News
Page 4
Street Roots • Dec. 23-29, 2016
Cristina Castano Henao, a social worker from Colombia, works at JOIN, a Portland nonprofit that serves the needs of vulnerable communities.
‘Do something’
When Colombian social worker Cristina Castano Henao brought her talents
to Portland, she learned how even in the land of plenty, there are needs
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
ristina Castaño Henao’s job as a
social worker once took her to
dizzyingly high altitudes amid
Colombia’s active
volcanoes. Four other
contractors had gone
up before her but
refused to return.
The assignment
was to act as an
intermediary
between the families
who had lived there
for generations and
A periodic series on the personal journeys
the Colombian
within Portland’s immigrant communities.
government. The
land had recently
been designated a
national park. It was her job to explain to
them that they had to release their
property.
Each trip - and she took many - began
with a seven-hour horseback ride into
freezing temperatures. She’d stay in the
mountains for two weeks at a time, traveling
between homes, which were often an hour’s
ride apart
“There are no roads, no electricity, just
farmers who have lived there since
colonization,” she said.
She and a co-worker secretly showed the
C
mountainside farmers what their land was
worth, warning them not to sell to the
gQvemment too cheaply.
“I think that is why I loved it so much,”
she said. “It was empowering people.”
She had found her calling in social work
and was making a living fulfilling
government contracts, often bringing aid
and information to isolated communities in
the mountains and valleys of Northern
Colombia.
In rural areas, farmers and their families
were caught in the violence between
paramilitaries and the Marxist guerilla
fighters who’d been waging a civil war for
more than 50 years.
Much of her work was helping children,
whether they were starving in the
countryside or fighting to survive, homeless
and alone on city streets.
Her interest in social work began in the
1990s, when she was a teenager living in
the small Colombian city of Pereira, located
at the foot of the Andes’ coffee-producing
slopes.
Pereira also sits at the center of
Colombia’s Golden Triangle, the area
between Cali, Bogota and Medellin - a city
once known as the murder capital of the
world, with more than 6,000 homicides in
1991 alone.
Its location made Pereira a center for
commerce. It also put it on the route taken
by many travelers, as well as drug and sex
traffickers.
When Cristina was a child, violence,
shootings and car explosions were a way of
life in Pereira.
“I remember hearing shootings, and then
seeing someone running with blood. You
just stop, you see what’s happening, but you
don’t stay there,” she said. “You don’t talk
about it.”
When she was 20, a man was shot while
he was walking right next to her.
She said people were always wary of
motorcycles because they were the
preferred vehicles of the “sicarios,” cartel
hit men.
But despite the danger, people didn’t stop
living their lives.
“We would go to school, we would play in
the streets with our friends in the
neighborhood, but of course it wasn’t safe,”
she said. “You could see it in people.”
Her father, Dario Castano, opened an ice
cream factory called “Pandy Helados.”
His business thrived, and he and her
mother, Orfilia Henao, made a home for
themselves and their daughters in a middle
class neighborhood.
Cristina attended an all-girls Catholic high
school. But in a country where 90 percent
of the population is Roman Catholic, her
family was not. She considered herself to be
See CRISTINA, page 5