“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
The discussions were tense and the late afternoon air was hot and stuffy. About 30 adults were crouched in the miniature chairs in the primary classroom, surrounded by drawings of all types. Each street representative had brought his or her hand-drawn map, from their own discussions. They had tried – not too successfully – to organize the maps each in relation to the others. But the different scales, sense of proportion and artistic approaches made the patchwork of stained and torn flipchart papers a compelling tribute to the communities’ commitment to representing all of their challenges and resources. By unanimous decision, they had assigned Juan, “the engineer” as he was known locally, the impossible task of making sense and combining all of these minute descriptions of each street into a single map to represent the Santa Rita area.
It had taken Ernesto a few trips to organize this meeting. On his explicit request, Mrs. Yolanda Flores – known to all as Doña Yolanda – had made sure to involve a few key additional participants, such as Don Raúl, the school headmaster; a couple neighbors who worked in the municipality; and Tío Joaquín, a 94-year-old painter who spent most of his days on his patio looking at neighborhood life go by. Ernesto wanted to make sure the street discussions and the broader perspective were sufficiently aligned and he’d asked Doña Yolanda to lead the discussions.
These local leaders, together with the map-bearing representatives from each of the streets, were reviewing and finalizing the neighborhood’s seasonal calendar – a calendar of annual employment cycles, flooding months, peaks in violence, dengue outbreaks and any other item that these different representatives had brought back from their own street discussions. Doña Yolanda kept the discussions moving swiftly. She’d gotten all participants to approve a historical profile of the community, digging deep in the memory of the older participants, from the founding of the area as a residential neighborhood (1960s), to the first floods (1975), first paved streets (1993) and first gang violence (2002).
They consolidated the extensive list of needs from the different maps onto a single list. Mario and Miss Yesica had posted five priorities from their own map: flooding, street lighting, security, the state of the road and activities for youngsters. After all the groups had presented their own concerns, the Santa Rita priorities were consolidated into thirty five topics. They now had to bring the list down to the five that could garner the broader consensus. They needed to focus on those that were most important, but also those that they could solve locally. Unless Santa Rita was able to get at least a few things done quickly, Ernesto pointed out, they would lose the momentum and interest of their neighbors. Ernesto went on, giving examples from other neighborhoods. Even though security was the highest concern, he explained, getting rid of the garbage in the streets was much more achievable in the next couple weeks.
In addition, Ernesto explained, the street representatives needed to discuss who else should be included in their neighborhood committee, an important strategy to gain allies to help address specific items that other organizations could help address. Miss Yesica was quick to jump in. She made a passionate appeal on including the electricity board, as she had already sent out numerous letters insisting that public lighting be installed in critical locations – such as her shop corner.
The discussion got animated, with each participant thinking of a couple partners that needed to be involved. Doña Yolanda stepped in and moderated the discussion. Mario was assigned as note-taker, and he did his best at reflecting everyone’s contributions on the flipchart paper. Thankfully Doña Yolanda kept the process on track, repeating key suggestions from the participants.
Doña Yolanda had been an important part of the roll-out of the process in her community, reaching out to a local coalition of local development organization and the Red Cross. She spoke with authority and people listened. Which is why Ernesto relied so heavily on her support. Mario knew of her story and felt honored he’d been tasked as her note taker.
***
Doña Yolanda was a local school teacher who, like Mario, had spent her whole life in Santa Rita. She had taken on a prominent role in the fight for better teaching conditions in the nineties and was still remembered for the fundraising campaign, known as the “Wednesday pastry sale campaign”, to build new latrines in the school through the sale of cakes and juices. Around the room, many of the street representatives remembered her from their school days.
In 2005, Doña Yolanda’s husband had been killed in a bus accident, days after he had finally obtained a local government job that he had been vying for. A few weeks later her daughter Maria Soledad decided to move back in with her. Maria Soledad’s partner had left her a few months earlier, and she found it impossible to get by with her two jobs and her three-year-old daughter Dolores. Doña Yolanda would take care of Dolores after school hours as Maria Soledad worked double shifts as a cleaner on the other side of town.
The little Dolores loved to sing, so Doña Yolanda made sure she’d learn a new song every week to sing to her tired mother when she finally got home. Anticipation built up late at night when the time came for Maria Soledad to come home and Dolores would stand guard by the window, however tired she may be.
The night would fill with music as Dolores stood proudly on her mother’s bed, the world her stage, and she sang the latest hit songs. Yolanda and Maria Soledad would jump in to keep her going when she got confused, but the ritual always ended with a round of laughter as they went off key. However hard Maria Soledad’s days were, somehow the energy and enthusiasm of her daughter made it all worthwhile.
***
On a late afternoon of October 13th, 2007, Doña Yolanda was at the makeshift local playground with her grand-daughter and other young kids from the neighborhood. Yolanda kept a distracted eye on Dolores as the girl made valiant efforts to climb up the wet slide, getting her little red dress covered in mud, as was customary for her on rainy days. The clouds had scattered, but the square was already getting dark under the shade of the few surviving trees and the closely built homes around the square.
Suddenly a black SUV came speeding across the square, coming to a screeching halt a few meters from two youngsters loitering under a broken lamppost. A half dozen gunshots were heard and the two youngsters collapsed to the ground. The SUV gave a quick spin and headed out the way it came, crossing the park again. From the opposite side of the park, three other youths came running out of the derelict home that served as the Los Santos gang headquarters. They ran desperately across the park as they fired their guns towards the fleeing car. Two bullets hit the car in the hood as it sped past the slides. One hit five-year-old Dolores in the head. The girl’s body collapsed and slid slowly down the slide, as the noise of the gunshots gave way to Doña Yolanda’s pathetic wails for help as she cuddled her grand-daughter’s lifeless body in her arms. Dolores and the two young drug dealers were killed on the spot. Three mothers received that afternoon the hardest phone calls anyone can give.
The park shooting led to a dramatic spiral of violence. Arturo, the gang leader whose friends had been killed under the lamppost, the Los Santos leader who, in his blind rage and poor aiming skills, had fired the fateful bullet that killed Dolores, waged a series of bloody retaliations in the neighboring gang’s territory. His revenge runs led in turn to further attacks in the community, which led to further counter-attacks. For weeks, no one wandered outdoors except for emergencies. Those who could afford to moved out. The others boarded their windows and doors. Perhaps more than anyone, the police and the military were conspicuously absent from the deserted streets.
Maria Soledad never recovered from the shock of her daughter’s death, combining the pain of the loss with the guilt of not being there that day. On the seventh day, four days exactly after her daughter’s funeral, Yolanda found Maria Soledad’s lifeless body in the bathroom. Two wrists slit open and an absent gaze from her daughter as she lay lifeless in the small tub. Her motionless body in a pool of red blood, red like Dolores’ dress on that fatal day. A strange peacefulness emanated from Maria Soledad as her empty, tired eyes gazed at the cracked ceiling.
In that moment, as Doña Yolanda’s responsibility for her grieving daughter suddenly vanishing, her world collapsed. For hours that felt like weeks, she cried on that bathroom floor, holding her daughter’s limp hand. The pain left way to anger, the anger to disbelief.
Yet strangely, as Yolanda’s eyes ran out of tears and the morning light entered through the barricaded windows, a peaceful calm and determination filled her aching body. With gunfire still ringing daily in the streets, she felt the inner void fill with a renewed purpose. Unaware of time or date, oblivious to the untold curfew, Doña Yolanda put on her nicest dress and walked out the door of her house. In an oppressively hot and quiet morning, she took a few steps into the empty street, the portrait of Dolores in one hand and Maria Soledad in the other. She walked down her unpaved street to the school, through the park and down the main business street. She passed by the shuttered stores, walked up the slopping hill to the other side of the neighborhood and back to the park. As she started her second round, she noticed more and more curious looks between the cracks in the boarded up windows. On her fourth round, three neighbors furtively opened their doors, looking left and right, and joined her march, carrying their own portraits of lost family members. By her sixth round, she had close to a hundred neighbors marching behind her in total silence, some with portraits, others with messages begging for peace. On her seventh round, she took a right turn and walked down the usually bustling commercial street separating Santa Rita from the adjacent neighborhood of Esperanza, where the Los Santos nemesis gang was based. She then crossed the empty Avenida Independencia and walked towards the narrow street leading to the neighboring gang’s territory. The crowd behind her came to a stop as she crossed the deserted avenue, but one, then two, then a dozen of her followers decided to follow her. All carried on.
As she had done in Santa Rita, Doña Yolanda completed her march around the Esperanza neighborhood, once, twice, three times, followed by her army of portrait bearers. No gang members in sight, no gun shots, even the birds seemed to look on respectfully in the heavy silence. As she pursued onwards, a few Esperanza residents started join the march, gravely carrying their own frames and signs.
Feeling the growing tiredness of the crowd, Doña Yolanda walked back down the hill, back onto Avenida Independencia, and, never doubting, started walking down the empty avenue towards the nicer parts of town. Her followers again started to waver – they knew their march would not be welcome intruding on the lives of the gente bien – the good people, those with formal jobs, cars, healthcare, security and the faith that their children’s life would turn out to be better than their own. But Doña Yolanda’s resolve knew no hesitation and she marched onwards. Her followers, cautious at first, carried on. As the marchers reached the manicured parks and freshly painted fences, bystanders looked on incredulously and reverently stepped aside. After a seemingly endless afternoon, Doña Yolanda reached her goal. Without a word, she stopped in front of the mayor’s house and, in the middle of the burning street, sat down, one portrait on each knee. The couple hundred followers still at her tow huddled around her, setting up camp in the street, all portraits facing the well-guarded fence.
Doña Yolanda spent the night on the tarmac. No one dared to say a word, other than the occasional whispers. Food appeared out of nowhere, seemingly from supportive maids working in the different houses on the street. No one came out or went into the Mayor’s house, though curtains moved and more security guards seemed to appear out of nowhere. A police cordon was set up at a respectful distance.
At twelve noon precisely the following day, Doña Yolanda rose to her feet, picked up her frames and started the trek back to her neighborhood. Those followers who had spent the night with her silently got up and followed her back.
The march did not solve the gang problems in the neighborhood. The news media had been surprisingly silent, focusing instead on the local beauty pageant. The police and the army did take a few measures, setting up a heavy presence in both neighborhoods for a few months, temporarily curtailing the shooting. The gangs reached a truce, buried their dead, and got back to business as usual. A strange tranquility fell on the neighborhood.
But something had changed in Doña Yolanda. She would have quit her job as a teacher if she could have afforded it, but she struggled on. All her friends and acquaintances seemed to believe – perhaps hoping more than believing – that time would heal her wounds. She got many hugs, many words of condolences, many “you are strong, you will get over it”, though seemingly more for their own sake than for hers. They acted as if she’d broken a limb and that her bone would naturally recover once cast properly. Time would heal anything.
But deep down Doña Yolanda knew she was more of a double amputee, losing her daughter and grand-daughter. Double amputees don’t recover, she learned; they learn to live with their new reality. Doña Yolanda had to relearn how to live.
So she introduced violence prevention classes in the primary school on afternoons, and started reaching out to different organizations around her town. She kept her living room door open 24 hours a day, offering guidance to school dropouts, shelter to abused housewives and a compassionate ear to grieving parents.
Perhaps more importantly, Doña Yolanda came to represent a change in this broken neighborhood. Whenever she spoke, people listened. Whatever she did, people watched. Losing everything had broken her; but having nothing more to lose made her invincible. Unwillingly, unknowingly, her commitment to ensuring that her story would not happen again made her a voice to be reckoned with.
***
The participants in the little classroom were tired, the flies were getting noisier. Ernesto knew the discussions had to end soon. There was only so much time Doña Yolanda could keep her neighbors focused. With that natural authority that came with decades of teaching, she was helping them reach a consensus on the top five priorities from their original list. Every participant had placed three little stickers for their priority topics as a way of casting their vote. Mario was actively ranking the findings based on the number of stickers.
Doña Yolanda then wrote on the blackboard, in her neat, cursive handwriting the results as Mario read them out. The items that most participants wanted addressed first were: 1. Public lighting and security; 2. Lack of activities for youngsters; 3. Improper garbage disposal and mosquito breeding; 4. Flooding in four streets by the main drain; 5. Teenage pregnancies.
Only one last step, explained Ernesto. They needed to create momentum, make everyone realize they were serious about change. They needed to show action, getting things done, focusing on the most tangible priorities and getting a few volunteers from each street on some immediate steps. Ernesto was obviously excited by the progress. He turned back to Doña Yolanda.
“What can we do about this?” asked Doña Yolanda as she pointed to the top of the list: “1. Public lighting and security.” Everyone in the room knew what such an innocuous-sounding title referred to, and a heavy silence fell in the room.
As if waiting for their cue, three young men barged into the room. Arturo, the Los Santos gang leader, shouted: “Thank you for your participation, everyone. The show is over, you may now go home.” He was obviously upset. He waited a few seconds for everyone to overcome their initial shock, then went on.
“This is nonsense, no one wants more problems here.” Arturo, despite his young age, was obviously used to being listened to, and the two menacing henchmen behind him often helped him make his point.
“Or does anyone here want to go through more wars, more deaths? Haven’t we been through enough?” Everyone stayed silent, their gazes facing to the floor.
Ernesto froze on his feet. This was not on his guidance notes. This was not in any course he had taken. This was not supposed to happen. Some of the participants started to collect their belongings as quietly as they could.
“I agree.” Doña Yolanda finally broke the silence and spoke in a slow, tired voice: “Haven’t we been through enough? Arturo, you, of all people, can’t you see we’ve been through enough…”
She paused. No one could disagree with Yolanda. She continued in her clear, sad voice.
“You and I have had our differences. But neither you nor I can change the past. I do know we can change the future. This is our chance to change our future. No one is going to do it for us. You know we don’t exist for the government. With all due respect, should we give credence to their characterizing of our neighborhood? Aren’t we nothing but a gang of thieves and murderers? No one ventures here anymore, you know that. If we don’t fix the drainage or lighting, no one will. If we don’t offer our youth real choices, they will keep on leaving.”
Arturo was not accustomed to being challenged. Doña Yolanda’s arguments only made things worse. He retaliated, waving his gun angrily in the air as he shouted.
“How can you think that dividing up our community will make us more united? We are already doing everything we can to make sure that money is coming in here, that there are no thieves wandering in our streets, and when there are, we find them and make sure they remember us. We provide security like no-one ever has. We make sure every youngster with a bit of ambition has the opportunity to help his parents.
Arturo seemed to reflect for a few seconds, then added, in a much softer tone:
“I wish I could say this did not come as a cost, and I lament your loss as much as you do. This war has cost me my brother, so you are not alone. We are all suffering here, but there is no other way. There is only one way we can offer this neighborhood a future, and if the way we do it hurts your ethics, well I am sorry, feel free to move out.”
Doña Yolanda was unperturbed. The weight of her sorrow seemed to be too much for her to bear, so she sat down on her chair, took a deep breath and carried on.
“I have been told you have a daughter now. That makes us both parents. You can’t change what has happened to your brother, I can’t change what happened to Dolores and Maria Soledad, but we can help to make sure it doesn’t happen to Felicia. This is our community…” Doña Yolanda breathed deeply.
“… this is your community as much as it is mine.” She paused a few seconds before going on, No-one moved.
“This is only a small step. We won’t change the world. You and I may not even see the difference in our lifetimes. But working together and reaching out to others is the only way. This community, as you say, cannot continue to be divided. To live in fear. To lock itself up. We are more than our guns and our greed. We have creativity, we have youth and, I have seen it in this room, we have faith that tomorrow can be different.”
Doña Yolanda got up slowly. Mario came to give her a hand.
“We don’t need to agree on everything, but we do need to accept that sometimes our collective wisdom is greater than our individual will. But our collective wisdom must include all of us. We can’t do this without you…” She paused again. All eyes were on Arturo and Doña Yolanda.
Doña Yolanda walked up to Arturo, still standing close to the doorway. She reached out slowly for his arm, in her slow, grandmotherly way, and offered him her chair on the first row.
Arturo violently removed Doña Yolanda’s caring arm, gave a sudden turn and barged out. He gave a quick sign for his hitmen to hold the door.
The meeting resumed under the watchful eyes of the gang members. No one discussed security or public lighting, though it stayed on the top of the list. All agreed on a couple activities they could carry out for the garbage disposal, and tasked Licenciado Morales and Ernesto with writing a letter regarding the state of the basketball court.
Ernesto read out the immediate actions they could take. A sense of disbelief could be felt in the room, following so many hours of intense discussions in the room. A muffled round of applause served as the official approval of the neighborhood’s priorities. For the first time ever, they had a plan and concrete steps. They had a way of working together, however small those steps were. The hitmen had not said a word throughout the discussion. As Ernesto gave some final words of thanks, the two gang members rate suddenly left the classroom. Without a word. No one knew what would happen, but a page had been turned.
Mario was satisfied. He felt his mandate had been achieved. Flooding had made the list, even if it only concerned four houses. He looked forward to reporting back with Miss Yesica on Saturday to the neighbors in his street. Ernesto explained the next steps. They needed to present their plan at the City Steering Committee, a pompous name for a gathering of neighborhood representatives, along with the Municipal Authorities, universities, the Red Cross and local development organizations. All agreed that Doña Yolanda should represent them. She reluctantly agreed but gave her condition: that all those present participate in a school rehabilitation day, and involve as many parents as possible.
There was applause, there was laughter, there was a feeling of progress. There even was a diffuse sense of hope. After much debate, the thirty participants had reached a consensus, a detailed agreement on concrete next steps, despite differences in income, affiliations and identities. Without realizing it, they had overcome past struggles and differing views of the future. They had identified leaders from within their ranks, leaders who shared their daily struggles but also believe in their ability to do more in the face of adversity.
Together they had set a common course, a shared vision for the streets they live in. The seeds of collective action had been sown. There was much work to be done and all knew the challenges would be great. But the participants also left the meeting with the confidence that if they succeeded in working together, anything was possible. They would be unstoppable.
One Billion Legacies 