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When Ana Maria Rey Martinez receives her flower and diploma from College of the Atlantic on June 7, she'll be setting out on the
 journey of a lifetime, talking with South American farmers who have once-but now no longer-raised coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Her journey, which she has titled "Testimonials of Former Coca Growers," will be funded by a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, given to just 50 graduating college seniors from 47 select colleges and universities. Since 1983, when COA was first asked to nominate students for a fellowship, COA seniors have received 25 fellowships.
Rey was raised in the northeastern Colombian city of Bucaramanga. She felt totally secure there-at least until 1993, when her best friend's uncle was kidnapped and held for six months. Rey was just a child then, not even 10 years old, but she began to connect the distress in her friend's family with the bombings of the electric plants outside her city, frequently leaving her to study by candlelight.
External politics became crucial to Rey. In junior high and again in high school, she was elected to attend special conflict resolution workshops and leadership seminars at the local and national level. "These workshops allowed me to reflect on the internal conflict in which I was growing up. I was persuaded into rejecting the violence and anger around me, but also inspired to think collectively-with other fellow students from around the country-about alternative ways of living and sharing," says Rey.
But it wasn't until Rey left Colombia for the baccalaureate high school program at the United World College in India, that she really saw her nation's struggle. She and a fellow Colombian student created a dramatic performance that forced her to see the world of Colombian drug smuggling and guerrilla warfare through the eyes of a farmer. "I realized I wanted to focus on the issues of the farmer and the war on drugs-to understand the human side of this issue," she says. The power of theater had brought her to a new awareness of her homeland.
Rey recently interned with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia. There, she helped two anthropologists synthesize data about Colombian coca eradication programs, to discover which alternatives to coca worked best for farmers. "I got a sense of how the government is handling the problem," says Rey, "but I couldn't do the fieldwork." This frustration inspired Rey to write the Watson proposal. She plans to spend her time in Peru and Bolivia, speaking with farmers who once grew coca to find out what it was that brought them to this crop-and what convinced them to switch.
Eventually, Rey hopes to work in Colombia, to add her voice to those trying to solve the problems of drugs and violence in her nation, and find ways not only to eradicate the crops, but also to reduce the hostility that has dominated her nation for decades.
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