"Senderos de Paz" (Trails of Peace)
Ways of telling local stories and forming narratives, an instrument of reconciliation and recognition
An 11-minute documentary that must be seen!!
 

Mobile Public Library of Las Morras. May 2, 2017
 

Pablo "rapping"
 

Work at the Rural Public Library of Las Morras

"A former combatant looks with nostalgia and bewilderment as they take weaponry from the transitory point where he is grouped for reinsertion into civilian life, and he lets out a scream that resounds in the depths of the Pato River: 'It is not by chance that the day when the books arrive, the weapons are gone.'

Legend has it... that twenty rural libraries arrived at the most unlikely places of "deep Colombia" and initiated processes of reading, writing, reconciliation and coexistence with the peasant communities and with the ex-combatants of the FARC.

Twenty librarians, plural in their practices, but with the same spirit of freedom to transform the realities of the armed conflict, set out in 2017 to visit the most rugged places of the geography of our country, to develop the Ministry of Culture and National Library's Libraries for Peace project.

One of these zones of Colombian rural life, San Vicente del Caguán, was the scene of encounters and disagreements based on the books that were produced in the communities that lived through the armed conflict, and from within the transitory normalization zones of the FARC, in the first year of implementation of the peace agreements.

A challenge that at the time awoke the most common fears when thinking about living in the periphery of Colombia and encouraged the librarians to be pioneers of this titanic task of settling part of the historical debts with the peasantry of our country. And this is how this adventure of books, peasants, writings, librarians, hopes, ex-combatants, peace and reconciliation began ..."

Section of the article published by Pablo Iván Galvis Díaz in El Espectador on May 6, 2018. See the full article here

Listen, Dialogue and Write: The librarian who promotes "farctastic" narratives

"...In Mira Valle, sitting around a long table, several guerrillas listen to the story that Kevin has written in his notebook: "El 'viejito' de Ithaca had 14 children with María. One morning she woke up to realize that she was missing a leg and saw that, by the door of her house, the frog that was carrying it in its mouth disappeared."

Galvis begins the "farctástica writing workshops" that he imparts to the ex-combatants of Mira Valle with his traditional 'retell the legend.' After hearing the story of the day, the members of the FARC compete in a group dynamic at the end of which they begin to write their own stories.

"Through the writing of their memories and their creations we want to accompany processes of writing, creation and reading aloud" says Galvis who, in addition to providing all the services of the mobile library, is also responsible for training two librarians, one on the road and the other at the transitory point, with the hope that someday, both can take charge of the collection that the Ministry of Culture and the National Library sent.

In another of the stories that came out of the workshops, a girl comes to school without shoes. The teacher tells her that she cannot be received at school that way, and she decides to leave with the FARC. Years later, the same girl is sitting in a library learning to tell stories.

"That story touched me a lot," recalls Galvis, "Two months ago, I went to work with FARC fighters and now I am sharing my life with human beings who have a world to tell. Little by little, the camouflaged one is disappearing and peasants who were in the war are leaving because they had no other option."

See the full article here published in El Espectador May 20, 2017.