“This is my cousin, Yeny,” Juan said, still a little out of breath. “We were running from Joaquin.”
David, the boy with springy hair, nodded. “You got away from him, I think. I saw him go over there, to the other side of the yard.”
“Is he really so bad?” Yeny asked.
“Yup,” said Beto, adjusting his baseball cap. “He’s the meanest boy in grade four. No one likes him, but everyone listens to him because he’s scary. If he tells people to ignore you, they will, and you could have no friends at all.”
“But that’s crazy,” Yeny said. “Would you three stop talking to each other if he told you to?”
The boys shrugged and looked uncomfortable, and Yeny decided that Joaquin must be worse than she thought. She’d never heard of a whole class turning against one person. It would have been impossible in her village, anyway. Everyone was a neighbor, and you couldn’t help talking to each other. Here in the city, everything seemed different. But so far, it didn’t feel much safer than the village.
Colombian kids playing games in the schoolyard, just as they might at Yeny’s school.
“Joaquin won’t pick on you, though,” Juan said. “You’re lucky you’re a girl.”
“Yeah,” said David, “you don’t have to worry about him. And I’m sure everybody will be nice to you, since you’re new and everything.” He asked where Yeny was from, and she told him about the grupos armados kicking her family off their land.
Beto nodded. “My family moved here from the mountains too. The groups are always shoving people around there. But the city’s not so bad. You’ll see.”
She asked him where his village was, but it didn’t seem to be anywhere near hers. The men with guns must have gone to more places than she had thought.
Yeny still had nightmares about the day they had come to her village. She and María Cristina were outside washing clothes when the men arrived. Yeny heard shouting. Then María Cristina grabbed her arm and dragged her under the table. From behind the pots and pans, Yeny saw a man in a green uniform jab a machine gun into her mother’s stomach. He forced her against a wall and shouted that they’d all better be gone before tomorrow. Someone yelled, and Yeny clapped her hand over her mouth as the man shoved her mother to the ground—a terrible thwack of skull against stone—and then he was gone.
Papá rushed to Mamá so quickly that Yeny realized he must have seen everything. And he was crying so hard that she was sure her mother was dead. The sound of crying grew. Louder, closer. Huge, scraping sobs filled Yeny’s ears until she couldn’t think, and then the whole world went black.
It wasn’t until she felt comforting arms around her that she realized the sobbing was her own. She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw her mother alive, holding her, saying that everything would be okay. Her father had his worried look, but he too said they would be okay. If they hurried. There was no time to lose.
They packed up as quickly as they could. They tied as much they could onto their backs and to their horses, and they began to walk. They walked for days, until they arrived at a camp for displaced people, people like them who had been forced from their homes. The camp had a little wooden church, a few houses, and space for more buildings. Yeny’s parents told her that the grupos armados were kicking many farmers off their land, and that soon this camp would be full.
María Cristina’s family decided to stay in the camp. But Yeny’s father had a sister in the city, and that was how her family had wound up here with Aunt Nelly. They knew they were lucky to be alive. The armed men had killed Papá’s best friend, an entire family that lived at the edge of the village, and even the mayor. In lots of neighboring villages, they had killed everybody.
“Hey,” David said, interrupting her thoughts, “are you coming to the meeting after school tomorrow, on the soccer field?”
“A meeting?” Yeny asked. “About what?”
“Peace!” David said. “Haven’t you heard? Kids all over town are getting together to talk about how to stop the fighting and violence.”
Juan laughed. “Who’s going to listen to a bunch of kids? If the grown-ups can’t make the grupos armados stop fighting, what are we supposed to do?”
“That’s what the meeting’s about, silly,” said Beto. “If we already knew how to do it, we wouldn’t have to meet, would we? Lots of kids have been meeting for months already. A bunch of them asked the teachers if we could meet right here in the schoolyard, to get more kids to come, but the teachers said it was too dangerous. No one wants to make the grupos armados mad.”
