September, 2012

A reflection on my three months in Bogotá, what I’ve experienced, and what about the country has changed. Some parts will feel familiar to my first entry, “A Reason for Applause.” Some will not.

There was a celebration when we landed. It’s traditional in Colombia to clap when the plane hits the runway. My hands, however, were cradling my head. It is Tuesday May 29th and I’m dizzy.

Immigration didn’t stop me. I always feel as though officials have the power to come up with a silly reason to stop you at immigration. You didn’t spell your address correctly. You can’t speak Spanish. You’re too old. You’re too young. You’re too beautiful. Hey, you, you’re too beautiful. What’s your name?

After a brief pause and a hard stare from the sad looking immigration man who hid behind the glass, I passed through, back into Colombia.

I’ve been here before. In 2009 I came to Colombia to volunteer as a CEEDer for AIESEC EIA and study Spanish for 2 months. I remember the fear and anxiety that plagued me when I landed in Medellín at the beginning of the summer. But suddenly there was an old friend from university and a handful of others hanging over a balcony in the Medellín airport. They were shouting and waving, and my welcome, indeed my entire time in that city, was warm.

Again, now in Bogotá’s El Dorado airport, even though the air is chilly, my welcome is warm.

Right as I walked away from the currency exchange window, I heard my name being called loudly. Cristian and Nataly, two members of the AIESEC Trainee Integration team, greeted me with huge hugs. They took photographs. They gave me a small traditional Colombian pouch with a hand-made Colombian poncho inside. A small bottle of aguardiente, the national white rum touted as a point of Colombian pride, came tumbling out of the pouch as well. Then they bought me a hamburger. We sat down. And we talked. We talked in Spanish. We talked in English. Everything was coming back. A gust of strong, good memories was pouring in from the smells, the sounds, the feel.

I was happy. I felt comfortable. I felt safe. And the hamburger was delicious.

Now, the first thing you learn when you get to Bogotá is just how dangerous it really is, how you have to tener cuidado or be careful. At first, I didn’t understand exactly what this meant. Did it mean that I was going to get killed? Kidnapped? Robbed? Tripped? Does it mean that some parts of the city are more dangerous than others?

“Everywhere in Bogotá is dangerous,” Yudbeny, the woman who runs my apartment, told me later with a big chuckle. “After 8pm in the evening, if you are on the street alone, and the street is empty, then debes tener cuidado (you have to be careful).”

Living in Bogotá, I realize, can be dizzying when the city around you has suffered decades of civil war, the Bogotazo, forced displacement, and a massive gap between rich and poor. The insecurity and the poverty can get dizzying.

After hopping into a small car with Cristian, the road starts moving underneath me. Small, wobbly buses called collectivos zip and dart around us. It is dark. The road is dented with potholes and cracks. The car shakes violently. Cristian is cool.

As we zoom toward the Alvarez family’s house where I will stay for one week until I get settled, something in Colombia is happening.

What coincides with (almost to the day) of my arrival is the release of Roméo Langlois, a French journalist, by the FARC (Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). The FARC, a left-wing guerrilla group that formed in 1964 in opposition to Colombia’s tattered political climate, took Langlois captive during a firefight with the Colombian military in the mountains of Caqueta (a department in the south of the country) on April 28^th.

During his 30 days in captivity, Langlois rigorously interviewed and documented the life of the guerrilla soldiers whose political motives and weaponry could decide life or death for the young Frenchman on a whim. He emerged from captivity claiming that he was treated well, and that the FARC desperately want to talk peace. Langlois came out of captivity carrying the voice of one of Colombia’s most marginalized and feared guerrilla groups – and how the international community needs to put pressure on Colombia for a peace process.

Now, three months later, much has happened around me here in Colombia, and fortunately the dizziness is passing.

Now, much more so in response to a tired 48 year armed civil conflict than Langlois’ hostage theatrics, after sacrificing 2% of GDP ($16bn) on military spending, and an $8bn Plan Colombia to help fight Colombia’s FARC, ELN and a variety of military groups, and after tens of thousands of lives taken on both sides of the fighting, real signs of a peace process have seemed to come alive again.

After a messy and inglorious attempt to start talks in 1998, President Juan Manuel Santos is renewing that failed effort. Colombia and the FARC have jointly declared that they agree to start a peace process starting no later than October of 2012. The talks will take place in Oslo and then later in Havana, and Chile and Venezuela will help facilitate the talks. The US will not be involved.

