A Thousand Words

Although sometimes the most beautiful of words are worth a thousand pictures, sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words.

On the right side of my weblog, just click the link that says "My Photo Albums," and come into my Colombian adventure with me.

Blessings and love to all!
And yes, updated stories coming soon, promise.

Myths

It's those rare moments, when I truly feel like I'm traveling, like my body is free of dissent and refusal to conform to the authority of everyday life and my mind is free from monitored experimentation, that I realize the hardships are small tokens, a mere few pesos in the economy of my experience, for an afternoon of volcano-dipping. It has not been easy, never once, living in Cartagena and working at a Technological Institution, for so many obvious reasons--how could a young writer, desperately searching for inspiration and walking an unrequited search for something better, feel satisfied among the next generation of engineers and mathmaticians? Yet I wonder: perhaps, if I have been simply looking too hard to find my future or my prized piece of writing in my foreign experience, if I have been trying too ferociously to devour my journey in order to find something worth writing about, then it's possible I have compartmentalized and diluted my life from what it really is. I'm looking for myth, for an alchemy of inspiration, in a world that is as practical as it is logical. But as life is uncertain, so is the future unwritten, and I only continue to praise life and the strangeness that is the sun, the moon, and the Colombian mud volcanoes.

So it was, after escaping my conservative skin and jumping into a lovely, sunny, exotic mud world, that I found myself covered in a sloppy, muddy, creamy substance praised for its exquisite medical properties. I was, in fact, a vague human face with a mask on--a mask of goopy, decayed organic material and gases from the dinosaur epoch. Certainly not many of us know what decaying dinosaur remnants feel like. The morning had been simple: Neil, Johanna, Bua, and I set off, bathing suits and towels in tow, up the Caribbean Coast, arriving at Cienaga del Totumo, a lovely coastal lagoon, early Sunday morning. We stripped to our summer unmentionables, tip-toed our way to the large grey mud pit, scaled up the ramshackle stairs placed precariously up the side of the volcano without regards to the physics of deep inclines, and dunked our toes into the slimy, muddy orifice.

Inside the crater were already a group of traveling Colombian grandmas, bobbing around and splashing each other with creamy, warm handfuls of muddy lava. This hilarious episode nearly had me exploding into giggles: a bunch of elderly, overweight, slightly wrinkled ladies frolicking around with mineral mud caked on their faces and slopped into their curly hair, floating around inside a volcano, is surely a comic relief to anybody's worst problem. Their faces, arms, back, and chests looking like concrete statues from either a terribly unattractive era in statue-molding or a bad day in Fernando Botero's workshop, what with their colored eyeballs and pink lips poking through chubby stone faces. Yet, as bizarre as it was, we tested the goop for ourselves and hailed to the sorcery of medicinal mud, dunking our own bodies in the mystic, creamy concoction.

The sun was bright, the lagoon dotted with afternoon diamonds, and the stone faces cheerfully chiseled in smiles; meanwhile, the magic mud volcano sloshed, gurgled, burped, and churned around us, occasionally popping out huge gas bubbles everyone mistakenly believed to be someone's ill stomach. We were, needless to say, quite the spectacle, swimming like hippos in fresh water, graciously slipping through thick, whipped seas, our legs dangling below us in an infinite abyss. Gravity, I might add, does not exist in this natural phenomenon, and for that reason precisely, I have compared us to a traveling band of hippos. Like them, I found us sifting through the water, often feeling our rear ends suddenly losing their grip under water and softly (but stubbornly!) rising to the surface and peeking out above the break in the surface.

They say it's magic mud, and after dunking myself, feet-first, into its gaseous depths, I can't say for sure how far the truth lies from the myth, or how much I want it to. The myth, of course, is this: according to the Tayronas, the ancient Indian tribe once inhabiting Colombia's coast, testifies that the Totumo volcano once spewed fire from its inner devil's lair; however, the local priest, being quite the magnanimous city-saver and worrier of salvation, doused the screaming fire with holy water and thus drowning Satan in a suitable pile of thick mud. This myth continues with the origins of the mud, adding that the ancient spirits of the ancestral world heaved forth from the depths of the ground to smother the devil in his unworthy actions.

On the other hand, popular science (often, naturally, overruled to myth on grounds of Realism and this era of practicality), suggests that the phenomenal mud holds its mysterious, occult powers due to the gases emitted from the rotting animal and plant flesh deep underground, which in turn force the muddy mixture upwards. It is simple science.

For what it's worth, anyway, I'll take the fairy tale to rotten animal matter anyday. I've seen enough technological advances in my semester at the Tecnologica to satisfy my science mind for a while, and besides, haven't we already lost so much of the magic in our lives already?

