Our mantra “Not for Self” has carried on in ways I never predicted.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Non Sibi Playground, Casabianca, Tolima Colombia 2013]
In late April, I stood in the well-appointed lobby of the Sofitel Hotel in Bogota, Colombia, breathless with altitude sickness and nervous that the reunion for which I’d flown from Washington would fall through. It had been 13 years since Angelica and I met at a USAID-sponsored event in Cali. Though she’d confirmed she’d make the three-hour bus trip from Villavicencio to meet me for a recorded interview, I wasn’t sure she’d come.
When Angelica appeared, we hugged like long lost friends. The doorman didn’t know what to make of us: me, a tall gringa in a blue blazer and she, a petite Colombian in a flowery blouse and jeans who’d clearly come from the countryside. Had the doorman known Angelica was a former guerilla who’d spent 10 years in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), he probably wouldn’t have let her in. We kept the conversation light in the hotel’s public spaces until, in the privacy of a conference room, we launched into our past lives and how they so strangely intersected.
From 2009 to 2014, I ran a small, U.S.-funded non-profit in Colombia, Fundacion ECCO, which promoted democracy and youth leadership in areas plagued by decades of civil war between the Colombian state and the FARC. Between 2009 and 2014, on a shoe-string budget, I completed several projects in the department (Colombia’s equivalent of a state) of Tolima, where the FARC first formed in 1964. In addition to private U.S. sources, I’d secured funding from USAID, the International Organization for Migration, Spirit of America and U.S. Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH).
With the recent dismantling of USAID, came the defunding of democracy promotion. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and International Republican Institute were forced to cancel pro-democracy programs. I worried that promoting democracy was now considered an example of “waste, fraud [or] abuse”. I had always thought that my foundation’s work was an example of how promoting democracy works. But, as fifteen years had passed since I began, I wondered if the impact was a lasting one – which is why I returned to Colombia to find out.
In 2009, I accompanied my husband on his grassroots campaign for senate in the department [state] of Tolima. Back then, a kid growing up in Tolima didn’t have much of a future. The countryside had been ravaged by decades of civil war between the Colombian government, the Marxist guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP). FARC recruiters lured campesino kids into their camps with false promises of empowerment, familial belonging, or escape from an abusive, impoverished homelife. (Over 30% of Colombians live on less than $7.00 a day and only 16% of the population ever obtain a college degree.) And the FARC recruiters were effective: the Colombian transitional justice court (JEP) estimated that over 18,000 minors were recruited between 1996 and 2016.
The idea of starting a foundation came to me by chance. I accompanied my husband on his grassroots senatorial campaign throughout Tolima. Travel between towns was arduous and sometimes dangerous; mountain roads were unpaved and often washed out after a rainstorm. When travel by land was deemed too risky due to guerilla activity, we went by helicopter.
It was during a campaign stop in Villahermosa, a remote mountain town in northern Tolima, where I first met some of the teenagers with whom I eventually worked. During one of the campaign speeches, the teenagers approached me and began passionately explaining all the things their town needed, including playgrounds. I didn’t understand everything they said as my Spanish was lacking. (I’d been told I spoke Spanish as if I had a mouth full of Doritos.) Nevertheless, I was moved.
On the four-hour trip down the mountain, I decided I’d return to Villahermosa to build a playground. But instead of giving the playground as a gift, the kids would use the democratic process to determine where the playground should be built and why. We would have a tour of candidate sites, a public debate among the kids representing each site, and a vote to determine the winning location. Borrowing my high school’s motto Non Sibi—not for self— the kids and I christened the “Non Sibi” playground. During the playground’s inauguration ceremony, a local councilman gave a speech, remarking how strange it was to have a foreigner who helped others, as the reputation of foreigners “wasn’t the best.” I then realized I was a de-facto representative of the United States in a place where few Americans had set foot.
[PHOTO CAPTION: The author with JOSE LUIS MENESES and XIOMARA PARRA CORTES at the NON SIBI playground in Villahermosa, Tolima in 2009]
Months later, after forming a non-profit on paper, I met with two of U.S. Army Special Operations Civil Affairs officers and showed them the video of the Non Sibi playground’s inauguration. I pitched them the idea that if I they were to give my foundation $5,000, I’d take the young people from Villahermosa on a two-day journey to Ataco in the south of Tolima, where they would teach the Non Sibi process to a group of young people there and build a playground. I received the grant. After the kids and I completed the Non Sibi playground project in Ataco, we formed the “official” Non Sibi Team of Tolima. I created a Facebook page which became the way the team members kept in touch and abreast of our latest projects.
[PHOTO CAPTION: “Young people join the FARC E.P.” Elementary school wall, Chaparral, Tolima 2014]
Over the course of five years, The Non Sibi Team grew to include young people from various towns in Tolima and Cauca. We completed 12 Non Sibi playground projects, a medical brigade, two leadership summits, two “pilot for a day” trips to an air force base, several marches for peace and, working with the Colombian air force, army and military police, “Operation Non Sibi” [ LINK to Vimeo a Christmas airlift ] of a thousand soccer balls and teddy bears to children living in a hamlet of Ataco called Santiago Perez.
Over the years, I received approximately $300,000 in grants from USAID, Spirit of America, the International Organization for Migration and private American funding. But beyond the grant monies, I’d invested much of myself.
And so, when I finally came face-to-face with the Non Sibi team members this year, now adults who’d made great efforts to meet with me, it made for the reunion of a lifetime.
First, I travelled to Ibague, the capital of Tolima, where I met with Mafe Murcia and Angelly Vega, both of whom were 13 when they joined the Non Sibi Team in Ataco in 2010. Mafe was raised by her grandmother after her parents abandoned her when they joined the FARC. While Mafe seemed to have struggled over the years, she never followed in her parents’ footsteps. A polite, self-possessed young woman, she told me that growing up in “a red zone,” there had never been activities for kids before Non Sibi and that she’d learned what it meant to serve her community.
