Today Amy started a special project for the refugee program. We need to collect some of the stories of the Columbian refugees who have come to Chile, and we thought it would be good for a volunteer. It occurred to me that Amy would be perfect, since she has worked for many years in immigration offices helping Spanish speakers create affidavits telling their story. So, I asked her and she was nice enough to volunteer.
We went out today to visit a family that I knew, and after I introduced Amy, I left so she could interview the family. It went well, but it is quite a project for her. She recorded it and it is a long, complicated story.
In general, the situation in Columbia is a long, complicated story. Honestly, I don’t understand it, but it appears to be basically a multi-sided civil war (that Columbian and US politicians refuse to call a civil war). But I can tell you this. A person from FASIC went to Columbia for a conference on the conflict. And during the weekend she was there, 300 people died in violence. If you do the math, that would be 15,000 people a year, just on the weekends. More like 30,000 probably. And as for refugees, Columbia is the country with the third biggest number of refugees and “internally displaced” in the world—right behind Afghanistan and Iraq. And it’s right here in our hemisphere.