“No one’s going to get hurt at this meeting, though,” David added. “I hear they’re trying to get as many kids as possible to show up. There might be hundreds there. Can you imagine a soccer field packed full of kids who want to talk about something? There’ll be so many of us that the groups will have to listen.”
Yeny liked the idea of seeing that many children in one place, but she agreed with Juan. “It sounds kind of weird,” she said. “Many people have tried to stop the fighting, but it’s impossible. The grupos come along and do whatever they want. My family never bothered anyone, but suddenly someone decided they wanted our land, so they took it.”
“But that’s what I mean,” Beto said. “It’s not fair, but we’re not doing anything to stop it.”
Juan still looked as doubtful as Yeny felt. She did want to see what hundreds of children in one place looked like, though. “Are you going, Juan?” she asked. She’d never figure out how to get to the soccer field on her own. She missed the familiar mountain paths around her village. She never got lost there.
Juan shrugged. “I might as well,” he said. “We usually play soccer there in the afternoon, but we can’t play with hundreds of kids in the way.”
Yeny grinned. No matter how big and overwhelming this noisy city was, it looked like Mamá was right: soon she’d have plenty of friends here. In fact, she’d have hundreds and hundreds to choose from. “Good morning, girls and boys.” Señorita Barraza was a young teacher with a twinkling smile and a heart-shaped face. Yeny’s old teacher had always looked tired and had hardly ever smiled. And the one before that had disappeared. Some people said she had taught the “wrong” lessons, and the grupos armados had taken their revenge. This new classroom was different too. The walls were smooth and painted bright blue, nothing like the old wood of the schoolhouse whose cracks let sunlight shine through. And the map of Colombia on the far wall here looked almost new. The blackboard didn’t have any chips in it, and in the corner was a shelf with more books than she had ever seen.
“I’d like you to meet Yeny, our newest student,” said Señorita Barraza. “She’s Juan’s cousin, and she’s come all the way from the mountains to study with us. Yeny, would you like to tell us a little bit about where you’re from?”
Yeny stood at the front of the class, looking at the tables full of children. She wondered what she could say to help them imagine the green mountains with narrow dirt paths between the trees, the sound of cicadas chirping, the glow of fireflies at night, and how everything smelled like wild parsley when it rained. She didn’t know where to begin. “My village was nothing like here,” she said, looking down at her hands.
“It’s really far away,” Juan agreed.
Village children help gather leftover bananas after the harvest.
And that gave Yeny a great idea. If her classmates knew how long it took to get to her village, maybe then they’d understand why it was so different. She thought about her trip to the city and tried to describe it in reverse. “If you want to go to my village, you have to ride for hours in a crowded chiva—a jeep that’s crammed full of people, bags of rice, chickens, and all the things that people usually buy in the city. It’s so crowded that sometimes people ride on the roof or hang off the side.”
A few kids in the class were nodding, as though they’d been on a trip like that before. Señorita Barraza smiled, and Juan grinned at her.
Yeny kept going. “You pass
towns, a police checkpoint, banana fields, and farms. And after a few hours, you get off the chiva and start walking up a long dirt trail into the mountains. Sometimes you pass soldiers washing their clothes in the creek, and you have to wait for them to finish before you can cross.”
Juan was jumping about in his seat now, waving his hand in the air. “Remember when the creek flooded last year?” he asked. “And your father had to carry me over because the water was so deep?”
“Yeah, it rains a lot in the mountains,” Yeny said. “I loved the sound the rain made on the metal roof, especially when I was falling asleep. In my village, most houses were made of wood and had straw or metal roofs. And all the houses were together in a clearing in the forest, right after the police post, and our house was the one with the great big papaya tree in front of it. I planted it last year and now it’s as tall as this school. You could plant anything in my village, and it would grow—bananas, mangos, oranges, and guavas. And there were lots of horses, and pigs, and turkeys too.”
