Sleep? Someday.

Across the street, mere feet away from my window, a great social experiment is taking place. Right now, at five minutes to midnight, on a Wednesday. They've played the song twice already tonight, but this time, the magical third time, perhaps it will come out different. Let's all scream until we're hoarse and find out. Really, I should be grateful for the chance to just experience this. It's probably my own fault for agreeing with Aimee's boyfriend today about how wonderful, simply marvelous it is to live so close to such a center of ideas, how UNAL students are so studious, thoughtful, and serious, how the energy just lifts us up into clouds and on and on and on.

Today was a good day though. Had class finally, "Ciudad y Poder." I feel really lucky to be in a class with some very important people on campus -- five of them had to take cellphone calls in the middle of class. The prof was unmoved and kept lecturing. I'm getting used to it as well, but it was a new high when someone who got to class 45 minutes late (to be fair, it started 30 minutes past the scheduled time -- does that make him 15 minutes late or just smarter than me?), asked me loudly to "catch him up," then took a call that lasted until class was 10 minutes from ending. He promptly organized those of us lucky enough to be seated near him into a group for the field trips. Lucky us. All three of us did get out of having lunch with him though. Thanks, Aimee! Mental note to always have lunch plans on Wednesdays...

Then I met Aimee's boyfriend, who is gleefully weird and weirdly gleeful. They seem like a great match, and I didn't want to leave, but I had a 3 pm appointment with two women who lead an artisan's cooperative for displaced women. I arrived a few minutes late to the offices on loan to them for meetings, and the more talkative one immediately launched into a spiel about what they needed, what they'd done, what they could do. The other woman, who I'd met at a march previously, leaves more of an impression on me every time I see her -- she's straightforward yet reticent, with a sadness impossible to ignore.

These are women without computers, without degrees or "names" (in the Colombian sense of being well-connected) or even permanent places to live. They have lived through unspeakable things, things I didn't ask them to tell. Of me they asked questions like, "what do you think about the conflict? do you understand it?" that I didn't know how to answer. And they have a board of directors, a mission statement and a vision, and a somewhat elaborate year-long project they propose to complete next summer, if they can get the funding. That's where I come in.

As artisans, they all do beautiful work, but their goals were much far-reaching than just earning money for the cooperative. They have their eyes on training women to not just know their rights, but demand them. Displaced women should have access to government funds, but in practice it's nearly impossible to get them.