My mom wrote to me after my last post and let me know, gently but clearly, that re-posting others' accounts of an experience didn’t count as a real blog. doh. She has a point...but I have been feeling like my life here is rather unremarkable since the New Year. Which, I realize now, is actually quite remarkable. I am feeling settled in here: I know how to direct taxis to my house, and realize if they’re taking the long way. I know the best place in the city to buy wooden chairs, fresh peppers, and nutella. I have a favorite dance place, a favorite bike ride, and a favorite pizza place. And I have enough local phone numbers in my cell phone to have to tab through them.
So, of course, it is now time for me to go. The next couple months will be hugely different from the past two. Three of my bestest friends in the world arrive on Friday, and we are going to the coast (Cartagena and Santa Marta) for a week of vacation, and will spend a little time here in Bogotá as well. After that, I head to the Peace Community for two weeks. After that, Gilberto departs, and I will be joined by a new team member, Camila. We then will receive visits from the San Francisco staff, and then another new team member, Mayra, comes, and we will prepare to return to the community again.
There is much to say about each of these events, and I look forward to reflecting on them in my blog as they happen. I am particularly anxious about Gilberto leaving, as we have spent every working morning, noon and night together, essentially, since I arrived. This reminds me a bit if my first year teaching at Parker, when Lisa Palaia and I would joke we were married, but since Gilberto and I also live together, it escalates this metaphor! I am excited about Camila’s arrival, but am also feeling the weight of being the soon-to-be senior member of the Bogotá office. Thankfully, it looks like Gilberto will be around the corner working with Peace Brigades International, and that our old teammate Trish will also be in town, so in case of emergency, they have promised to help me out.
January is a strange month to be “working” in Colombia, since no Colombians are working. From the second week in December until...next week, basically everything is shut down. The banks, the government offices, the local restaurant, the laundry place with most of my clothes locked inside it, the yoga place...Colombians are serious about their vacations. I was periodically annoyed about this, until I stopped and remembered that this is one thing I appreciate deeply about this country and this culture: people make time for family, rest and breathing (even if it is contaminated air).
I have had wonderful experiences during the past couple weeks, but they have stopped feeling totally new and foreign. As a result, I don’t have pictures! I have stopped feeling like I want to document and apprehend every moment of this new life- and have started to feel a comfortable rhythm here.
Some interesting things have been/will be:
* After taking the transmilenio (the subway-like bus that has its own lane on the major roadways in Bogotá) all the way to its ends, my Bogotano friend Julio and I took another bus into the hills that hug Bogotá. After our self-guided tour of the city, we went downtown to buy a guitar pick for me (I am taking lessons!) and a cell phone gadget for him. As we exited a technology flea market and rounded onto a fairly nice plaza, he told me that previously, the plaza, and in fact the whole area, had been the most dangerous, drug-ridden, seedy part of the city. To deal with this, the mayor of Bogotá literally bulldozed this 5-square block area, and made a park – called “Park of the New Millenium.” I asked where all the residents and their related activity had gone after they had been bulldozed, and he told me that some had been shipped out to a suburban part of Bogotá, some had been arrested, and some had been relocated to “the L.” we walked half a block, and he showed me a street which was blocked off to traffic. Visible from outside were police guards at the ends of this stretch, and a permeating, muddy brown – the people and their clothes, their goods & worldly possessions lying haphazardly on the street, the street itself – which smelled like it looked. After standing outside the street and watching a few people dressed like us come and go without incident, we decided to walk down this two-block stretch, which at the end turns rights and goes for another block (hence, it’s called the “L”). What I saw on this street was the embodiment of human misery – people passed out everywhere, drug use happening in the open, kids laying beside their stoned parents, and unspeakable filth. Julio and I walked quickly through with our heads down, and though we were called after, didn’t feel threatened. At 11am on a sunny day with a local guide, this felt like an OK thing to do – and though it was awful, I am glad I saw another side of Bogotá, nestled only blocks away from shiny skyscrapers and peaceful church squares.
* I am learning a lot about how the US vets the Colombian military for human rights violations. The Leahy Law, sponsored in 2001 by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, prohibits U.S. military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity. In theory, this law should give an incentive for the Colombian military to improve their human rights practices in order to continue receiving aid from the US. In practice, little is known about how this vetting happens, and it has been argued that units avoid being “de-certified” for human rights compliance through loopholes in the law: the US overrides a decertification recommendation if it deems it important enough; once a unit is cleared, new soldiers are transferred in that haven’t been screened; they use private contractors, or mercenaries, who don’t have to be screened; or the few identified human rights violators are transferred out of a unit, which then clears the whole unit without examining their human rights practices as a whole. Gilberto and I are meeting with the US Embassy to learn more about this this week, and I am fascinated to learn how this well-intentioned policy work here on the ground.
* This might seem less remarkable to some people, but I found a wonderful local farmers’ market only about twenty minutes from my house. I love open-air markets all over the world, but this one in particular is enchanting. I love interacting with the people who, oftentimes, produce the food. I love how vegetables stretch out before you, and that it is always noisy, and that I hear “a la orden” (at your service) hundreds of times, and that you have hundreds of options of where you want to buy tomatoes, so you can look for the hard ones that are red but not over-ripe, and that you can get anything in the market – and that everyone knows, in an acres-wide market, where you would find ceramic plates and a basil plant. I love that when you buy meat, you have to really confront what it means to be a carnivore, because the meat stand has a pig’s head for sale.
And I love that I got a backpack and two big bags worth of vegetables for under twenty dollars. I feel like this is one of the only times I feel fairly good about being a consumer – I talk with the people selling the vegetables, I am outside, I am supporting small farmers, and I am buying healthy fresh food. I don’t have a picture of it, since I have stopped taking pictures! But will get one soon and update this.
OK – When I next update this I will be on the beach!
Cartagena is the most beautiful city I've ever seen. It is rightly famous for its balconies dripping with bouganvillea, the amazing purple flower pictured in this photo. It is also a city divided...there is literally a wall dividing the wealthy, picturesque "old city" from the new, bustling, skyscraper and slum-strewn part. Alas...we were on vacation, and did spend most of our time in the old city, but also got a chance to see how balconies and flowers gave way to poverty, filth and displaced communities once you stepped outside the walled city. 
Mis amigas in Santa Marta, where the sea meets the mountains. Santa Marta is supposedly four, but actually 6 or 7, hours east of Cartagena along the coast. It has the highest sea to mountain rise in the world - which means there are breathtaking views of mountains crashing into the sea everywhere you look. It has about half a million people, but quickly breaks up into isolated beaches and fishing villages on its outskirts. We spent three days there, with a lovely guide shepharding us on and off lanchas, or small boats, showing us the area, with a hotel right on the beachfront (where we swam in the mornings). We also visited the beaches of Parque Tayrona, a breathtaking National Park which consists mainly of fairly desolate jungle, we've heard, but we were content to hang out on its beached sea outskirts, where we did some amazing snorkeling.
Us with Francisco, who is a native Bogotano, and who went to grad school with Gabi. He was our gracious tourguide, and showed us the paradasical national library pictured here, with Cartagena-like bouganvillea spilling over its sides. The library is surrounded by water, has gorgeous window views everywhere, and even has free internet. I plan on making this the FOR satellite office when I return to Bogotá.
