Inspiration

Ernest Hemmingway was famous for his concise use of the English language. He is famous for having said that the first draft of anything is shit. One day, at his home in La Habana, a friend challenged him to write a story in six words. This is what he wrote:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

sharing the podium

“Get in, get in,” says the taxi driver. “Hurry. Something amazing is happening.” Two friends and I jump in and slam shut the taxi doors while the driver, a dark, plump, middle-aged man, turns up the volume dial on the radio. “It’s incredible,” he says in animated Spanish, “I reckon he’s going to win. They’re not going to catch him.”

Juan Mauricio Soler Hernández, 25 year-old Colombian cyclist, is close to winning the mountainous ninth stage of the Tour de France. A thousand miles away, in central Medellín, our taxi driver is close to tears.

This is the beauty of sport: the rare occasion in which the larger than life achievements of one individual touch and inspire another person who shares the same accent, same slang, same favourite foods, music, liquor and humour as the person achieving greatness. It's not patriotism so much as a common place in the world. The cyclist and taxi driver might be brothers or neighbours, and so for a brief moment the achievement and greatness is shared.

The driver’s excitement is contagious. Goosebumps tickle my back and when the driver tells me the cyclist’s story, I too find myself close to tears. I think of another time, ten years ago, huddled around a radio in the misty, Blue Mountains bush at dawn with my dad and his two brothers, listening to Pat Rafter winning the US open. We were five days walk from the nearest tennis court, but that didn't matter.

2007 is the first year Hernández has competed in the tour de france. Normally it takes a cyclist many years to reach his or her peak, but I need only look out the taxi window to see the big, steep advantage Hernández has on a mountainous course. He started cycling at age 17 and within a couple of years won several national competitions, without a coach, fancy bike, or sponsorship. There’s no such thing as a Colombian Institute of Sport, just determination.

An Italian cycling team scouted Hernández, and the rest is (a short) history. A week later he wins the spotty ‘King of the Mountain’ jersey in his very first tour de france, and for a brief moment he takes our taxi driver to the podium.

Peace and Justice

On the last day of a recent trip to Colombia I meet Marleni, a woman from an indigenous nation whose woven shoulder bags I’ve long admired. 


The Kankuamo live in the highest coastal mountain range in the world, where green mountains saturated with equatorial rainforests rise abruptly from the coast to snowy peaks within sight of the sea. The earth was born in those mountains, the Kankuamo say.

Marleni is part of a women’s cooperative that makes and sells the traditional Kankuamo bags. She explains to me how the bags are made from a fibre spun from the bark of a mountain cactus, how the fibre is coloured with vegetable dyes and woven by the Kankuamo women using their hands and feet. We talk at length about life in the mountains, and happily I choose a bag.

The next morning, waiting to board a plane in Bogotá, I read in the Sunday paper that a paramilitary officer known as ‘El Paisa’ has been caught in Colombia’s coffee region. He is accused of having lead massacres of at least 200 Kankuamos. I read the words but in my mind I see Marleni’s broad smile. Inside I cry, silently, and without tears.

Paramilitary groups - or ‘auto-defense’ groups, as they call themselves - have long been the heavy, hired hand of the government, landowners and corporations. Where the interests of such groups collide with the land rights of indigenous groups or peasants, the paramilitary is sent in to write the law. According to Human Rights Watch they are responsible for two thirds of all human rights abuses in Colombia.

In the quest for national peace, it is said, the government of Alvaro Uribe is trying to disband paramilitary groups, offer them amnesty for their crimes, and facilitate their re-entry into normal society through work programs.

Last month president Uribe tried to pass a law that would make all paramilitary offences political crimes, and hence pardonable by the State. The Colombian High Court ruled against the law, stating that political crimes must be waged against a State. Because paramilitary groups have always acted with the tacit endorsement and in the interest of the Colombian government, their crimes cannot be deemed political, the judges said.

The issue of amnesty is a knotty one. The Colombian people want peace, and, on the face of it, disarming the groups that most terrorise the nation makes sense. Furthermore, entering the paramilitary is often a last-resort choice for young, bored youths who are denied education or employment.

The nature of their crimes (playing soccer with a child’s head, cutting the foetus from a woman before she dies from loss of blood) may suggest otherwise, but surely these people are human too, as much a victim of a system of oppression as those they kill.

Uruguyan journalist Eduardo Galeano writes: “The torturer is a functionary. The dictator is a functionary. Armed bureaucrats, who lose their jobs if they don’t do their tasks efficiently. That, and nothing more than that. They are not extraordinary monsters. We won’t grant them that grandeur.”



