I wanted to write a bit about my time in Colombia (BTW - Colombia, the country, is spelled with two o's). I have tried to include a picture taken by my pitiful webcam of a poster that I have now in my computer room. It is my favorite poster from Colombia - we have quite a few - because, possibly it is the most abstract. Which, in some ways, is the best way to remember Colombia. A beautiful country, sometimes difficult to understand. Definitely hard to live in, but you'll never want to leave once you've been there a while.
I arrived Good Friday in 1989 and just about everything was closed. I had to prepare hurriedly for class on Monday. I was basically given a stack of teacher manuals and told good luck by a very tired looking mother who was filling in for the last few months and was glad her time in the 3/4 split class was over. I got to work to begin my first full-time teaching experience in the garage of the house that the school had rented.
Now for those of you who don't know Colombian history, I was living in Colombia at the time of Pablo Escobar. He was in control of the infamous Medellin drug cartel. He was a nasty, vicious sort of man to his enemies. A loving, caring leader to those who had earned his favor.
By the fall of 1989, when I returned, visa hurriedly worked out, to teach a grade 2/3 class, Escobar had begun his campaign of terror that would ultimatel lead to his dramatic and televised shooting on a rooftop by police. Escobar was randomly bombing anything, banks, food stores, etc. to protest and try to stop the extraditionof drug dealers to the US. For more details of these times, please see the bibliography below.
One time, I had just returned from a grocery shopping expedition at Carulla (grocery store) next to Bulevar Niza (mall that I lived close to) when I felt a shudder go through my apartment. I looked out my window and saw smoke rising from the direction of Bulevar Niza. My good friend (now my wife), Ruth was still there, I thought. I called her apartment and she was there - I sighed in relief. It turns out the car bomb went off in front of the Carulla, but didn't level it. One of the families at my school was actually there when it happened. The father was getting a haircut close to the grocery store and he ran out to try to get into the store after the bomb went off. The police hit him with batons to keep him from entering.
His wife and daughter were in the store. The girl must have been around 5 or 6 at the time. When the bomb went off, the mother and daughter flew away from each other. The mother looked frantically for the daughter and found her, miraculously, sitting on top of a pile of rubble that fell from the ceiling! Needless to say the family came out of it physically undamaged. The news that night said that only 8 or so people were killed but the father later told me that he saw a lot of bodies being quickly hidden by the police. The news was toned down publicly so as not to cause panic.
So you must think it was awful to work there. No, it was tense, yes, but I loved my time there. Perhaps it was because that is exactly where God wanted me at the time. How could I not feel secure in God's hands?
I loved Bogota! I love that it is the land of 'eternal spring'. It is quite situated at quite a high altitude, 8,600 feet or so. There are no extremes in climate there. It is either raining or it isn't. I can't recall talking or hearing much about the weather there, because it would be the most boring topic. Cool in the morning, warming up during the day. The sun setting at 6:30 and rising 12 hours later. Only a few minutes variance during the year.
I loved walking to Bulevar Niza. I often joked that the third floor of that mall was my 'office' to my students. The third floor had all the restaurants and the movie theater... I would vary where I would eat each night. I was single, the US dollar was strong and it was actually cheaper and easier to eat out. I pretty much would only prepare lunch and breakfast at my apartment.
I loved being able to see the Andes mountains around me. I loved that they were green and filled with trees all the way up. We had a fantastic principal, Stan Yohe, who would take the teachers on tours around Bogota and to towns just a short ride away for the weekends. Stan was a historian at heart and would be forever telling us stories about what happened here and there. We really didn't need any other guide!
And the food! My mouth waters thinking of
ajiaco, - a kind of chicken stew, of
arroz con pollo, of
empanadas. I grew to love the traditional breakfast of hot chocolate with a young, runny kind of cheese - I think it was called
campesino. I loved grabbing a bus like we grab taxis in North America. You would just wave it down and tell it to stop where ever you needed it to. I learned the buses fairly quickly, once I got my own apartment and actually preferred them over a taxi. They were not only cheaper, but it was easier for me to 'blend' in on a bus - I didn't have to talk so much...
Colombia still is a violent place, gripped in an unending civil war, but I know what the place is really like. I have seen the Colombian heart and I miss it. The violence is not what Colombia actually is - I would hope that others would discover that, too!
Bibliography:Bowden, Mark.
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, c2001.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia.
News of a Kidnapping. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, c1997.
