Dignity- Caroline of the Prince

61. Elena - April 19, 2010 [Edit]
What I love about some of Colombia’s small towns is that they still have a human size and life. I was in Caroline of the Prince over the weekend and remembered why I am standing on the issue of our humanity and the need to protect it and remember it, for those that have forgotten it.

We arrived in mid-afternoon and as we drove up to our friend’s house, a woman beyond time, thin, in black and with a delicately embroidered shawl on her back, was walking up the road with her friend. Thesa stopped and greeted her warmly and asked if she’d like a ride up the hill. I moved to the back seat and she stepped in leaving her friend behind who walked back to her house. “It’s harder to walk up the hill these days, thank you Thesa” said Matilda and continued telling us about her failing body with a brilliant mind and a dignity I had almost forgotten. When we got to her place she stepped out and told us to wait a little, walked into her house and came out with a pot of maize porridge that takes two days to make, gently cooked in wood and coal. “This is the most delicious maize I’ve tried in years” said Thesa and thanked the woman for the gift.

“She’s ninety now” said Thesa after we drove off. “Doesn’t take a pill” “Her lungs are beginning to fail but when they tell her to stop cooking the maize because the smoke makes her cough worse, she says, “Perhaps it’ll kill me but the maize needs to be made”

We always walk up and down in Colombia: up and down the mountains, huge like the Alps, green and luscious they stand one after another all across the land from North to South with two rivers separating the three ranges and five million tones and textures of green. Why is green so green and light, so light and green, so lean and prim? In their womb, Colombian emeralds tell their tragic story.

The old men sit in the tiendas where coffee candy and cigarettes, bread, arepas and beer can be purchased and in the bars with the pool tables, chatting some, sitting and playing dominoes, chess or parcheeze. The old men are truly old and truly exist. “That one is ninety seven” says my friend, “still has his small piece and takes out some little crops to the market”

The horses are parked next to the mulas, (mixture of horse and donkey almost as big as the horses), always stronger but more difficult to control when they just don’t like it. The mulas and the donkeys, all parked around the plaza after the Sunday market, while the farmer leaves his crops, does the shopping, has a few beers and heads back home with the four or five children and his wife, who’ve had the luck to come this time.

Children arrive in horses on bareback as if they were one piece. A huge older man with a big belly walks around in bare-feet and a hat in the late afternoon, gets into a discussion with a man whose nose is more red than the clowns and his eyes bulge out equally red and they scream at each other from opposite ends of the old fountain without anyone bothering to look, but smile.

Most of the main doors are open and a smaller door beyond the hall allows one to see the cleanliness and decency with which every plant flowers, witness of its mistress’ hands.

Time lives itself out with dignity. A dignity that my friend Ton doesn’t understand when I speak of the need to protect life, still thinking of animals but forgetting Who we are or that We are One.