Nevertheless, paramilitary crimes are heinous, and above the rank and file are the bosses, commanders and captains who join the paramilitary for sinister, selfish and calculating reasons, or rise through the ranks because they enjoy what they do. The man who lead the killings of 200 Kankuamos was one of these.

Under the new amnesty laws he would have spent a maximum of eight years behind bars had he delivered himself to the authorities. Having fled from the law (partly because he had reportedly stolen nearly $1.5 million from the commander of his paramilitary block) he is now a criminal scapegoat for a criminal State. Even so, if he cooperates and admits his crimes he’ll likely spend no more than 20 years in jail. And the Kankuamo will have little to no say in his judgement.

The disbandment of paramilitary groups receives much scepticism and criticism from many Colombian journalists, academics and human rights groups, who claim that the paramilitary organisations do not disarm at all, as outlined in a recent letter to president Uribe from Human Rights Watch.

In the last ten years, an average of around 1000 Colombians have been forcefully displaced from their homes and lands every day, as a result of the country’s ongoing civil war in mineral rich rural areas. Colombian economist and activist, Hectór Mondragon, writes, “It is not merely a case of displacement because of war, but rather that there is war so there will be displacement.”



Millions of hectares of land have been stolen by paramilitary groups, some of it rich in minerals, some of it perfect for growing illicit crops. In the process of amnesty, the stolen lands are not returned to their rightful owners. Guns are (ostensibly) handed in, not crops, homes or livestock.

Amnesty International writes, “In practice, hundreds of thousands of people in Colombia could be faced with a lethal dilemma: either continue to be homeless or move back to their land and live with the very same people who tortured, raped and killed their loved ones and forced them to move out in the first place."



Colombians want peace. They also want justice, and they know that one can never exist without the other.

Abundance and Starvation

Colombian meals are big, and there’s a simple reason why. In rural areas feasts fall from trees, and regardless how much (nuclear) families of up to 20 people eat, food inevitably rots on the ground, nourishing the dark, moist humus. Although a majority of Colombians now live in cities, the countryside is still the cradle of national culture and tradition. Most city restaurants serve country-style meals.

A $3 lunch also comes with soup, coffee and fresh fruit smoothie

It is curious then that in spite of such abundance, Colombians eat as though their food might disappear if it’s left on the plate too long.

Beyond curious, however, is the fact that in such a bountiful country children die of hunger. Three kids a day. Not in the countryside, but in city outskirts where blocks of land that measure six metres by two metres are sold to displaced and marginalised families for $400. Twelve square metres to build a family home, and the families rarely have $400.

Corrupt politicians and businessmen know this. Families who can’t afford to pay for the land work in indentured labour for whoever might ‘own’ the land. ‘Own’ because men with power and influence claim public land as their own, and rent it to families in need of shelter, even though they themselves have no legal right to it.

In reality, the families do not actually buy the land, since there is no owner; instead they pay a kind of feudal tax. At the end of the first year, when the family may have nearly payed the $400,
they are charged $800 for the right to live there a second year. In the poor and rapidly expanding south of Bogotá, this is an unspoken normality. Nobody says or does a thing, because corruption is institutionalised. Land is the source of power in Colombia, and the key to understanding a conflict whose beginning nobody remembers, and whose end few can see.

Poetry

The rain began falling at six pm on a thousand odd heads in the amphitheatre. Thunder cracked and the sky fell in sheets of rain. Many people left, nearly as many stayed. At 10 o’clock, after six hours of recitals, Alhaji Susso from Gambia, the last of 57 poets, rose to the stage to close the 17th International Poetry Festival of Medellín. He sang and plucked the strings of his kora, and the soaked audience danced and clapped beneath umbrellas. When he finished and the audience sang out for more, nobody doubted that what so many poets had said was true. Medellín is the world capital of poetry.

This is no small achievement. In 1991 Medellín, the capital of Colombia's coffee region, was the most violent city in the world, and a global centre for drug trafficking. “The poetry festival was founded in [this] context as a macro form of cultural resistance,” says festival organiser Fernando Rendón. “It is a voice for peace, and a protest against injustice and terrorism, including state terrorism.”

The festival is now the largest of its kind in the world. Over eight days, free poetry recitals are held in public parks, university theatres, high-security prisons, and schools and libraries in poor, marginalised suburbs. To date, Medellín has hosted 820 poets from 142 countries, and many indigenous nations.

