Whom my work did benefit? I believe that mainly to the presidency of the republic and the net delegation. It is supposed that it was for community benefit, but it is hard for the community to make the most important decisions. The normal thing is somebody other who knows how the things are made. The officials are not accustomed to the people participating. If somebody consults them they answer the little thing that they know and they put him to turn rounds or to make line for speak with the governor or the mayor. Only some few officials manage the entirety of the problems. In a poor department as the Guainía there is not an information office for the public, when what is needed would be more than four.
The bad attention is not only owed to laziness. When requesting them about communitarian participation, departmental government's secretary and the municipal planning secretary (both in charge of their local entity by absence of the holder) they told me almost in chorus in a meeting "you could not be so democratic". As if it was not enough, the departmental corregimientos coordinator mentioned me informally a proverb of the region: "Neither the mañoco7 is food neither the Indian is people". His intention when making that quotation was a clear manifestation of racism, because he dedicated the whole conversation to demonstrate that the Indians were inferior people. That they are still high officials with mentalities like that gives worries to anyone.
It cannot be refused that to face a different culture implies more than a difficulty. The natives have a different way to behave, they manage terms in their own language, but they find hard to understand Spanish terms in a technical level. They listen to you, they say and they make as if they have understood, have they understood or not. For them the ignorance is something supremely shameful and it is not normal that they accept it in front of who represents an authority. With the little thing that I knew them, I found that they only accept it in front of well-known people, of trust, that they do not seem "to be doctorse14". There are also differences in the blood relation, in the way they celebrate, with the language, with the data... However, none will be enough to justify dictatorial, prideful and racists positions.
The government's ministry Indigenous Affaires Direction has an office in Guainía. It is supposed that it assists all the problems presented to the communities with the state authorities and anything like that, but only one anthropologist and one indigenous boat pilot are in charge. Only one person to assist at least four cultures in a department twice more extended than the Valle! Add to that colonists that look at the natives as an inferior ethnos and say "they are lazy", "they seem like animals", "they do not have any ambition" and so on.
The anthropologist should explain cultural aspects to human groups that do not have the most minimum interest in understanding each other, and among them I can count the professionals. Also, the communities have a heap of necessities to solve; each one implies that the indigenist moves to distant places and explains the same thing one time and another. In the long, he takes the same posture of a box official in a state institution: &he nags people, he gives them excuses, display with the tone of his voice and attitude the nuisance that causes him that they ask him the same question for fiftieth time. The mistreatment to the citizen is the state corporate culture and they are few the entities that escape to it.
From the Andean-industrial point of view, the natives do not know how to make anything, they are very belated people. As they do not have industrialization (machines, electronic and other teams), they are considered belated. A worker of any company would overcome them with easiness in the machinery8 operation, most of them are undocumented and illiterate, and that locates them at the same level of the unemployed or the indigent. Very few people recognize that many of their complex abilities in the handling of the natural means are top technology. In the great majority of the communities of the rivers Isana-Cuyarí and Guainía-Negro, where only the miners and the few Colombian government's representatives have arrived, the natives have devised how to him to obtain out everything (drinkable water, nutritious, transport, medicines, housing, etc.) from forest and rivers. Their activities generate a tiny contamination level that any country's municipality would envy.
However, in the Guaviare and in the near to Inírida communities, where the colonization is more and more intense, the natives feel shame of being what they are. They reject the natural and traditional products for consume foods produced for the market, with a smaller nutritional content and to those they are not accustomed. The forgetfulness and the cultural shame attack with force the traditions of sharing things in community, they mine their deep respect to the ancestral authorities and the environment.
It can feel the step of the different ethnos toward the customs that we would call ours. It becomes a common cultural place the physical native with mestizo's mentality; somebody with features and indigenous accent, but that he only has in common with the communities his genetic code.
The road that we follow in our relation with the U.S. has the same symptom. The Colombian also feels shame out of his culture. It is very strange an English school without clientele, they are more those that have travel to Miami that those that know an indigenous resguardoe15. Right here in Cali, the signs in Spanish are disappearing. It seems that to the merchants they don't find their language very "in", neither very "play"e16, nor anything similar. We behave like a subordinate culture and the codes of the dominant one are those that prevail. However, we can still follow the advice of Rubén Blades and look for something better.
Don't let them confuse you / look for the bottom and its reason
remember they are seen the faces / but never the heart
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