Before our students take out their cameras, microphones, or notebooks, we always start our work with our community partners in Manantiales de Paz by sharing a meal together. The dish is called sancocho, a traditional Latin American stew that, in Colombia, has yuca, potato, plantain, corn, squash, and one or more kinds of meat, and is often accompanied by rice and beans.
A large sancocho shared by a community is about integration, said Ena Gonzalez Ospina, one of the leaders of Manantiales de Paz who runs a juice business and organized our meal. “It’s so that people can distinguish each other, since sometimes, we’re in the same neighborhood, and we don’t know each other,” she told us. “It’s very beautiful.”
(See a short documentary about Doña Ena’s personal story and juice business, and a video of her talking about sancocho.)
Fostering this integration—building real relationships with the community members with whom we will collaborate on our documentary this summer—is precisely why we begin our work this way. About 200 people, including some of the students’ compañeros and compañeras—Colombian university students paired with them for the summer—eventually shared sancocho with us.
To introduce our My Home | Mi Hogar documentary project to residents of Manantiales de Paz, we assembled in the neighborhood library and showed one of our previous videos, about the founder of a community similar to theirs, who explains the story behind its name, El Triunfo, or The Triumph.
Leaders of Manantiales de Paz then showed our Global Pathways Colombia students around the neighborhood, talking about its history, terrain, continued challenges, and strategies for resilience. They emphasized that the last word of its name—Paz, or Peace—is a fundamental principle for the community, and that its sustainability and advancement is dependent on their strong sense of solidarity.
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