Such contact with foreign visitors is an anomaly in Medellín. The city’s infamy has served to isolate it from contact with the world. The massive green mountains that surround it are a geographic metaphor for seclusion. Penetrating the valley like dust in a vacuum, the words, thoughts and solidarity of 60 poets each year bring hope, interest and dialogue to a city that for too long has been a black stain on the world map, rather than a black dot. The poets, in turn, leave the city with love and gratitude for its people and their compulsive generosity.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” says Nepalese poet Chirag Bangdel. “Thousands of people come to hear our poems. They cheer and ask for our autographs. It’s like being a rock-star. I don’t want to leave. In fact, I’m looking for somebody here who might adopt me.”

Miguel Barnet, from Cuba, has similar impressions. “I’m accustomed to see masses of people come together with a cultural motive,” he tells an audience of thousands, “but I’ve never seen an amphitheatre full of so many people gathered to hear poetry. UNESCO must declare Medellín the international capital of poetry!”

With the exception of the current Medellín city council, the festival has never received support from any level of government in Colombia. The festival organisers are vocal critics of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and his government’s ongoing links to right-wing paramilitary groups.

As a voice of dissent, the festival is yet to receive the national and international attention it deserves, however last year it received a Right Livelihood Award, also known as ‘The Alternative Nobel Peace Prize’, and the annual event receives funding from several European nations including Germany and Switzerland.

Swedish Poet Bengt Berg and his wife dance with local kids at La Cruz, a suburb of displace people, while Gambian poet Alhajir Susso plays the kora.

Colombia is still a country at war, but Medellin is no longer a place where the majority live in fear. Walking to a poetry recital with friends, two young men on a motorcycle speed around a corner and pass us, accelerating up a busy street. “Ten years ago,” say my friends, “one would turn the corner and expect to see a dead body. There’s a saying here – a threat – ‘I’ll send the guys on the motorbike.’ Two men on a bike meant hit-men.”

We turn the corner. A man with a trolley sells juicy slices of papaya and fresh pineapple rings for 30 cents, and a lady walks in the opposite direction selling cups of sweet black mountain coffee from a thermos.

A repercussion of enforced isolation is authenticity. City buses are boisterous with local rhythms, and restaurants serve regional dishes. It has also made its people resilient, resourceful, independent and curious.

Jorge, 12 years old, is one of many people gathered to hear poetry in his primary school high above the city centre. In his suburb, La Cruz, 95 per cent of the population are internally displaced, victims of the ongoing civil war in Colombia’s mineral rich rural areas. “I don’t know much about poetry,” he says, “but it’s cool to see so many new people here, people from Africa and Europe. I like to hear them talk in different languages, and to hear their stories.”

Typical of Colombia kids, Jorge asks me more questions than I ask him. The first two questions are givens, as though they were taught in school: Where are you from? And, are you happy here in Medellín?

The Medellín International Poetry Festival is an annual opportunity for people to break open the vacuum, and say ‘yes’ to the latter.

Nnnnerves

We walked to the river along an old train line. Men were digging sand from the riverbed when we arrived, tipping it into wooden canoes moored to the shore. They dived beneath the water with a bucket and appeared again ten seconds later, heaving with the weight of wet sand above their heads. The midday sun was burning, but the men’s muscular bodies stayed cool in the water. An old tip-truck reversed into the river in a rocky, shallow section, and the men shovelled their canoe loads into the back. Truck drivers will sell the sand to construction companies that use it to make cement.

The railway line crosses the river on a rickety old bridge. Adrian was the first to jump. Fifteen metres, I reckon - high enough to count ‘one dinosaur two’ before hitting the deep brown water. I climbed out onto the frame of the bridge from the old railway sleepers, and looked down. Adrian stood by my side, wet and happy. My heart was thumping so hard my entire stomach and chest jumped with each beat. Adrian laughed. I jumped.

A week later I stood in a room with a phone in my hands, dialling the organisers of the Medellín International Poetry Festival. Underneath my shirt, my heart was on a bridge again. Thump, thump, thump.

Definitions

Nine and ten year old kids in public schools around Medellín were asked to define things, feelings and ideas. These are some of the responses...

Body
It’s what covers our bones.

A very necessary organ.

Government
People dressed in green.

Person
Something covered in skin.

Earth
What they cover dead people with.

Memory
The reason for living

Night
Very dark daytime.

When the family gathers together.

Empty
It’s when there’s nothing in a jar.

President
Somebody who doesn’t value our complaints.

