The process

This is a description of what happened to me in the lapse that starts in February 11^th 1995 and ends in July 15^th, same year.  Those are the dates that I remember. This whole work has been elaborated by heart to tip. The pictures, the conversations with friends that were also in Option Colombia, they tell me much about the country as a group, but too few about Guainía specifically. I brought local newspapers and they gave me texts, but they only speak of very specific topics, they are very short or related only to a single situation in time and space. It is very little compared with what I learned and I lived there. The media, the statistical and almost any reliable data about that department is something very hard to get. Even the IGAC³, in the maps of the department, they ask for help in the information gathering. When I traveled, my objective was to find a professional that would will to be my thesis director, besides fulfilling the assigned work. But the time passed, the professionals are scarce and there were restlessness and many responsibilities.
Option Colombia gave me the opportunity to travel to Inírida, to work with the Net of Social Solidarity, not like a state official but as a student in the course of an interdisciplinary practice. During the semester of the experience, I sent out a monthly report for the Net and, if I recall well, two for Option. In them I talked about the activities related with that institution, following a methodology sent from Bogotá. That helped me when remembering, not so much because I had them with me, but because I had the habit of to remember and to reconstruct. But several reports got lost in paper tangles in Bogotá and they were only three, and those I recovered them thanks to the students of the COC⁴, but near to the end of the process of writing. Anyway, the experience was something unforgettable, full with things that I will take always with me. Option demanded me to make a feedback to the university⁵ and the text that I elaborated as answer I introduced it to the teacher Julián González as my thesis project. He was of the same mind about deepening it and even publishing it. He recommended me enlarge it as much as I could, using my memories as base. What followed was to squeeze and to squeeze my brain in search of all the rakes of the Guainía that had been in it. Thanks to God, they were many; after everything, six months don't pass in vain. I presented them to Julián and he requested me amplification, but this time containing the information by subthemes again. I found that memories are as an arboreal road: if you take for a road you found it subdivided in several another, and the same with the next, and so on. I could continue speaking of the Guainía infinitely, discussing my own memories and analyzing them until the smallest minutiae. It cost me more and more work to differentiate my personal life of that that could interest a possible reader, academic or not. I made a list of possible topics that deserve to be treated and then I took the most interesting, those that hid more things to say. But the fatigue in search of memories took me to rave. It is very difficult to go into in the own mind and not say the only things that the self wants to say. I attempted a text in which I only said what I like to say and titled it Drowsiness. It hardly made sense, it was very arduous for reading and it was based on thousands of things that the reader didn't know. Therefore, Julián advised me to translate that first great text (almost 40 pages) to the reader's language, one that had never known Guainía. He encourages me to toss scissors to all that was reiterated or it was unnecessary, to enlarge what was not well explained and to correct the not so well edited things.
So, paragraph by paragraph, I looked for those characteristics in the text, I turned it back and forth, but conserving the original intention of showing the department from my vision. The latter was the only one that I had to contrast in such a meticulous way, and in fact the only one that I could show in the text.
The two following rewritings were fed with texts of José Luis Romero and Jesus Martin Barbero's conferences. I got the songs, each one with a meaning anchored in the text, since my view, they are indispensable. The first one is a deep memory, the biggest hit before my coming. The last one I could only hear it in Christmas, when someone gave the compact disk to my nephew and I understood the meaning of the lyrics. It is almost the same one that that of the thesis, but more folkloric and more cheerful. When reading them you will realize why I'm saying this.
The last version arose from Julián's recommendation of taking the text at a good level. There is not doubt that I didn't achieve it. It lacks a lot for say that, but the road traveled among the previous version and that last one was quite a long distance. Speaking in terms of quality, of course. In addition, a misfortune happened in the road. The text that began the process that I wanted to include in the appendix, as a testimony, it was devoured by a computer. No matter how much I tried I could not recover it, I have regretted thousands of times for not having a backup copy. In the course of this work I have learned all and each one of the reasons for those that a computer can destroy a diskette. But it beats me that I still have to learn one hundred more.
I organized it again, I removed several paragraphs in those that it prevailed the speculation and the opinion; I have summarized it and ordered again. But I know that if I work the text once more, I will find out defects in it, that I will want to organize something and I will think that many of its sections don't make sense. But in some place I have to stop. It would take me more than five years to find the work that I could call "almost perfect", or at least to say "this is it!"

In this whole process they almost lapsed two years: From November 1995 to August 1997. Time in which I turned my eyes head over heels, I condemned myself to the underemployment and I had to fight for a space in computers those were not of mine. But it is worthwhile to begin. To narrow knots and feel me nearer, be just from here. To take always present those that I met and to look in my mind for an appropriate answer to the problems that I felt closely. To remember their plurality of origins and to give thanks to ⁶ for made it possible. Inírida is the demonstration that we can live with the natives, the Venezuelans and the Brazilians, blended with all that we the mestizos are. The most terrible (and armed) intolerance they are conquered by simple people, with their humility. I have always seen the natural wealth beside the hearty generosity, so many times that I no longer believe that it is coincidence. On the other hand the pride, the reproduction of the suspicion and mainly the prepotency, they are fertile ground for pain and death. Will it be possible that we recognize it once at all? It is not about to restrain us mutually, but to share and to bring without waiting anything to change, from the heart. Because everyone who gives something with interest puts the things above people, he or she gives foot to hypocrisy and suspicion. If I hide my interest, being good actor or not, the other can, in someway, look a shine of it. If I opt for the nerve, my words become aggression. It is not better maybe to be sincere and to think about the other ones? My religion is the foundation of my facts, even in my improvisation. When I have stopped to follow it, it is when I have made a mistake (it happens to me to frequently). It is the social motivation of this thesis, of my practice, of my yearning to see to the minority groups well treated. The tyrannies of the Middle Ages harmed us a lot, they twisted us the spirit and today we have to reconstruct it. There is much talkative in the road that only looks for fattening their saving accounts. But what about those sincere those help although they manipulate them? The Colombian society needs the peace and Guainía has it. Come closer! Go and learn that is your life the one that worth! The one that is at risk when the one that stands for war triumphs...
It is a lot of pretense for such a small text, but it isn't for a human group, when they know what they want. It is what this thesis looks for. If it gets it we will have another reason to thank and to continue ahead, to smile and to live, but this time with less tears.

Pon manó, apewe? is a free translation of where do you go, brother? to the puinave language, the same one that they speak most of the communities in Inírida surroundings. By this way, since the beginning, I support a beautiful language, so that Spanish doesn't push it toward its extinction. By the same way, I have reduced all the spaces in white and the size of the characters to reduce the paper consumption. It would be a contradiction to speak of ecology and not to make something similar.

I request to that his will be completed in this text. He created the men and the waters and He put them each one in their place. He is here, in the forest and in everyplace, although they are many those that ignore Him completely. Be this thesis a step toward that Being, to Who I seek to serve. That we come closer to his tolerance and his peace and to the discovery of that unknown place that is in ourselves.

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NOTES

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3		Geographical Institute Agustín Codazzi, the national maps drawer office.
4		Option Colombia Corporation. If you want to consult about it and the IGAC, click here.
5		Please see the appendix.
6		Normally, we would put the word "God" in this place, but it would be as wanting to put the sea in a pail. God is a word to name something that doesn't fit in a word, a concept to explain something that doesn't fit in a concept. All the cultures of the world have a special vision of Who is the Maximum Level Possible of Kindness, Who created everything and Who goes beyond the physical world, although He is also in it. To use the capital in the pronouns when I mention Him is a form of respect, the symbol tries to overcome the precariousness of the language when we face a reality of that size.