Before coming to Colombia, I spent a summer working with an Aboriginal women’s group in the Yukon. I thought I knew things, but one of the greatest lessons I learnt was how little I actually did. As I researched and read, I learnt more deeply about the realities of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, colonialism,
Tag: justice
Español Last night a bomb exploded on the veranda But sounds of birds sweeten the earth this morning. I hear the fragrant trees, look in the garden, Find two silent clusters of ripe guavas. -Lam Thi My Da (translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and Tay Dinh) In days of protests and surveillance, of
I miss my family’s Easter traditions. I miss hunting for bags full of jellybeans and chocolate rabbits. I miss eating sweet yeast bread, covered in icing for breakfast. I miss turkey dinner around the dining room table with people I love. I miss hymns and traditional greetings. When I am honest, I admit that I
When I was growing up, my mom started selling vegetables in my hometown. Each year, the garden and thus the corresponding chores grew a little bigger. I speak for all of my siblings when I say that we hated it. After too many complaints, the s-word was banned from our vocabulary but that did not
“Reparation requires messianic hope. To hope, then, is to hope for the reparation of the irreparable. It is to hope for the present. The hope is for now…It is not a question of hoping to escape time, but of hoping for new time, for a new day and a new birth.” (Weakness of God, John
We walked the 73 kilometres to from Mampuján to Cartagena in December of 2011 together to demand the rights of compensation for forced displacement. Then, on August 27 and 28 of 2012, I watched my friends and community members walk forward to receive their cheques of individual reparations. It was a wonderful, indescribable moment to
Before I get to Colombia, I’ll spend a week in Nicaragua for orientation to MCC. Our Father Who Drowns the Birds In memory of Nicaraguans killed by the Contras, 1980-1990. By Barbara Kingsolver There is a season when all wars end: when the rains come. When the landscape opens its own eyes and laughs at
Anna L. Vogt 