Rebuilding hopes

Anastasia Moloney -

When fighting in Colombia forced Everlides Almanza to abandon her farm, she ended up in a slum near the coastal city of Cartagena where with only some plastic tarpaulin to shelter her, she longed for a new home. She dreamed of a brick building with a sturdy roof and a tiled porch — she just never expected to be the one to build it.

After arriving in the slum in 1992, Almanza and dozens of other destitute families who had also been uprooted by the conflict met human rights lawyer Patricia Guerrero, who helped organise them into a group.

The League of Displaced Women — many of them single mothers and war widows — went on to build a new neighbourhood of 102 houses on the once barren bushland in Turbaco, a municipality near Cartagena.

It became known as the City of Women.

“We learnt about construction, how to make bricks and mix cement,” Almanza told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as she sat in a rocking chair under the shade of a mango tree.

“We had to fight to build our own homes. Some people said women weren’t capable of doing this,” the 60-year-old said.

Since the first house was built in 2004, the neighbourhood of brightly painted green and pink facades and tree-lined streets has been cited as an example of rebuilding that other communities emerging from conflict could emulate.

While men live in the City of Women, it’s the women who are in charge, bolstered by property deeds in their own names.

“Here women call the shots,” said Maritza Marimon, another league member. “We fought tooth and nail to build our homes. Men can’t come here and say this is mine. It’s ours.”

A peace deal signed in December between the government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) has raised hopes the 7 million Colombians displaced by war can return home or put down permanent roots. Yet roughly half of all the displaced live in cities, many settling in makeshift shelters in hillside slums, often with no land tenure rights and no running water.

How Colombia ensures its displaced population has access to housing is key to forging lasting peace and rebuilding their lives, political analysts say. For many, the City of Women — where residents joined forces to build houses together and petition for title deeds — could prove the model to follow. Back in the 1990s when the women lived in Cartagena’s slums, Guerrero vowed to help the women lift themselves out of poverty.

When she asked them about their most urgent need, most replied they wanted a house they could call their own.

“With a house, your rights are restored,” said Guerrero, who founded the League of Displaced Women.

Guerrero eventually secured funding, most of it from a $500,000 grant from the US Agency for International Development, to buy a plot of land on which the City of Women was built. — Reuters