Pueblo-Hopping in Bucaramanga

The function of the artist, the Navajo answered, is to provide what life does not.
--Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

I guess you could call it pueblo-hopping—like island-hopping, perhaps, somewhere off the exotic South Pacific, yet with the flavour of time lost in history, of modernity static in the hands of heritage. There’s something special, almost ephemerally picture-perfect, about pueblo-hopping, because not only does one see a tiny village for just an instant, just enough time to snap a lovely photograph and breathe the fresh air of a new place, but also because there is not enough time, nor history, nor experience, to taint the perfection of a place seen for only an afternoon. A few words in a journal, a few photos in a scrapbook, will retain our feelings long after the town changes, long after things happen that we will never see, long after our visit has been forgotten. That is the beauty of summer love, of travel, of meeting people only for a moment in your life, because, unlike most things, it hasn’t reached reality.

A people make a town; a town makes the people. Interestingly enough, so does Cartagena create its vast and curious faces, its stark changes between poverty and wealth, black and white, and pleasant beaches inside chaotic crowds. It is a city of contrast, not because I stopped by for a few charming days to soak in the sun and the colonial city—but because I came, rather, to live. Perhaps Cartagena would mean something much different to me had I breezed through as a traveller in my sunglasses and tour guide, but because I didn’t, it means something much more. Bucaramanga, on the other hand, a quaint city high up in the Santander district of Colombia’s interior mountain region, holds stark changes for me, perhaps because I only passed through, or perhaps because I found a tranquillity there in those sleepy streets.
Just $40,000 pesos (roughly, let’s say, about $18 dollars) for a fourteen-hour bus ride, round-trip, half-way across the country, took us to the city of Bucaramanga. I had envisioned a bus trip quite differently, however, than the reality in which I found myself—sleeping, that is, for the majority of the journey. I had imagined a night-bus scenario with the expectation of actually never taking one, for images of threatening, cracked roads winding through jungles with howling monkeys and coarse guerrillas, popping out from the dense woods with guns and motives, had me a bit worried. I had imagined rickety buses with stains on the ripped metal seats and holes in the dusty windows, military men patrolling highways, weird jungle smells, and that constant fear of being robbed and clinging to my bags. However, this was the reality: a Hollywood movie playing on the air-conditioned bus with refreshments and friendly chit-chat, passengers sleeping with their heads cocked to the side, drooling onto their cushioned seats, and bathroom breaks in-between. I was pleased to discover, albeit, that the bus companies pay the FARC a lot of money not to mess with their customers.

Along with Bua, my funny Thai friend whose sense of humor runs profoundly deep beneath her otherwise polite and Asian self, and Micha, a Spanish-speaking German co-worker and pious, seasoned South American traveller, I arrived at the University of Bucaramanga, where our conference was to be held, and where we met Heather from Canada and Leen from Belgium. My first impression of Heather was that of a confident, selfish, often demanding bitch with a sarcastic attitude and an edge of humor. When she announced that she was a confident, selfish, often demanding bitch with a sarcastic attitude, I began to wonder why people who are this way tend to brag about it as if it’s some sort of good thing. Leen, on the other hand, appeared quiet-mannered, soft-voiced, yet very friendly and interested, with a certain European air that I have grown to yearn for. It was after this first meeting, when we first interacted together, that we decided to make a weekend of pueblo-hopping.

Setting off for the "bohemian village of Giron," (to quote Lonely Planet), we found ourselves amidst a new Latin American world, one that is so underrepresented but necessarily imperative to include. I felt a certain ease, a comfort, which though probably was feigned due to my simple ecstasy of temporarily somewhere new, was much desired and heartily accepted. Giron greeted us with beautiful things: cobblestone streets, white-washed limestone churches and townhouses in perfect white rows with matching Spanish tile roofs in red, earthy clay; tall, European-styled churches with Catholic statues, and, in our case, a funeral procession led by a Hertz with the guy’s name plastered all over the casket in glittering, painted letters (most absolutely a cultural phenomenon). Little did Leen and I know this, however, as we unabashedly snapped tourist photos of ourselves in front of a pretty church (and yes, Micha got quite the air of satisfaction upon alerting us of our faux-paus). We passed over shaded patios, small stone bridges over tiny creeks, and wandered along the mountain town, lost in time.

But while crossing over a certain small stone bridge, we came across some four or five children tossing a ball amongst themselves in a friendly game of catch, along one of the side streets tucked gently inside Giron. Upon seeing us, they started to giggle, point, stare at their unlaced shoes and cover their faces in shyness, peeking through a crack in their fingers. We greeted them, smiled at them, and continued our stroll towards the center, where we had hoped to stop in for an afternoon juice and typical Santander lunch. And not only did we realize that a tiny group of four had split off and decided to follow us, but I noticed that Heather and Micha were annoyed by their fascination, obviously irritated and annoyed by their presence. I imagined my pale face and blue-lagoon eyes as a tiny child from the jungles of Colombia might see them, and I wondered if next to their dark faces and black eyes I look emptied, drained of color, sun, and passion, with nothing left but a bright shadow. I was fascinated by the children: their innocent eyes, their mouths open in wide O’s like mosquito traps and ice-cream cone faces, their persistent, curious questions. How could anyone, I mused, be so fascinated by me, a dime-a-dozen blonde, a curious American, a less-than-refined, suburban girl from the South?