Hope
I hope that when I get home there will be food.

Dust
It’s when somebody coughs.

News
Information, or important gossip.

Mud
Something women put on their face to stop wrinkles.

Ingenuity Two

Door to door laundry... washing machines are rented at 50 cents an hour in poor suburbs.

waste

Wastage is global. Garbage bins outside of restaurants pile up with good food that has no value because somebody has touched it. Half a pizza is not worth half as much as a pizza; it is garbage.
This is irrational, but the greater waste is that which has never been: the human wastage on city streets, where intelligence and creativity are abused in menial labour. A massive loss of thought.
Life is dedicated to survival.
Protein has a price tag and remains in the butcher’s.
Brains atrophy.
Where there might have been a doctor, there is a shoe shiner. Where there may have been a young student with a book, there is a boy sheltering from the world under a newspaper he cannot read. What art? What literature? What medical breakthrough? What bridge is lost? This is the great waste of things, and people, that never were.

The Law

The gears creak and crunch with every shift. The jeep is orange, partly from rust, partly from a 1960s paint job. Eight fellas stand on the back, holding on as best we can. We don’t exceed 40 kilometres an hour on the way to the river. Going downhill, the driver puts it into first gear. Everything in the car is original – I guess – including the brakes. Other cars, buses and trucks rush past, honking and overtaking on blind bends. Two boys stand on the back ladder, each with one foot and one hand attached to the jeep. Inside, the driver says earnestly to the girl in the passenger seat, “put your seatbelt on. The cops around here are really strict.”

Ingenuity

In a little restaurant with $2 meals served on large plates, Gustavo tells me a story:
A few months ago a Japanese firm invented a machine to catch thieves in supermarkets. In London it caught 300 thieves in one day. In New York, 1400. The first day it was installed in a supermarket in Medellín, it was stolen.

Fame

Bon Jovi is coming to Colombia!
Sort of.
No insurance company will cover his stay, so, in fact, he’s not staying at all. He’ll be in Bogotá for five hours – long enough to give one concert – before flying in a private jet to a Caribbean island.

Colombians don't count; they dance

Half a million Colombians have been killed in the last 50 years. But that’s maths. Colombians don’t talk about numbers. They talk of brothers, cousins, mothers and uncles. Numbers are the lifeless illustrations of academics and journalists who forget about life and tally death on decorated walls. Four million forcefully displaced, nine million hungry, three million kids out of school…

“Bury the dead and keep on dancing,” they say here. And they dance.

Ana, mother of 11, makes arepas - corn bread - on a rainy street. She and her family were forced to flee their home on the Pacific coast because of violence.

Art

On the tile floor is Colombia. A sculptured mound of brown earth: two coasts, the Amazon, a peninsula in the north, and the Andes split into three – central, east and west.
A pale, hairy arm emerges from the eastern range. The hand lies still, palm down, across the humid eastern plains. From the highest peaks of the central range pokes a masculine nose. Death lies beneath Colombian soil.
Art.
A Cadaver becomes art, a message; anger, sad and silent. I look at Colombia spread across the floor. The arm is real. It absorbs my vision. From behind the white tape I look, bewildered, mouth open, breath slow, blank.
And suddenly it moves. Uuup and dooowwn. Slowly. Colombia is breathing; it is alive.

Upstairs in the gallery are photographs of war, torment and hardship in the Americas. Each photographer’s name is written with a brief description below the black and white prints: ‘Nicaragua’, ‘Guatemala’, ‘Prostitute’ and ‘Refugee’. The photos are beautiful.

Is this resistance? Seeking beauty in misery? Composing the right elements – the dirt floor foreground, diagonal lines, an anguished look towards oblivion, the dark evening clouds looming on the horizon? I’m not the first to address this contradiction. What role does art play in social change?

I can only think that peace emerging from war is not merely a physical change but an ethical and cultural change in which beauty and discussion play a critical part. Art, at least at its best, is a dialogue.

Bullet Holes in the door of a small, family home - A 1am reminder that Colombia is not at peace

A new friend and fellow photographer, Jonny Lewis, told me a story. He was exhibiting in Paris in a group show. His photograph was a portrait of an Aboriginal elder in northern Australia, a woman with the leathery, weatherworn face of a sea turtle. A Parisian woman approached the photograph slowly, one leg moving in unison with a walking stick, her back hunched with age. The woman looked up at Jonny’s photo. “Bonjour Madam,” she said.

Communication. Art at its best! The question, then, is what each of us chooses to say.

