Year Two in Colombia

Second Year as a Peace Corps Volunteer

     The year was filled with  preparing and teaching eight leadership courses, then visiting the dozen or so communities represented at each course the following month. It meant traveling even more in remote regions but, to me, that was the best part. Visitors were rare and a foreigner even more so, hence the women were most welcoming. Not only was I immersed in beautiful country, but Colombian culture. While I sometimes envied volunteers who spent their entire time getting to know one community really well, I appreciated that I got to see so much of the country and meet so many people (and I'm a relatively shy person!).

    In the end, I extended my service for a third year to work as assistant to the Peace Corps' health and nutrition director. It meant broader travel throughout the country and frequent trips to Bogotá.

Rural teaching site

Both were nice but I still remember the people and time in the remote rural areas best.

     When you extend your service you get a month break at home, in the U.S.. While there, I got a call from P.C. headquarters asking if I'd go to El Salvador for two months on my way back to Colombia, to prepare and execute a training program for women volunteers. It was another unexpected and fascinating opportunity.

Here are two memorable Colombian cultural experiences:

Transportation:

Getting to remote rural areas was often a challenge and a good way for clock-driven gringos to learn to just go with the flow. Often the better part of a day would be spent getting to a teaching site, no matter how early in the morning I'd leave my home base. It usually involved a pre-dawn arrival at the dusty bus plaza where the aromas of coffee, fresh-squeezed orange juice, cigarettes and diesel fuel mingled in the cool air with tinny cumbia or ranchera music coming from transistor radios.

    Young men would stand by each bus to watch for potential riders, sell tickets and bark the bus's destination every few minutes. Inevitably, just as the bus was taking off, they'd be engaged in deep, important conversation with someone a distance away and would have to run to heroically jump on the bus when it was in full motion. Very macho, very amusing, very predictable - and dangerous.

Fellow ag teacher heading to an assigned site

     The bus would arrive in a town or village where one would take another bus deeper into the campo (rural area), usually on bad (sometimes very bad) roads with steep climbs and no guard rails on narrow mountainsides. Fortunately, the view was usually breath-taking enough to keep your mind off the deadly possibilities. These vehicles were called mixtos and were actually wooden frames with bench seats, a flat roof (for baggage, jute bags of produce and often extra passengers) built on a flatbed truck. They were painted in the colors of the Colombian flag: yellow, blue and red. Roll-down canvass covers on the end of each row offered a bit of protection during driving rainstorms. Otherwise, it was all open-air.
     Mixtos were especially fun to ride back into town later in the week, because I knew many of the passengers by then. Everyone else knew each other and would greet the entire busload as they got on. The chilly pre-dawn bumpy, jostling ride was filled with friendly banter and often live animals headed to market at one's feet or back – chickens, goats, or piglets. It was a community on the move, in for a long day at market, appointments, or doing errands. Most would return on the same bus later that day.

     For really remote sites, the last stage of trip was by foot, horse or mule. Someone would meet me at the road – either a woman from the class, or a young boy, usually barefoot, who would walk the whole way if he'd brought a horse or mule, unless I could convince him to take turns riding.

     The mixto drivers were sometimes messengers, as well. Once, I got a message upon its evening return that I needed to call the Bogota' office immediately. I couldn't until the same mixto went back to town at four o'clock the next morning, then phone from the telegraph office. After worrying all night, wondering who in my family had died, I learned it was just a photographer who ended up going elsewhere when I didn't respond quickly. All that worry for nothing.

La Violencia

      We think of the terrible violence that wracked Colombia during the recent decades of drug wars

Hard to imagine such violence  where laundry dries in the street

. However, there was a period called “La Violencia” that began in the mid-1940s as liberal and conservative parties fought over control of rural land. Most fighting took place in rural areas until the killing of a presidential candidate, Jorge Gaitán, in 1948 took it to city streets. Guerrilla groups formed which would eventually morph into now-recognized forces such as the FARC (Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) or the ELN (National Liberation Army).
    The violence became as terrifying as that in Mexico in recent years where the press was driven out by murders and threats, leaving no official record of the number of deaths, though it's estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
     Though La Violencia was supposedly over when I was there, I met numerous families with horrible stories of what had happened to family or neighbors within the previous two decades. It's hard to imagine witnessing such atrocities, most committed with machetes, to women, children, even the unborn, as well men. Occasionally, it would flare up again near sites where I was working. My roommates and bosses in the city monitored news and would send someone to get us if the need arose. Fortunately, it didn't at my sites, though the other volunteer working for the same Colombian organization, was evacuated once when guerrillas were reported approaching her site.

      Ironically, I felt very safe in the countryside – more so than in the cities. If the people I stayed and worked with were fearful, they didn't express it in my presence.