From the plane I say goodbye to Uraba’s lush green mountainous and hello to Medellin’s brown river and tall buildings. While waiting for my plane transfer, I eat lunch in the terminal. There is table service and a waitress dressed stylishly in hoop earrings and high heels. The news blaring from four TV’s at once talks of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” and I realize I forgot about Thanksgiving. The news talks of relations between countries and elections and protests. I realize that all of a sudden I will be up on the news. On politics. On the world. I forgot what it was like to have a TV in front of me. Commercials. Anchors. I forgot so many things. Did I lose them? Will I find them?
Another time up into the air and back down and I land in a familiar city. Welcome to Bogota in its nightlight splendor. For the first time in months I feel chilled. Cold, actually. For the first time in months I am cold. I arrive to an empty apartment and look out over the city to the distant hills as every other FOR volunteer has done upon leaving the campo for the capital metropolis and I feel so very strange. My body has made the transition from rural war zone to one of the biggest cities in Latin America, but my mind has a long ways to go. Just as I start shaking (Cold? Confusion? Too many thoughts all at once?), I look down to see a letter left by my roommate and posted mail with my name on it from the states. Birthday cards and presents from my mom and my Grandma. All of a sudden I will be connected to my family again. And I sit down and I read the cards over and over. And then I think about how I’d had my morning coffee in La Union. I think about my friends that left me in Apartado and waved goodbye to my taxi. I think about Emily… How will I readjust to life without Emily? Then I take my first hot shower in 8 months.
In the night, in a half-sleep/half-identify the campo noise outside your window state I think to myself, “what a strange noise for the rain to make” and then I wake up to car horns. I wake from dreams of the community with a vallenato song in my head, but I listen to Bob Dylan over coffee. It rains at night here too, but the apartment building is tall and I don’t hear it intensely on my roof. Mostly I know it rained because I hear cars splashing through puddles on the pavement. Isaac and I go for breakfast. We eat pastries full of ricotta cheese and spinach while our co-workers in La Union take off on an accompaniment in response to emergencies La Esperanza. Isaac goes to work, but I get a few “adjustment” days which works out fine, because one of my dearest friends is visiting from Holland. And because I have not seen my friends in Bogota for months.
Slumber parties with Lisa and Diwy and Luna are just what the doctor ordered. Lisa works, Luna goes to day-care and then Diwy and I have nothing to do but everything we want. Diwy and I walk city streets and shop for needed items in my new city life. We eat delicious foods, which are ten times as delicious for me because I have been eating the same thing for 8 months. In the grocer I smell guava and immediately think of the tree outside our house. I smell it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Eventually I find it. It’s packaged in plastic. Together we try and adjust to Bogota’s altitude and together we laugh at our failure to do so. We go to Isaac’s goodbye dinner and eat curries. We catch up on life and love and future plans and current adventures. We laugh a lot.
Diwy decides we “need to get out of the city” and, amazingly, after 24 hours of being here, I agree. We road trip to Villa de Leyva, a small colonial Colombian tourist town three hours outside of the capital in pastoral Boyacá. We stroll the central plaza and take photos of ourselves. We drink beer and laugh and loiter in shops, trying on clothes we never buy. We café hop and drink coffees and chocolates and teas. We try and hike a “half hour hike” but it takes us 3 hours because we literally can not breathe in the altitude. We arrive at the summit just in time for a thunderstorm and Diwy pops up her umbrella. We eat artisan pastries in the rain on top of a mountain and then nearly die sliding back down the slick mossy rock in the rain. We’d had great plans to hike to beautiful pastoral waterfalls and lakes, but in the name of oxygen decide to meander cobbled streets instead. People do not understand my Caribbean vernacular. They do understand Diwy’s crystal clear Guatemalan accent. She does most of the negotiating.
Diwy watched me culture shock and let me talk around in circles confused about life. She walked arm in arm with me under the same umbrella and made me laugh talking about all things relevant and what becomes of us through the choices we make. We talked a lot about Colombia. And the world. And travel. And our expat lives. And how in our current society people feel so worldly. And then Diwy said, “People in the first world feel like they are so connected, and they are. They are so connected without knowing what they are connected to.” I was so thankful to have Diwy.
Back in Bogota I unpack my bags and set up my room. I look around and try to adjust to the idea that this is home. I straighten my hair for the first time since Emily chopped it all off our first month in the campo (sans comb) and am impressed with her straight-lined cut. I try to come to terms with the fact that my days are complete without talking to the same people I talked to everyday in the community. I take naps and try to pull myself out of campo time in order to go out dancing. Diwy, Jon and I go out dancing. We dance vallenato and salsa and reggaeton. We bar hop through city lights. I dream about the community. I try on every sweater I own and thank the weather because I love sweaters. Jon and I walk through Bogota’s central plaza and shop for a hammock. I revel in my love for Latin American plazas on Sundays. I buy a colorful umbrella. We buy tropical flowers off the street to put in our home. The kind of tropical flowers that a week ago, I could have picked myself. We get a bright blue hammock for the living room and some Christmas lights to get into the December groove. Jon and I cook good food and watch American movies from comfortable couches. A helicopter flies low and my heart pounds- some internalized physical reaction even though my mind knows that this helicopter is not out to bomb anyone. I waste a river’s worth of water every time I get into the hot shower. It is just that good.
Starting work mixes another world into the whirlwind. There is so much to do! A conference on laws for human rights defenders, a meeting with a group of conscientious objectors, conference calls with people in Austria and the states, planning publications and articles, meeting with other accompanying organizations and hearing about their work and partners, planning webinars, learning about massacres elsewhere in the country and the overall situation in Colombia. In Bogota conversations are so packed- they are jammed with so many themes and topics and everything is so beautifully put together. People are eloquent and they flow from one human rights issue to the next and activists are pumped and people talk fluidly about death and policy and corporations and protest. I know I can do that… I have done that… but right now I am used to conversing about yucca. And when someone says there is an Amnesty International urgent action for the town of La Esperanza in the Peace Community, I don’t just think about the need to respond to it, I actually see the faces of the people there. I think about things they have said to me. I think about the fact that I was there two weeks ago. Is that healthy? Effective? Normal? Inspiring? Scary? There are so very many things I do not know. And so many things that I have a feeling I knew one time but now seem to have lost. This is the first time I have culture shocked within the same country I currently live in. Weird. As in with all things transition or otherwise, there is something to be said for being gentle with oneself.
The rain has started to pour down on our office roof. The rain somehow brings me back to myself. In concretely happy news from my new amazing Bogota life, I am going to a free Calle 13 concert in a park tonight. I suppose his advice is as good as any… atrevete.
