Indigenous Nasa children are gently splashed with water using a leafy branch — a ritual meant to protect them and symbolically “open the path” — before setting off with wooden signs they had painted with messages like “We were born to protect the environment” and “Peace, please.”
Wearing protective gloves, the children nail their signs to trees lining a dirt road still used at times by armed groups for drug trafficking, as they collect trash from land their families reclaimed from vast industrial sugarcane plantations in Colombia’s conflict-scarred southwest.