The mood amongst students in my classrooms, of my boss, around my neighborhood in the Palermo, my housemates – a Venezuelan political science Masters student, and a Colombian history student – is generally a cool mix of tired hope and cautious skepticism.

It has been roughly three months since Langlois came out of the Caqueta carrying the voice of a marginalized group that wants to talk peace – supporting it, promoting it. Finally, his wish is coming true.

Three months, and things are still changing fast around me.

But my changes happening to me are different from the changes that frame Colombia against its tired civil conflict.

Since day one, and beyond the backdrop of the Langlois fiasco and hopeful peace talks, a rich and lucid life has unfolded for me as an AIESEC trainee.

I have learned to listen to the sound of harmonicas whine through the sleepy streets of the Candelaria.

I’ve learned to dance Salsa on rooftops, in kitchens and backyards, and a creaky old joint called the Cubano where the bathrooms might as well be an entrance to purgatory, where no one is younger than 40, and where I reckon they make the mojitos stronger than Hemingway’s beard.

I’ve taught students at a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) call center that handles ATT&T telecommunications accounts, where employees are students making an extra buck next on the side of university classes, oil mechanics making an extra buck on the side, aspiring teachers, and a Eurozone crisis refugee from Spain. I’ve taught engineers, CEOs, and designers.

I’ve learned to bravely cut into a new, strange and exotically delicious fruit each new week, struggling to defeat the element of surprise that springs from Colombia’s insanely endless diversity of botanical temptations. So I cut again. And then low and behold there always is: another surprise.

I’ve learned to be scolded, praised, humiliated and advised by Yudbeny Gonzalez – Queen of an old broken down house in the Palermo where I used to live. Queen of twelve young boys who want to be men. Mother none.

I’ve learned my language from a new perspective, how its complexity is both its flaw and its beauty, and how news of the way phrasal verbs work is always taken as tough news.

I’ve learned that what is important to remember when living against the backdrop of a place, a people, a country made up of a narrative laced with violence, drug-trafficking, street crime, and robbery, is that it is important to stay hopeful, to stay positive.

Colombia is a country that has been led through countless dizzying trials of hope and despair.

Right now though Colombia is leaning toward a hopeful future.

There was a celebration as Juanita struck the piñata and hundreds of dulces scattered across the floor. A group of children converged on the blind-folded Juanita, whose birthday has brought salsa music, grilled meat, family and friends into the house of Diego Jaimes, the man from whom I rent a room in my neighborhood, the Palermo. I stand somewhere off to the side and talk to a father of one of the children about the US. He is curious. For all the dizziness brought about by Colombia’s political conflict, Juanita’s birthday and the people it brings together feels extraordinarily lucid.

Juanita holds up a dulce. She looks at it, and then she looks at me, and then she unwraps the candy and stuffs it into her mouth and chews and smiles. She is shining. Juanita, who has just turned five years old, will grow up with the worst of Colombia’s memories buried in history. It is hoped.

In the snap and thrash of Juanita’s piñata exploding like a bomb in mid air, I realize I’ve been here for three months now. It is September 8^th. There are children and dulces and laughter covering the floor of my house. These are clear and beautiful things.

And Colombia is less dizzy than ever before.

“Watching Juanita’s Piñata” is a reflection on my three months in Bogotá, what I’ve experienced, and what has changed. Parts, though by no means the whole, of this piece are taken from my first entry, “A Reason for Applause.”

July, 2012

Ahead of us there is smoke billowing out of the back of something metal, black, stained and industrial. It’s moving slowly.

And it is making me late for my lesson with the Gerente.

I can see the smoke through the front window of my stick-shifting, gurgling, gears-grinding-gears bus that holds more than twenty people. There are roughly ten seats. The driver sits on something soft, maroon, and squeaky and uses one hand to steer as he rips several peso notes out of his fist and quickly turns to make eye contact with his latest passenger, whose feet have barely left the ground as the bus lurches forward and away. The new passenger is a mother holding a child.

Changing cash and driving stick should be classified as an act of God in Bogotá’s gnarly traffic frenzy.

But it is not.

This, like any other concrete vein coursing through the city, is just the way the road is. This time it is the road to Mosquera, a small, and what I expect to be sleepy, town one and a half hours outside of Bogotá

Some sort of divinity, surely, is the only thing I can think of that keeps my driver sane.

