Colombia bonita

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Things I'm going to miss #4: Devotion

I had started to think about this aspect of life in Colombia the other day when I saw a teenaged boy walking down the street arm in arm with his mom (or aunt or grandma), but I didn’t know what to call it until I walked past a church today, Easter Sunday.    The church of Santa Beatriz  is between my apartment and the gym and the seamstress and the hardware store and the closest mini-market, so I walk past it pretty often, including most Sundays and holy days that we have off work.  Without fail, when Mass is being celebrated on those days, the place is so packed that people are standing in the doorways or sitting outside in little camping chairs or on tiny folding wooden stools.  Non-practicing-anything heathen that I am, I always think that that seems like a lot of trouble to go to for Mass, but I also always have to marvel at what moves people to do it.  Today I saw this devotion taken to another level.  Not only were people standing in the doorways, but they were doing so in crowds ten people deep.  Others were sitting on the park benches  outside the church next to the avocado seller lady who is a fixture here at Santa Beatriz.  Even later, when the service was over, I noticed (not for the first time) that many people who walked past the now-closed-up church crossed themselves as they went by.   I am not saying that all Colombians line up for Mass (in fact, many are devoted to a wide range of Protestant churches too), or that people in the States don’t turn out in huge numbers at churches on Sunday, but something about the worshippers camped out at Santa Beatriz gives me pause and reminds me of the fervor with which Colombians approach so many aspects of their lives.

Take the family, for example.  Going back to the teenaged boy walking arm in arm with his mom, I have to say that that’s not something that I have seen very often in the States and to me, that gesture captures a simple truth about life in Colombia, namely that family is everything.  Having grown up far away from all but my immediate family and having subsequently moved away from them too, I have to appreciate the closeness that characterizes so many families here.  From my friend Adelaida who spends pretty much every Sunday at her parents’ house and whose sixteen year-old daughter is not above coming to the faculty room to give her mom a hug, to María Elvira who rushes home on her free afternoon to have lunch with her husband and either one of her grown children if they’re around, to Camila who always seems to be doing one thing or another with her mom, her dad, and/or her sister, to my Colombian colleagues who are mystified by my decision to live so far away from my family, to my student (she’s a senior) whose dad meets her and her brother at the school bus stop most afternoons, to my manicure lady whose kids sometimes run around the salon on a Saturday afternoon, family ties are everywhere and are absolutely cherished.

Indeed, it is safe to say that the only thing that can even begin to compete with the treasures of faith and family is the national soccer team.  For the first time in a long time, it has been kicking butt in the latest round of World Cup qualifier matches (except for their 1-0 loss to Venezuela the other day), and people are going nuts.  On game day you can buy a jersey on just about any street corner, and you kind of feel like you need to unless you want to be the only schmuck in the city who isn’t wearing one.  Bars and restaurants are decorated with balloons and streamers, and everybody from the ladies at the salon to the patients in a doctor’s waiting room are glued to the TV.  If for some reason you aren’t watching the game, no worries.  You can tell when Colombia scores a goal by the shouts that reverberate through every apartment building on the block.  I can't wait til they play Argentina in June.

Things I'm going to miss #3: The food

I know.  No surprise that I have a lot to say about this.  While I hope to be reincarnated as Anthony Bourdain so I can just roam planet and eat, until then I have to take a little time to rave about the food in my current corner of the world.  As a rule, Andean fare is pretty bland.  My experiences in Peru and Ecuador taught me that before I ever arrived in Colombia.  Corn and potatoes feature prominently, which can be, well, boring.  But while potatoes (especially) are everywhere here, there are about a hundred different types of them, and they are – hands down – the most delicious potatoes you’ve ever encountered.  Seriously, you get yourself some little tiny boiled and salted papas criollas, and you will tell Idaho to just not even bother. 

Colombian cuisine, however, goes way beyond potatoes.  Take for example what is maybe my favorite (and surely the most lethal) Colombian dish: bandeja paisa (paisa platter, i.e. platter from the department of Antioquia – where Medellín is).  This is truly a heart attack on a plate, and much to my delight, the cafeteria at Colegio Los Nogales does a more than respectable version of it.  It is a delicious spread of rice, beans, ground beef, fried plantain, a fried egg, and chicharrones, all garnished with an avocado.  Calling chicharrones pork rinds really doesn’t begin to do them justice because it just makes them sound like those gross things you buy in a bag at a gas station when, in fact, they are all meaty (ok, and fatty) porky goodness.  I can’t believe it took me until this year to figure out that on bandeja paisa day it is best to go through the lunch line with somebody who doesn’t do chicharrones so you can have theirs.  Gracias, David Aguirre.  Although teaching class after a double helping of pork rinds may not equal stellar history instruction.  Good thing the kids are as comatose as I am.    

