Beached

Today, my host grandma and Heidi’s host mom decided to take us to the beach. Barranquilla’s beach—Puerta Colombia, is an old port and the original reason Barranquilla is such a large city. So, around noon (only about two hours after our planned departure time, since everyone here operates on “coastal” time), we headed out. Taking the cheapest bus meant getting a taxi to a bus stop and then standing on a crowded bus for the next 45 minutes or so, until we reached the beach.

As far as beaches go, and especially Caribbean ones, it wasn’t hugely impressive-- it’s rather small and the water is full of giant seaweed plants that curtailed enjoyable swimming. However, the breeze was wonderful and the water warm, and Heidi and I strolled the small beach front while our host parents sat under our rented cabana. 

We packed a picnic—as you can see, perhaps not the typical beach picnic! It included fried fish (as in, cut a whole fish, with scales and head still attached, in half and dunk it in a giant pot of bubbling oil), a few boiled potatoes and boiled pieces of yucca, an avocado to split, and some cooked bananas.

I’ve yet to see any other beaches in the area, but I hear they’re fairly amazing…can’t wait to see them…meanwhile, thinking about the fact that it’s actually November is pretty ridiculous! 

 Pretty much the entire beach

 The small children enjoyed the seaweed

 Lunching in the cabana

 Colombian-style picnic

 Wading time!

 beach!!

Salsa!

On Friday night, I finally experienced some Colombian-style dancing firsthand(!)-- a group of us went to  La Troja, which is a historical place in Colombia to go and dance salsa. Contrary to my initial assumption, this is not a “club” or dance place of generic style; we arrived at 10:30 to an open seating style location replete with blaring music and tables overflowing over the sidewalks—not many walls involved in this place. People—Colombians and as many tourists/foreigners as I’ve ever seen in Barranquilla—sat at their plastic tables and shouted to be heard over the music. 

So where’s all the salsa at this famous salsa place? Welp, turns out La Trosa is perhaps the only established dancing place I’ve ever been without a dance floor— dancing here meant finding space on the patio between tables and, under glaring lights, (attempting to) dance Salsa. Avoiding the gaggle of foreigners in one corner, our group of volunteers (complemented by two of our host fathers) positioned ourselves directly in an uncomfortably central location and began our clumsy imitation of salsa.

Now, I couldn’t tell you all the music played was salsa, or if salsa was all people danced, since I think there might have been a few different dances going on throughout the night. However, I’ve learned that I’m pretty sure the act of doing salsa, or any of its dance cousins, is potentially physically impossible. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to have many steps. However, turns out actually dancing it basically necessitates dislocating your legs from your hips in order to simultaneously shimmy the entire limb while traipsing back and forth in short double-time steps, flicking your ankles, and provocatively swaying your ass, all while keeping your shoulders fairly still, although a shimmy and shake or two up there is apparently desirable as well.

This is what I learned first from observation, and then from when the friendly Colombians (male and female) sitting near us, after watching our painful gyration attempts, began to give us helpful hints from the peanut gallery. “More hips!” and “Relax!” were followed by the women getting up to demonstrate the aforementioned impossible moves…and then their boyfriends hopped in to try and guide us girls through a song or two, to various degrees of success…

Meanwhile, the poor guys in our group were just completely given up as a loss. At least as girls you can usually follow the direction of the knowledgeable guys, if not the complicated foot patterns. Guys, well…handicapped already by genetics and a lifetime of getting away with the “I’m jogging in place while bobbing back and forth!” style of dancing...as one guy in our group was bluntly told by a native, “You’re bad at this.”

Waking up with ears still ringing and a cramp in my foot did not exactly sway me towards going back to La Trosa the very next night, as some people in our group planned to do …I think perhaps it’d be advantageous to find a place with less revealing lighting to get some practice in before repeating that exercise quite yet!

Decisions

Just a little bit on the “where am I going to end up?” question that, although we’re only three weeks in, has been the looming question on everyone’s minds.

On Thanksgiving day, Peace Corps will announce to us whether we will be spending the next two years of our lives in Barranquilla, Santa Marta, or Cartagena—in the city-proper or somewhere outside of it. Most placements are directly in the cities, but there are a few rural ones—there’s one on a mountainside outside of Santa Marta, and there are rumors of a placement on an island off of Cartagena. Even the Peace Corps folks haven’t made the final decisions of what schools will receive Peace Corps volunteers. (And just as a point of reference, these cities are all on the coast, 1-3 hours away from each other).

