Monday, April 7, 2008

Accompanying

This has been a busy week for me here in Colombia. I got to do my first accompaniments both in the city and on a trip outside of the city. During the week I was accompanying a lawyer from one of the lawyers groups that we accompany. He was at a trial involving the murder of two or three campesinos. Some members of the army are accused of the crime. The situation was a little tense because one of the guys had just been captured by the police so there were a ton of heavily armed prison guards and police in the room. This weekend I traveled to a displaced community with two of the organizations that we work with. They are gathering information about what happened to them in order to try and get them back to their land. The trip was pretty fun we stayed two nights. While they were meeting with the community me and the other PBI volunteer stayed outside and mostly played with the kids and chatted. I also experienced my first military road block. They pulled over the bus that we were in and patted down all of the men and looked through our bags. I was pretty nervous about it but it was actually really easy. We did a role play before I left on the trip to train for this kind of thing but the role play ended up being a lot tenser than the actual thing which I guess is a good thing.

NEWS UPDATE: Clinton advisor resigns after meeting with Colombian officials concerning the free trade agreement and is fired by the Colombian government. For more info check out the NY Times article

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