For decades, armed conflict in Colombia has affected millions of people and shaped the childhoods of generations across the country. Experiences of displacement, loss, separation and insecurity have become part of many families’ lives.
As part of its international research and documentation work, the War Childhood Museum collaborated with researcher Louis Monroy Santander to collect objects and personal stories from people whose childhoods were affected by the conflict. Through these objects and testimonies, individual experiences become part of WCM’s growing international collection documenting what it means to grow up during war.
We spoke with Louis about the stories he encountered during his fieldwork, the objects people chose to preserve, and what documenting childhood experiences can tell us about both war and its lasting impact.
During your fieldwork for the War Childhood Museum, what has stayed with you most from the stories people shared about their childhoods?
What has stayed with me most is how the effects of war often continue long after childhood itself. Many of the people we spoke with experienced violence or displacement when they were young, but these experiences continued to shape their lives in different ways as they grew older.
The stories are very different from one another, but many speak about having to adapt repeatedly – to displacement, insecurity, discrimination or the loss of people and places that were important to them.
At the same time, these are not only stories about what happened to people. Some of the participants later became human rights defenders, community leaders or peace activists. Documenting their childhood experiences therefore also means documenting what they carried with them into adulthood and what they chose to do with those experiences.
The War Childhood Museum documents personal experiences through objects and the stories connected to them. What did this approach reveal during your work in Colombia?
Objects can bring us very close to someone’s personal experience. Large historical events can sometimes feel abstract, but an object allows us to see what those events meant in one person’s everyday life.
The stories we collected come from very different parts of Colombia – cities, small towns and rural communities – and from people whose childhood experiences were very different. Their objects and stories reflect displacement, separation from family, insecurity and other consequences of the conflict, but also memories of home, family relationships and the ways people adapted to difficult circumstances.
Looking at the conflict through childhood experiences also brings attention to things that can disappear from broader historical accounts: what a child remembers, what they were afraid of, what they valued, what they carried with them and what they decided to keep many years later.
Was there anything about working with personal objects that changed the way you understood the stories you were documenting?
Working with objects makes the process very personal. An object may look ordinary to someone else, but for the person who kept it, it can hold an entire story.
During the documentation process, we were not only asking people what happened to them. We were also asking why a particular object mattered, what memories it carried and why they had kept it for so many years.
That creates a different way of talking about war. Instead of beginning with armed groups, political events or statistics, we begin with someone’s lived experience. The object becomes a way into that memory.
What does it mean to you for these stories from Colombia to become part of the War Childhood Museum’s international collection?
It means placing individual experiences from Colombia alongside childhood experiences of war from other parts of the world. The conflicts may be very different, but some experiences of growing up during war can speak to one another across countries and generations.
For me, this has also been a professional and emotional process. Listening to these stories and documenting the objects connected to them has made me think deeply about how violence affects people not only while a conflict is happening, but throughout their lives.
Preserving these experiences is important because they add something that statistics and historical accounts cannot provide on their own. They allow people to encounter war through the memories of individuals who experienced it as children.
By bringing these stories into the War Childhood Museum’s collection, they become part of a broader record of childhood during war – one that preserves differences between conflicts while also creating space to recognize experiences that people across different parts of the world may share.
