What makes Medellín so special in 2010? Is it the year-round suave and just-warm-enough climate? That the city is enjoying a surge in commercial and entertainment-related investment, while Colombia as a whole is on the brink of becoming the world’s least-discovered but most desirable eco-tourist hotspot? The newest and cleanest Metro I’ve had the joy of riding? The fashion show appeal of the nightlife? That while I teach at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, my fellow Pitzer grad and dear friend Sonya is here studying at EAFIT on another grant concurrently? The lush green hills of the Valley surrounding me? Sitting on Sonya’s new 13th floor balcony while reaping the views of that wonderful valley? The pico y placa traffic restraint system that keeps some cars off the roads certain times each day and the air several times cleaner than Bogota’s, so I can breathe easy? The fact that I can enjoy a fair degree of US-caliber quality of life while still being able to dance to Cuban salsa all night on a Tuesday? The crystal clear and agreeable quality of the local Spanish accent? Listening to the drum-driven anthems of the Deportivo Independiente de Medellín while sitting in the city soccer stadium, eating caramel popcorn? Or just simply that I seem to have found a worry-free and natural passion in my “work” as an English instructor, waking up eager to hit campus and see my students once again? Whatever attraction may fuel my interest at any given moment, I only know that today I must thank the universe, once again, for placing me at the exact place on earth at which I’d like to be this moment. Family and friends, know I love you and miss you dearly, but already I am speculating about future ways I can live here, savoring the comfortable life of a full-time English teacher while enjoying the most fulfilling and modern city of Latino fusion known to man.
So, how does an ethnically ambiguous foreigner like myself attract students to learn English, anyway? This week at work was mostly about luring new students into joining my supplementary teaching activities designed to motivate their practice of the world’s lingua franca. My colleagues have reinforced the uniqueness and advantage of my presence at the UPB as the university’s first Fulbrighter and one of its only native-English-speaking faculty partners in years. Accordingly, I am eager to encourage my students to utilize my services as much as possible. (A background note: the Education Department’s students, who must demonstrate intermediate-advanced level fluency in English by the end of six semester’s of work amid their 10-semester programs, are under a lot of strain to achieve this expectation without a whole lot of handholding by conventional faculty members; many of the students fail to meet their performance benchmarks, and therefore are held back many times in the rest of their majors, coming up short of graduation for up to 14 semesters at times… Talk about frustrating!) As a result, my tutora and I have designed my schedule in such a way that I am available for a decent deal of hands-on and personalized English help each week. So I am holding daily office hours in the mornings in the Education Faculty, hosting twice-per-week lunch-hour conversation groups, open to any student of any English level, and guiding three intercultural workshops, taught only in English, each week. But getting the students to commit time out of their schedules, jam-packed with up to as many as nine courses, and, naturally, plenty of night-time rumbas, is easier said than done. Having made several animated announcements in person to various English classes about the start of the tutoring and workshops, I had less than excellent luck this week motivating them to show up. I sat in my reserved classrooms three afternoons this week, hands full of illustrated maps of the US and images comparing Martin Luther King to Barack Obama, and waited alone. This experience is a slightly frustrating time drain. But, having been forced to learn how to be more Colombian in my patience, I feel far less agitated than I would have previously imagined. I have no problem using this time to continue reading my State-Department-issued English teaching manuals (many hours of my week are devoted to teaching myself how to be a teacher). And the downtime allows me to gleefully laugh reading the cost-cutting allegories contained in my new favorite book of all time, The Undercover Economist, by Financial Times columnist Tim Harford. Really, I consider this state of affairs sadder on the part of the student’s loss than mine… Here I am, ready to embellish the dryer activities of my regular class, Oral Comprehension 2, with fun word games, an open ear for questions about US cultural stereotypes, discussions about the geostrategic importance of Colombia to the United States, and I am staring at a wall in an empty classroom. Indeed, Friday morning I got a bit fed up and went on a photocopy frenzy, printing and posting bulletins advertising my workshops all over my department and the entire campus. My tutora, Olga, was right when that afternoon she declared: “Sol, our greatest challenge is to coquetear, or flirt, these youngsters into devoting more of their own time to really get the hang of English.” But voluntariness is what it is. A young English Teaching Assistant must pick his battles and devote his resources wisely…
Surely, I feel a responsibility to serve my local paisa community. So I have developed a new version of a “side project”. Though some of my students may be more careless, I feel reassured that I can actively teach at least one. I know that my most-eager-to-learn student, Raul Gomez Yepes, 23, is benefitting mutually alongside me, because he gets to speak English with me at will during several hours of after-class adventures like searching for a nightstand in the crowded streets of Medellín’s downtown. I am grateful that Raul has become a trusted friend here. For a guy who’s never once been to the States, Raul’s intercultural patience and curiosity, astonishingly well-developed ear for English and fervor to achieve native-speaker fluency in the language inspire me each day. Already, I’ve made it my goal to help and advise Raul to get to the States to perfect his English within the next three years. Maybe, once he finishes up the Education program at the UPB, I might convince him to apply for one of the roughly 6 Fulbrights available for young Colombian scholars to travel to Norteamerica. This is a guy who will enhance his English through immersion and come back to his country as a model English-as-a-Second-Language instructor. In a sense adopting Raul as my Colombian brother, I feel few things in my life would give me more satisfaction than contributing to the realization of his cultural, linguistic, and professional dream. Come spring 2011, we will begin to get things cracking…
Another exciting piece of news in the world of workday schedules and teaching: I have a new job. Deciding that in my first semester here, it would be wiser for me to make extra dough than to take post-grad level Political Science courses at the UPB, I have accepted an offer to teach part-time private classes at a new language institute up the street from my campus, US Alliance. I will teach two students in separate classes a total of five 1.5-hour blocks per week. The first lessons with Sebastian, a businessman in town working for Kimberly Clark (yes, the US-based paper products firm) have already begun. Sebastian needs help in order to pass an English-based exam for promotion at the company, so he can make more trips to the US for conference presentations. We discuss the world of international business, listen to and linguistically analyze stories on NPR, listen to American rock music, and watch subtitled episodes of The Wire to exercise his listening and verbal fluency. (That’s right, I am actually doing what I said I would do in my Fulbright teaching proposal here. Fun enough, I’d have to say!) I must admit I feel just a tad guilty for soaking up time at the Alliance while not auditing more courses at the university. (But I am taking one class, pre-grad level Comparative Linguistics in Spanish and English, which is insightful in helping me improve my Spanish pronunciation and comprehension of the roots of each language.) At the same time, I figure that devoting time to an institution founded to foster US-Colombia linguistic exchange and cultural dialogue is an appropriate endeavor for a Fulbrighter. I am satisfied with my temporary paradigm; flexing my right to audit courses at the university will come later, likely in the spring. Let’s hope this one is worthwhile!
