The weather in Goshen was totally perfect for most of May! Warm and sunny – and in Bogota the sun sets at 6pm every day forever, so it was nice to have light late into the evening. Just right for dinner the backyard:

For variety, we also ate on the front porch. Lots of tastiness from the farmer’s market & rachel’s breads:

A very sad story in today’s New York Times talks about the increased pressure – through violence, killings and displacement – on some of Colombia’s many indigenous groups in remote regions of the country. As previously demobilized paramilitary groups re-form into new drug trafficking organization they are moving into indigenous territories (Indian groups in Colombia have the right to collective, ancestral territories) on the Pacific coast and displacing large numbers of people. The guerrilla groups in the same area not only clash with these new groups, but are have also committed displacements and massacres.

Wars for Drug Turf Threaten Existence of Colombia’s Indians

Here’s an excerpt from the article – there’s also an audio slideshow:

“…Up and down the rivers of western Colombia, a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into the jungle, fighting with guerrillas who have been long in the Chocó region for control of the cocaine trade, and forcing thousands of Indians to flee.

It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia’s long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.

But as Colombia’s war for control of the drug trade intensifies in frontiers like this one, with new combatants vying for smuggling routes and coca-growing areas where Indians eke out a meager existence, it is adding to the already grave toll on the nation’s indigenous groups. At least 27 of the groups are at risk of being eliminated because of the country’s four-decade conflict, according to the United Nations, and human rights organizations worry that the new violence is pushing even deeper into the Indians’ ancient lands.

The battles are unfolding far from largely pacified cities like Bogotá, where a newly confident government acclaims recent military advances against leftist rebels and the demobilization of thousands of paramilitary fighters….

…these new armed groups, stripped of their old ideological bents, are forging alliances with rebels in some parts of the country while going for their throats in others, like this swath of Chocó, according to security analysts. Either way, their objective remains the same: dominance over coca-growing areas and routes to ship cocaine abroad, predominantly to the United States.”

As always, feel compelled to photograph what we eat…
We stopped on the highway on the way to Cali for breakfast and ate Juan’s preferred breakfast item: changua. Changua is basically hot milk with lots of cilantro, cheese, and a whole egg that’s dropped in and cooked in the milk.  Then you put some bread in it…it’s a lot better than it sounded to me at first, but I think to really love it you have to be like Juan’s whose grandmother made it for him when he was little.

In our tour of Valle de Cauca we had a giant sancocho de gallina lunch – it was delicious. Sancocho is a chicken soup – the broth is also made with yucca, plantains and potato (ratio depending on the region of the country) and is always brought out with additional chicken, yucca, plantain, rice, etc.. and you add as desired to your bowl of soup. A little hard to see there, but you can see our giant platter of chicken and platanos.

Our travel diet involved a large number of empanadas – in Popayan we ate tasty, tiny empanadas de pipian, which are made from little yellow potatoes and peanuts with additional peanut hot sauce added when you eat them. We then had an in-depth comparison with some very good meat empanadas from Cali, at traditional empanada consuming spot:

The fruits were mostly the same as what we can get in Bogota – although there are lots of concord grapes in the area, so we drank a lot of delicious fresh grape juice (and sampled some fairly bad local wine)…I did try zapotes - I didn’t love the flavor, but it looks great when a big pile of them are for sale on the side of the road because they’re a very dull, bark-looking brown on the outside and an outrageous bright orange inside. (here’s a photo – even though it doesn’t quite do justice to the extreme orange). Also tried these delightful, tart, little berries whose name I have totally forgotten: