Planting Peacer Profile: Daniel Serrano Bernal

My name is Daniel Serrano, I’m Colombian and I’m philosophy student. It’s hard to see people suffering for hunger and pain for their families looses for our hidden civil war. The peacemakers in Colombia, have to affront a lot of faces of the conflict and we have to see how the conflict and the violence hide in every corner and transform in something new, but there’s always hope for work for each other. I’m going to tell you a story that shows you how we can walk and make food together for the justice and the dignity of the human being.
There is in Colombia a town called San Pablo in a zone with a lot of natural resources, water, petroleum, gold, silver, platinum, natural gas, etc, this is a very conflictive place because everyone wants everything only for himself. In this town you can find the Police, the Army, the Guerrilla (Leftist Extreme, Rebels) and the Paramilitares (Ride Wind) in the same place. Every group thinks only about his own good and development and the rest of the people always suffers because nobody cares about them.
One day, Some of the social organization that works with community development decided to celebrate women’s day with a communitarian soup in the central square in San Pablo specially for women, and they didn’t have enough money to buy the ingredients for the soup, so we decided to walk to the stores to ask for contributions in order to get to our gathering celebration with three enormous pots at 6 p.m. We ask and walk in all stores and at 1 p.m. we collected like 50 kg of food (). At 2 p.m. we decided to start peeling the potatoes, cut the vegetables and we invited the police and the army to help us. We told to them “you can’t bring your guns with you because this is a peaceful meeting in honor of women”. Some didn’t agree and a few accepted our advice to cook the soup and so we built a community in that circumstance. At 4 p.m. everyone was working and helping each other to prepare the dinner. At 6 p.m. we started to serve the soup, but the servers were a hip hop and break dancing youth group who have a bad reputation just because they’re young people and they wear different clothes, the mothers and all of the whole neighborhood couldn’t believe that this was happening, everyone said “we never imagined they will serve the people that’s quite impossible, but it’s happening”. That’s the second shocking moment.
Before 8th of March with these young people we made 200 paper flowers for the women and before the dinner start the 12 b-boys gave the flowers. That was the first socking moment. When the dinner finished we realized that the soup was enough for more than 400 people in the town, that was the third socking moment for the town and the first shocking moment for the people who was in charge of the meeting, us. At 9 p.m. we talked to the town’s people and we said “you always can use a public place to share something like this”. This was a small step to build a new future with peace and justice, only if we work together like, wonderful things can happen. That is the beginning for a peaceful revolution. That is an example about peace building.
That’s a cruel reality because in Colombia we spilled and still spilling a lot of blood, but we can’t always think for the destruction or the hidden civil war in Colombia because maybe you can’t find a peaceful way to walk. We have to know the background where we are living but we have to think of different ways to build peace, hearing each other and respecting the opinions but we have to try making the conversation provocative which seduces you to make some proposals, things to help the people who are living near and far away of you.
We have a beautiful country with a lot of nature and you can find the weather of the four seasons in Colombia. Not everything is war and suffering because of people’s warmth and we like to laugh a lot, the 90% of Colombians is good but the other 10% gives the country a bad reputation because of the drugs and the bad government, but you can always find a kindly face and good things to build a peace in the community.