“Oh! Oh!” Juan said. “And last time I was there, I helped Yeny’s family with the banana harvest. We cut the bananas down from the trees, and put the stickers on, and packed them up in cardboard boxes to send to away. We had to be careful because people in other countries don’t want to buy fruit that’s bruised. And we got to eat all the bananas that weren’t good enough to send away. Mmm.” He rubbed his tummy.
Yeny laughed. “Juan was the only one who ate the leftovers. The rest of us were already sick of bananas.”
Señorita Barraza nodded. “I look forward to hearing more about your village in some of your writing assignments, Yeny,” she said. “Class, I’d like you to make Yeny feel welcome and help her out in her first few weeks here. Yeny, I’d like you to sit right up here at the front, next to Joaquin.”
Yeny looked where her teacher was pointing. Sure enough, there was an empty seat right next to the tall, thin boy she and Juan had escaped from. Across the classroom, Juan looked worried. >Yeny wondered if he had only been trying to make her feel better when he said that Joaquin would never pick on a girl.
Well, Yeny thought, she had survived the grupos armados. Surely she could survive the silly-looking boy who was staring at her as though he would eat her for breakfast.
Joaquin ignored Yeny for most of the morning, but as soon as recess was over he started flicking things at her. Little things at first—rolled-up bits of paper that he tore from his notebook or tiny pieces of his eraser. She collected everything in a neat little pile, and when the teacher wasn’t looking, she dumped the whole handful into the middle of his page of math problems.
He glared at her. Then his face went red. “You’d better watch out, Banana Girl.”
She met his eyes. “Why?” she asked, a little too loudly.
“Yeny,” their teacher asked, looking up from her desk in the corner, “is something wrong?”
Yeny thought for a few seconds. Complaining would probably make things worse. Complaining would mean she was a sapo. A sapo was a toad with a big mouth, and people with big mouths could get other people in trouble. No, she wouldn’t say anything. “There’s nothing wrong, señorita,” Yeny said.
“Muy bien. I’m pleased to hear that. Please finish your math problems quietly.”
Joaquin bent over his work, but not before Yeny saw the smirk on his face.
Maybe the city wasn’t such a great place to live after all.
“What are you going to do?” Juan asked, on the way home from school.
Yeny shrugged “Just ignore him, I guess.”
They were walking along a wide avenue with a red tile side-walk. Most of the shops and cafés had put little roofs over the walkway, and Yeny was relieved each time she stepped into the shade. The sun was hot. And there were hardly any trees. She missed the cool mountain air of her village. And today, after spending the whole day next to Joaquin, she missed her friends more than ever.
“Maybe he’ll give up and leave you alone.” Juan didn’t sound hopeful. “I don’t know why Señorita Barraza sat you next to him. She must know he’s bad news.”
Yeny tried to sound more confident than she felt. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll figure out something.”
CHAPTER 3
Stay Away
Everyone was already home by the time Yeny and Juan got there. Carlitos was chasing a yellow ball around on the floor. Elena, Sylvia, and Rosa were doing their homework at one end of the table, and her parents and Aunt Nelly were sitting at the other end, drinking coffee and frowning. Juan and Yeny put their bags away and smiled hello. It was best not to interrupt grown-ups who looked that serious.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Papá was saying. “He talked about joining the grupos armados as though it were any old job. He kept talking about how well they pay, as if money could make up for what you would have to do.”
“So you’re not joining,” Mamá said, more like a statement than a question.
“Of course not! There has to be a better way to put food on the table.” The grown-ups were silent for a moment. Papa took another sip of coffee. “I have to admit, though, that it’s harder to find work than I thought it would be.”
“Don’t worry,” Aunt Nelly said. “We’ll make do. I’m glad you’re here, anyway.”
Yeny tiptoed past them to get a glass of water from the sink. Her mother looked up from the kitchen table and smiled. “How was your first day?” she asked.
