Re-entry: seeking grace beyond invisible buffers - war correspondent returns from Colombia - Starting Point - Column

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 30, 1994 by Leslie Wirpsa

What an eerie feeling it is to sit here at my desk in the newsroom and receive news bulletins about torture and death threats against people in Bogota, Colombia, where I lived for 10 years before coming on staff in NCR's Kansas City office Sept. 1. Granted, such tragic accounts are foreign to no one here: The El Salvador special report in the last issue or the previous week's anonymous, wrenching views from Haiti attest to that.

But a very different sense of responsibility stirs within me when I read a human rights group's calls for immediate action about people who are my friends, acquaintances, former colleagues. I have lunched with them, laughed with them, helped nickname them, been terrified with them, yet danced with them, hiked with them, played with their toddlers and made snapshots of their lives. I see them, glimpse their smiles and hear their voices when I close my eyes.

It is not possible, then, after having broken bread together, to put up buffers against their pain, to distract myself from knowing I may soon be reading news of their funerals, rather than simpler reports of arbitrary detentions and ominous telephone calls. The daily bread we shared won't let me forget, no matter how many times I venture now to Kmart or a megagrocery, surrounded by the comforts and the cushions in the affluent suburb where I temporarily reside.

While these reminders from far away startle me, it is something else that brings shock as I undergo this process of reentry into the United States after so many years of being part of the pulse of life in Latin America.

Eerier than the reports of abuses from foreign lands is my constant recognition of the invisible but deliberately placed buffers that contain our lives here, limiting our possibilities for real grace. No, I am not talking about the evening news reports that tell only a portion of the truth about Somalia or Haiti; I am describing our expressway loops and air-conditioned cars and urban "development" schemes that keep us isolated, not necessarily from pain in Latin America but from the suffering of human beings right next door.

You don't have to be 3,000 miles away from social and racial and ethnic and economic and political pain to avoid it. The suburb where I live is snuggled right up next to the impoverishment of vast areas of Kansas City. If Kansas City is any barometer, you must simply live your life without ever crossing State Line Road at certain points, without venturing too far north of 48th Street and definitely without crossing the racial "borders" in the area around Troost Avenue.

Rub elbows with someone poor or marginalized on a bus? Buses barely exist in most cities of "middle" America. The scanty mass-transport vehicles that remain certainly don't run out to most of the predominantly white suburbs. The African-Americans who live east of Troost or the Mexican-Americans on the West Side might ride those buses across the invisible lines, challenging our myths about "integration."

A teenage friend visiting from what is actually an affluent area of Bogota described it quite well: "I feel like I am living in a bubble. I miss the indigents whom I gave food to and talked with in Bogota. You cannot avoid people there like you can here."

Yes, it's hard to avoid the pain of the poor and the marginalized and the suffering in dirtier, more chaotic places like Bogota. But I'd like to share a secret: Once you get past fear and denial, it's impossible to avoid the grace present in their lives. And before you know it, you've pushed on toward what I would describe as nothing short of miracle.

A case in point is my buddy "Mano." That's his nickname, which means "hand" in Spanish. I am not going to tell you his real name because even though most Colombian army officers don't read this newspaper, Mano would feel safer if I didn't. Two and a half years ago, Mano lived in rural Colombia where he grew coffee and yucca and juicy papayas. His hamlet was always being raided by the military who were hounding the National Liberation Army (ELN), an extremist guerrilla group that still believes revolution is the only way to bridge the vast gulf between rich and poor in Colombia.

Though Mano always tried to avoid both sets of violent troops, he got blasted one day when Colombia's U.S.-backed and Fort Bragg-trained army dropped an aerial bomb near a group of peasants working in a field. Mano lost his left hand, three fingers on his right, sight in one eye and part of the cartilage in his knee. Mano was once a strapping, attractive young man, but the bombing left his face speckled with shrapnel scars. He looks now like he has severe, incurable acne.

Mano fled to Bogota after the army found him -- and nearly shot him -- during his recovery in a hospital in Medellin. He landed in one of the poorest and allegedly most violent shantytowns in the country's capital city of 8 million inhabitants.

That's where I met him, at the home of an impoverished young couple that had taken him in, no questions asked. My first image of Mano -- one I still conjure today -- is of absolute beauty.