Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal

Author:Velia Vidal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: tidal waters;Velia Vidal;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2024-03-19T12:50:06+00:00

Quibdó, 29 March 2017

Dear friend,

It’s just sixty days since Casa Motete opened its doors. In sixty days we’ve begun our first programme of activities, we have seven children’s reading clubs on the go, we’ve been visited by Maité Hontele and Teresita Gómez, we’ve run a workshop for teachers (Motete on the road), we’ve set up a teachers’ club with twenty-three members and we’ve run workshops with children in eight different educational settings in Quibdó.

I’ve travelled twice as a guest to national events. We’ve opened this café every day and now we’ve bought a new café as well. There have been concerts, panel discussions and films, and we now hold a story time with regular visitors, from Monday to Friday.

Of the sixty days, I’ve cried on about twenty. Sometimes from joy, and many more from stress. I cry for a bit and then go back to work. On some days I’ve been exhausted, and on others I’ve been bursting with energy.

One of the most painful moments was the death of Brayan. He never missed a story time, and used to borrow books and take them home with him. He understood everything. At just nine years old, he could play the saxophone like a pro. Days earlier he’d asked me about the language in some of our books, and if I thought it was suitable for a child. We talked for a bit about the magic of books, how they can have anything in them and it’s up to us to decide what to take and what to leave.

We read together one day, then the next day he didn’t turn up and the day after that I left for a trip. I was in Bogotá when Roge called to say that something bad had happened to one of the local kids, the ones who came to story time. I flatly refused to listen. Annoyed, I told him not to pass on speculation, and to do me a favour and go to the house and ask what had happened. A few hours later he called back and said the child had died. Something genetic in his head, which there’d been no way of knowing about or preventing, took his life.

I cried uncontrollably. Everyone in Motete and the neighbourhood cried. Lili helped me think through what to do next. She suggested we do something at story time when I got back, just to heal our souls. And that’s what we did. Every day we read a story that made us think about life and death, and about the pain and sadness we feel when other people leave us. Brayan’s sister, cousins and friends were all in the group.

Without knowing it, we were weaving a strong bond with the community. The end of the week, the very day the last novena was said for Brayan, was also Brayan’s birthday. That day we made a cake and invited the music teacher and his family, and we read, sang and celebrated Brayan’s life.

There have been days when

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