Wishing for Rain

Here is another update from Sean in the field (You can read his previous post by clicking here). He and Andrea have spent the past few days in Quibdo, in the Choco District of western Colombia, visiting with displaced communities in the surrounding area.

I'm in the rainiest part of the world right now - Choco, Colombia gets over 35 feet of rain a year. Except for now - it hasn't rained here in 15 days. They don't have a public water system since everyone collects rain water and uses that. But since it hasn't rained, there's no water. Our hotel just ran out today and is trying to get some more so that we can bathe. Otherwise, the next four days here are going to be hot, sticky, and dusty - not something I'm looking forward to.

The displaced people we're working with have it much worse. They've resorted to going to the local river to collect water for their basic needs, and you can see people bathing and doing laundry in the rivers. To say the least, these rivers are not clean in the urban area - I wonder if things are getting cleaner or dirtier by using the rivers, but I realize people have no choice.

Work is going well, but our findings are also very depressing. It’s the same problems we’ve already seen in Colombia, with the authorities taking funding meant for the displaced and "disappearing" it. The displaced are being charged for services that are supposed to be free, and it seems like no matter who they go to with the local authorities, no one can help them. There are some very interesting NGOs here that represent the local displaced communities, and they can't get anyone (domestic or international) to fund them to do basic service provision projects.

We've spent the day today talking to indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups about their efforts to help their people despite the lack of support. It's incredibly inspiring to see what they're doing, but also depressing to think that they could be doing more if resources actually got to them. In the case of the indigenous organization, they just finished building a center for their people to convalesce in when they're ill - it's a beautiful place. But though they got some support from the Basque and Austrian governments, they have no funding to keep a nurse there or to bring a doctor in to care for the people who are there. One of the Afro-Colombian groups got a small bit of money to buy a computer and a printer, but they can't afford toner for the printer. Needless to say, we'll be drawing attention to this as best we can.