Rifle & Camoflage

Rifle and Camoflage, shadows over the bodies of the Children

The zone where Omaira lives with her brother and four sons adjoins the region of San Vicente del Caguan. It's about 150 km distant. In this region there have been continual confrontations between the military, the guerrillas and the paramilitary. It's a place where the ravages of war are all around and the children are obliged to pass by. This is due to the fact that there is only one road that runs through the large, rugged area near the mountains, close to Piedmont of the Cordillera.

Dionisio (the father of Omaira) told me that his wife Juliana was 6 months pregnant when the confrontation arose between the military and the guerrillas. The encounter was so violent that the house suffered damage and the plaster fell from the ceiling due to the shock of repeated explosions. A strange picture then of a house covered in flowers and blossom engulfed in the smoke of war.
The family was saved miraculously; Dionisio has no doubt that God saved them. Dionisio doesn't doubt that God saved them because of the prayers of his mother, an elderly believer, who from under the bed called to God that He would have mercy on them. Dinisio shouted 'Juliana, keep your face down or they will kill us,' but she couldn't comply due to her swollen, pregnant belly. Juliana was afraid she would abort and lose the girl baby. Thanks to God that didn't happen. The girl was born healthy and now is 4 months old. I have her in my arms and she is a precious baby.
Juliana gave birth far from the house of her husband Dionisio and his grandparents because the war displaced her.
There are now four more refugee or displaced children, aged from a few months to 10 years of age. Without a permanent home, born in the midst of fear, the clatter of rifles, machine guns, and helicopter artillery. This is the life we offer to our children, the sound of battle even in the womb!

What then about the starving children of Choco, are they any luckier, malnutrition on the Pacific coast of a country rich in food but poor in charity and love. The story of suffering can be repeated throughout our beautiful country.

About 4 years ago we sensed something unusual, on a highway in Caqueta, well travelled, went some 300 young people in civilian clothes. We asked these people who they were. They responded: We are the students of various universities who have come to receive military training with an armed group.
Later In another context of this diverse Cataquenian geography, and in the complexity of the conflict, we meet a group of young boys and girls walking down the road in single file, one behind the other, rifle and camouflage uniforms, which were larger than their fragile bodies.

Colombia, is a country where reality surpasses fiction. Many people from the cities ignore the crude living conditions and violence that happens in the countryside. Few are the Christians that come near with compassion and mercy to those who suffer and are wounded, maltreated and left half dead on the sides of the road, as in the Biblical history of the Good Samaritan.

What of Emmanuel, the child born in captivity? Perhaps he can be a symbol in the search for liberation of the hostages. But there are thousands more children suffering; these include those who died before birth lacking the basic medical attention for them and the mother, no amount of speeches and platitudes can reach them.
What of the children now, thousand waiting to be used as food for the guns, excluded form education, love, compassion, trained to kill for ideals they do not understand. The hunger for basic food in a land of milk and honey, we need doctors, nurses, hospitals, schools. The Government must care for its entire people.

The success of government is the care with which its gives its people, the ethical and morals of its leaders shall be exemplary. What the are our children to think, when they realise that they lack the advantages of schooling and education and basic civil rights and no-one seems to care?