El Intierno

On Sunday night a friend of mine was shot dead round the corner from where I live. He was 26.

All of monday there was an open casket with people drinking till the early hours of the morning, some people drinking Coffee and the majority Aguardiente. Then on Tuesday they buried him.

Death is a part of life here that everybody understands, they are accustomed to losing friends. Two of my friends were discussing that they go to work in the morning and never know if they are going to be coming home in the evening. This statement is true for everybody on all sides of the planet but somehow it seems all the more real here. I find it hard to grasp that for this community it´s part of life to be shot dead in the street at 26, that in the evening on the monday the majority were drinking and chatting as if it was a street party. Me included. It felt as if the majority of the people didn´t want to feel the grief, desperately scrabbling for any subject to talk about as long as it wasn´t the death. Two friends discussed grammar for about an hour with a passion like I had never seen. If they truly delved into the grief every time a friend was shot dead then they would go crazy, how would life continue. And the life here has to continue, for that everybody needs to develop a form for dealing with the losses that they suffer. But it´s a sad situation when you have to learn how to cope with forever losing friends before they´ve had a chance to live.

Everybody in this neighbourhood knows exactly who it was who shot this man dead but apparently nothing will happen. The man will go away for a while and when all has quietened down he will return. Perhaps a revenge killing but it depends who he was friends with. If anybody said anything to the police they would be killed. Neighbourhoods like these are policed from the inside and if you try and change that there are obvious repercusions. The other part that is difficult to bear is that the killer was eighteen. Where were you when you were eighteen? I know where I was and it wasn´t killing people on street corners for territory.

The grief of the family was absolutely intense. A friend of mine said to lose a father is painful but to lose a son is a pain unimaginable. He is right. Looking at the mother, father, three sisters and the brother I couldn´t begin to relate to what they were going through. I have lost some one very dear to me in my life, I have shared the grief of friends who have lost loved ones but this was a grief like I had never seen. A grief without reason.

The part that makes it all the harder to deal with was that this man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are things here called "Oficinas" which translates as an office. But this is where gangs control an area from, where they do all of their deals etc. Apparently an Oficina from another neighbourhood had problems with one from Verhel and a man from Verhel had come this night to kill a man to try and solve the problem. But he didn´t. He fired of a number of shots and shot my friend dead where he stood. This man was in the wrong place at the wrong time and now an entire neighbourhood has lost a friend, a family its son.

I don´t know how many people came to the burial but it must have been around five hundred. They had to hire six huge coaches all of which were completely full and there must have been about fifty motorbikes all escorting us. It was a moment I will never forget, six buses, the hirst, all of the cars with the familys and friends all trying to stay together on these busy roads, I would think it impossible. They managed it in a way only Colombians could. At every junction all of the motorbikes would drive up and baracade any traffic from entering so we could all stay together. And I´m not talking about little country roads I´m talking about big busy three lane roads. It´s like driving up Oxford Circus and using motorbikes to block any traffic from entering. Traffic control Colombian style.

And I´m not going to lie he wasn´t an extremely dear friend. If I saw him pass my house I wouldn´t invite him in for food but we would stop and chat if we saw eachother in the street, he used to come and watch when we played football, we drank together. My grief wasn´t one of losing a part of my life but in seeing the grief of others, watching how this loss affected a community but most of all a family. And all because somebody thought they had the right to take a life. This family will never really recover from this grief and there is no explanation as to why it is their son that is gone and not me or you. Solo La Vida Es Asi. It´s a common phrase here, roughly translated as That´s Life.

And now after two days of being together the life has to continue and everybody is joking, laughing, continuing with things as they were before. In two days. I don´t know if the family have gone back to work but everybody in the neighbourhood is continuing as normal. It´s as if nothing had happened. There is a feeling that if you stopped to mourn you would get left behind, everybody needs to put food on the table, everybody has bills to pay and if you stopped to really look at the shit I don´t know how you´d continue. The life here is delicious, beautiful and full of riches that money simply can´t buy but at the same time this is a part that I can´t really quantify or understand. I need more time.

It´s not the most up beat edition of my blog but I think an essential one if you want to understand the culture here.

Take care and live your life to the full.

Be open, caring and generous with all that you love because you can leave your house in the morning but really you never know if you are going to be coming back.