The accompanying photographs show two of my other all-time favorite Colombian delicacies.  First, ceviche (above & which I hope you’ve tried somewhere) is just raw fish “cooked” in lime juice.  I don’t know what else to say about it.  I am fortunate to have a great cevichería around the corner, which I go to very often.  Yet as good as it is there, I have actually figured out how to improve on their deliciousness and get it up to the truly-very-special standards of La Cevichería in Cartagena: mint and olive oil.  And while I love that you can find ceviche everywhere, I am not so sure it belongs everywhere.  The movie theater?  I’ll stick to popcorn, thanks. 

And then there are tamales.  If you’re like my mom when she visited Bogotá a couple of years ago, prior to trying good tamales tolimenses you thought that tamales were dried out corn meal stuffed in dried out corn husks.  But just as the tamales I bought from a lady selling them out of a bucket in a market in Oaxaca were nothing like the crap you can get most places in the States, these tamales (wrapped in banana leaves) from Tolima are unlike anything you’ve ever had.  Trust me.  I’m pretty sure that the floppy semi-transparent things in them are just slabs of (chicken?) fat, but combined with the smokiness  imparted by the banana leaves, these bundles of joy are truly memorable.   Sí señor, with some Colombian hot chocolate (minus the cheese that some people melt into it – that’s one food thing I have not been able to get behind), I could probably eat my own body weight in these little gems from Tolima.  Fortunately for me and hung-over Colombians, they are ubiquitous at Saturday and Sunday morning breakfast places.  In my humble gringa opinion, some of the very best ones (pictured here) are to be found at La Puerta Falsa, a tiny place off the Plaza de Bolívar that has been open since 1816.  As part of my Semana Santa stay-cation I schlepped down there today just for the tamales.  Even if it weren’t a block from one of my favorite bookstores in Bogotá, it would have been worth the trip.

Things I'm going to miss #2: Nicknames, pet names, and terms of endearment

As someone who has never had a nickname (in English there’s not much you can do with Sarah), I have loved that in Colombia I have, not one, but two of them.  Like I have always been anywhere in Latin America, here I am Sarita.  But besides “–ita” also Colombians have “-is” as another diminutive/term of endearment that they add to the end of people’s names.  So here I am sometimes Saris, and I love it when people call me that because a) it’s only for people you really like and b) it’s so 100% Colombian.  

Those are some of the things you do with people’s names, but there is also a whole host of other pet names and ways of addressing people that Colombians use that I think are great.  There are some things that are reserved only for people you know really well (like family) and others where the line is more blurry.  I crack up whenever I hear my friends call their husbands or children “gordo” or “gorda” (fatty), especially when they are not at all.  I also love it when people refer to babies or toddlers as “mami” and “papi,” since they are clearly nobody’s parents.  Then there are some of the ways I have been addressed in stores or at the gym or at the market or by people at school.  Among my favorites are: “mi vida” (my life), “mi reina” (my queen), “mujer” (woman – I think this is more a thing from the coast, but the guy at the photocopy place called me it yesterday), and “profe” (short for profesora (teacher)).  There’s also the expression “sumercé,” which is short for “su merced” (your mercy) and is a veeeery old fashioned but widely-used way of addressing someone respectfully.  I’ve always thought it was surprising that the graffiti artists at the Universidad Nacional use it in some of their calls to arms, though I guess it does rhyme with “rebelarse”  (to rebel), which is how it usually appears.  

Things I'm going to miss about Colombia #1

After getting off to a strong start almost four years ago, this blog has been woefully neglected in recent times.  Save for a trip to Cuba and a tear gas incident at the Universidad Nacional, life in Bogotá became just that: life.  It was good, though not necessarily remarkable or anything that felt blog-worthy.  But now this gringa en Colombia is bringing her time here to a close, and I am feeling a need to savor and document my last few months.

On Facebook I have a photo album entitled “Things I’m going to miss about Colombia,” and it brings me a little joy every time I add to it.  So I think that this space needs to be where I record things I’m going to miss for which there is no accompanying visual.  Expect frequent updates.

 

Here begins the list (in no particular order).