Yeny hugged her and told her about her teacher and the classes they’d had. She did not mention Joaquin. Judging by her parents’ serious conversation, they had enough to worry about right now. “And guess what’s happening tomorrow,” she said. “After school, all the kids in the neighborhood are getting together in the soccer field to talk about peace. The field’s not far from here, and it’ll be the perfect way to meet other kids. Isn’t it exciting? Wait till I tell María Cristina.”
Yeny looked back and forth between her parents and her aunt, but none of them looked especially happy about her great news.
“Lo siento, chicos” Aunt Nelly apologized, “but I’m afraid tomorrow’s not a good day. I heard from the radio station that it’s our turn to talk again.”
Yeny didn’t understand. She’d listened to a radio before, of course. They’d had one in the village. But the radio was for news, or sometimes music. She’d never known anyone who actually talked on the radio. Was her cousin famous and he’d never told her?
“We’re talking on a radio program for people in captivity,” Aunt Nelly explained.
“People in captivity” meant people like her uncle Alfredo. The grupos armados had kidnapped thousands of people in Colombia, and they hid them away in secret places. Sometimes they demanded money from the families. Other times, they kidnapped people to make the other grupos mad and they promised to release their prisoners if the other groups released theirs. Yeny’s uncle had sent letters to his family, but no one could write back because they didn’t know where he was.
“Papá wrote to us once that the kidnappers let them listen to the radio,” Juan said. “There are special programs where families can talk, and that way the kidnapped people can find out how their families are doing. We talk on the program as often as we can. He listens every week, and now he writes to us about the things we’ve said. Maybe you could come tomorrow too, Yeny. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”
Yeny nodded, but she couldn’t find words to speak. She couldn’t imagine not knowing where her father was, or only being able to talk to him over the radio. Maybe David and Beto were right. Maybe it was important for children to get together to talk about what was happening in their country. If there was anything they could possibly do to change things, she wanted to try.
That evening, Yeny’s father asked her to go out with him to buy panda for the next day’s breakfast, and she hurried to put her homework away. He’d been too busy trying to find work in the past few weeks to go for walks with her. In the village, he’d often
asked her or Elena to go with him to measure the bananas or check for disease. The buyers were always particular about how big the bananas had to be, so it was important to measure regularly to know when to harvest.
Some of the fields were far from home, but Yeny had never minded. She and her father told each other stories as they walked along the trail, and when they heard something rustling in the bush, they made each other laugh by trying to guess what it was. A monkey or a parrot? A wild tatabra, even bigger than the pigs at home, or one of those giant rodents called guaguas? (Usually it was just someone’s turkey that had wandered out of the village.)
Except for the occasional animal, it was almost always quiet along those trails. No noisy motorcycles. No one shouting. They often met a neighbor and stopped to talk. And if they were in a hurry to get home before nightfall, she and Papá raced each other along the mountain paths to and from the fields. She missed her walks with Papá.
So when he asked her to go with him to buy panela, Yeny jumped up from the table. Her father took her hand in his big, rough one, and they went out into the street.
“So what do you think of your new school?” he asked as he closed the door behind them.
The first thing that popped into Yeny’s head was Joaquin, but she didn’t want to tell her dad about that. “I’ve never seen so many kids,” she blurted, saying the only other thing that came to mind. “And it sounds like they have big ideas and big plans. I hope they have more peace meetings. I’ll meet kids from everywhere in the city, I bet.”
Her father was silent for a few moments as they walked. The air was still warm, even though the bells for evening mass were already ringing. Yeny wondered if it would ever get cool here in the city.
Her father kicked at a pebble along the road. “I’m not sure that going to those meetings is a good idea, Yeny.”
Yeny turned and stared at her father. It was the last thing she had expected. For as long as she could remember, Papá had encouraged her to try everything she could, and he had always said that the only way to bring about peace was to get everyone talking about it. Talking was the only way to stop the violence.
Yeny and the Children for Peace Page 2