Meet Viviana Gamboa: Peacebuilder amplifying the voices of Colombia’s ethnic communities
Viviana Gamboa, fourth from right.
EEAbroad is fortunate to connect and partner with Viviana Gamboa in producing our first Colombia virtual learning module, exploring Afro-Colombian culture and literature. In this module, Viviana and her friends, Lázaro Valderamar Sarabia, Joyce Rivas Medina, and Dayana Blanco Acendra, share thought-provoking, important insights into Afro-Colombia. Viviana impressed us with her depth of knowledge, centered around her experience and passion in the fields of culture, peacebuilding, gender, race, and ethnicity.
Viviana is someone you want to share a cup of coffee with and learn from. In this blog, we asked Viviana questions about her life’s pursuits, passions, work, philosophies, and inspiration. We hope you enjoy getting to know Viviana as much as we did.
VIVIANA’S CURRENT PURSUITS
Viviana Gamboa
I am currently working as the Communications Director of RESPIRA en Colombia, a program approaching peacebuilding with mindfulness techniques and developing a practice that is sensitive to trauma, culture, and context. We work with the humanitarian sector, particularly with the UN, and in other countries (as Breathe International) giving support to mental health teams and first responders in refugee camps. But we also develop projects with the educational sector in Colombia, Switzerland, Salvador, Peru, and among others. We are currently developing methodologies oriented towards caregivers, organizations, and children. We strongly believe in cultivating more compassionate and conscious humanity, and that’s why we try to design what we do according to the dynamics and specificities of the communities we work with/for.
Apart from this, I work for an NGO called Diversity and Development. I am part of the management team in charge of launching a new platform — Connecting Diversity. We seek to connect different territories, entrepreneurs, local leaders, and environmental guardians through music and other cultural expressions. We had the first online concert in October 2020 within the Terra Madre event organized by Slow Food in Italy. For this occasion, we connected with music groups from Morocco, Chile, France, and Colombia to celebrate diversity and to dig into the valuable efforts that local communities and visionaries are doing to protect key zones, in coherence with traditional environmentally-friendly practices and initiatives.
After many years of activism, I have recently decided to keep working and giving support to women as a doula. Getting to know our body-mind-spirit and better understanding who we are, are key elements to better birthing, mothering, and giving closure not only to babies but to ourselves, our ideas and projects, our relationships, and life stages. Health, traditional medicine, and midwifery are therefore essential threads/driving forces for me.
INTERVIEW WITH VIVIANA
Tell us about your background. What inspired you to pursue studies and a career in the fields of culture, peacebuilding, gender, race, and ethnicity?
Being born in Colombia, a country that has experienced the longest civil war, had to do with it. “Why were we at war?” was my “guiding question.” Inequality was also something I perceived since I was very little, and I was always looking for explanations to better understand “us” as a nation and as a species. I felt very concerned with racism, poverty, social injustice, and this tendency to dehumanize those who we feel are different (in political, social, racial, economic, and/or sexual orientation terms). Therefore, I “traveled” through tons of books — Latin American and Colombian literature — and decided to immerse myself in culture as a “language” that is capable of shining light upon very complex issues to create connections/bridges rather than divisions.
Learning from the unlimited diversity Colombia has been blessed with made me fall in love with my roots, and with the very plural worlds that this nation is made of. I have since dedicated my energy to bringing further visibility to the very valuable cultural expressions and livelihoods of ethnic communities; learning and sharing with vulnerable groups, social movements, and activists whose resilience I admire and wish to enhance; and editing books in which ancestral knowledge and racialized voices have “a place” and can be amplified.
What has been one of the most influential projects you have worked on? The most interesting?
The word influential is a little tricky. If I were not to think of it, I’d say it’s the Afro-Colombian Literature Collection, as it was the first project of its kind in Latin America. We delivered collections to more than 1,000 public libraries and research institutions in Colombia. This material has been essential to supporting the law obliging public education to include the Afro-Colombian Studies Program in their curricula. This project became an affirmative action that has given space and inspiration to create other strategies including music labs involving youth leaders from different Afro-Colombian territories, peacebuilding actions through poetry and music, and republishing works.
However, a project I managed called Women Weaving Life has been my favorite. It was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the National Victims’ Unit. We worked with six groups of Afro-Colombian and indigenous women located in different regions of the country, seeking to strengthen collective work and networks, based on their cultural assets and the immense wisdom these matriarchs represent for their communities.
Viviana was the Project Manager of The Afro-Colombian Literature collection
What are the challenges you often face?
Culture is somehow disregarded in Colombia. There are so many complexities and emergencies within our territories, that we — the government, the private sector, and society — forget the importance of culture and all the strategies and abilities acquired through it for people to survive, weave their memory, thrive collectively, and/or find other paths and answers to their troubles and existence.
Due to the latter, it is not always easy to find “the right job” with dignifying conditions and long-term contracts that would provide stability and security. Creative doing seems to relate to a vast ocean of changing conditions — reinventing what I do and how I do it on a daily basis, clashing with political agendas, going into red zones to work with the people and communities I love, and daring to “touch” the very painful stories and conditions in which some communities keep on living; digesting what they share with me while facing my arrogance, my privilege, and my ignorance to better understand, sense, and visualize my own limits and my role in every interaction. Tearing down hierarchies so as to gather as “equals” despite our differences.
