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This article is part of a series about racism in Colombia. Read more.
When I was 26 years old, my husband and I moved to Colombia to participate in MCC’s Seed program. We were placed with the Mennonite Brethren Churches in the Chocó, a department on Colombia’s Pacific coast that is 95% Afrocolombian.
Here are some sad truths: Before I moved to the Chocó, I had never eaten a meal in a Black person’s home or stayed overnight for a visit. I had never participated in the life of a Black church, had a direct supervisor of color, or been cared for by a Black doctor or nurse. A Black dentist had never examined my teeth. I had never had a close Black friend.
I was unaware of the huge loss that this was in my whitewashed, segregated, middle-class life in the U.S.
In the Chocó, the impacts of systemic racism are impossible to ignore. Chocó is Colombia’s economically poorest department. Governmental abandonment of the department has created a power vacuum that has allowed armed actors to move in and take control, and the mining activities of multinational companies extensively exploit and pollute important rainforest and rivers. Only two main roads are present in the entire department, poorly paved and difficult to navigate, in part due to terrain and in part due to the presence of armed actors. There is no aqueduct; instead, people collect water off their roofs to supply their homes, a system that is made possible by the Chocó’s 400+ inches of rain per year. Access to health care is limited and difficult; for almost any specialist or surgery, people need to leave the department and travel to a major city. It was the first time I had ever lived in a marginalized region of a country, rather than a highly privileged one; it was the first time I had lived in a place that did not have access to the best of everything.
We lived there for two years as Seeders. It is impossible to articulate the profound impact of this experience on my life and my understanding of the world, as well as the profound love and joy that I experienced while living there; instead, here are some vignettes that led to my transformation.
One day during our first few weeks, we visited the town of Andagoya, where a Mennonite Brethren church is present. A river with a bridge across it divides Andagoya. The church member we were with explained that when the U.S.-based Chocó Pacific Mining Company arrived in the town in the 1940s, they segregated the town by having white company employees live on the one half, with better housing, and sent “the ugly people” to the other side of the bridge to live in the other half of the town.
“Who were the ‘ugly people’?” I asked her.
“Us,” she said.
I later learned more about the mining company, about how it plowed farther into the jungle than its permits allowed, extracting gold and sending the wealth north for several decades before its departure.
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Part of our orientation involved visiting the fifteen or so Mennonite Brethren churches in the region. While churches sang many upbeat songs with local instruments and rhythms, most services also included singing hymns from song books that the 1940s white North American missionaries had brought, some of which include negative imagery associated with the word “black” and positive imagery associated with the word “white,” such as “black sin” and “white purity.”
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Since the Chocó is majority Afrocolombian, it serves as a safe haven from racial microaggressions for Black Colombians in their daily life. As part of our Seed experience, we had the opportunity to do an exchange and visit another Seeder’s community, inviting locals from our community to travel with us. We invited an MB agriculture project member, and he selected a rural farmer to come along as well. When we arrived at the bus terminal in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, I presented the four ID cards of our group at the window to print off our reserved tickets. The man behind the counter gave me four printed sheets, but they appeared to only be two tickets. I confirmed with him, “Are these the four tickets for our group?” “Yes,” he said. When we got to our gate, the agent there informed me that there were only two tickets among the four printed pages: the tickets that had been printed for me and my white husband. The ticket man simply had not printed the two tickets for the Afrocolombians in our group whose IDs I had laid next to ours on the counter. We had to go back. I was shocked and furious; I had never firsthand witnessed such a blatantly racist act. The two Chocoanos were completely unsurprised and chuckled at my rage. This was not news to them.
One time, a learning tour group came to the Chocó that included a white North American missions representative. We learned that day about the incredible obstacles that the MB churches in the Chocó have overcome in order to establish their agricultural work with farmers in the region, even risking their lives to stand up to local armed group leaders who were trying to extort the project. Following our debriefing discussion about this later that night, the white North American missions representative stated, “You know, it’s amazing what little things little people in little places can accomplish.”
When will we, as the white North American church, open our eyes and see the protagonism of our black and brown brothers and sisters in the global south as significant lessons for our own education, rather than belittling their efforts?
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I mentioned before that the Chocó is an area that is largely abandoned by the rest of Colombia. Why, then, did the armed conflict arrive there in the 1990s, causing mass displacement of communities, massacres, sexual violence, and trauma? Because the U.S., as part of the “war on drugs,” funded aerial fumigation of coca crops in the Amazon in the southern part of Colombia. Armed groups then looked for another place to expand coca cultivation, and found a perfect target in the Chocó: a lush jungle, with little to no government presence or protection. My tax dollars led to the armed conflict arriving in the Chocó. In recent years, under Plan Colombia, U.S. tax dollars continue to fund aerial fumigation using glyphosate, a known carcinogen, that damages in its wake licit economic opportunities as well as the health and safety of rural communities, without addressing the root causes of why rural farmers grow coca. Through the MB agriculture project, we met farmers whose cacao (chocolate) and other fruit and vegetable crops were burned by glyphosate and were forced to leave their farms, seeking work in larger urban settings.
Through Seed, we witnessed our complicity in systems that serve to marginalize and oppress communities of color; we witnessed our inherent role in the persecution of Black communities that we had the immense privilege of knowing, who embraced us with open arms and blessed us, taught us, and bless us and teach us still.
We left the Chocó almost exactly five years ago. Our Seed term ended, and we stayed on as service workers with MCC Colombia for three more years based out of Bogotá.
Now I carry these questions with me daily in my life in Virginia, a place where 155 years ago it was legal to own a Black person; a place where Black people are unequally policed; a place where economic systems and healthcare systems do not treat Black people as equals. I carry these questions as I raise my white son, who was born while accessing high-quality healthcare in Bogotá before we left Colombia, whose birth complications may have led to his death had he been born in the Chocó.
This is my testimony. I am grateful for this moment of collective awakening and recognition of the work that needs to be done on personal, community, churchwide, state, and national levels. May God open all of our eyes to our complicity in systems of oppression of our Black brothers and sisters, giving us the courage to face the truth and work to tear them down in love.
Amy Eanes served in the social ministry of the Mennonite Brethren Church and with MCC partner Fagrotes in Chocó, as part of MCC’s Seed program from 2013 to 2015.
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