BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published January 28, 2010 — Updated January 31, 2010 21:19

In response to the current drug war in his home country, Colombia, Devid Rojas ’11 decided to begin a program, Taller de paz — meaning “Workshop for peace” in Spanish — that would provide internally displaced youth with a safe space to use art as a means of expression and empowerment.

A team of four Swarthmore students, Rojas, Alex Frye ’11, Camila Leiva ’09 and Andres Freire ’10, along with the organization Conciencia Social—Spanish for “social conscience”—launched Taller de paz in Bogotá, Colombia during the summer of 2009. The project has three specific goals: give refugees access to safe spaces and educational tools, teach them specific skill sets in the areas of technology and teamwork and guide them through the development of a final project that uses all the skills they’ve learned.

“Primarily, I was very interested in this because I felt people turned a blind side to it, either Colombians living in Colombia, Colombians living abroad, the world, or the government. And just like people in Colombia have learned to live with violence, people have learned to live with displacement,” Rojas said.

Currently, Rojas and Frye are seeking two committed students with proficient Spanish background to join the Taller de paz team. These students will become workshop leaders and collaborate with another member of Conciencia Social to develop lesson plans.

Colombia has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. For fifty years, an armed internal conflict, known as La Violencia, between drug dealers, guerilla insurgencies, militaries and paramilitaries in Colombia has forcibly pushed peasants, farm workers and villagers from their homes and into the outskirts of large cities where resources are scarce. Outside Bogotá, the capital, forty to fifty displaced families find refuge in the northern district of Suba every day. They often have to fend for themselves due to a lack of resources and governmental support.

After working with ESL students in Kennett Square, PA through Club Despertar and with children greatly affected by the 1992 Bosnian genocide after his freshman year, Rojas decided to gather a team of three other students, Frye, and develop a program to focus specifically on helping the children of displaced families in Bogotá.

Rojas discovered Conciencia Social, an organization initiated by two students of La Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá that has dealt specifically with this crisis since 2007.

“We got involved because we wanted to create room where people could be aware of the displaced people’s problem,” said Daniel Huerga, one of the founders of Conciencia Social, which partnered with Rojas and his team during the fall of 2008. “I’m pleased, working with Swarthmore students. They provide us [with] knowledge and compromise [and] they are very responsible with the project even though they are far away.”

The program offers displaced children ages 10 to 14 the opportunity to spend several weeks during the summer cycling through four workshops in photography, art, English literature and social justice. All workshops, focusing on empowerment and nonviolent self-expression, culminate in a concrete final project.

In the art workshop, children created murals exploring topics such as basic human rights and the importance of taking care of the environment. In the photography workshop students created digital stories about different people in their community. Taller de paz plans for the final projects to be displayed throughout the community as well as in the United States to spread awareness about the program and the current crisis in Colombia.

While Taller de paz shares many elements with traditional schools, members of the team try to make the workshops as much fun as possible for the students.

“[Taller de paz] is school-like in that we have workshops which are educational, but we try to run in a nontraditional style and very rarely was I ever standing up in front of them while they were sitting down and dictating a lesson,” Frye said. “Everything was very interactive and usually without desks or chairs or anything like that. It was kind of like a hybrid version of a camp and school.”

Last summer, the displaced families in Bogotá welcomed the program into their community. Parents transported their children to and from the program. It was customary for parents to invite members of Taller de paz to their homes for casual gatherings or to soccer tournaments to watch their children compete.

Rojas and Frye said the strong relationship formed between Swarthmore students and the community at Bogotá was the most significant accomplishment of the summer for the members of Taller de paz.

This upcoming summer, Rojas and his team hope to establish a parent committee in order to further the sustainability of the program. With input from parents and guardians, the program can adjust to the needs of the community and rely less on Swarthmore students.

“We’re looking for someone who is just really excited, who can really on some level connect to the crisis, who’s really about working with kids and social justice,” Rojas said.

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