In order to decide where we’re placed, members of the staff interview us on our “strengths and weaknesses,” listen to our Spanish skills, watch our “field practicums,” or teaching examples, and evaluate us day by day. We can sort of voice, or at least hint at, our hopes and desires as well, although the Peace Corps does everything with the injunction to its volunteers to “be flexible.” After all of this, they make like a sorority and vote on where we’ll end up.

Needless to say, there’s been a great deal of hullabaloo over the process, as well as over where people want to be. Barranquilla is traditionally the least popular destination, since it’s really an industrial city without the history or beauty of Cartagena or Santa Marta. And yet, everything has its pros and cons—Cartagena, outside its historical center, is dirty, hot, and mostly urban sprawl. Santa Marta is a tourist resort destination, filled with beautiful beaches and scenery, yes, but without any real cultural activities and with the transiency of a tourist town. Barranquilla is blocky and plain, but with the best resources both Peace Corps and otherwise. And then to compound the basic destination thing, there’s the fact that although most spots will be urban, there are a handful “peri-urban,” or more rural school placements out there, and there are quite a few people in the group ready to fight tooth and nail over them.

And of course, under everything is a rumbling of disquiet from many in the group, since the fact that most of us will be in highly urban city settings for the next two years is really starting to sink in; most of, if not all of us, were basically expecting to spend a couple years of our lives doing the classic living-in-a-hut-pumping-water-never-shaving-and-loving-it Peace Corps thing. In Colombia, however, our placements will almost all be completely urban. We’re talking, high-heels, full makeup, skirts, tourists, and discotecs sort of urban. 

Awesome, some might say…but after eschewing city life as often as possible, for me it’s a little odd to be in this scene, living in the biggest city I’ve ever been in, in an extremely odd mix of poverty and development—of unheated showers and streets without sewers, cinder-block schools and huge shopping malls and American prices. And even after packing basic professional clothes, I really did not come close to being prepared on the fashion wardrobe front, which is really just another issue entirely. 

It’s not just the supplies/city living aspect, either. Ensconced in this city atmosphere is an important, totally different aspect to our jobs and lives, and that is fundamental role that Peace Corps has in this country; Peace Corps is in Colombia to do a specific task as set by the Colombian government—to improve the quality of its English education. Unlike the classic Peace Corps routine of reaching out to towns and villages that otherwise might never hear a word of English or have an English teacher, or might never been connected to other countries or even bigger cities, our job is much more corporate, and potentially much more governmentally shaped. ( I don’t know enough about all posts to completely generalize this way, but I haven’t heard much to the contrary)

My job in the Peace Corps is going to involve fitting myself into an established school hierarchy, working with teachers to help them improve. I am not a lone bringer of English—I am a status-laden classroom aide, a tremendous resource armed with materials and knowledge and native speaking abilities to help bring the English level of this country up.

I am certainly not saying we shouldn’t be here. I’m absolutely not saying that this country, with its incredible dichotomy of rich and poor, of children who take English from teachers who can’t speak it, but can only dictate grammar, of people so poor they don’t have running water and live in classic squalor because half of this country is at or below poverty level, should not have the Peace Corps presence.  I’m simply saying that this is much different than I ever expected, from way back when I first contemplated the idea of doing Peace Corps after college…a decade ago at least!...and I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

Volunteer Visits

This past week was Volunteer Site Visit week, which meant that finally, on our third week in-country, we got a taste of what our job will, in reality, entail. We were split into pairs and assigned a volunteer to shadow for a day. After a ridiculous amount of drama last Friday, we learned whether we would be traveling to a volunteer in Santa Marta, Cartagena, or remaining in good ole’ Barranquilla. No one was hurt or killed in the process, and when it all shook out, I was lucky enough to be in a traveling group—off to Cartagena I went!

After hearing only fabulous things about this hot, Spanish colonial ex-slave-trade-destination port city, eight excited volunteer trainees filled our “Puerto-a-Puerto” (translates to Door-to-Door, a taxi-like mini van that travels between cities on the coast and is the only approved intra-city transport for US government workers of any sort) to the brim.

The trip, during which we traveled mostly by highway through ramshackle country towns, was extended by an hour or so due to detour caused by a town near Cartagena blocking the roads in protest of their local election results. Sadly, we didn’t get to see this interesting development in person. After the last bumpy half-hour of pitted dirt road, we reached Cartagena. In these first views, its reputation did not disappoint—the road went straight along the beaches, and we drove right to the walled city.

Cartagena is one of the biggest destination spots for Colombian travelers and other tourists, and is famous for its walled city—literally, the beautiful downtown is literally encircled by an old stone wall. Inside these walls are narrow, European-style streets lined with colorful, balcony-laden buildings. Horses and carriages mingled with cars and the many tourists out for jaunts. See pictures below!

