By Duvan Caro. Photographs by Elmer Arrieta.
Born and raised in the town of Guaimaral, municipality of Córdoba Tetón, Montes de María subregion in the department of Bolívar, Colombia, Bernarda Verena Anaya Cohen, 57 years old, is a rural teacher and writer, who with her stories seeks to make the voices of rural women visible to help them carry out their processes of resilience in the face of the multiple difficulties they face.
"Professor" Verena Anaya Cohen began writing her own stories as a healing process after being subjected to different situations of domestic violence.
He has been a teacher for more than 26 years, but a couple of years ago he began his journey in literature.
My first steps
It all started when she was 16 years old, after finishing her high school studies in the city of Cartagena, where she reflected on the economic situation her family was going through, a situation that gave her a lot of strength to return to her community and take up a job as a teacher in the village of Bellavista, in the district of Guaimaral.
This work allowed him to realize the challenges that the territory has and that life itself presents.
Knowing that they do not have the educational support, the necessary implements to carry out a day of classes and the lack of tertiary roads to these territories close to the large cities of the Caribbean, make the work of teachers in rural Colombia more difficult every day.
She is currently a teacher at the Centro Educativo school in the Rancho Largo area, where she and her students in grades 1, 4, and 5 of primary school teach their classes in the school cafeteria or under the shade of a tree, since she does not have an adequate space where she can carry out her work and where her students are comfortable receiving her classes.
This is due to the deterioration and abandonment of the school by the municipal and regional education departments and the national education ministry of Colombia towards rural schools throughout the country.
Bernarda is not only dedicated to teaching but also to drawing, knitting and writing as an exercise in resilience in the face of the difficult times she has experienced due to abuse and domestic violence, to the point of hindering the upbringing of her children.
At the age of 27, her first son was born and two years later her second daughter was born. Their birth marked a milestone in her history as a woman and as a mother, who was being subjected to a scourge of abuse and psychological, verbal and physical mistreatment by her partner, which forced her to flee to her parents' home and assume the role of father and mother in raising her children.
Another of La Profe's passions is preparing delicious traditional delicacies that are part of the regional gastronomy of the Colombian Caribbean.
Since she was young, she has enjoyed preparing local sweets that she later sells to provide another source of income for her home, such as the ripe plantain bun, which is kneaded together with corn, ground, and wrapped in the husks of the corn cobs and then cooked. After 2 or 3 hours, these delicious plantain buns can be eaten.
«I am a person who likes to do many things, and among them are having small sales of sweets, food and other things that allow me to have a little extra income. This is what allowed me, in one way or another, to support my children alone.»
This is how Professor Verena Anaya begins her first book entitled «Life. Life. Strong and determined woman» which, in his own words, is written from the heart.
Every word in the story is wisdom given by God. Because many women will accept it and it will help them to get through their daily lives full of difficulties. This book is a tribute to life.
«I write for women. For those women to whom life has presented many obstacles and who, as those obstacles progress, have to overcome them.»
"Life, Life" is a book made up of 7 chapters in which the author narrates moments of her childhood, the arrival of some technological inventions of the time to the town, her adolescence, the arrival of her first children and all those moments of tribulations and sadness that marked her life.
This, his first book, is released to the international market this July 19, 2022 at 12 p.m. on the platform of amazon.com.
Professor Berena wants the whole world to read, share and know the stories of the deep Caribbean that she tells in her book while sharing her feelings.
What does it mean to be a rural woman?
«We rural women are those who work in the fields, those who do not have everything at hand. Those who know that water will not come to us through pipes, but that we have to go and get it from the well on a donkey. Those women will have everything difficult because of the inequalities, the violence of armed groups and the domestic violence that we experience in our communities.»
"As rural women, we have to be very hard-working and very strong to keep moving forward and cope with our own lives and with them those of our families. And these are the things that I try to highlight in my book."
In many ways, Verena has been overcoming the obstacles that she herself faces and continues to face as a mother, and now with her experiences she seeks to support other women to heal their deepest wounds rooted in the violence that rural, peasant and ethnic women suffer daily.
The armed conflict
In the 2000s, violence marked the lives and work of many teachers in rural schools in Colombia. Teachers could not see, hear, or even talk about the violence they and their students were experiencing in schools. Hundreds of communities were left in the midst of terror and horror instilled by armed groups that moved through the area day and night without any control by state forces.
Horrible things happened in the community of Guaimaral, there was a lot of violence that still affects the daily life of its inhabitants to this day. In many homes in the community, people experienced first-hand the harassment and violence exerted by armed groups.
Seño Verena considers herself a phoenix, and she really wants to continue writing stories from the region to show them to the world using digital platforms, where she seeks to help people, and especially women, who have suffered domestic violence find a path to resilience in her texts.
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