The children giggled and dug their toes into the dusty cobblestones, following us intently along the tiny sidewalks. They wanted to play with me and Leen—just play. Imagine if the curiosity in the whole world could be satisfied by simply playing! I kept glancing back to see them running to hide behind store windows and laughing at their game, but when I saw Micha and Heather tapping their watches and scoffing impatiently, I interrupted the children’s game and said my goodbyes, Leen doing the same. We soon realized, however, that despite the fact we had already given our buenas tardes, we had four tiny sets of feet trailing excitedly behind us into the restaurant. The children, it seemed, had decided they’d not had enough of us; and after hearing them call out Kristin! Kristin!, I turned to see the eldest girl waving a small yellow flower for me, smiling, and holding it for me. I paused to pick the beautiful yellow gift from her tiny hands and thought for a moment how much wonder child eyes hold. I went into the restaurant, left them outside, and watched eyes grow large and pouts inflate.

Not long after, we heard the familiar tune of naïve giggling coming from around the large wooden door of the café. Once again, it seemed as if the fan club had stormed the limousine, and the celebrity would have to remember, again, that he was a star. Curious little faces and tiny fingers had crept up behind us--peeking out from the door was a totem-pole of smiles and innocence. We had once again been conned into another game.

We realized that though time had paused in Giron, the afternoon sun was beginning to peak, and long shadows drifted across Spanish verandas and white windows, eventually beckoning us to Bucaramanga. We kissed the magic of Giron goodbye, tapped the children on their heads and waved them farewell, climbing into a taxi in order to rejoin reality. We arrived at our cabana, lit softly in romantic afternoon sun, and laid our heads on our pillows, trying to better understand life.

In the following days, we found magic in these places: San Gil, a little town with a mystical natural park of long, high trees dressed in silver shawl parasites and white-water rafting (during which I found exotic birds, parrots of rainbow colors, naked, hairless cows bathing on the shore, and our guide, Ruben Dario, as the famous poet himself...); Barichara, a 300-year-old colonial gem (which we celebrated by joining in the town festival with the locals, the coffee crops, and the cows); and Mesa de los Santos, a breath-taking village of lush canyons stretching farther than the sight of our eyes and the lines of the horizon (which we explored by jumping into the back of a Toyota truck and hitch-hiking our way up the vast farms of the magical countryside of Colombia, the untouched parts that the history books don't see..., to the fantastic Chichmocha canyons). We left with our wanderlust temporarily satisfied, for life finds itself in moments of rare pleasure when spontaneity takes a grip.

Dreams in San Pedro

It is kind of ironic: the day I decided to turn my otherwise pointless work experience into a more rewarding job, I picked up a novel, How to be Good, that I’ve been hoping to read since first leaving America, and it actually happens that the book deals with just that—how, in other words, to be Good. What constitutes sanctimony? Graciousness? Piousness? At what point should we share what we have, whether it be our time, our money, our friendship, or our experiences, and at what point do we reclaim what remains as selfishly our own? That, both the theme of this book and of my Saturday, was the question I was hoping to answer.

The barrio of San Pedro is anything but clean, respectable, or middle-class; it is, in fact, one of the poorest, most suffering of all the neighborhoods in this misleading city of Cartagena. Cartagena, as we very well know, is not the gem of beauty it seems in the photos and on the internet and travel guides; rather, it is a series of hidden pueblos, poverty, and hunger amidst a few special tourist attractions. This is, obviously, the very thing that has shocked each and every one of the foreigners who has come to teach here. Places like San Pedro, so characteristically Cartagenan, so uncharacteristically advertised, is a district running along an open sewage line, dotted with color-splashed shacks of concrete and wood slats, washed with cracked windows smeared in dust and cement floors. Explaining it in words seems ridiculous to me now, but as a camera would have been as out-of-place as a stereotypical American tourist in khaki shorts, a straw hat, and a Hawaiian-print tee, I have only my feeble memory and unreliable words to assist me….