Aguapanela

Every city has a flavour. Returning to a familiar city is like visiting your grandparents as a kid. There’s a certain indescribable smell that becomes more familiar and distinct each time you visit. In Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city, the smell is more an overwhelming sensation. From a distance it is a city of red bricks climbing defiantly up the steep green walls of a long valley. A northerly mountain breeze cools the city and blows away the black smoke belched by colourful, noisy buses, leaving it bright and clear. Flowers are everywhere. So are music, fruit, and men and women selling something – anything – on the city streets.

A mathematical genius collects tomato crates to sell at the local market

My wife is from this city that is known in Colombia as the place of eternal spring, and infamous elsewhere as the once home of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. I lived here for 18 months. After two years away, everything says, smells, feels and sounds Medellin: distinct and familiar. The carved shapes of wooden window panes, the texture of slippery terracotta tiles, local expressions, honking horns and screeching brakes, thick tangles of electricity cables within reach of second-story red-brick homes; close enough to hang clothes to dry.

The evening after arriving we visit friends high on the city’s eastern valley wall. We pass kids playing football on streets so steep the local diesel buses struggle to climb them in first gear. One team gloats a considerable gravitational advantage, and the goalkeeper on the downward side has added motivation. If he lets a goal through the walk down to collect the ball is a healthy hike. Behind the buses kids on bikes tow a ride up the hill with a short length of rope. Nothing, it seems, has changed.

Until we arrive at our friends’ perpetually nearly-constructed home. There’s a little more roof than two years ago. Whenever the family saves a little money, they make a fire on the street and cook a big stew called sancocho – three meats, potatoes, yuccas, plantain – for local friends who come to help build the house. But the extra section of roof is not what’s changed. A few additional roof tiles do not alter the city’s flavour.

It’s the custom in every Colombian home to offer something to guests. Traditionally the something is aguapanela, water boiled with pure blocks of condensed sugarcane juice, panela. The aguapanela is usually heated and served with coffee or drinking chocolate, or served cold with lemon juice, depending on the time of day, and a pot of it has long been a permanent fixture on the stove of every Colombian home.

A Young girl plays with freshly cooked panela before it hardens

On this occasion, however, we are offered glasses of coca cola. My wife and I look at each other in bewildered shock, and in half-gest we protest that we haven’t come umpteen thousand kilometres to be served something as atypical and ubiquitous as coke.

But a litre of coke, we are told, has become cheaper than aguapanela. The next day, we discover why.



The bus to Altamira leaves at 7:30 in the morning. It’s a four-hour trip up, down, over and around fertile mountains cloaked in cloud. A thousand shades of vegetation paint the landscape. The overall effect is a world of green.

The view from Altamira

Altamira is a small town in Colombia’s coffee region. It’s an obscure little dot on the map, rarely visited by anybody who doesn’t live there, but my wife’s family has many friends there with small plots of land, and it’s these parcels of land strewn around the town that are our destination, rather than the town itself, which, for security reasons, I never actually see.

Altamira is part of Colombia’s ‘red zone.’ Ongoing guerrilla activity has resulted in heavy militarisation of the town. Police and soldiers oversee foot-traffic, and, because of nearby guerrilla activity, strangers are treated with suspicion. In 2001 three Irish tourists were detained after travelling in a red zone. They were agents of the IRA, the army announced, training Colombian rebels in urban warfare techniques. Their capture was hailed as another ‘success’ in the war against terror. Over a year later, the trio were finally repatriated and cleared of all terrorist related charges. There have been precedents of foreigners aiding guerrilla insurgency groups, however, so we decide it’s best to avoid suspicious authorities.

The bus drops us a few kilometres below the town at a friend’s home. It is the same family who we had visited the evening before. Three sisters of one family married three brothers of another. The family tree is more labyrinthine than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Márquez’s books are more real than magic.

Across the narrow dirt road, Jesus, a brother of the three sisters, is making panela in the small distillery he founded five years ago. It is a big open-air shed with a high roof and clay floor.

Earlier in the morning he has cut, with his brother and two friends, enough cane from his adjacent crop to make a month’s worth of panela for the local families, around 100kg. The cane is crushed in a fuel driven machine with a big belt that drives a series of cogs (in many places the cogs are still powered by mule or running water). The juice is collected in a big barrel before running via a tube into the first of five large vats. There the juice is heated over a cavernous cane-fuelled oven and passed from one vat to the next. The bitter froth is skimmed from the bubbling surface until the juice finally evaporates into a thick molasses in the final vat. It is then put to cool in smaller quantities and poured over one-pound moulds.

