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.

The deadline was bullshit from the start, of course, and of course the rebels would not meet it, just to show the Colombian George Bush that he was not really in charge. If he had thought for a minute about it, there was obviously no way for him to win that one, since if he called the whole operation off because of a deadline, he would have to take the heat from everybody, the press, the families, the rest of the world, including the French George Bush (Sarksozy), who is also out to get some of the credit if anyone does get released. So, theColombian George Bush had one of his ministers announce that the deadline was flexible (why didn’t he announce this himself??? Hmmm….)–so the deadline quickly became no deadline.

So, on Saturday they couldn’t perform the rescue because they couldn’t get it together before the airport closed. Hmmm…

Then on Sunday, when everyone should have been ready, it failed to happen again. The FARC insist that the Colombian government didn’t live up to their end of the bargain, security-wise (very possibly true) and Uribe swears that the FARC never had the 3 year old kid in the first place. That sounds a little strange, since obviously if FARC doesn’t have the kid, their plan would have to fall apart at some point, so why would they even begin a farce of a hostage release with hostages they don’t have? They could easily have used one of their other hostages that they are definitely known to have.

Of course this whole operation didn’t happen as planned, because as much as the various parties might hate each other, it’s in ALL of their interests to drag it out. The FARC gets the world stage, which they haven’t been able to command for quite a while, Chavez gets to look like a good guy and a statesman and smarter than Uribe, but Uribe also gets a platform for his propoganda, even though he doesn’t seem to be playing the situation very well.

The losers, of course, are the actual hostages and their families, and all the Colombians who thought there might be some actual movement here.

All the news reports say that this is the first proof in three years that Ingrid and the Americans are alive. But last spring just before I left Bogota, a hostage escaped, and he said he had been held with her and the Americans, and confirmed that they were still alive. 

But, this guy was a Colombian soldier, which basically means a poor schmuck whose family had not been rich enough to buy his way out of military service, so does this explain why there are no references to his story during this current time? He had been with Ingrid off and on for years, and with the Americans, but now nobody seems to be talking about him. Even at the time that he escaped, there were many unanswered questions in the news that was released, so the public never did get the whole story. Of course, when we can’t get the truth from our news agencies in a country like the US, imagine how much harder it is in a place like Colombia.

From what I’ve learned about Ingrid Betancourt, mostly from reading but also a little from some people I’ve met who are involved in or at least pretty knowledgeable Colombian politics, she seems to be incredibly sincere in her desire to fight corruption in every instance and at every level in Colombia, which is pretty unique there. Even the politicians with the best intentions in Colombia are often in it at least partly to see what they can get for themselves, and she is apparently a true maverick. She was running for president when she was captured, and given almost no chance of even making a dent in the race, but if she ever does get free, her name recognition and history now might actually give her a fighting chance.

My problem with the Sarkozy (the French George W Bush) puffing up his chest to talk about getting her free is that he’s interested in getting himself some street cred on the world scene. He’s interersted, by the way, because Ingrid hold dual Colombian/French citizenship. The same with our own GWB, who spouts off on occasion about the three US “contractors” who’ve been held for a while. Nobody seems to talk much about the many Colombians similarly situated, and I have a feeling that if Ingrid and the three Americans were freed, the French GWB and the  American GWB and the Colombian GWB (Uribe) would declare it a total victory–job done! The thing is, I have a feeling Ingrid would disagree.

Colombians can visit something like 30 countries in the world without visas, and most of those are Latin American countries or obscure island ones, with a few exceptions (Israel, South Korea, Japan). Colombians can’t even visit Mexico without a visa, and Mexican visas are hard to obtain, because–my cynical theory–the US dictates to Mexico their visa policy because we don’t want any of those Colombians getting closer to our border and trying to come into our country to take what we got!

