Gabriel Jaime Vanegas: Rescuing La Loma's Historical Memory

PeriodismoCiudadano.com (CitizenJournalism.com) ConVerGentes Group Hiperbarrio Pilot Public Library San Javier-La Loma Medellín-Colombia Gabriel Jaime Vanegas http://esasvocesquenosllegan.wordpress.com/ Rescuing the Historical Memory of La Loma So, every step we've taken has led us to learning a lot, has led us to answering many of the questions that still remain We started asking ourselves questions, we began, for example, making the family trees for each one of us trying to investigate, to get a bit closer to the past and to the elderly, to our ancestors, to asking Why do the things that happen happen to us? Why it is you that live the conflict, for example? Exactly. Because we come from a community that for example, in this case, has faced a reality of a related violence the fight between armed groups and the Colombian state, and then we found that the possibility of having these kids meet in a library as customers of a library, as young kids that have questions and that we could translate these questions to looking at their history in a different manner that is, trying to identify in these questions simple aspects such as that eternal question that asks: why did this happen to us? Today we are just getting to see what it was that happened during the violence What was lost, what got broken as a community as a community used to being peaceful to not take part when faced with armed groups, that has great community processes that has a great cultural tradition that could go back between 300 and 400 years of history in the musical and artistical level All that reality, we had to ask ourselves, why it was happening to us And when we were able to get it and say: we are this way we found that 98% of the available information on the net speaks about the 13th Commune, the Orion Operation and the armed conflict and the question we all asked I think was: and where are all the living people? Where are we? and when one asks a quiestion such as this one in a library then what is the responsability we have as a public library What are the challenges this is leading us to because in adition to that, we found that when the people came to ask about the history of La Loma We found a type of brochure made by the religious organizations, for example the parish priests who had been here, but nothing else So then we asked: Where is that history? and we began to find in the possiblity to communicate, to use the blogs to use wikis, web logs, all these tools of participation the possibility to keep on working a bit in the rescue of the historical memory but thought from the perspective to answer the questions we have today Such as, why as young students we have to study, why we have work options or why not. where is that history that has made us what we are how to change a bit of that version of history so that when they tell the story of La Loma, that the history passes through the living history, the story that they are living. and for the history that they can tell through the eyes of a past that still affects them. I can understand it like a model generator of tact. Is it efficient? It has to do with making bonds again. So when whe ask ourselves what got broken believe me that behind that question there is a profound pain a profound reality that implies many dead, many victims and the presence in this community of words such as kidnapping, murder, violence, extorsion and intimidation and it is about understanding that today, in a certain measure from a library, with a group of young kids and through the use of web 2.0 tools we have the opportunity to have a community recognize itself anew and that we can recover what I would call the social weaving, because what we have managed is to have the community not just read them, but identify them as their youth, even as the crazy youth that go around taking pictures, asking things they shouldn't be asking making interviews, digging through their own history Interview made by: Jacingo Lajas /Elia E Espejo Medellín, September 2008 music: "Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)" by scottaltham http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747 periodismociudadano.com