excellent Colombian newspaper called VOZ (‘Voice’), which is the only one I know of that tells the truth of what is going on in Colombia. It is a communist newspaper, very high quality. Address: Carrera 8, 19-34, Bogota, email: vozcaloz@openway.com.co

Wishing you all a lovely sunny Northern European summer – don’t holiday on the Equator, it’s WET.

With love and thanks to all our correspondents,
Jenny James

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