I've been here in Colombia almost a year now and I don't regret the move for a second. There are so many reasons why I love it so but I think foremost among them is that I feel at home for what seems like the first time in years. I'm not under any illusions, I'm a foreigner here - a gringo, no less - and there's no changing that. But life here makes sense to me. I enjoy it. I look forward to each and every day like each one is a new adventure - like I'm always going to learn something new. I'm always learning here. I love that!
From the moment I landed I hit the ground running. I had my first assignment - covering a music festival in Cali - within 17 hours of exiting the airport. Then I could lay back and enjoy my first week in Bogotá. High up in the Andes, it was colder than I remembered. (I was last here in 1998... for a meal...) Hearing and speaking Spanish again was at one and the same time daunting and challenging. It's funny, because now I'm so used to it. I don't even think about the language anymore. But those first weeks - which don't seem like a year ago - I was constantly finding my feet. And yet I felt comfortable with the challenge. That was what I needed. To be tested again....
Cali was the first place I went to after Bogotá and it will always have a place in my heart. Apparently it is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet but you'd never know it. Hot, sweaty and with smell of sugar cane in the air, this was the Latin America I knew from my days in Cuba. I was there to cover a festival of Colombia's Pacific region music. Cali is an Afro city. Very black. And oddly enough, that made me feel more comfortable. More at home. It was like being back in Havana. Or Santiago. I recognized the mannerisms, the accents.
In the midst of an interview with a local group, the female singer invited me to go swimming with her. Her name was Aleli and she's gorgeous. Sitting here now with the memory, I can't help but smile. I want to go back. It just all made sense... But then that was just the beginning...
After Cali, I had a look around the rest of the country. I went to Medellin where I stayed in a Comuna (a slum neighbourhood), standing out amidst the gangs and gangsters while at the same time being protected because I staying with a local family.
I felt like a kid in sweetshop. Medellin has the reputation for being the home of Colombia's most beautiful women. And with some justification (although there was a little too much silicone for my liking). The locals are called 'Paisas' and they have a very idiosyncratic way of being. They talk. A lot! But when they talk, the accent is enchanting. I thought I would melt.
After Medellin, I went down to Putumayo, one of the most dangerous areas of the country, to meet some unionists protesting against multi-national oil companies' rape of the country. Sixty per cent of all unionist murders on the planet happen right here in Colombia. The paramilitaries and the military are the perpetrators. Putumayo is a controlled zone where people live in fear. One of the guys I interviewed was under a death threat. Every time a motorbike passed his house he ducked beneath the window. When I climbed into his car to go back to the bus station I sat down on a spare bullet proof vest. He told me to wear it, 'just in case'. These are the realities of life there.
I also stayed in a remote indigenous village, far down the Putumayo River near the border with Ecuador. It was like landing at the end of the earth. Like that scene at the end of Apocalypse Now. Really! Vegetation rioted on the shores of the river. The military had moved into the village. We landed in the midst of a tropical rain storm and the alleyways were lined with heavily armed soldiers. Two naval gun boats were moored at the dock. The army had built their base and a helicopter landing pad next to the local school. When the Farc (Marxist guerrillas) attacked the village they had fired a rocket into one of the classrooms.
The Farc only attacked the village because the army was there. The guerrillas have no reason to kill indigenous civilians. But that's the plan. The so-called US- sponsored Plan Colombia which the politicians say is to wipe out the drugs trade. In fact it has nothing to do with drugs. It's about protecting oil and gas fields and mineral resources. The government wants the locals out because they want the land. There is one soldier to every seven inhabitants of this mineral rich region of the country and if they could narrow that ratio they would. People get in the way of profits. And if the people are living in the midst of conflict, they will move. That's why Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world after the Sudan. The numbers are anything between 2.5 and 4million.
A day after I returned from Putumayo I got a job with Secretary of Education, doing a diagnostic of education in public schools in another controlled zone, Meta. Meta also is rich in petrol, gas and emeralds. As such it is controlled by paramilitaries groups protecting business interests. Meta also forms the bridgehead between the Farc battalions in Putumayo, Nariño and those camped out on the Venezuelan border.
I led a charmed there in a deeply dangerous part of the country. Working in schools with teachers who had next to no resources apart from their will was humbling. I camped out on the edge of jungle in villages that were little more than a collection of huts. I saw the Wild West aspect of this part of the country. Colombia is going through an oil boom. In places like Puerto Gaitan, the whore houses are the size of shopping centres to cater for the oil workers and truck drivers who come from all over the country to seek a fortune.
Men walk openly in the street with heavy weaponry. And dissenting voices are silenced with a bullet. That's how it works...
And yet in the midst of all that one of the places we worked in was a kind of 'hippy' school, Puente Amarillo, where the headmistress, Beatriz, was the kind of tough nut with a sweet centre you usually only expect to find in films. The kids there were those that have been thrown out of other schools. They were supposedly the baddest of the bunch. But the policy of the school was to identify each kid's talent and contract a teacher to nurture that talent. There was no discipline at the school; none of the shouting and screaming we found in so many other places. Part of the school was dedicated to the study of nature- they had a butterfly enclosure, for Christ's sake! And, yet, Puente Amarillo is streets ahead of any of the other schools in the department all senses. Academically the grades are higher, the pupils more dedicated. It was truly humbling to see. To realize how lucky and spoilt we are in the West.
Meta will always be close to my heart... I want to go back...
Anyway, this but part one... I'll write some more later. There is so much to tell...