There are websites for companies who supposedly help people get visas to places like Canada or Europe, but I think many of them are not too trustsworthy and that the best way is to find out through research the policies and procedures and just do it yourself. Visas for Colombians are harder and harder to come by to first world countries, so most of those agencies can’t help so much in the end anyway. A program to study English in Canada or England is probably one of the easiest routes to a visa, but even that requires a lot of work and, honestly, a lot of cash (and a few connections).

So, I last year helped my Colombian friend Jose try to get a visa to go to England to study English. He had a friend who had a connection with a language school in London, and we started there. Then, since the school works with the British Council, all the paperwork collection and documentation was supervised by that agency. The good part was that the British Council knows what the government wants to see and tells the people working with them what to gather in order to present a case. Basically it comes down to studying fulltime (21 hours per week) for at least seven months, with the course and a month of accomodation paid for in full up front, proof of a long-standing Colombian job, ability to pay living expenses in UK, property ownership, and lots of other detailed stuff.

 Getting Paperwork Together

It took a lot of time and money to get everything lined up, and with the incredible amount of effort and time spent waiting in lines in Colombia to get seals and signatures verified, it was probably 100 hours worth of work, at least. But, the part that sounded fair to me (and quite the opposite of the MO of the United States embassy) is that the paperwork case, once submitted, would be evaluated  by a computer in order to increase impartiality, and the answer would come in under a week.  Contrast this to the US, where an embassy employee makes a seemingly arbitrary decision that might or might not include an actual evaluation of the case, and the applicant might wait several months just to get an appointment.

Here’s a list of the types of documents that needed to be gathered and submitted:

1. Passport and other ID, of course

2. Birth certificate

3. A CV accounting for every month and year of life from birth till present

4. Proof of employment (longstanding is better)

5. Proof of property ownership

6. Bank statements

7. Paid-up course in London of at least 7 months duration

8. Paid-up housing in London for at least the first month

9. Documents, letters, etc. showing how life in London will be paid for

10. Airline reservation

11. Documentation from the school showing accepted courses of study

12. Copies of all diplomas, courses of study, etc. ever undertaken anywhere

And, of course, most of these documents required numerous seals and authentications, which in Colombia entails standing in numerous interminable lines and paying numerous fees to the sealers and authenticators. Then the authentications need to be authenticated (really!)

Finally, when we had it all together, it only took three days to get an appointment for submitting the paperwork, and about another three days to get an answer.  How nice is that???  And, it was even nicer that the answer was YES!

Comparing Progress in Colombia and Turkey

I see a billion similarities between Colombia and my new home, Turkey. And a lot of differences, too, but more similarities. They are both in about the same place economically and in many ways socially as well. One big difference is that Turkey hopes to get into the European Union so is likely to clean up its act at a faster pace than Colombia, but in Colombia I also see some movement. The natural resources of Colombia are just astounding, the human resources are just waiting to be tapped, and development could come very quickly with just a little effort and some reform policies that a certain minority segment of the country’s leadership seems aware of and ready to make, if possible. Turkey will get there first, but when Colombia finally starts to compete, it will have a lot of raw talent to back it up.

Looking Back on Colombia

Since I left three months ago, I have kept up with Colombia in the news and of course talked to my friends who remain there. After two years in Bogota, I had started to become a little cynical (but that is my nature–I was cynical the whole time I lived in the US too) about the government and the “ruling class” idea that Colombia seems to hold onto. Early on I had thought that it is too bad the upper class doesn’t want to allow a middle class to develop, because, sadly, they don’t seem to realize that their own lives would be dramatically improved if the whole country were allowed to progress. 

The Tourism and Retirement Rush–Not Quite Yet

I think that someday Colombia will become a major tourist destination and also a major retirement destination, if a few things change–some minor ones and some major ones. The major one, of course, is the security issue, though I believe that even at this time that issue is very overblown by the press and that Colombia is suffering unjustly from an image problem that is no longer accurate. So, Americans and others can come to Colombia safely, and many do, but only a certain type of person at this point is willing to look deeply enough to see that it’s really an okay place to travel to and to live in.