1.       The public buses.  This may seem an unexpected listing because, really, these vehicles of questionable origin that hurtle down Bogotá’s streets at sometimes terrifying speeds reflect the best and the worst that Colombia has to offer.  I am choosing to focus on the former.  Bogotá bus culture and etiquette are surprising and refreshing in many ways.  I mean, where else do they play salsa music on public transportation to which passengers unabashedly sing along?  And in what other country on the planet do people hover/squat over a recently-occupied seat to let the butt heat dissipate before sitting down?  They even have a saying for that: “Asiento caliente? Ni de pariente.” (Hot seat? Not even of a relative).  And for all the smack that people from other parts of the country talk about “Rolos” (people from Bogotá) and how cold and heartless they are, there is one bus practice that I love and that I don’t think you would ever see in the United States, or many other places for that matter.  When the buses are really packed and so passengers are even boarding through the back door, these people who are barely squeezing on pass their fare forward via other passengers who then pass back any necessary change.  We are talking money changing hands about 50 times here.  In a similar spirit of solidarity, if a standing passenger has a big or heavy bag or package, then a nearby seated passenger will usually offer to hold it on their lap.  Oh, and also the buses get you where you need to go for less than a dollar.

La lucha sigue

EVERYBODY said this would happen.

I WAS SO EXCITED to begin my class on land, politics, and territory in Colombia and to get out of northern Bogotá bubble at least once a week! But when I told my Colombian friends, colleagues, and students that I was going to take a class at the Universidad Nacional, pretty much everybody scoffed that I was bound to miss at least a few classes because of protests at the notoriously radical university. Usually the remark was kind of snide and hinted at (at the very least) disdain for the leftist riff-raff that attends what is one of the most competitive universities in Colombia. Some people were more supportive. My friend and colleague Carlos, who appreciated the awesomeness of my photo with Subcomandante Marcos, laughed knowingly when I told him that my class was in the sociology department. He knew perfectly well that it wouldn't bother me a bit to hear that, in his words, "Oh, those guys are a bunch of communists." I figure that if the long history of shocking inequality and violence that have marked the land issue in Colombia doesn't get you fired up and make you want to bust our your Che Guevara T-shirt, then I really don't know what will.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY, what I saw this afternoon didn't come as a great shock to me. When I got off the TransMilenio (Bogotá's astoundingly irritating but sometimes convenient trolley bus system) at the univeristy stop, it seemed like something was up. I mean, I don't have a lot of experience with gun shots, but the "pop! pop!" sounds I was hearing did not seem to bode well. Needless to say, I headed out of the station to see what was going on.

THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE lining the several pedestrian overpasses that cross one of Bogotá's major thoroughfares ("la 30") near the entrance to the university. The were riot police at the entrance, on the median strip, across the street, and on some of the walkways. There was a very ominous-looking black armored car/tank thing parked in the gate of the school. It was clear that the shit was about to hit the fan.

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, I had brought my camera so I could take pictures of the sometimes-over-the-top-but-very-compelling leftist graffiti that adorns the campus so I could include it in a blog post about my class. I'm no Christiane Amanpour or Nicholas Kristof, but you can be sure I was going to document this new, developing situation from my excellent perch on the overpass. By this time, the police were shooting tear gas canisters from the median strip as the people around me shouted various obscenities at them. Some were shooting from closer to the university gates. Some came pounding up the stairs to take a position on the adjacent overpass to ours. Some were revving their motorcycles on the other side of the street. You could barely see the students inside, but every once in a while I caught a glimpse of people with their faces covered hurling rocks. You could smell the tear gas in the air, but it was kind of far away -- at least until one of the cops shot a tear gas canister and it hit the giant TransMilenio sign and bounced back across la 30 to his feet. Everybody booed and hissed and jeered at his lousy aim. But then everybody also figured out that the canister was way too close to us on this breezy afternoon. And boy, did the wind catch that smoke and send it our way. I've been to a lot of protests, but I've never had a dose of tear gas. It is terrible. With just a whiff, my eyes were watering like crazy, my throat was on fire, and I was coughing uncontrollably. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to really get a faceful of that stuff.

I THINK IT WAS AT ABOUT THIS POINT that I thought about how my parents and my principal would KILL me if they knew where I was. I hung around to get some more photos and videos but eventually figured I should probably get my gringa self the hell out of there. So, eyes stinging, I crammed myself into the mobile sardine can that is the TransMilenio at rushhour and headed back north to my bougie enclave.

SO WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT? As explained to me by the very nice, very pierced young man standing next to me, it had to do with the selection of the university's next rector. Apparently, the university went through some kind of voting or consultation process that allowed students, professors, and alums to vote from among seven candidates. Lawyer and political scientist Leopoldo Múnera won by a giagntic margin, earning something like 75 or 80% of the vote. But today, when the Consejo Superior of the university announced the name of the new rector, it was . . . not Múnera. Instead, they installed Ignacio Mantilla, a mathematician and former dean of the faculty of sciences. Besides the fact that people were pissed about a supposedly democratic process being a farce, it's complicated by the fact that Mantilla is like the poster boy for increased involvement of the private sector (read: business) in public education in Colombia -- a new law about which had tens of thousands of people in the street last year protesting. I went to a couple of newspapers' websites to try to do a little fact-checking about this explanation, but all I found were really generic reports about Mantilla and his background. Given the political context in Colombia right now, in the absence of a better explanation, I'm going with the story as told to me by the university student with a stainless steel rod in his nose.

