Changing Plants and Lives: a journey into Los Llanos

Una gota. One drop. Ein Tropfen. In your palms, rub it and inhale it, close to your nose. Lemongrass. An intense smell, sensation, refreshing energy. For us, it brings back memories, the colours and sounds of Los Llanos, an extensive landscape of dry savannah plains and rivers of rainforest in Eastern Colombia. And the communities of Muruji and Guanapi, home to the hopes and dreams of a few families, re-finding their feet after years of fear.

Dona Rosa never wanted to produce cocaine, she told us, hiding the slight shake in her hands by clasping them tightly together. Her family moved here from Boyaca and had been working on this land for almost 30 years, growing basic crops, keeping chickens and cows - a few of which they took on the week-long trip to market twice a year to trade for the goods they couldn’t produce themselves, such as clothes, shoes, sugar, salt. In the 90s, guerilla groups took control of the region, to increase their financial income. Families were obliged to pay a charge on any goods brought in or out, gatherings were strictly controlled, teenagers and younger children ‘disappeared’ - taken to combat training camps or taken in as prostitutes. Families would be exempt, and helped, Dona Rosa was told, if they grew and processed coca. The guerillas would bring the items they needed from the markets from far away, in exchange for the processed good.

What choice did she have?

Coca took over their lives. The work was intensive, requiring long hours, in exchange for small sums or few goods. They had to use many chemicals, she explained, not only for growing the coca on the sandy soil, but also to process the leaves, hidden in sheds under trees. Illnesses plagued her and her husband’s lives. Fear and guilt coated their everyday actions.

Hope comes in small drops

At 5am, the first morning colours emerged as we set off with Mauricio in his weathered but carefully maintained pick-up truck, for the 14 hour journey ahead of us. The evening before had dropped us 3,000m on the 100km journey from Bogota, into these vast plains reaching towards Venezuela, a quarter of Colombia’s land mass, the size of Germany. Through the morning banks of fog emerged cattle grasslands, oilfields, monocultures of sugarcane giving way to miles of palmoil. Agricultural land reaching the border with savannah. Tarmac turning to gravel and disintegrating into mud-tracks. 

For the past 4 years, a few families at the end of these tracks now have an alternative. They are growing and distilling lemongrass, to be sold in Villavincencio and Bogota. “A market to be expanded to guarantee their income.” The never-tiring Mauricio drives every month to visit the families, to talk through their ideas for improving processes, deliver packages of ordered food, and pick up the glass bottles of distilled oil. He initiated this project with the families: gently teasing out their ideas for how they could give themselves another option, a product they may be able to sell to ensure an alternative, stable income. The small lemongrass plant, used by the families to make a medicinal tea, provided the answer. Mauricio’s tinkering engineering, designing a ‘field distillation process’, provided the next step. There is no NGO support, no grand charity providing back-up funding - only an engineer strongly motivated in his work for others, given energy from the hope these families distill. 

Mauricio offered to take us with him on his April trip. 5 days with a few isolated families in Los Llanos in their 'new lives’: the now chuckling, smiling Don Pedro, showing us proudly round his 'limonaria’, the ¼ hectare of lemongrass plants. The agile Don William, showing us how to fish in the small river by his house. The shy, warm Janet, washing her floors with a by-product from the lemongrass process ('hydrolata’, the distilled water with traces of lemongrass), which keeps the disease-carrying mosquitos away. Dona Isabel, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, filling us with home-ground 'arepas’, rice and 'revueltas’ and making us a tea with a few drops of lemongrass oil, to ward against stomach upsets, colds, and almost any other ailment possible.

Distilling their future

Don Pedro’s face clouded when he talked about the past with us. After a number of years under FARC control, Paramilitaries seized the region, killing anyone who was considered to have been helping the guerilla groups. They spared those who agreed to grow coca, to fuel their work. We drove across the flat, open lands to the house of Don Pedro’s neighbour, passing several wooden crosses in the savannah. Paramilitaries would kill random people in the small villages to keep their 'reign of fear’, we were told. A cold shiver runs down our backs.

We were greeted at Audelino’s house with a warm smile and a plate of freshly chopped pineapple. Don Pedro and Don Audelino are excited to show us their current lives - how they distill the lemongrass plants into oil. Pedro loads 30litres of water and about 40kg of the green leaves into a metal barrel, and feeds the fire underneath. The steam heats the lemongrass leaves, evaporating the water and essential oil within them, which rises, travelling through the 2nd hand metal tubes, until it condenses in the pipe construction at the end of the process. Drop by drop, their hope is collected in re-used bottles, cleaned and then transferred to the 10ml blue glass bottles. 

Climates of conflict

This area knows only two seasons: dry and rain. We are arriving at the beginning of the latter season. We are lucky enough to still have roads which are drivable - the ground is not yet completely flooded. But the families have suffered long months without rain - an especially harsh, dry, El Nino year.

Gilberto and Delio, the two sons of Dona Rosa, are enthusiastically perfecting their skills constructing 'Ram pumps’: using old plastic bottles and the deceleration force of a flow in a river to pump water up to the fields, without having to rely on a costly diesel generator. Mauricio encourages attentively as William adjusts the tilt of the air-compressor wind turbine, pulling water up to the house and fields of Don Pedro and Dona Isabel. ‘Ingeniero Campesino’ - engineers of the field - they are using the resources they have, and importantly, building themselves the skills they need - an important aspect of this project. There is no 'outside expert’ taking over the tasks, leaving technology which cannot be fixed in the field by those in the field.

The rain shows up the evening before we leave: 12 hours of unbreakable torrents. The distance between these families and their nearest town widens with the lakes and baths of mud on their 'road’ leading out. Nature determines your path and speed, at least in these parts of Colombia. Nothing perishable can be sold in the markets - it simply won’t get there on time, in one piece, with enough value to cover the costs of these distances.

The glass bottles of lemongrass oil lasts the journey.

In the morning, muddy tracks first have to dry. We eventually set off, with bags of mangoes, arepas, homemade cornbread, a last ceilidh dance and warm wishes.  Hopes are travelling with us. And the motivation of these families too. Lives are changing, with every drop.