March 27-April 6, 2009
Youth Arts and Action Delegation

Building on last year’s dynamic Youth delegation and the fall 2008 Drop Beats Not Bombs Tour, this spring 2009 delegation and organizers exchange to Colombia will continue to expand the network of youth in the US and Colombia who are seeking creative ways to resist militarism. This delegation will also be the focus of a documentary film produced by two participants through the Dar Papaya Project. The Dar Papaya Projects seeks to “tell the story of the delegation through individual experiences of the participants in the form of a film. The film will focus on the meeting of youth from different backgrounds and cultures, what happens when they come together, share their personal experiences and interact while in Colombia.”

August 15-29, 2009
Delegation to San José Peace Community, Medellín and Eastern Antioquia

Witness the incredible commitment and experience of the Peace Community of San José and other Colombian grassroots initiatives. To download an application, please click here.

2009 FOR Delegation to Colombia Program Highlights:

Youth and Arts Action Delegation, March 2008

By Liza Maytok Smith

Hurricane Katrina was what did it for Escenthio. At his school in Oakland, he was enrolled in a JROTC program (an army prep course given in high schools) and would have been on his way to joining the military. But one of his teachers invited him to a benefit event about the victims of the hurricane and it made Escenthio question his involvement in the class and our country’s priorities in general. As he said, “why are we over there killing people in Iraq when there are people in need right here?” Soon afterwards, he decided to organize a debate in his school around these issues and invited the JROTC army officers to the table alongside Pablo Paredes, a well-known conscientious objector. The debates created quite a stir -- and Escenthio became one of the central youth activists of BayPeace, an Oakland-based organization doing counter-recruitment work in high schools.

The Buddhist Peace Fellowship has posted dispatches written by participants in FOR's April 2007 delegation to Colombia.

Read the dispatches here

An excerpt:
We went to a displaced settlement with community leaders and ate a delicious lunch in a cinder block house with a partial roof. Leaders described many of the challenges of their new city life here and the lack of implementation and enforcement of laws guaranteeing displaced people's rights. Hunger and unemployment is much worse in the city for them - one leader described how their rural life had always sustained them, even large families, but in the jungle of concrete that is their new city life, they can barely eat, much less buy the notebooks needed to attend the "free" schools. We were amazed to learn that the poverty we saw there was a "2" on the Colombian stratus system, which ranges from 1 (or 0) to 6. One delegate commented that our perspective on the situation here (because of our working environment, something we've discussed at length) was evident in how livable we felt this dirt-poor settlement was, compared to others we had seen. You know your point of reference is unusual when a cinder block house project with no sources of income and a few tin roofs seems not so bad.