What advice would you give someone who wants to pursue studies and a career in a similar field?
Peacebuilding cannot operate under a “black and white” scheme. One must navigate through the grey zones with an acute awareness of what humanity is. I believe there are very big questions one should ask before engaging with this path, “Do I have a savior complex, and if yes, where does this come from and what do I seek with it? Am I fully aware of my privileges and of the many micro-aggressions we tend to normalize and function with on a daily basis? What does peace mean for me? Where and how would I stand to better resonate with it?”
The more I investigate and do within peacebuilding, the more I ask myself how am I doing with my inner peace. I now believe this is a structural question every human being should ask her/himself as this is a key issue for how we relate to others and to the environment we live in. Another way to look at this would be, “Am I looking outside for what I lack inside of me?” Through mindfulness as a peacebuilding practice, I’ve embraced honesty and vulnerability as guiding principles to connect with others and with myself, despite the career choices we make.
Viviana (center) helped facilitate a workshop with local MCs, El Jke from Crew Peligrosos (Medellín), and one of the greatest current musical producers and musicians in Colombia, Juancho Valencia.
What advice would you give someone who wants to be more mindful and aware of intersectionality? What are actions people can take to show understanding, support, and solidarity?
Intersectionality lenses require us to be constantly aware of many variables, of analyzing our “sense of place” in the system so that we can first spot our privileges and oppressions, along with how others may perceive in different contexts.
Understanding, support, and solidarity come in different shapes and forms, depending on context and social-cultural codes. Thus, committing to being very informed and open about the places we visit, and taking the time to see and hear people and their environments beyond our own mindsets (cultural-social-economic-racial-gender frameworks and bias), is a huge step.
It is affection and “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes” that may grant us the keys to respectful and valuable interactions.
How can people visiting Colombia be respectful, mindful travelers?
Colombia has been portrayed as a drug-trafficking nation. This does not only offend its nationals but is also reductionist and violent. Becoming a cartoon does not let people appreciate and explore the many wonders of this nation, nor does it grant them a sense of collective responsibility for the causes that have been fueling war, violence, and environmental destruction.
Connecting to a sense of common humanity, embracing the possibility of analyzing social issues before giving an opinion, and being considerate about people’s sensitivities and struggles may help us be mindful travelers.
Colombians love to host foreigners. We are caring, loving, and very welcoming. We do change according to the region, thus you’ll find people in the capital city to be similar to its weather — cold and distant.
How has traveling and learning about different cultures impacted your life?
It has certainly given me a wide spectrum of humanity and of the many “truths” and livelihoods that coexist in this world. It has allowed me to better understand the notion of identity as constant transformation. And it has led me to cultivate tolerance, profound love, and respect for diversity, and an eagerness to keep on exploring this fascinating colorful world. I feel every person, every community, and every country I visit as teachers from who I learn through contact and experience.
Viviana with "Maye"Aura Helena González, local leader and founder of Ríos Unidos, on the Guapi River, in Cauca. Ríos Unidos is a community-based organization that produces medicine from plants and gathers 180 women from the surrounding rivers and villages.
What has been your favorite country or place you've visited?
This is a hard one. I absolutely adored Turkey due to its food (there are so many vegetarian options everywhere), history, and beauty. Gambia is another country I fell in love with. Although it’s tiny and very touristic, its people reminded me of the Black Communities of Colombia’s Pacific Basin. It’s as if a magical invisible thread was still there, despite the centuries that have gone by since slavery and African Diaspora. And last but not least, I’d like to mention Nuquí (Colombia), as it represents paradise for me.
What are some Viviana fun facts? What is your favorite book? Favorite film? Favorite food?
I cannot live without good coffee (such as Urbania Café), dark chocolate, and mangoes. Eggplants are my thing and pasta is sort of my staple.
Favorite Book: Silk, by Alessandro Baricco. Other books I enjoy include:
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
- Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío, by Elena Poniatowska
- The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
- Baghdad Diaries, by Nuha Ali-Radi
- Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, by John Carlin
- Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Delirium, by Laura Restrepo
- The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat
- Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Favorite Films: This is so difficult…One of the gems that first comes to my mind-heart is The Color Purple but also Machuca from Chile. Thinking of recent films, I very much enjoyed Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.
Is there anything else you'd like to share about yourself or your work?
Come to Colombia! Travel to Cuba! Diversity is key to our survival as species and if we better understand our role and impact on this planet, we may be able to reverse climate change and find more harmonious ways to coexist with all forms of life. Culture opens the doors to consciousness and to all the marvels we are also capable of creating both individually and collectively.
We hope you enjoyed getting to know Viviana. As she states, come visit Colombia and Cuba! There’s always the opportunity to learn now through our EEAbroad virtual learning experiences and then travel later whether on a faculty-led program, study abroad program, or a cultural travel experience. We invite you to learn with us on the road less traveled.