Escuela Nueva

I found the notebooks abandoned in a school without roof or walls, in the village of Chicocora, on the shore of the Pacific in the region of Chocó. The sand was dark and the jungle the backdrop. A small village of African-Colombian fishermen. All displaced by the paramilitary horror. Wooden houses and palm roofs. In one of them, a mattress on the floor was rolled up like a seashell without dreams. That was in 1998. Never before had I heard a village without the voice of its people.

How could I forget Chicocora?

—JME