Until recently, Jesus operated his panela distillery throughout most of the year. He saved for years to establish it, often working in much larger industrial distilleries. Because the process of making panela must be done in one go, from juicing the cane through to drying the final product, he commonly worked 20-hour shifts, earning less than 50 cents an hour. “The only way to get through a shift like that,” he says, “is drink a lot of cane juice.” He also sold the little livestock he had – a few pigs – and replaced his coffee and bean crops with sugarcane.

However, since a new hygiene law was passed last year, he only operates the distillery once a month to make panela for local families. He trades it for beans, eggs, roots, plantains, papaya and other local produce. Jesus is no longer allowed to sell his panela, and he is broke.

“The government wants me to seal off the entire distillery and buy stainless steel benches and instruments,” he says. “That would cost millions of pesos. I’ve never seen that much money.”

While we talk one of his friends sweeps the clay floor. It’s a simple place, but it is kept with dignity. Three years before I visited a poor, displaced woman in her improvised one-room home in Medellin. She too swept the earth floor while we spoke. “There’s no need to let dust settle on dust,” she said with a smile.

On the surface, the modernisation of industry is a good thing. But the motives behind the new hygiene law are shady, and result in the monopolisation of a staple industry. The big end of town that mass-produces sugar derived products from thousand-hectare cane farms makes more money, while small-scale producers go broke, and the average Colombian family must economise their use of panela. In the last year, the price of panela has nearly doubled, increasing by more than 50c a kilogram. Given that two thirds of Colombians live on less than two dollars a day, that’s a big increase.

The booming ethanol industry is also a factor behind the new law and the subsequent monopolisation, says Jesus. White sugar and ethanol are more profitable than panela, which is a more pure product. “The big producers don’t want people to buy panela anymore,” says Jesus.

In the afternoon we walk for an hour along muddy mountain tracks to stay with two close friends of the family, Mariano and his wife Eumelia. My father in-law worked here in the 1970s as an agricultural engineer, and has returned frequently ever since. My wife spent much of her childhood climbing mango and orange trees with Eumelia and Mariano’s 13 children. Eumelia is now 62, has five great-grandkids, and more energy than a pound of panela.

Eumelia, 62, mother of 13, great-granma to five, walks along a mountain track to visit her son.

Their home is a beautiful, incongruent mix of modernity and tradition. Eumelia cooks on a clay oven. The ceiling is low and suspended by walls made of a mix of cow manure, mud and lime compacted over cane. A web of electricity cables climbs the mountains and powers the electric lights and a fuzzy little television with a bicycle rim for antenna. The shower is a bucket.

Eumelia tells me that when all the family lived at home she boiled two pounds of panela each day in a big pot. Mariano starts the day with a tinto at dawn, a sweet black coffee made with aguapanela, and takes a flask of energy water with him to work in the fields.

He invites me to work with him digging holes to plant coffee saplings. The terrain is steep, and it’s hard work. The productivity of his small plot of land, about a hectare, is awesome. On the ground beneath the coffee plants are bean vines, and above us plantain and banana trees shade the crops with their massive leaves. The area is so fertile that even the electricity cables have small succulents growing from them.

Before climbing back up to the house for a 9am breakfast, we collect some beans. A few square metres of terrain provide enough bean pods for several large meals.

Christian, Eumelia's grandson, plays with a hoop (future TV antenna) along a mountain track

And what meals!! Normally beans are bought dry and are soaked overnight. But Eumelia cooks us fresh beans with plantain and a green leafy vegetable called coles. They are served with rice, avocadoes picked from nearby trees, and fried ripe plantain. Mmm!!

And writing anything more after such a scrumptious gastronomical conclusion can only lead to an anticlimax, so I’ll leave it there.

Margaret

“Thank god somebody invented the remote control,” thought Margaret, 60, sitting at home in 1987. It was a big black remote kept in a plastic cover with fake fur on the underside. Andrew, the youngest of her five kids, had given it to her the Christmas before last. Her other kids had laughed when she unwrapped the silly furry present. So had her two sisters, but Margaret thought it very practical. “This blessing is worth protecting,” she said to herself, aloud, after switching off the ad, yet again.

“A woman can’t watch Sale Of A Century in peace anymore, damn it,” she said. Margaret rarely cursed. She felt attacked, as though the Grim Reaper was coming for her. Margaret’s eldest son was HIV positive. The image of Death claiming children and grandmas with bowling balls was too much. She’d wept the first time she saw the ad, now she refused to let it into her home.

