Colombia Ya!

Ok so I have been in Colombia almost a month now and its my first blog, so maybe I’m a bit behind but I've never been too big into blogging.  I just arrived in Santa Ana on Isla Barú this past Saturday, where I will be teaching English to 9-11^th graders for the next 11 months after 1 month of orientation. 

A Quick Orientation to Colombia

On January 2^nd I left Columbia, South Carolina early in the morning and that evening arrived at the city of Bogotá in another Colombia a little deeper to the south and a bit warmer.  I arrived along with 34 other volunteers as part of a program called WorldTeach that works with Volunteers Colombia to place volunteer English teachers in schools and universities around Colombia. 

Anyway, Orientation was cool and all but its over, so to quickly sum up:  We were 35 plus our teaching teachers in a Catholic retreat named Santa Cruz about half an hour outside of Bogotá in a town called Cota.  It was beautiful up in the mountains and lots of open space.  There was a sweet little lady across the street that ran a tienda and sold us beers and let us kill a chicken and cooked it for us.  We went to a cool cathedral built into an old salt mine.  Spent some time in Bogotá, hitting up Bogotá Beer Company was a highlight.  The beers here are not so bad, Aguila and Club Colombia but a nice porter was a good change.  I learned a lot about teaching, shored up my Spanish a bit, and made a few friends.  Everyone from the whole group is great but after 3 weeks I was ready to get out and see my reality for the next year….

 

Welcome to Santa Ana

That reality is this small pueblo of roughly 5-6000 named Santa Ana on Isla Barú, which is a peninsula the Spanish made an island by cutting a canal across it, leaving no land access but only a ferry.  Santa Ana is roughly an hour or so south of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, at least by truck and ferry.  By bus and ferry or bus, ferry and moto taxi (the preferred Santa Anan mode of transportation) I am not sure yet.

Santa Ana is a bit of a different Colombia than Bogotá, a different world really.  It is a poor Afro-Colombian community with the overwhelming majority of the population in the lowest of second lowest income stratification level in Colombia.  At first glance it may appear to be a dirty ugly place with lots of trash and a few creeks of green sludge flowing through the unpaved streets.  However, even after only 4 days here, it’s clear this place has a beauty of its own kind.  Everyone I have passed in the street has been so warm and friendly.  There is always music playing even late into the night which makes the bedtime cigarette that much more lovely.  Sunday night, they trucked in 3 big speakers with names for a fiesta.  There are a few tiendas, a pandadería, a clinic, and one restaurant.

The school that I will be teaching at as well as where the eight of us volunteers here will be living is a charter school named Barbacoas.  It is this beautiful, huge, gated oasis with lots of trees, very clean, and all open-air buildings.  It is at once my home, my work, a peaceful refuge, a prison, and potentially an asylum.  The other 7 volunteers are all great, but all girls so maybe I will go crazy by the end of the year.  Fortunately there is a guy here who volunteered with WorldTeach last year at the public school in Santa Ana and is now a staff member at Barbacoas.  He will also be my co-teacher, which is great that he as experience and there will be no potential communication problems with him.

All this week, we have had meetings and planning for classes to start on Monday.  All the other teachers here at Barbacoas also live on site for the week and commute to their homes in Cartagena on the weekends, so we have a nice little school community that we are beginning to get to know in addition to Santa Ana.  We also get some delicious lunches here.  Today we finished early and after lunch went to Playa Blanca, a famous and beautiful beach at the end of the peninsula of Barú.  Doing as the locals do, we didn’t take a charter bus but Moto Taxis.  We piled on the back of motos two a piece plus the drivers and went down a winding, bumpy, unpaved road and it was awesome.  I was concerned I would bounce off the back of the moto a few times or that our driver’s engine would die, but after about 20 minutes we made it.  Swimming in the Caribbean in late January=terrific.  Much of the community works on Playa Blanca selling food, drink, or crafts to all the tourists that come so we met some of our neighbors and some of our students.  I will be looking forward to many more moto taxi rides and weekend days there at the beach.