“I buy hair! I buy hair!” This is one of the cries heard in the anarchic informal market encountered by migrants who have just crossed the border from Venezuela to Colombia. They cross either via the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, if they can pay the fees and present the proper permits, or through the various informal and illegal routes (trochas), a no man's land where traffickers, coyotes and abusers of all kinds proliferate.
“I buy hair!” shouts the man again. A trembling Venezuelan girl, almost a teenager, approaches him and negotiates the sale of her hair for 50,000 Colombian pesos (about $13). She has just crossed, accompanied by her sick mother, in the hope of finding treatment on this side of the border. She will continue along the route into Colombia’s interior, leaving a piece of her life and her beautiful hair behind.
This is one of some 1,700 stories about the Venezuelan diaspora that non-governmental organisation TodoSomos has collected from the 200 kilometres of road that separate the Colombian border city of Cúcuta from Bucaramanga, the regional capital. It is a dangerous road that goes deep into the green, cold mountains of Colombia’s Norte de Santander department. The young migrant and her ailing mother are sure to find food and rest in one of the shelters, which have been set up to provide humanitarian assistance along the way since this crisis erupted in 2014. And perhaps one of the TodoSomos volunteers will approach and invite the girl to write down her story in one of the books that collect testimonies of some of the 6,000 migrants who pass through each week.