“It made me feel as though my son was contaminated and dirty,” says Margaret, twenty years later. “He’s still alive, though,” she says. “He takes medication and looks after himself. He looks after me too. He hasn’t been knocked over yet.”

Jan

Jan, 42, used to dream a lot. He dreamt of travelling, of living abroad, falling in love and being accepted. Australia is a long way from Munich. He lives in Sydney with his boyfriend, Jamie, in a small apartment where they like to throw parties for their many friends. Jan has achieved his dreams. And he misses them.

He misses the quiet, safe space his dreams provided, his parallel world of endless possibility and fantasy. “I feel condemned to the present,” he says.

“Sometimes Jamie and I talk about buying a house together. But then I think, fuck, how long will he be able to live there? Why pay for something that will never be his – never be ours?”

Jamie is HIV positive. He takes anti retro-viral drugs, but his viral load is high. Jan and Jamie are both aware of his fragile mortality. “I already grieve his death, sometimes,” says Jan. “It’s horrible and I feel guilty. I have to live in the present to avoid living with death. The future makes me sad.

“My life is going to change dramatically one day. That used to excite me. Now it scares the hell out of me. I feel like all my dreams are slipping through my fingers, and they’re like water. I can’t grab them.”

Angelica

A word was written on her wrist.
The needle pierced her smooth brown skin through the dot of the letter ‘i.’ Angelica, 26, watched as the syringe vacuumed the blood from her body. She didn’t flinch.

She was already grieving two mortalities. Love. Anger. Bewilderment. Fear. Her feelings were exhausted. The needle might have been a mosquito.

Johnno looked at the tattoo and asked what it meant.

“It’s something I never want to lose,” she said.

Angelica loved her boyfriend. They’d lived together for three years, in an apartment in Sydney’s inner city. She never suspected he was bisexual, never thought to use a condom. The pill was easy and sex was great. “I’m HIV positive,” he told her one night.

Johnno looked at her arm again, his green eyes teary, and pressed the word with cotton wool. “Faith.”

Johnno

“Sorry I’m late,” says Johnno. I moved house on the weekend and I had a bit of a bender. I’m living with one and a half prostitutes.”

It’s a good introduction.

We sit in a café on Oxford Street near the community health clinic where Johhno works as a nurse. “There wasn’t any one moment I can think of,” he says. “It was more a process of realisation. I grew up near St Maries – I was a Westy – and I got engaged right after I left school. I only called it off two months before the wedding. I had to. I kept hanging around men’s toilets at pubs. I never went to any gay bars because, you know, if you go there, you’re gay. But in the gents at the local, you just liked sucking cock.

“I can’t believe that was 20 years ago. You know what’s really amazing, though?” he says. “I’m 39 and I’m still HIV neg. I can still see the Grim Reaper ads so clearly. They scared the hell out of me.”

Most of last year Johnno juggled his career as nurse and councillor with an addiction to crystal meth. “I was really lost,” he says. “It speeds everything up. An hour feels like ten minutes, and it makes you horny as hell. I just wanted sex.”

Johnno says he can talk under water. I believe him. He’s a handsome bloke, six foot something, broad shoulders, slim waist, furry chest, well groomed. He greets a dozen people on the street in the course of an hour. He happily sweeps you up into a world he knows is wild and wacky. “I love being me,” he laughs cheekily.

“I tried a lot of really kinky stuff on ICE. Leather, whips, fantasy, you name it. But I always made sure. There had to be a condom. I’ve had to be really disciplined. When I was in a long term, monogamous relationship a few years ago, I had to practice masturbating with a condom to feel the same pleasure. My partner was HIV positive.”

Johnno sees and hears a lot of first hand accounts of how HIV/AIDS affects people’s lives, and how people relate to the disease.

“A lot of young gay guys think it’s like having diabetes, or any other medically treatable disease. A lot of them actually seem relieved when they get infected. They want to have open relationships and enjoy sex. They want to feel accepted. There’s a common saying in some parts of the gay community, ‘planting the seed’, or ‘give me your seed.’ There are ‘gifting parties’ where HIV negative men go to get infected. It’s like an initiation ceremony.”

Johhno says sometimes he feels sexually discriminated against for being HIV negative. “I was first knocked back by a man in a bar earlier this year because I’m HIV neg. It’s happened to me again since then,” he says.