We stayed in a hotel nearby, and much as my host-abuelas are wonderful people, it was fairly awesome to be staying with a fellow trainee rather than my host family/be able to eat meals without being yelled at for not finishing my plate. 

Our afternoon and evening of sight-seeing over, the next day was all about our site visits. Adam and I went to a “Normal” school. Unlike most schools the Peace Corps is working in here, this is sort of the equivalent of a vocational school. It teaches specified subjects, including English, to students in 10^th and 11^th grade who elect to follow a trade course after finishing the 9^th grade, their last mandatory year of public education. Our volunteer, Micah, mostly taught students who were also learning petro-chemical engineering—classes that took up about 12 hours of their day every day of the week. 

Although the initial idea had been for us to be able to observe our volunteers and how they co-taught in a classroom, following true Peace Corps “who-knows” attitude, Adam and I ended up being the lesson of the day…aka sitting with groups of students while they asked us every question from “What is your favorite color” to “What do you do in the Peace Corps,”—and I quote, “Have you ever loved a man so much it made you cry?” 

For the most part, their English was rough and often hard to decipher, and throughout the time we were there I didn’t hear the Colombian teacher speak to them in a word of English. Overall, it was great to see the school, but I learned very little about what a typical placement might be—because this school has so few English teachers and has resources like computers and internet and air conditioning and a “decent” teacher, more likely than not they won’t actually be placing one of us in that school for the next two years. 

Back at the Peace Corps office “processing” our visits, it was interesting to hear a range of experiences. Many volunteers had struggled in some way or another at their sites—whether it was from complete lack of classroom organization, to resistance from the teachers, to apathy from students and teachers alike—and we all became a little more apprehensive after seeing these challenges first hand. And yet, volunteers are doing amazing projects as well—everything from organizing libraries, to hosting English camps, to holding English learning competition days. So many good ideas and project starts for so many of us, if we end up at some of these schools!

With field practicum—teaching in actual classrooms in Barranquilla—starting this coming week, things have started to ramp up. From teaching practice lessons to beginning our first rounds of evaluations, every day brings us closer to finding out where we’ll be for the next two years, and we’re officially done with the first quarter of our training!

Some pictures of Cartagena:

 In the square 

 Standing on the wall, view of the modern part of the city

 Still standing on the wall, view of the inner, colonial part of the city

 Clock tower at night

Ship at the port

Cooking Time!

This past weekend I got to have my very first in-Colombia cooking experience. This involved making a sort of jam—or “Mermelade” with my two of my co-volunteers, Heidi and Katie, and Heidi’s host mom.  We made two different kinds—raspberry as well as “tomato de arbol.”

What is a tomato de arbol? Well, here’s a picture of Heidi with one:

 

And yes, it does translate directly to Tree Tomato. They actually are reminiscent of tomatoes in taste, and it’s many peoples’ favorite type of fruit from which to make juice. As I am a fan of the salty sort of tomato juice, preferably flavored with worcestershire sauce, pepper, lime juice…and potentially some vodka as well…this sugary watered down version of tomato juice is perhaps my least favorite fruit juice here. That being said, it does make some tasty jam!

Anyway, back to jam making. Turns out, making jam is super simple. All you do is blend the fruit with a little water, strain out the seeds, add an ungodly amount of sugar (what else is new, here), and simmer it until it starts to thicken. When it’s done cooking, you pour it into any container on hand and let cool, then refrigerate without a top (Not sure about the why on this part, but since my abuela puts covers on NOTHING I didn’t think to ask about that direction at the time).

In other news, I had my first areppa! My abuela made it for me last weekend and watched to ensure I devoured it all. Made of cornmeal with cheese, fried in butter, and then topped with over an inch of MORE grated cheese, it was the size of my plate and incredibly delicious…as well as probably enough food for the day.  However, as my days of enforced meals continue, it has become clear that my abuela has every intention to follow through on her thoroughly stated intention to “grow my stomach” so that I’m substantially bigger by the time I leave her house in three months. I’ve told her I can’t afford to buy a new wardrobe but alas, this provides only another source of humor for her…and so, onward.

Pictures of jam making:

                                  Heidi and her mom starting the raspberry cleaning process

                                       Katie and I doing some more raspberry cleaning (stems and leaves
                                       were still attached!)

                         Pureeing the fruit--blenders, or "liquifiers," as they're called here, are
                         indispensable here/are in every kitchen, used daily for making juice!

                                       Yes, we licked our spoons like 5 year olds