Yeny and the Children for Peace (8 page)

In the two weeks before the vote, Yeny was hardly ever home. She was always busy talking to other children, making signs about the election, or visiting Rocio next door.

“I'm so happy you're making friends,” her mother said one evening. She was cutting thick
yuca
root on a plastic plate, first slicing away the waxy brown skin, and then chopping the rest into big chunks. (Yeny hoped she was making
sancocho
, a delicious soup full of meat, potatoes, plantains, and yuca.) Mamá finished chopping one root and grabbed another. Then the
clack clack
of her knife stopped for a moment, and she turned to Yeny. “I'm proud of you for helping to organize the next party too, you know. I was pretty worried about you on the day of the last one. I know you had your heart set on going.”

Yeny squirmed in her seat and stared down at her homework. Mamá was being so nice that she almost felt guilty for not telling her about the election. Adult elections could be very dangerous, with bombs and everything, and since there had never been an election for kids before, no one knew if it would be any different.
Personally, Yeny thought the armed groups would look pretty silly if they got scared of a bunch of kids. But she didn't know if her parents would agree. They seemed afraid of everything these days. When she talked to them, she would have to stay calm and make sure she didn't say anything scary.

“I only want to make friends, Mamá,” she said. “It's lonely here in the city sometimes. I miss always having something to do in the village, and I especially miss María Cristina.”

Mamá started slicing a carrot. “Well, you seem to be doing a great job of fitting in,” she said. “I like to see you come home from your meetings so excited. Both your father and I are proud of you.”

Even if you won't let me go to the peace carnivals
, Yeny thought. She wondered for the fiftieth time, how on earth to tell her parents about the election, and how to convince them to let her go. Obviously, Elena wasn't going to be any help in that department. Yeny would have to do the convincing herself. But she still had time to figure it out. First, she had to spread the word—everywhere.

≴My parents won't let me go,” Beto announced at the meeting a few days later. There were more kids gathered on the field today. And across the street more men were gathered at the café, as though they too were spreading the word about the children's meetings. A breeze blew up dust from the street, and Yeny wiped the grit from her face. She still missed the cool, clean mountain air.

“My parents won't let me go either,” said the girl with short pigtails. She was wearing blue bobbles today. “They said the grupos armados aren't going to like us complaining about the way things are. The election could be dangerous.”

Yeny shivered. She hoped that the frightened adults weren't
right. But she still thought it was silly to imagine that the armed groups would be afraid of a bunch of kids. Everyone knew that, no matter how many kids voted in the election, they couldn't make sure kids were protected. Only grown-ups could do that. The election was a way for children to say what they thought.

“It's hard not to be scared,” Celia said. She spoke louder than usual so the kids at the back could hear. “You never know what could happen. But part of our job in organizing this election is to make it as safe as possible.”

She looked ready to say something else when a car with a big megaphone turned onto the street near the field and started blaring messages about some church or other. Yeny sighed, and they all waited.

It took a long time before the car rolled past and its noise faded into the distance. Celia cleared her throat and tried again. “So how can we make this election safe?”

“My dad's a policeman,” David said. “We should get the police to protect us.” He grabbed an imaginary gun and made clicking noises, as though he were loading it. “Then everybody would know that they can't mess with us kids.”

Yeny tried not to make a face. The police near her village had threatened people and sometimes demanded money.
They
certainly didn't make her feel safe, and she wondered if the police in the city would be any different.

“There must be another way,” said Elena. She, Rosa, and Sylvia were coming to every meeting now. Yeny suspected that Aunt Nelly would let her children go to the election. But even
that
probably wouldn't convince Yeny's parents to let her and Elena attend. Elena paused, then kept on talking. “I mean, aren't we trying to stand up against violence? It would look pretty funny to have a big election with white balloons, white doves for peace, and peace-protest music, and a bunch of guys standing around with guns.”

“But how else can we make sure it's peaceful?” David wanted to know. “You've got to protect yourself, right?”

Yeny frowned, and she turned to see the expressions on people's faces. She spotted Joaquin beyond the edge of the group. His arms were folded over his chest, and he was looking in the other direction, as though he wasn't part of the meeting, but why else would he have come to the field? She smiled and turned back to face Celia, before he spotted her.

“Elena's right,” said a girl in a green and white high school uniform. “There has to be another way to make the election safe. So many adults—and sometimes kids too—use violence to solve things. But in lots of places, people do get things done peacefully.”

No one said anything for a few moments, and then Yeny had an idea. The others would probably think it was pretty dumb—
especially Joaquin—but nobody else was making suggestions, and some idea was better than nothing. “What if we ask the grupos armados not to be violent that day?”

Sure enough, she heard a few snorts of laughter. But Celia glared at the snorters so angrily that they fell silent immediately.

Rocio was standing next to Yeny. She didn't laugh, but she didn't look convinced either. “Grown-ups have been asking the grupos armados to stop the violence for ages. Why would they listen to us?”

“Because we're
kids,”
said Yeny, trying to sound like she didn't care about people laughing at her. “Because they probably have children too, and we're doing such a good job of spreading the word that some of those kids will probably come to the election. And their parents wouldn't want anything to happen to
them.”

“We've got nothing to lose by trying, right?” Celia said. “Maybe we could send them letters.”

“But where will we send the letters?” Elena asked. “You can't just write grupo armado on an envelope and take it to the post office.”

Yeny scowled. Now Elena was making her look silly.

