I feel like I should give a trigger warning before this post. It is not like I am going to go into great detail but there are certainly violent acts that I will write about.
Today we had a leisurely morning eating pancakes and fresh fruit at our place before we headed off to the House of Memory. This museum is a state-of-the-art place where the history of Colombia and of Medellin is kept. This huge building is three floors high and the top two floors are library and archives and study area. There was quite a bit of English (both written and subtitles) in this museum so we were able to follow a lot of it. Basically the idea behind this museum was keeping alive the diverse stories from the past. Although the museum went into the history of pre-colonial and colonial times (and this gave context to the present), it mostly focused on stories from the last 40 years. Both Rudy and I sat for a long time at a story slideshow that told individual stories about life in Colombia through the 70s to the present day. There were stories of activists and of regular people. The activists often told of the deaths of their friends and fellow activists but others told of random violent acts that occurred out of nowhere and the loss of friends in the everyday events of grabbing a drink at a bar after a day of university. A woman told the story of her rape by paramilitary persons when she was 11 and when her mother went to the authorities to report it, the mother was shot to death. But there was an element of truth and reconciliation because in recent years when this woman was gathering stories in an effort to foster healing amongst all sorts of people she traded stories with a man who had been in the paramilitary and had committed those same crimes as she was victim to. I will certainly carry these stories with me when I leave this place. This memory museum is an incredible national project filled with so much pain and so much hope for the future.
