“Migrating is crying, crying every night, abandoning your dreams, abandoning the life you had built. For me, that’s what migration is, leaving everything I had achieved.”
This is how Damaris*, a Colombian migrant returnee from Venezuela who returned to Maicao, in La Guajira, more than six years ago, together with her parents, partner and children, including Esmeralda*, her eldest daughter, a 17-year-old teenager, begins her story.
Damaris continues her story: “I had two houses for my children, all my things, I had a very good job that I liked, and from one day to the other – there is no water, there is no food – we had to pack our bags and leave”, she refers to the moment when she and her partner and parents made the decision to migrate to Colombia to restart their lives, especially for their sons and daughters.
Restarting was a complex process, “hard” as Damaris describes it, but she assures that in the last two years she has felt calmer, because they were able to find work, her children have access to formal education, they have a living space in La Pista, the largest settlement of migrant population in Colombia, and she participates with her children in the project Joining Forces – Child Protection in Emergencies.
Damaris and Esmeralda are leaders in their community and play an important role in contributing to the protection of children and adolescents. Damaris says with great pride that she is part of the Community Child Protection Team and Esmeralda is a so called community agent.
Esmeralda says: “I am a community agent, the knowledge has been very rewarding because I learned to play guitar, I learned to play frisby, soccer and that are actions to strengthen teamwork. The topics we have touched on are assertive communication, empathy, resilience, also being autonomous, they have taught us to make our own decisions when we do not know what to do and to have the solution to that problem”.
Esmeralda continues: “We arrive half an hour before the teacher, we organize the space for the meeting, we receive the children who always arrive an hour before. Being a community agent has taught us to be very responsible, because we make the children responsible for us, we are always like “come here, don’t leave because something might happen to you”, and it is very gratifying to see that the children recognize us as community agents, where they see us, they identify that he/she is an agent and it has taught us not to walk in bad steps, to walk on a good path to set an example for the children”.
Damaris defines her leadership as follows: “We are here and they strengthen us, so that the children do not miss school, we as mommies come and report to the teacher that this is happening in this house, and the teachers are alert, they teach us the referral pathways. I practically never leave here, I come through the network, I come as a community mother, I am always looking after the children, when the leader is not here I come and open the door for them, I fix things, I am always here with the teachers. And for the children, this is their second home.
Transforming lives: the profound impact of the project for Esmeralda
For Esmeralda the project has changed her life: “it gives us a lot, it is something very impactful in our lives. In my personal life it helps me to learn to be empathetic with other people, to have an assertive communication because otherwise how do we understand other people and the situation they are living, team work, to know how to treat each other, since we are young and have different opinions, we have had to sit down and discuss our differences, but in a way that brings back assertive communication, to know how to respond to things. In young children we have seen a lot of change, because they no longer choose to yell at each other or fight.
They work as a team, they present their things to each other, it is something very impactful in their lives and in the lives of their parents, because they see the change in the child’s attitude”.
And she concludes: “First of all, thank you for your support and for always keeping us in your hearts for this beautiful project that you are giving us. May you always keep us in your heart, here you have a family that is waiting for you with open hearts. You have left a positive message in us, those of us who are part of the village, we are villagers, I consider myself a villager at heart, the truth is very nice and I would love that many people know the work that is being done here, and thank you from the bottom of my heart, it is very gratifying to have spent this time with you and all that we have learned. The only thing I can do is to thank you for everything you have taught me”.
*Name changed for protection.
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This publication was produced with the financial support of the German Humanitarian Assistance
Its contents are the sole responsibility of Joining Forces and do not necessarily reflect the views of the German Humanitarian Assistance.