well, im on my way back to bogota after another 3-week travel stint. i spent a full two weeks on the coast and now a few days in medellín, trying to concretize logistics, job details, orientations, etc for seeders when they arrive to their service locations. i have about a week in bogota before heading to belize and then off to nicaragua to meet seeders and bring them back to colombia to start the program finally!

i am consistently impressed by the hospitality that awaits me at every community. this culture is so much more hospitable than the us - its incredible how people bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, comfortable, etc. its so foreign to my experience it can make me almost uncomfortable, i feel like i'm putting people out. but i've learned so much about hospitality. i hope that some of this rubs off on me and i learn to make people feel so appreciated and special as is custom here. it is a gift and one of many beautiful parts of colombian culture i admire.

last week i was in the mojana, a region of the coast where there has been a lot of flooding. i have seen much displacement in colombia due to violence and injustice done by humans, by the society, but in this visit i witnessed another kind of displacement - that which the environment is doing to many families and lives. in the end, however, isn't this a displacement of human society also, as we over-use the earth's resources and it fights to make up for the damage we do to it? normally, i arrive to the mojana by motorcycle (after a 1.5 hr bus and 2 hr boat ride) but the region is so flooded, i mobilized throughout the region completely by boat - long, skinny metal boats that people pile groceries, household items, suitcases and human bodies into. a small johnson motor urges us forward at an incredibly slow pace while we sit low to the water with no top/shade in 95 degree weather. the amount of water is hardly believable. we pass house after house, vacant with water a yard high. these families have gone to higher grounds, some staying with families, others living on the side of larger roads under lean-to's. in other houses, families have built a small raised patio where they have all their belongings and pass day after day after day, sitting, waiting for the water to go down. we passed field after field of crops, drowned in water, only seeing the tops of dead corn stalks, yucca plants and trees, floating over fences we should be opening to pass through on a path. riding in the johnson, as they refer to the boat, one almost feels chlosterphobic, there is literally no place close where you could stand on hard ground and you can't see further than a few hundred feet as we are so low to the water.

the human spirit is incredible, though. i am astounded by the hope and the valiant attitudes of so many. amidst so much difficulty, people continue in the struggle for life, making do with their circumstances and finding ways to keep going. in the end, it is more live-giving to be amidst these communities, in the middle of difficulties - be it violence, lack of employment or resources, flooding, etc - with their unending hospitality and never-failing fight for life than it is to be elsewhere.