Other smaller problems, such as the litter one I wrote about before, are also obstacles. There are beautiful beaches in Colombia, for example, if you can get off the beaten track, and there are POTENTIALLY beautiful beaches that are loaded with trash. A friend of mine visited the desert/beach area in the northeast of the country last year, and said the desert was on the one hand stunning landscape, but on the other hand was in places a desert of discarded plastic bags. When I visited Cartagena I loved the colonial old town with Spanish architecture and cobblestone streets, but sometimes the trash in the gutters made me feel a little unclean.

Monserrate Full of Plastic Bags

On my first or second weekend in the city, some friends took me up Monserrate, one of the major tourist things to do in the city. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday day, and there are hundreds of vendors of all types at the base of the mountain where the train station is and where the trail starts. Then, there are another or so hundred vendors on the trail.

Whatever people buy from these vendors usually comes in some sort of plasitc container, and the plastic containers simply end up thrown down on the trail and the rocks nearby. That day I saw probably THOUSANDS of plastic water bags all over the trail. I was shocked.

On another trip up Monserrate, I noticed that at various intervals there would be a sign asking people to keep their plastic and other trash till they got to the top of the mountain, and to throw it away there. These signs were basically ignored, of course, but I wondered why the authorities didn’t, instead of putting signs, put trash cans at these spots on the trail. 

Plaza Bolivar on Sundays

I love to go to Plaza Bolivar on Sundays, usually on my bike, because the Ciclovia route goes right to it. Downtown on a nice Sunday morning is crowded with all types of people out enjoying the day, vendors of all types, street entertainers, people visiting museums and feeding pigeons, or just hanging out.  It’s a really fun scene and charming and picturesque too, till you look on the ground on the street or on the Plaza Bolivar or on the cathedral steps and see all the crap that’s been left behind–plastic containers of all sorts, styrofoam, newspapers, cigarette butts, half-eaten food.  People just drop their crap wherever they happen to be standing. 

Cleaning Up for Bush

A couple weeks ago, when US President Bush stopped off for just seven hours in Bogota, the city and national governments sent out legions of cleaning men to sweep up Plaza Bolivar.  Appearance is everything, it seems, and President Uribe was pretty anxious to impress his buddy Bush.  What’s really sad is that they would never consider doing such a clean-up for themselves.

Litter All Over the Country

On the beaches in Cartegena and Santa Marta, the country’s two big beach resorts, litter is part of the landscape. A friend of mine who went to the dessert in La Guajira, the far northern part of the country near Venezuela, called it a “desert of plastic.” for all the plastic that had been left behind and is now blowing around the landscape.

Recycling and Trash on the Streets

Another part of the problem is that businesses and residential buildings often put their trash in plastic bags out on the street to be picked up. Then poor people who make their livings by selling to recyclers come along and rip open the bags in order to dig through them for plastic, cardboard, paper, and anything else that can be sold. This leaves the trash from the ripped open bags to be scatted by the wind and further dug through by homeless dogs looking for some food.

Something Oughta Be Done About This

To be fair, the US only made an effort to attack its litter problem in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but today I guess it’s considered pretty uncool to litter, and we have the attitude that only ignorant and uncaring people do it.

I would love to see Colombia start a really massive and nationwide anti-littering campaign. The government could make a big effort to provide places to dispose of trash in the cities and in the tourist attractions, and could employ a lot of people managing this and cleaning up public spaces. After a couple years of this, maybe they could then start some fines, etc. for littering. Supposedly this country is right on the brink of becoming an accepted tourist destination, and not just for brave people. If they could make a dent in their litter problem, it might happen a lot faster and on a larger scale.

What about Tourism?

