Archive 2008
Colombia: Brighter Futures Through Entrepreneurship
2 October 2008
Posted by Gaddi Vasquez on Oct 02, 2008 - 09:17 AM
About the Author: Ambassador Gaddi H. Vasquez is the 8th U.S. Representative to the United Nations Organizations in Rome.
Around
the port city of Cartegena today I traveled in and out of poor
neighborhoods that would make even the most optimistic person despair.
Urban slums with precarious living conditions: putrid water seeping
down crevice-filled dirt roads and pooling in front of makeshift houses
without windows, donkeys attached to carts, young kids in their
underwear standing in doorways. A place called home for the displaced
of Colombia and for many of its Afro-descendants.
Families on
the run who are drawn to these quarters find few if any social
services. The group of Latin American reporters accompanying me on this
trip and I were deeply moved by this reality and by the work of an
80-year-old Belgian nun who helps to keep women and children of Barrio
Nelson Mandela from slipping through the cracks. An education in
nutrition is what Sister Ines and her staff offer the young mothers,
some in their early teens. With food from the United States delivered
through the World Food Program, mothers are drawn into her health
clinic to learn how to provide the necessary care to their newborns to
keep them alive and well.
Education comes in the form of useful
training at the Minuto de Dios Corporation’s vocational center
supported through a World Food Program food-for-training initiative. I
was impressed students engaged in an array of programs the center
offers, from the art of hair dressing to Baking 101. The students learn
skills that they can apply immediately in the local market.
Possibly
because of such excellent training programs, even in these cramped
neighborhoods, entrepreneurship is taking root. Today I witnessed a
community in San Basilio de Palenque, a UNESCO cultural heritage site
recognized for its strong ancestral ties to Africa, working together to
create a village micro-enterprise of production and marketing of
traditional sweets for mutual benefit. They compete for funds provided
by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). My
group also spent time learning how two young displaced men transformed
their lives through a small business. One has built a thriving sausage
factory with twelve employees out of a one-man backyard production
operation. The other operates a mini-market in Barrio Olaya Herrera.
These examples showed us how the displaced, through emergency
humanitarian assistance, are lending a hand to their neighbors who have
even greater needs.
Tomorrow we travel to Bogotá, Colombia’s
capital, for a stop in Soacha, the neighborhood that receives the
highest number of displaced in the country. Hasta manana.