The Revolution will not be televised, but it has great rhythm

I arrived in Cuba on the afternoon of April 16, which was the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, that U.S.-backed debacle that Cubans refer to as the battle of Playa Girón (after one of the beaches where the attackers landed). For a history geek fascinated by the history of radical political movements and a long-standing interest in the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, this was a great starting point. This island, so demonized by U.S. politicians for years, really had pulled off something different than any other country in the region. So what have been the impacts, dare I say the successes and failures, of this other American revolution? What does communism look like in practice? As a casual tourist, would I even be able to tell? Or would I have to "settle" for just soaking up the uniqueness of the things I had expected to see: old cars, crumbling but clearly once-grand buildings, impossibly turquoise Caribbean waters, and revolutionary propaganda everywhere?

One of the first things that struck me as I walked around Havana was that there were used book stalls all over the place. Of course, Fidel's writings featured prominently in the selection, as did books by and about Che Guevara and José Martí. Also ubiquitous were the newspapers of the Cuban Communist Party, Granma (named for the boat that carried Fidel, Che, and other revolutionaries to Cuba from Mexico in 1956) and Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth); people were selling them and reading them on every corner. Say what you will about what people were reading -- I bought a comic book called "Girón: Victory of the People" -- but the fact of the matter is that is a country of highly literate people. According to the CIA World Factbook, the literacy rate in Cuba is 99.8%. Not long after coming to power, the revolutionary government declared 1961 "The Year of Education." That year, "literacy brigades" fanned out across the country and taught more than 700,000 people to read and write. To me, this is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

That said, I had plenty of moments when stereotypically not-so-great things about communism were (sometimes comically) apparent. There was the fancy-looking ice cream parlor where it took a game of twenty questions to establish that they only had one flavor available. There was the customer service, which could be indifferent at best or even make you feel like you were out of line for interrupting the person who was reapplying their makeup, braiding a girl's hair, or having a snack. There was the airport waiting room that was almost pitch black because all the lights were burnt out. There were the Soviet-era airplanes. Sweet Jesus, those planes! Thankfully, I had been warned about the condensed, foggy air that came billowing out from under the seats prior to landing, but still.

And then there was the propaganda. It is absolutely everywhere you turn, in the form of murals, flags, banners, posters, billboards, handwritten signs, and (my personal favorite) coloring books. It is full of hyperbole and optimism. Sometimes it is an overt call to arms. It permeates captions under exhibits in museums. It maintains the cults of personality of (mainly) Fidel, Che, and Camilo Cienfuegos. It is without a trace of irony. Truthfully, to me, it was everything from quaint to ridiculous to cheesy to creepy to downright funny. I know it's not supposed to be any of those things, but I have to admit that that's how I saw it.

These casual observations aside, it was my conversations with regular people that gave me the best -- which is to say, complex -- picture of what the revolution meant for the average Cuban. Antonio, the tour guide who led me around on my first day there, showed me his card that gives him permission to "trabajar por cuenta propria" (work on his own behalf) and told me about his work with brigades doing extermination of mosquitos. I was struck by my encounter with a man who, upon seeing me taking a photo of a Girón commemoration poster, stopped rooting through the garbage to show me the pin that identifies him as a veteran of the battle. Jorge the Havana taxi driver talked about how gratifying his work as a teacher in Angola was, when he went there in what I can only think of as a sort of communist Peace Corps. The groundskeeper and father of two who showed me around the historic Colón cemetary told me about how his wife disappeared, only to call him from Miami to let him know she wasn't coming back. Manuel, a taxi driver in Santiago de Cuba, reflected on his time spent cutting sugar cane and gave a withering indictment of a system that he described as failed. His observations stood in stark contrast to those of my hosts in Santiago who raved about the Girón commemoration extravaganza televised a few days earlier and, while acknowledging that they weren't enough, boasted that the prices of certain rationed goods had not changed since 1970.

So I am left with those stories and images and impressions, as well as an appreciation for the music that comes from every corner, the spontaneous salsa dance party I saw on the beach, the sunshine, the mojitos, and the warmth that (despite my earlier observation about customer service) characterized my interactions with almost every Cuban I met.