All these things will be forgotten,
all these things will be drowned,
all these things will be just memories,
the world will no longer have this image,
and the sadness of knowing what will happen makes me drown,
it makes me water,
I dream of the sea,
I dream of it.
Sand under the sea,
but when the high seas will come
there will be no sand but only the end of this land as I see it now.
All things will become different and this scares me
and I don't know why all this will be allowed,
why does God want to extinguish man again?
I have no answers,
maybe he doesn't have them either,
he is thinking about it,
he is deciding whether to do it or not,
whether to give us a chance,
but he sees the hatred and the war,
and the violence,
and how can he say that we are still one thing good?
Margoth Escobar was at a friend’s birthday party in the town of Puyo in the Ecuadorian Amazon last September when a neighbour called to say her house was on fire. The blaze destroyed her home and more than $50,000 worth of artisanry that she and other women planned to sell over Christmas. The local fire department said it was an act of arson against Escobar, who belongs to Mujeres Amazonicas, a collective of mostly indigenous women who have banded together to defend their land and the environment against oil extraction and mining. It was one of several alarming attacks against members of the collective in Ecuador last year, amid a broader trend of threats, smear campaigns and physical violence against women human rights defenders across South America. Putting aside her distrust of Ecuador’s police and justice system, Escobar filed a criminal complaint at the regional Attorney General’s Office in October. She has not been granted protective measures, despite the risk her activism brings and the attack already suffered.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 