Bogota Blogger

Settled in Turkey, and busy, I have neglected this site for months. But I still keep up with friends in Colombia regularly and read the Colombian news from time to time.  Turkey and Colombia have so very much in common, I couldn’t even begin to list them all. Some things I found charming or frustrating about Colombia are double or triple or more here in Turkey. And yet the countries don’t have much to do with each other–they don’t even have embassies in each other’s capital cities.

Maybe I would find other countries that are kind of 2 1/2 world-ish that are also like Colombia and Turkey–lots of people have suggested that.  But, based on my friend Jose’s experiences in London in the past seven months (he went there when I came to Turkey), I’m drawing some anecdotal conclusions about the similarities between the two.

Jose went to London to study English, and I helped him to get there. Basically he loves Colombia but feels the need to escape (that’s the correct word) if he is ever to have any opportunity to improve himself. He has a university degree and is hard-working, but those things don’t count for too much in the classist society that Colombia still is. So, he got a visa to study English in London and is about to renew it for another year.

The thing is that his language school is loaded with Colombians and Turks, as are most of the reasonably priced language schools. There are many folks from other nationalities, of course, but those two are predominant. And the reason seems to be that they are two places where people right on the verge of being middle class, with the intelligence, work ethic, and skills that would make them easily middle class in the US or other first world countries, seem to find that the best way to get there is to leave there homelands. So they go to places like London and work in menial jobs at first, establish networks with their countrymen and other immigrants, learn English, and find a way to get ahead (because the UK allows this, where Colombia and Turkey make it pretty difficult). Some will work hard for a few years, make some money, and return. But more, I think, eventually find ways to stay in the UK or emigrate to some other first world country.

Sad for Colombia, sad for Turkey.

But it’s going to take a long time for them to learn. Later I will write about how two of my (rich) Turkish students told me that Turkey’s potential membership in the EU will be bad for them personally because then the poor people will have the chance to get good educations, taking away an advantage that’s been open almost exclusively to the upper classes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under Colombian Personality, Getting Out of Colombia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.