Newsletter 1
And in the beginning…. Everybody was talking fast!
Well, so it seems. My Spanish being a little rusted, not everything made sense at first. Oh well, it gives you a good opportunity to laugh at yourself!
I have been here for a month and you will forgive me for not writing earlier, but time goes by differently here. For example, meal times are a little different. Breakfast is around… well, when I get up (waken by the oh!-not-so-gorgeous sound of the rooster that lives behind our house), lunch is around 1 or 2 pm, and supper around 7 pm. There is only about 12 hrs of daylight (6am-6pm), so obviously getting up later than 9am doesn´t really make sense... I think I´m also getting used to the “colombian cold”. Yes, yes, all you Winterpeggers can laugh, I know 12-15 degrees (above 0) isn´t that cold! But the thing is that I caught a cold at the end of my first week!!! The next best thing to it, is that I got to drink a lot of hot chocolate – made of real chocolate. Not the powder stuff we use in Canada. Yummi! Another good thing here is that every morning I can walk around the corner to get fresh fruits (bananas, guavas, passion fruits, oranges) to make fresh juice! There are also a lot of panaderias (bakery) to get fresh bread and croissant. Have I forgot to mention the coffee!? Well, there are still a lot of new kind of food I am trying, I´ll cook some for you guys when I get back!
Bogotá seems very much to me like any big city. Okay, they do speak Spanish here, and there are a lots of little stores and homeless dogs and crazy taxi drivers and holes in the pavement; but seriously, they have a better bus system than Winnipeg! Hurray for the Transmilenio!!! And as for the danger, from armed groups for example, it is not oppressive, actually it is not that “obvious” in the city. You still notice it, like the presence of so many police officers. That is one thing that annoyed me a little at first. Everywhere you look there is a police officer, dressed like an army guy, with a gun (automatic riffle, for all I know) hanging from his shoulder. I haven´t dared to ask if they are loaded, but even at the banks you get your bag/purse checked before going in. After a month, it seems to be becoming part of the “usual” here, and I found out the other day that most of them are willing to chat with you while you wait in line! The danger seems to be getting higher as you travel towards the outskirts of bogota and or to key areas of the country (coast line, mountain regions, cultivating areas, borders with other countries). Although I said that the danger is not that threatening here, it is ever present. You can bet that 4 out of 5 people you see on the street have had a relative threatened/sequestrated or killed by one of the armed groups. The fifth person is the neighbor of one of the other four… At church we have a time for prayer requests, every sunday I have been there someone have asked that we pray for a family member being sequestrated or threatened. It sounds grim, but there is the other side of so much violence and fear: love and creativity. Unfortunately it is overlooked by the media 98% of the time.
Last week I went to ciudad Bolivar, one of the poorest area of Bogota (south-west of where I live). I was accompanying a women delagation of Witness for Peace from the US. Among other things, we found out that the area is a corridor to several armed groups (legal and illegal) who are discriminating/persecuting the youth of the area to control the corridor. Young people get systematically arrested and detained for no reason, beaten up, and sometimes killed. They also tie them up outside the police station as an example/warning to the rest of the community. The approximate rate of this illegal social cleasing is 2-3 teenagers a day. The landscape counts many hills. On one there is the military base, where most of the torturing/killing happens, and on the next hill there is a tree. That tree is called arbol estrangulado “the choked tree”. The reason being that it is about the only one around -because of the many houses- and that’s where people go hang themselves out of desperation (lack of jobs, violence from armed groups, youth being killed, etc). Let me tell you that one went right home… On top of that because this area is so poor and violent, humanitarian aid workers do not want to go work there. Therefore we met one, only one, organisation working there: Organizacion Femenina Popular (Popular Organisation of Women). In the last 3 years, they have opened 4 soup kitchens, organized a few community food cooking projects and done a lot of education on people’s situation. They work wonders from scratch and the people they are helping are little geniuses of creativity. I like their slogan: “Las mujeres no parimos, ni forjamos hijas e hijos para la guerra.” Women do not give birth nor raise daughters and sons for the war.
And so as not to finish on a sad note, I notice that I started this letter talking about food, and I will end it in the same way. Oatmeal, thick, no? Try it the Colombian way: blend it in the mixer first with a little more milk and water than usual, and warm it up in a pot on the stove with a few cinnamon sticks and a spoon of sugar. It makes a delicious hot drink and not as heavy as the usual way we eat it!
Keep on writing me, I enjoy reading every bit of news from you!