That must be why, when looking through the window, the exhaust filled road is not the only thing I see. Hanging from the window there is a string holding several crosses with a crucified Christ dangling from each one. And on the dashboard, The Virgin Mary faces our driver head on.

The lore behind the Virgin Mary’s relationship with Bogotá’s bus drivers goes something like this: some years ago a group of drivers were taking a rest along the road. A group of old hands told some younger fellows that they should get religious quick, that they should start respecting the virgin Mary, and carry some faith with them for their new lives on the road. They declined, and two of the young drivers went off and got into an accident later that day. The story circulated. Anecdote turned to superstition. The superstition spread. And now, years later, decking out the interior of almost every collectivo bus in Bogotá, there is a fervent display of Catholic symbols and paraphernalia. And the Virgin Mary is almost always present.

The bus’s dashboard is almost like a private altar.

Along the way what I see along the road is a chaotic sort of transformation. A gigantic excavator tears up soil from a fallow farm field and deposits it into a dump truck. Modern architecture sticks up on the outskirts of Bogotá with signs draped over its glass window panes, signaling “office space for rent.” Further along a town street lined with grease-stained mechanic shops and heaping junkyards, where every other bus is a truck carrying freight, there are apartment residences under construction.

The small towns toward the West of Bogotá – Funza, Mosquera, Facatativá – are hotbeds of an industrial wildfire, where industrial parks, distribution warehouses, a Nestle factory, and massive flower companies have sprung up and started to thrive in a lively, chaotic way since the early 2000s.

Somewhere in this chaos there is an office where the Gerente of a French multinational manufacturing company is waiting for me to arrive.

Then, suddenly, the bus screeches to a halt. The bus driver shouts at me to get off. This, apparently, is my stop.

My feet hit the ground. Dirt. Next to me something of a makeshift flatbed truck is broken down. Several men hover around two feet, which stick out from underneath the engine. Across the road there is a massive and vacant industrial park. Everything else is flat, open green.

Several paces back in the opposite direction from the broken down truck there is a gate and what appears to be a complex of buildings.

I trudge toward it.

At the gate there is a man with a gun. Security. I pass him my identification card through the thin slats in the fence. Inside his guard house I hear the murmur of a voice on a telephone. The phone clicks. The gates of Saint-Gobain open.

“Siga,” says the security guard, telling me to enter.

I do, and then I set out to meet the man who will be my private pupil of the English tongue for the next several months. I set out to meet the General Manager, the Gerente, of Saint-Gobain Colombia.

The cluster of offices is a two-story box that hangs over a long, narrow factory building with wide sliding doors and no windows. Inside, there is a young, black haired woman who appears to be no more than 20 years old. She points to a set of stairs. At the top, there is a long wide room that stretches the entire length of the building. About 15 shirts and ties face me as I enter. Then, just as suddenly as I appear, they go back to their whirring computer terminals, and all I can hear is the snapping click of keys entering figures into spreadsheets. I behold the finance department.

A woman in her forties approaches me. Her posture says professional and confident, but it balances polite and hospitable too. She explains that the Gerente will wait for me here, and gestures with an open hand to a long black sofa outside a closed door at the end of the room. She asks me if I want coffee. I say yes. She disappears.

After a quick five minutes, the door swings open. A round-faced man who appears to be his late thirties stands in front of me. He is wearing blue jeans, a pressed shirt, and a tie. There is a fast, intense sort of energy in his round frame. Wearing a modest smile, he looks at me, holds out his hand, shakes it, and says, “Buenos días.” Something in the way he says it is hesitant.

We enter the Gerente’s office.

The Gerente’s office is many things. It is the sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shania Twain, and a string of Salsa tracks playing softly through speakers close to the windows. It is a round conference table with a projector poised and ready to flash presentations at a screen that fills up one entire wall at the end of the office. It is phone calls. Phone calls from the factory line downstairs, phone calls from the secretary just down the hall, phone calls from Paris, phone calls from Brazil, emails in Spanish, emails in English, sudden ideas for innovation, for branding, for re-branding, debates, resolutions, fast black ink scribbling on white correspondence stock. And it is time, too, falling away at the feet of the man who tries to run faster than everything happening around him.

We sit down across from each other at the conference table. There is a knock at the door. A maid enters with two cups of coffee. She places them in between the Gerente and me. The maid leaves. The Gerente turns back to the table, looks at me, produces a heavy sigh, smiles, and apologizes.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say Buenos dias. I meant to say Good morning, how are you?” he says.

And then class with the Gerente begins.