“And do we all have to write?” asked the girl in pigtails. “It takes me forever to write anything. I'd rather do something else.”

“And where are we going to get the supplies from, anyway?” called someone from the back. “Some of us barely have enough for our schoolwork.”

“Okay, okay,” Celia said, pulling her notebook and a pen from her back pocket. “Let's think about this for a minute.” She chewed on her pen lid. “Who can bring us paper, pen, and envelopes?”

A few hands went up. Celia asked for names, scribbled them down, and asked for five people who would be part of a letter-writing team. More hands rose, and she scribbled down more names. “Now what else do we need?”

“The names of who to write to,” Elena said, still looking unconvinced.

This time, no one raised a hand to suggest anything. The crowd was silent.

“Well,” said Celia, “who would be in contact with the groups? And who do we know who might know them?”

More silence. Then a boy at the back said, “What about journalists? They have to talk to the groups to be able to write about them, right? Does anyone know any journalists?”

“My dad knows a guy who works for the newspaper,” said one of the girls in the high school uniforms. “We could ask him for suggestions.”

Again Celia's pen flew over the paper. “These are great ideas.
Together, we know hundreds of people, and I bet someone will be able to help us out.”

Suddenly, everybody started talking at once. “My uncle might know someone at the radio station.” “My mother works for a TV channel.” “I bet that newspaper reporter who talked to our class last year would help. Wasn't that Oscar's older brother?” Within seconds, everyone seemed to know someone who could help.

Only Yeny was silent. She'd never know as many people in the city as she did in the village.

The brainstorming session went on so long that Yeny was relieved when Celia changed the subject. “The other thing we need to do is to start making signs for the election. I know someone with a photocopier who's going to send me big stacks of ballots—the little pieces of paper you use to vote—but we need people to help with other things.” She flipped to a new page of her notebook and held her pen ready.

Minutes later, Yeny had agreed to find cardboard for signs, help look for voting tables, and go to the radio station with Juan to ask if they could help spread the word about the election. She wondered whether word of the vote would reach María Cristina in the displacement camp in time. She wished she had a way to tell her friends from home, so far away.

Children wore white for peace and made peace banners to carry through the street.

“I don't hear you talking about Joaquin anymore,” Yeny's father said that evening. They had gone out walking together, this time to buy rice. He had a rare day off, and Yeny was happy to be walking beside him in the warm evening air. In the distance, she heard someone selling lottery tickets over a megaphone, and somewhere closer a horse clopped along the pavement.

“Joaquin hasn't been bugging me much lately.” She thought about saying that he'd shown up at the Peace Carnival, but she didn't want to sound like she was whining about not having gone to the party herself. Above all, her father hated whining. “I keep waiting for him to say something mean, but he hasn't bugged me in over a week. Maybe he's figured out that no one can mess with Yeny.” She held her fists in front of her face, like a boxer. “Pow! Pow pow!”

Papá's eyes crinkled up in a smile. “I hope he's figured out a better way to handle things,” he said. “He probably hasn't had an easy life, if he's always so angry.”

Yeny frowned. “What do you mean?”

“All that anger has to come from somewhere,” Papá said. “Maybe he doesn't get enough to eat, or maybe someone in his family hits him. You never know.”

Yeny was silent. She'd never actually thought about what made Joaquin the way he was. She'd only wanted him to stop picking on her.

They turned at the big white and red church at the end of the street. Her father nodded to a group of teenagers leaning against the wall. Farther down, Yeny saw a man in a green uniform, carrying a big gun. For a split second, she panicked, and her father's hand tensed in hers, but he kept walking as though he hadn't noticed. So did she. They turned onto another street and walked as fast as they could. And after a few blocks, they relaxed a little and slowed down.

Her father took a long breath and shook his head. “Guns everywhere,” he said. “How will we ever achieve peace if you can't walk down the street without seeing someone with a gun?”

Yeny kept quiet. This would have been the perfect moment to mention the election, children's rights, and the stuff she and her friends were working toward, but she was afraid of saying something that made her father turn silent and scared again.

Luckily, he brought the subject up for her. “I guess you've heard about the vote, Yeny,” he said, and her eyes opened wide in surprise. “Someone was talking about it on the radio yesterday, and it made me think of you and the Peace Carnival.” He didn't look angry, only tired.

“I think it'll be great,” Yeny said, in a voice that was much smaller than her excitement about the whole event. From inside a house, the loud
boom-boom
beat of cumbia music wafted into
the street. Somewhere a car horn blared. Yeny looked up into her father's face, trying to read his thoughts.

He was slow to speak. “I think it's a great opportunity for young people to learn about democracy,” he said. “But Yeny, it is still too dangerous for me to feel comfortable about letting you go. We have to be patient. We have to hope that, one day, democracy will work in this country—that one day we'll be able to vote away the grupos armados altogether.”

Yeny swallowed her reply. If she wanted to win her father over, she shouldn't argue with him. Besides, they had reached the store and Papá was pulling open the squeaky metal door.

Several people were crowded around the cashier, talking. It was the only spot in the little store with space for more than one person. The three aisles were crammed full from floor to ceiling with bright orange boxes of guava candies, bags of bread, shiny green packets of coffee, boxes of panela, yellow packages of Yeny's favorite drinking chocolate, and more kinds of cookies than she had ever seen. Close to the cashier was an enormous stack of bags of rice, almost as tall as Yeny. Her father grabbed one off the top, pulled some bills from his pocket, and moments later, they were on the street again.