I have had mixed emotions about Colombia becoming a more and more popular tourist destination. While it would be great for the country in lots of ways, there would of course be some negative effects. But my concern is mostly selfish, since I prefer to keep all the wonderful things about this country to myself and the, relatively speaking, rare number of travellers like me. Lately, though, I’ve started to think that the litter problem might actually keep a lot of folks away, even when the other bad image problems of the country have started to fade. I think about people like my uppper-middle-class sister and her typical suburban family, and how they would never want to come to a place where they felt unclean, no matter what else it might have to offer.  So, I hope Colombia does start to attack this problem, because it’s got implications for more than just the nuisance factor that litter is to folks like me.

Sometimes arepas are moist inside, whether they have cheese or not, and lots of people like them this way.  I prefer the extra-thin ones that are very flat and crispy, and I guess they are less popular, because they’re a little difficult to find. In my local Carulla I can sometimes find Dona Paisa Extra-Delgado, but only on a semi-regular basis. Often at roadside restaurants, which are common in Colombia as they used to be in the US in the days before interstate highways and chain fast-food places, arepas will be standard fare, either alone or as part of a meal. I suppose arepas could be eaten cold, though I’ve always had them hot, and I’m sure they’re better that way.  Maybe arepa is a little of an acquired taste, because I didn’t really like them much when I first came to Colombia, though now I eat them whenever they’re served and make myself one at home almost every night as sort of a snack–either with cheese or butter melted on top.

Sometimes I look at conditions in the country and think that a revolution could really do some good. Then I remember: supposedly, there’s a revolution going on already. The problem is that the revolutionaries have strayed far, far, far from their cause, and are now basically just money- and power-hungry, no different from the ones they are supposedly revolting against. And the drug trade has made the money so much easier to come by. So, the only people who suppor the revolution are the FARC members themselves, so their cause is going nowhere. Maybe many years ago they actually had the people’s benefit in mind, but those days are long gone.

There are tons of kidnapped Combian people still being held for political reasons (not for money), and the hard-line president isn’t negotiating. People are happy with him, even though he’s maybe two shades away from fascist, because he’s created a lot of safety (relatively speaking) in the country. He lies a lot, is my impression (from people who should know, mostly), but what politician doesn’t?

I have a friend whose family has suffered a great deal due to kidnapping, and continues to suffer, and I’m thinking of writing a post about that situation. I probably will, but want to be careful about what I say, since it’s hard to trust anybody when it comes to this issue.

Hamburgueseria is a hamburger joint, of course, but an upscale one. They have three other locations in Bogota that I know of–one is by the bullring, one is in Usaquen (lots of funky restaurants that have a few locations in town have one in Zona G and one in Usaquen), and they just recently opened on in Parque 93. That last maneuver actually caused them to drop a notch in my estimation, because Parque 93 is sort of the uber-trendy. I have a friend who is friends with the owners of the chain, and he says even they admit that opening a restaurant in Parque 93 is sort of selling out, because the other locations are all in neighborhoods that are actually more neighborhood-y and a have distinct personalities. But, I guess the opportunity to have a restaurant in a location that almost guarantees being packed from opening till closing every night was too much to resist. And, I guess the people who hang out in Parque 93 deserve to be exposed to a little bit of a funkier culture. After all, how much TGIFridays and El Coral Gourmet can you take?

 The Usaquen location, by the way, has live entertainment a few nights a week. My location, in Emaus (or Zona G), is just for food and hanging out.

So, the ambience is probaby the most important thing in Hamburgueseria. It’s dimly lit, has a lot of really whimsical murals and papier-mache statues as decor, but for the main decorations are authentic concert posters, many oversized ones, from the 1960’s, 70’s, and early 80’s. They got posters for Al Green, Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, and tons of others.

There’s also a second floor that takes up just half the space of the first, so there’s a loft-type effect that creates a really open feeling. The tables have painted wooden coverings atop table cloths, with geometric designs in red and yellow–each different. It’s a really casual place, with a big-screen TV over the bar and an outdoor patio for smokers to eat.