Ciao, Mylene
Well, so it seems. My Spanish being a little rusted, not everything made sense at first. Oh well, it gives you a good opportunity to laugh at yourself!
I have been here for a month and you will forgive me for not writing earlier, but time goes by differently here. For example, meal times are a little different. Breakfast is around… well, when I get up (waken by the oh!-not-so-gorgeous sound of the rooster that lives behind our house), lunch is around 1 or 2 pm, and supper around 7 pm. There is only about 12 hrs of daylight (6am-6pm), so obviously getting up later than 9am doesn´t really make sense... I think I´m also getting used to the “colombian cold”. Yes, yes, all you Winterpeggers can laugh, I know 12-15 degrees (above 0) isn´t that cold! But the thing is that I caught a cold at the end of my first week!!! The next best thing to it, is that I got to drink a lot of hot chocolate – made of real chocolate. Not the powder stuff we use in Canada. Yummi! Another good thing here is that every morning I can walk around the corner to get fresh fruits (bananas, guavas, passion fruits, oranges) to make fresh juice! There are also a lot of panaderias (bakery) to get fresh bread and croissant. Have I forgot to mention the coffee!? Well, there are still a lot of new kind of food I am trying, I´ll cook some for you guys when I get back!
Bogotá seems very much to me like any big city. Okay, they do speak Spanish here, and there are a lots of little stores and homeless dogs and crazy taxi drivers and holes in the pavement; but seriously, they have a better bus system than Winnipeg! Hurray for the Transmilenio!!! And as for the danger, from armed groups for example, it is not oppressive, actually it is not that “obvious” in the city. You still notice it, like the presence of so many police officers. That is one thing that annoyed me a little at first. Everywhere you look there is a police officer, dressed like an army guy, with a gun (automatic riffle, for all I know) hanging from his shoulder. I haven´t dared to ask if they are loaded, but even at the banks you get your bag/purse checked before going in. After a month, it seems to be becoming part of the “usual” here, and I found out the other day that most of them are willing to chat with you while you wait in line! The danger seems to be getting higher as you travel towards the outskirts of bogota and or to key areas of the country (coast line, mountain regions, cultivating areas, borders with other countries). Although I said that the danger is not that threatening here, it is ever present. You can bet that 4 out of 5 people you see on the street have had a relative threatened/sequestrated or killed by one of the armed groups. The fifth person is the neighbor of one of the other four… At church we have a time for prayer requests, every sunday I have been there someone have asked that we pray for a family member being sequestrated or threatened. It sounds grim, but there is the other side of so much violence and fear: love and creativity. Unfortunately it is overlooked by the media 98% of the time.
Last week I went to ciudad Bolivar, one of the poorest area of Bogota (south-west of where I live). I was accompanying a women delagation of Witness for Peace from the US. Among other things, we found out that the area is a corridor to several armed groups (legal and illegal) who are discriminating/persecuting the youth of the area to control the corridor. Young people get systematically arrested and detained for no reason, beaten up, and sometimes killed. They also tie them up outside the police station as an example/warning to the rest of the community. The approximate rate of this illegal social cleasing is 2-3 teenagers a day. The landscape counts many hills. On one there is the military base, where most of the torturing/killing happens, and on the next hill there is a tree. That tree is called arbol estrangulado “the choked tree”. The reason being that it is about the only one around -because of the many houses- and that’s where people go hang themselves out of desperation (lack of jobs, violence from armed groups, youth being killed, etc). Let me tell you that one went right home… On top of that because this area is so poor and violent, humanitarian aid workers do not want to go work there. Therefore we met one, only one, organisation working there: Organizacion Femenina Popular (Popular Organisation of Women). In the last 3 years, they have opened 4 soup kitchens, organized a few community food cooking projects and done a lot of education on people’s situation. They work wonders from scratch and the people they are helping are little geniuses of creativity. I like their slogan: “Las mujeres no parimos, ni forjamos hijas e hijos para la guerra.” Women do not give birth nor raise daughters and sons for the war.
And so as not to finish on a sad note, I notice that I started this letter talking about food, and I will end it in the same way. Oatmeal, thick, no? Try it the Colombian way: blend it in the mixer first with a little more milk and water than usual, and warm it up in a pot on the stove with a few cinnamon sticks and a spoon of sugar. It makes a delicious hot drink and not as heavy as the usual way we eat it!
Keep on writing me, I enjoy reading every bit of news from you!
Ciao, Mylene
posted by Mylene @ 1:01 PM
1 comments