My intentions for the day were two-fold: to disappear behind the ritzy district, ritzy, mind you, for Colombia, of Manga to give my time to La Fundación (a foundation for young boys in poverty coming off drug addictions and lives of crime) and to actually spend time with someone I actually liked talking to, granted, when we could understand each other. Costeño Spanish, as it’s called here, is certainly the more slurred of any speech I’ve heard, and let’s face it—I lived in a college town for four years, and I’ve definitely heard slurred speech. Gustavo, a Psychology student at the Tecnológica, invited me to see San Pedro, to see, as Micha so desired upon moving from Manga to the “real part” of town, people dancing in the streets and mingling with stray dogs. I, however, got all that and more.

The difficult thing about explaining the streets in Latin America are their absolute distinction from anything the Western world has. A house, for example, is not a house to hide your family and surround yourself with tasteful, matching decorations—it is merely a place, hidden from the sky of the Caribbean rains, where everyone who is mildly related goes to sleep at night. They are brilliant colors of blue, yellow, orange, and green, with dust, dirt, and cracked paint peeling from the corners; they are sparse yet stuffed with a random collection of beds, chairs, artefacts, history, and people. There are chickens literally clucking around outside, picking at piles of rotting garbage, crumbled bricks from old houses, and sewage. Dogs, somehow, are more populous than people, having taken over the neighborhood with all their matted hair, tangled coats, skinny bodies, and wild faces. They sleep lazily where they wish, along with old men crowned in wrinkles and dust, who both have been waiting for nothing for a long time. There is a woman, one woman out of all the many mothers (both too young and too old to bear children) cutting plantains and stuffing empanadas over an open kettle fire, preparing food for every family on the street. And sometimes, when they have nothing, Gustavo told me, they chop limes into pieces and boil them in water, making soup. The images are strong—fierce, but very real, and I felt, upon feeling it in my own white skin, like I couldn’t be any more of a rich, undeserving, particularly ignorant anglo-saxon American. So I had nothing to do but swallow my embarrassment, hold my head to the blue skies as if San Pedro were the most natural place in the world for a suburban, middle-class American girl to be, and shook hands with Glen, the first of many boys I was going to meet that day.

He stared at me for a few seconds (which, remember, seemed like a few hours), and didn’t answer my questions. He looked at the other members of the Fundación for some kind of affirmation that I wasn’t going to bite him. The woman in charge suggested that I sit and talk with him, find out about his life, enjoy his company—so, pulling up a plastic chair and sitting in front of my new friend, I did.
To see a boy of nineteen realize, after a youth of desperate hunger and cocaine addiction, hopelessness, and frustration, that he can get from one side to the other of a concrete room is not only a small step, but tons of little ones! The second game we played during the afternoon’s meeting, after drawing pictures of what we desired to be in our futures and then having them ripped in half (to prove the metaphorical point of the activity), we divided the room into two halves and assigned the 15 boys the task of using their imagination to get from one side to the other without walking or running. And what imaginations we discovered! Teenage boys, laughing, dancing backwards, going underneath chairs, crawling on their stomachs, jumping on one foot, helping each other and ourselves come up with good ideas…how reminiscent of the awkward, unconventional paths their lives have taken, and will take in the future! The group dynamic improved, the sense of humor deepened, the friendships and the hope grew, and little by little, the nervous girl in the back became a little more confident, and even invented her own creative path: spinning in circles from one side to the other.

But what truly surprised me was the amount of affection and love these rough-edged boys gave to me—after the initial shock reaction of curiousity and uncertainty (because for many of them, I was, get this, the first foreign person they had ever seen), they opened their homes, shared their pictures with me, went crazy over taking pictures with me, tried to speak a little bit of English with me, and didn’t seem to care that I would never know a life like theirs. The dreams they drew, with such an indiscreet ferver, confirmed my suspicions: that silly thing we call the “American Dream,” that thing invented to tell promising young people that they could turn out any way they wanted to, leaked, somehow, into the minds of these boys. Industrial engineers, car mechanics, father figures, computer specialists, doctors, rock stars, families with two children and a dog (and the occasional swimming pool, naturally), with a nice house with a nice fence and a nice yard and a nice bank account….these dreams, drawn from the hands of what were the most frightened and scared children in this city, prove something unbelievably difficult—most of them want what I realize they will never have.

One boy said, after being prompted to share how he felt upon seeing his dreams ripped in half and thrown to the ground, that we felt terribly sad. He was hurt, offended at the lack of respect shown for what he believed to be his only dreams, and felt defeated, because if no one of going to respect something as intimate and personal as his dreams, what else does he have to wish for?
Another spoke up, adding that he felt as if he was being laughed at; teased because he wants to be a doctor and cure the sick people in his neighborhood, and no one believes in him. Being laughed at, he said, is the most discouraging, and yet the most frequently-used, method to break your dreams.

Judging people is a habit I’m desperately trying to break, and especially now: how could I ever think of young boys on drugs the same way again? Precious faces, black skin, tattered clothes, and some without shoes; yet all, as we now see, with dreams.