Angelly, who brought her mother and her 10-month-old son, had been the leader of the Ataco contingent, giving speeches and helping to organize the community for the 2012 Operation Non Sibi airlift.
[PHOTO - author and ANGELLY VEGA with American flag she made, Chapparal, Tolima 2014]
Still soft-spoken, but less shy, Angelly told me how, after earning her undergraduate law degree at the University of Tolima, she started working as an advocate for victims of the armed conflict. She said that, as a victim of the armed conflict, the Non Sibi program had offered something of a “different character than the life [she’d] been living” and that she applies the leadership skills she acquired with Non Sibi to her professional life today. Both Mafe and Angelly confirmed having no problems with the FARC as members of the Non Sibi team. Though tragically, in 2022, Angelly’s father was killed in Ataco, gunned down in the hamlet of Santiago Perez, allegedly at the hands of an adolescent member of a FARC dissident group – a stark reminder of how the 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC has not effected lasting peace.
The next day, I travelled to up the mountain to meet the original Non Sibi members from Villahermosa. When I walked into the restaurant where we’db arranged to meet, I found myself hugging two accountants, a council woman, and a hairstylist, along with Don Fabio, an older campesino pastor who’d joined the Non Sibi team when we inaugurated the first playground.
We sat down for lunch and Don Fabio said a prayer, as he always had. After the blessing, he remembered how the march for peace we’d done was something Villahermosa had never seen. He remembered how taking part showed [Non Sibi members] “how to take up a flag…that [they] felt they could be instruments of peace.” He said “peace has reflected in the work” and that the work showed “what great value one vote has.”
Xiomara Parra Cortez, 30, and her sister Yessica, 29 had become accountants and were in the process of opening a new office in Villahermosa. Xiomara remembered how strange it was to have an American show up in such an isolated town. She remembered our trip to the Colombian air force base in Melgar, home of the CACOM4 combat helicopter group that participated in the Christmas gift airlift: “It was a dream; I remember it as it was yesterday.”
[PHOTO CAPTION: “Pilot For a Day trip to CACOM4 base, Author with team, including XIOMARA, MAFE and ANGELLY, Melgar, Tolima 2013]
Yessica told me how, as part of the Non Sibi team, she’d learned that she could “lead a project, reach a goal...and that her vote counted.”
Diana Patricia Cardona Osorio, now in her early 30s, recounted in detail, the Non Sibi democratic process – the tour of the candidate playground sites, the public debate and the public vote. She said that participating in the Non Sibi projects inspired her to eventually run for town council in Villahermosa, a position she held for four years.
Jose Luis Meneses, 33, has been living with cancer for several years now. It has spread to his brain. He was thin, fragile. His boyfriend, Kevin, had accompanied him, as despite his health, Jose Luis had insisted on making the trip. My foundation had paid for Jose Luis to get his cosmetology license in Bogota and he’d worked as a hair stylist for a few years before he took ill. I teared up when Jose Luis spoke about how “growing up “in a village between two mountains, [he] could only think about war” and that, “[he] was a kid with dreams he thought would never come true. “Non Sibi changed my life…It planted a seed in me that has kept me moving forward.”
[PHOTO CAPTION: The author with Andres Restrepo, Don Fabio, Yesica, Kevin, Xiomara, Jose Luis, Diana, posing in front of a playground, Libano, Tolima April 24, 2025]
And as for why the FARC never sabotaged the Non Sibi projects or retaliated against me or any of the team members: That was the question that Angelica was finally willing to answer when we sat down to talk Bogota.
After meeting at the USAID sponsored event in 2012, I’d interviewed Angelica about her experience in the ranks for an article for Foreign Affairs. At age twelve, she’d run away from home to escape abuse, proving to be an easy mark for a FARC recruiter. For ten years, she endured the brutality of guerrilla life before she finally escaped in 2005. Despite everything, she still considered the FARC to have been the family who raised her. As part of her indoctrination, the FARC taught her that the United States was the enemy.
Nevertheless, Angelica and I had struck up a friendship of sorts. I invited her to observe one of the Non Sibi playground projects, albeit surreptitiously. As Angelica had been involved in propaganda and youth recruitment activities, I wanted to get her “Red Team” perspective. Back then, she congratulated me on mobilizing so many kids and suggested things might have been different for her, had she had the option of joining the Non Sibi team. But she wasn’t willing to say more than that.
Now, Angelica, happily married with a teenage son, was much more forthcoming. She pointed out that, technically speaking, as an American, I’d been an objectivo – a military objective for kidnapping. (This, I’d known all along, though it was something else to hear it from her.)
And, as I was operating in their territory, she said the FARC would have been watching. However, because the Non Sibi projects seemed to be run by kids themselves and were benefiting the community, the FARC wouldn’t have seen the operation as a threat. In fact, she argued, the FARC were most likely shocked that I crossed class lines by showing up in the first place. She thought I’d might have even changed their minds about Yanquis. Certainly, I’d changed hers. And more significantly, would-be enemies became friends.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Author with Angelica, Bogota, April 22, 2025]
The work of the Non Sibi Team had won many hearts, including my own. Though the playgrounds are long gone, the kids who built them became adults who continue to give back to their respective communities today. By their own accounts, a U.S. funded foundation promoting democracy gave them a reason to believe in the democratic process, and a reason to believe in themselves. And the Non Sibi team members want Americans to know that.
Christine Balling is Senior Vice President of Professional Affiliations and a Faculty Member specializing in Latin American affairs at the Institute of World Politics located in Washington, DC. She is a former adviser to the US SOCSOUTH Commander.