The menu features hamburgers, of course. I’ve been to this joint maybe 30 times in the 20 m0nths that I’ve lived in the neighborhood, and have ordered the same thing each and every time–a bacon cheeseburger and a malteada (milkshake). Sometimes I vary the flavor of the milkshake. But, I know they list about 10 varieties of hamburgers (Mexican, for example, with chili and cheese), and have turkey and vegetarian burgers, and also serve other sandwich-type dinners, like chicken and fish (they call these “afuera de hamburguesas”–”away from hamburgers”).

There’s always oldies music, a roaring fire (obligatory in Bogota year-round), and they bring about 8-10 types of sauces to your table to use on the burgers or whatever else you like to put sauce on. The waiters are fast and friendly, and the kitchen is separated from the dining room by just a bar, so you can see what’s happening back there if you like (a lot of restaurants in this zone have that feature).

Oh, one thing that’s not so great about this place–all of the appetizers I’ve tried (about 5 of the 8 or so listed) really suck. Must to avoid: the quesadillas, which are dry and taste a whole lot like cardboard.

But, just skip en appetizers, and everything else adds together to make this a fun place that you can go to often–it’s not time-consuming, it’s very informal, it’s fun, and the food is consistently good. 

Oh, did I mention that she was my student this year? 

She got a lot of help with the book from a teacher at my school, Federico Diaz-Granados, who’s a published poet himself. Federico teaches Spanish and we got to be amigos when we rode the same bus last year. His English is minimal, and my Spanish is just a step above that, but we like each other and I can tell that he’s 1. probably a genius, and 2. maybe one of the funniest guys in Bogota (even though I can’t usually tell specifically what he’s saying).

So, a little about Maria.  My school is small enough that in two years I have managed to teach all of the 10th and 11th graders in at least one class, and some of them as many as three. But, I never had Maria in class until this past semester, though I knew her very casually from other students. Maria’s the type who is every teacher’s favorite student, while at the same time she’s quiet, a little shy, sensitive, and doesn’t really create a stir. In fact, it’s her subtlety that ends up attracting people to her, I think.

She also has, almost every minute of the day, as big a smile as a girl can possibly wear. In class she doesn’t draw attention to herself, though she participates readily and very often has incredible insights. I had her in class before the morning break, so afterwards she’d often hang back to chat. During one of these first chats, she explained to me why she carries two bags each day.  One has in it things that she values: her Spanish, English, and French literature texts, philosophy books and projects, novels she’s reading for school, other books she’s reading for pleasure, her journal, which she’s never without, and whatever else she wants to have with her that day. The other bag is for things that don’t rank very highly with her: math and science books, notebooks, and whatever other things that are necessary for various reasons in life at the moment. By having two bags, the trivialities and dull necessities don’t contaminate the things of value.

I taught Maria in US Literature class, which includes a little history, and she also told me once that she’s much less familiar with the US than most of our students are. I said I hoped she’d get a chance to know the US better someday, and she told me that she would enjoy getting to know the people and the country through their literature.

Occasionally we’d ride the same bus home, and sometimes discuss the novels or plays we were reading in class, and her appreciation of literature is on a level that’s very rare and also very refreshing to find. But more than that, her simple enjoyment of it is so obvious in everything she says.

Her other passion is politics, in the global sense of being very concerned for humanity in general, having an intense sense of justice and fairness, and wanting her country to become the best it can be and do the right thing by its citizens. There’s a long way to go, but I think that someday Maria will make great contributions to the process.

But, back to the poetry. A couple people, including her mother and Fererico, read some of the poems, and then Maria read a few of them herself. I could catch about every third line, because my Spanish is still at the level where I have to translate in my head most of what I read, but even on that rudimentary level, I could tell it is really good stuff, with great insights and really original phrasings. It’s going to be a fun project for me to read them, and translate them into English. And, of course, I’ve got an autographed copy, so when Maria becomes a world-renowned writer, I can remember that I was there near the beginning.