Click here for more background [17]). The return took place amid new threats against the community. On September 26, the community reported that armed men identifying themselves as paramilitaries entered the house of a woman belonging to the community and threatened a massacre. (see www.cdpsanjose.org/article.php3?id_article=245 ) Amid the actions of combatants, the community continues. The following account by FOR team member Mireille Evans conveys how the war and daily farming life commingle.

It was a beautiful sunny morning. The sun was beaming down with much intensity, cleansing our pores. My team-mate Trish and I had gone up to the cocoa farm just outside the community houses toward the mountain. The cocoa trees were at their peak stage of production. A fruitful time for the community as it is one of their main cash crops. The colorful shades of green, yellow and red pods hung from the lichen-licked and twisted branches. They were ripe, waiting patiently to be picked.

We were on a mission to collect cocoa pod compost to enrich the soil in the garden behind our house. We filled our bags and had begun to trudge back, each with a big bag of heavy seeping compost, when we heard a helicopter overhead. Emerging from under the canopy of the cocoa trees, we searched the sky to spot the military machine. It didn’t take long to locate the mechanical dot circling the community. The inhabitants of La Unión who had not yet gone to work seemed unconcerned about the recent arrival of the helicopter, having become used to having it pass overhead over the past decades. We watched as it made a big circle in the cloudless sky, encompassing La Unión – where we live - as well as one of the five Peace Community Humanitarian Zones, Arenas Altas. A Humanitarian Zone is made up of Peace Community members committed to not being part of the armed conflict, who do not live in the two main communities.

Arenas Altas is composed of about seven families about an hour walk over a mountain from La Unión. Previously it was the third community that made up the Peace Community. However after the massacre in February of last year, it became a Humanitarian Zone. Most of those who live there have been displaced from their land in other, higher conflict zone areas and resettled to this nest of houses. They are living here physically, yet in their hearts still long to return to the homes and farms from which they were uprooted. This is also the community that has been subjected to the most recent violence: two members have been killed in the last year and combat has occurred disconcertingly close to them.

After a while of watching the helicopter, we returned to our garden work and daily activities. The helicopter persisted circling for a few hours. At one point we heard a round of shots come from the air when the helicopter was above Arenas Altas, and we raced out from our house. Throughout the morning explosions and shots could be heard from that direction. We waited.

At 3 o’clock, a community leader came to ask us to accompany a group to go to Arenas Altas to investigate, as they heard someone had been taken by the military. We gathered our cell phone, satellite phone, ID’s, and a bottle of water, slipped into our gumboots, put on our campesino hats and joined the others all set to go. Our small group grew in numbers and diversity from four to nine men, women and children as we proceeded.

The path was getting swallowed in vigorously growing vegetation. It is also a path notorious for having copious amounts of liquid earth, known as mud. We slogged our way through the goo, trying to go quickly. Although my feet are not as agile and sturdy as those of the campesinos, I only fell a few times into a muddy embrace. When we arrived in Arenas Altas, we were all relieved to find it quiet, the people gathered at a few houses. We went to talk with them to get their account of what had happened earlier that day and see how they were doing.

Luckily that day, there had been no fighting within their community, although there had been to the near north and south of them. They had been hearing shots and bomb explosions all day, constantly worrying that the fighting would approach, trapping them in the middle of somebody else’s war. Their heartbeats had returned to a normal pulse and they offered us some much appreciated juice. They also shared with us the account of a woman who lives a short walk away from the main collection of houses. She had been visited by the military and accused of being a guerrilla, and was lucky they left her without harming her or her family.

This was just another example of a conflict being fought with little concern for those uninterested in it. They are interested in living their lives on the land peacefully and in community, with hope that their commitment to nonviolence and politically risky stance of refusing participate in the conflict will bring a peaceful place for their children to live. We stand with them in solidarity as they continue their struggle for the betterment of our planet.