It would be unfair to suggest this relationship to HIV/AIDS is common to gay men, but it’s a growing trend, says Johnno, and something that concerns him. “I tell so many young guys who come in for a check up to be careful. A lot of them are on ICE. It changes personalities and makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Sometimes they arrive high to the clinic, and you can just tell. They’re really flirtatious. Some of them pull their dicks out, and of course afterwards they’re really embarrassed.”

Johhno agrees that the Grim Reaper adds had a big impact in Australia, and suggests that something similar is needed now. “I’m sure I’d be HIV positive now if it weren’t for those adds,” he says.

We pay for our coffees, and I ask a final question. “What do you mean, exactly, that you live with one and a half prostitutes?”

“Oh. One of them’s only part-time, God bless her.”

Frankie

Frankie, 22, sat in the sterile little space while Johnno strapped her arm tightly, preparing to draw blood. “Guess what my porn name is,” he said, grinning cheekily… “Slugo Monfarvel.” They both laughed. Johnno was a tall, masculine nurse with a Merv Hughes moustache. And he was a queen. Frankie relaxed, and thought again about what the doctor had just told her. The rate of HIV infection in Morocco is very low. She would probably be fine.

Morocco was the last stop of a three-month European trip with her best friend, but when she arrived home, Frankie spoke of little else: the four o’clock prayer call that brought Marrakesh to its knees, the acrid smells of camel leather and tanneries, the laughter of children charging for photos in narrow, moon-blue streets.
And Sam.


Sam who looked like Ben Harper and spoke four languages. Frankie had spent two unforgettable weeks with him, and fallen in love.

In Sydney the waves and traffic stopped. Life revolved around the next SMS, next email, next phone call. Old photos blue-tacked over her iron bed-frame were replaced with new ones. Life had taken on new meaning. Frankie felt loved, desired, wanted.

Soon the time between calls increased. Sam became less reliable. Frankie began to feel the distance between them in her belly more than she had on any map. He lived in Melbourne, he said, he’d be coming home soon. He had an amazing opportunity, 3000 per cent profit on the saffron. He already had a buyer. “The money’ll be yours too, babe. It’ll be ours.”

Frankie sent him $1500. Two weeks later she made an appointment at the clinic. She felt stupid, abused, used, disappointed, angry and scared. Tears followed tears. Always the same wet path down her face. Her best friend thought Sam had been high on cocaine. “I don’t know how many women I’ve had,” he’d said one night, and Frankie realised how little she knew about him. Only what they’d shared, and it still seemed so much.

Could it really have been an act? He’d said so too… it was love, a connection. They’d both felt it. Two weeks condensed into one night in Frankie’s mind. Pleasure turned to anguish. Nobody could have resisted. A tiny town in the desert, a rooftop bedroom.

The pregnancy test came out clear. Now she wondered if she could ever have a baby at all. Three months to wait. Three fucking months. And the waves crashed again at curl-curl, the traffic crawled past the apartment at peak-hour. The phone sat still.

HIV/AIDS in Sydney. Tales of Ordinary Folk.

Here I begin five brief stories of how HIV/AIDS affects people in Sydney, and how people relate to the disease. I do not relate them in typical journalistic style, but in narrative. They are human tales. I tell them as a human.

Though some names have been changed, all the stories are real. In most stories names are irrelevant anyway, I reckon. Like a face in a photo, they draw attention away from the context, the bigger issues. If anybody should read these stories, and enjoy the form they take, I would suggest the work of Uruguayan journalist, Eduardo Galeano, as an inspiring precedent for genre defying writing.



No face needed.

Waking up

Today finally feels like Autumn. Colder, darker, sleepier. But it's time for me to wake up. To take my first tentative steps into the cyber world of blogging. Who knows where my fingers will take me. They are my cyber-feet.

My hope is to go forward with this blog. To leave the comfort zone and explore themes that are alien to my closeted little Sydney world. But, before I do, I will take a step backward (again, with my fingers), and post something from the past. One thing at a time. I need to know how to post, before i can post something new. And so i will put an image, and a link - though both are bridges to Colombia. My wife, Natalia, and I run a little business selling traditional and contemporary arts and crafts from Colombia. Our little business supports fairtrade and aims to promote an awareness of Colombia beyond the infamy of cocaine and guerrilla groups. Our business is called Barachalá

My little friend in the photos is Marcelo. These are his feet, standing on the doorway to his little one-room home in Medellín. And so the digital journey begins. Good luck hands. Good luck mind. It's time to wake up!