Turbaco, 1 May 2017

My dear,

I’m writing to you from Turbaco, in Bolívar. This time, life has gifted me the pleasure of spending three days with my mum.

It’s been a hectic week, the kind you city people have. The list of good news stories for Motete is long. So is the list of things I’ve learned. It’s very encouraging to compare ourselves to other organisations and see that we’re on the right track.

I’m going to take part in some projects to train teachers and librarians with the Terpel Foundation and Fundalectura, and another with the SM Foundation, and we’ve begun a joint project with Arcadia for our new festival, FLECHO (Fiesta de Lectura y Escritura del Chocó), which will have the theme Reading the Jungle.

But there are three painful things I want to tell you, which have slipped in among the words and books:

1. Cote Lamus’ Diario del Alto San Juan y del Atrato has finally been published. They did a good job, as always. I’m pleased, but I can’t help feeling sad that an idea of mine, which I saw as an opportunity to raise funds for our activities, ended up being carried out by other people – people I trusted. In the end they just sent me a note thanking me for submitting the text and asking for an address where they could send a copy that never arrived. They basically took the project away from me, even though what I’d asked for was a price estimate for publishing a certain number of copies that we could then sell, with permission from Cote Lamus’ children, to raise funds. They hadn’t even known about the text before that, but they fell in love with it and kept it.
2. The time has come to publish the end product of the diploma, the Satchel of Pacific Stories. But by the final stage, there was so much bad feeling that all the happiness I felt about my story being published had gone. They erased us completely: the invitation doesn’t mention the writers, or include a photo of us. It says: ‘Four weeks of creative immersion produced new stories from Afro-Colombian communities about the forests (jungles) of the Colombian Pacific.’ As if the stories wrote themselves, and as if it were possible to be immersed in what you already are.
3. A love that never happened. I told you a while ago that I was keen to get the better of a muddle in my head, or my heart, I wasn’t sure which. Well, I was talking about the beginning of a love affair, but I think it was further along in my imagination than it was in reality. Eventually the tangle in my head came undone, and it stayed in the category of a love affair that never was. It still hurts a little, I admit. But I don’t know if the pain is because it never happened, or if it’s awkwardness and anger because some of the love is still there, even though nothing ever came of it. The problem is that I’m at risk of running into the object of this love face-to-face, and I don’t know how I might feel.

Although I’ve reflected a lot on being married and at the same time letting myself feel the passions or interests that bring me life, I sometimes find myself worrying about the idea of being a woman who has eyes for no one but her husband. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler to have my head in a single place, without the distractions that, although they have the charm of flirtation, sometimes lead to things like this awkward and even painful episode. But in the end I come back to the idea that this is my way of loving and perhaps it can’t be changed.

I decided to write to the publisher and express my dissatisfaction about the book. I decided to write to my teachers from the diploma and tell them I’m annoyed about what happened in the final stage. Words help me work through my emotions. But in the case of the love affair, I think the words could be misunderstood and end up saying something I don’t mean, or beginning an unnecessary chapter. So I don’t have anything to write to that love interest. I can only write a little to you. And meanwhile I wait, hoping that when I see him face to face I’ll find that the emotions really have been processed. Fingers crossed.

Lots of love,

Vel