Back in Bogota

This morning I packed away my shorts and sandals and we flew back into Bogota for the final component of our trip. At supper last night I said, “From now on we aren’t meeting with real people anymore.” Of course that is an overstatement. The people we will be meeting with have lives and hopes and dreams and struggles. We will probably not see that however, because they will be speaking to us as representatives of important agencies.

First however, we went back to the Mennonite Church we have been going to for the regular “Moment of Peace” event. The leader, Paul Stucky of Justapaz, chose to reflect on Psalm 137, which I found an interesting choice. “By the river of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.” He asked people to substitute “Bogotá” for Babylon and put the psalm in their own context. That made the Psalm very real for some as they talked about what they have lost and how they felt they were in exile.

I found it interesting that Paul pointed them in the direction of thinking about their situation as an exile. Exile-- to my mind-- is a temporary situation. The hearts of exiles are still in the place that they had to leave. A refugee is one whose story is more like the Exodus. They have left the land of oppression and suffering behind for go, and are focused on the Promised Land: the Land of Milk and Honey called Canada which we heard about the first day we were here.

I think many of the people we met on the coast were exiles who talked passionately about going back to their land some day. I expect more IDPs in Bogota to resonate with the exodus story of leaving behind the land of suffering for good. Today however, we did not hear that in the Moment of Peace meeting.

During the meeting, Ed Wiebe was also asked to speak about the Mennonite experience of displacement from the Dutch Anabaptist experience from the 1500s, to his ancestor’s coming to Canada in the 1870s.

With these stories fresh in our minds, we headed to the UNHCR office here in Bogota. The program director we met with is a Canadian who actually attended the Ottawa Mennonite Church for three years while he and his wife were living there. That church has been very active in refugee sponsorship over the years and he had helped with a settlement of a Sudanese family while there.

The most significant thing that I learned from that meeting is that the role that UNHCR plays with IPDs here in Colombia is different than anywhere else they work. This is because Colombia has the resources to deal with their IDPs, so the UNHCR’s role is more on the lines of trying to bridge the gap between the very good policies around caring for IDPs and the reality of weak implementation. They seem to be doing good things about land problems by making sure that the land of IPDs cannot be transferred to other people while they are away.

The next meeting was with the International Organization of Migration (IOM). We connect with the IOM mostly because they arrange the travel for IPDs that are going to Canada. We got a lot of helpful information about that process. We also noticed some disturbing trends in terms of the number of cases that are being referred to IOM for travel arrangements by the Canadian visa office. The meeting took a rather strange and unexpected turn when a program official responsible for short term workers came into the meeting to do a presentation. A couple of meat packing companies in Manitoba and Alberta have been importing short term workers and the IOM has been acting as the agent to get them there. While none of us really work with short term workers, we wondered among ourselves if this is a situation ripe for abuse of these labourers that needs to be watched by MCC.

Is Canada the Promised Land or is it Babylon for these Colombian workers working hard cutting up and processing our meat?