03-12-2021
During the last Orange the World campaign, WO=MEN published six different portraits of women human rights defenders from around the world. Courageous women, who have dedicated their lives to their cause. And who have chosen not to be a victim, but a fighter. This is part three: environmental defender Juana Esquivel, member of Fundación San Alonso, and protected by IM-Defensoras.
Stories by Makena Ngito.
Dear Diary,
Today, again, they refused to lend me their bikes. I don’t know why they keep doing that, like I won’t come back again the next day and ask again. Or better yet, I wasn’t going to ‘borrow it without permission’ and go wherever I wanted to go. The land was big and fertile, with small pathways to ride on across the thickest of forests and most beautiful of farms.
Anyways, today, I really wanted some fruit. It was a nice sunny day and I knew that Mama’s farm had lots of beautiful goodies hanging from the trees. So I ‘borrowed’ a bike, again, and rode off. Enjoying the feel of the sun on my body and the gentle breeze on my face. I got there, and the land was giving, kind with its blessings, wholly generous. Got some oranges, mangoes, sugarcane, just a whole basketful of fruit.
Now, as a kid, you live life as you go. The whole experience of childhood is a learning curve, and that’s exactly what happened today. My basket didn’t have a lid, and I’d also conveniently forgotten that my ride on the way here was up a hill, which meant the ride on the way back would be? Yup, you guessed it.
I’m not even done with the little surprises this story holds. Something I didn’t know was that this particular bicycle had no brakes, so the minute I got to the top of the hill, it was just downwards from there. Anyone who might have been viewing this whole scene from afar would have been viewing one of the most hilarious things you could see on a random day. Here’s a little girl on a bike, practically rolling down a hill on ‘her’ bike, and her hair isn’t the only thing flying about. Remember the basket without a lid that I mentioned earlier? Well, that comes into play here, because I’m watching all the fruit fly out and fall to the sides. It’s about 200 metres before I manage to come to a stop, and I can’t start going back up again. So there I am, a little girl without fruit, but with one hell of a story to tell.
1ST OF DECEMBER 2021.
Dear Diary,
I don’t remember the last time I opened up these pages, but I’m trying to be more conscious with my feelings and thoughts. We started a little circle with my closest girlfriends, where we meditate, and talk about spirituality with a glass of wine in hand. It’s not easy doing the kind of work we do. I’ve been fighting since I was twenty. Fighting a narco-dictatorship, fighting the military, fighting rich corrupt land owners, fighting the patriarchal system that demands to control and feigns it to be leadership.
Living like this, always on the edge, can take a heavy toll on you. And you don’t realize it, since the cause is so important and you can actually see some results, till you sit down and clock that you’ve spent all your adult years on the frontline against structures that were established centuries ago to crush people like you. And you haven’t rested. Heck, your body doesn’t know how to rest now, even.
So it’s important that I farm, and I take a particular interest to only have plants that give me flowers or fruit, because I need to be gentle with myself, I need to see beauty in my backyard. I need to snip away and propagate plants and see them take root so slowly yet surely, and this reminds me to breathe, to slow down, to rest. That eventually, what is good will come.
The land I’ve talked about that bears fruit and has sustained my people is the same land giving us grief, and not because it’s dry or barren, but because the same people who are supposed to lead and govern us are the same people trying to steal this land away.
When the hurricane in 1998 hit, afterwards, peasant farmers reclaimed the land for food. To use it to feed their communities, but right after that is when all the trouble began. This was when the rich discovered that not only did the land give food, but it was also full of resources, from minerals to rocks, the soil was blessed. And you can see what viewing that from a capitalistic lens will lead to.
With the locals starting to see threats of dispossession coming in, they fought back. You would too, since this is your home, your ancestry, your source of life. But you can’t match up to rich land owners who hob nob with the violent narcotics dealers in government, who will in turn send a heavy military presence to further push away the locals.
And I use the word ‘push’ very lightly. What the peasant farmers got as punishment was loss of lives, people murdered by military forces or goons who don’t answer to anyone. There was persecution, there was loss of property, both land and personal goods. And they tried to frame it as a voluntary migration, as if there exists a people who would just up and leave their homes and go to far worse areas, just for fun.
*Is, that’s the word to use.
Because just recently I had to escape to a safe house because my life was at risk, for fighting for what is right for my people.
The worst thing, or maybe one of the worst things about all these extractive forms taking over, is that they won’t care for the land like we have. Instead they’ll abuse it, just like they’ve abused women, they’ll take from it all that it has to give, and when it’s not beneficial to them anymore, they’ll leave it like a carcass out in the dry desert.
And the women. My goodness the women have suffered. Just like in any conflict or war, the people that give life and nurture, are the same ones that are abused and forgotten. There’s the physical abuse, rape, murder… and there’s the subtle erasure of our very evident work in this struggle. The overall degradation of human rights affects women more, we are excluded from every mention and every decision, only remembered when it’s time to please those who abuse us.
The lives and bodies of women are at risk.
My people have been turned into a political laboratory. What is simply an experiment of gain to these people for me and others is a daily fight for our lives. Sigh, imagine having to fight to live. And not against lions or other wild animals, but against fellow human beings.
But we have hope. Because we know that they see us now. They push at us with big trucks and guns but we fight back with our communities and hearts.
They notice us now, and for them it might be as annoying as swatting off a bee that keeps coming back, knowing that you are mightier than the bee but stand no chance against a swarm.
They hear our buzz. And even the mightiest of weaponry couldn’t defeat a swarm of bees, and you know who’s at the head?
The queen.
About the author:
Bios are interesting to me, and I’ll use one of my favourite things in the world to summarize it. They’re like trying to fit the vastness of the ocean, it’s size, beauty and might, into a glass. My name is Makena Ngito, and I’m a writer. I use words to describe myself, to explain things actions couldn’t show and to capture the beauty of my thoughts in a paragraph when speech fails me. I hope you like my words. I hope they light up that little part of you that you’d forgotten exists, and I hope they stay in your memories forever too.