To transition to the utmost “extracurricular” glories of my life abroad, on Friday night my Swiss roomie, Fabia Metzger, and I threw our first in what will surely be a spring series of club nights at our apartment in Conquistadores. I dubbed this one a Latino Mixer titled the “House of Pleasure,” after Raul and my favorite album of the moment, the excellent summer 2010 banger from Plan B. (If you want to hear the freshest Electropop-driven Reggaeton on earth right now, then you must pick this one up!) We began the night with some Swiss-style baked hotdog rolls and a guacamole mix-off between Fabia and I (which avocado delicacy will win? That made by the woman from Europe or the dude who lived 200 miles from California for four years? Hmmm… You decide!). Our guests and us got into some tunes, cross-cultural socializing, and berry punch until late into the night. Truthfully, the party wound up taking on much more of an international than strictly Latino flavor: we had a grip of local paisa friends in the house merrily dancing to Salsa, Bachata, and, of course, Juanes alongside students from France, Switzerland, Germany, the US, and the Colombian Caribbean coast. Though we overheated the sound system twice, the punch was gone by 3 am and Fabia and I can claim the fiesta was a success.
Saturday night, it was time to get into something highly anticipated and brand new. Natalia, Sigi, Raul, and I went to see a fútbol match starring Medellín’s most historic team, the highly energetic Deportivo Independiente de Medellin (DIM), or simply, Medellín. I had heard plenty of people claiming reasons to support Medellín over the city’s richer and arguably more famous team, La Nacional. The most salient common narrative is that while La Nacional is the team where the best players go to become overpaid and lazy, Medellín is the vibrant team “of the people,” that is, which represents the city’s commoners and middle class. Coming into the game, I knew that I was leaning toward supporting Medellín, if for nothing else, just simply because I get a kick out of this popular mythology. Not to mention, I tend to really enjoy the color red, the highly charged color of “the people,” over my second favorite color, green, the color of the supposedly snobby La Nacional. The red team, nickname El Poderoso, was playing against Real Cartagena, another outfit playing in green and yellow from the Caribbean coast. Arriving near El Estadio, the Stadium, I stopped for a pre-match beverage with Sigi and Natalia at Sigi’s snack shop, and was pleased to see the streets rumbling with red jerseys, loud percussion groups, jumping, dancing, and debauchery of all sorts. Sensing that this style of fan-hood is more similar to that which I know and love in Brazil, I immediately felt right at home. At 8:30 pm Raul, Natalia, Sigi plus two other friends and I entered to take up our seats. The Estadio’s various price tiers were mostly crowded, but the lower, uncovered level was, of course, noisiest and most outlandish of all. Not even three bouts of rain during the game could stop these most diehard fans, who had paid an absurd US$6 each for their tickets, from keeping up 90 minutes of constant jumping, red flag waving, drumming, and singing. Now, once and for all, I could see what people meant when they explained this idea of the PEOPLE’S team! The match wound up in a disheartening draw… But oh well. Until next game—the clásico against in-house rival La Nacional. The red side will certainly have a firm new fan: El Poderoso and a red shirt it is for me!
Sunday was a lazy day well spent by waking up at a decent time to fulfill a commitment to Sonya. She’s just moved into an apartoestudio, or one-bedroom apartment, in Floresta, a well wooded neighborhood about three miles west of me. Raul and I showed up to help her paint her new bedroom, which she had goofed up and splattered an awful hot pink the day before… After taking care of the mess with a few new coats of a more soothing white, to be later covered in purple, the three of us soaked in eye-popping views of our city from her rather off-the-chain 13th floor balcony. A new reading spot for Sol—don’t mind if I do! Sonya, Raul and I paused for a traditional lunch of frijoles, or bean stew, and reflected on how out-of-this-world impossibly remarkable it is that we get to share this year in Colombia’s Valley of Wonders together. After an afternoon trip to Home Center, a home improvement warehouse, to gather extra paint (and ice cream) with Sonya, I could call the day, and the week, productive and fun.
For now, I’m off to bed… right after I fight off this damn gecko that keeps sneaking into my room! I’m going to get this sucker before he crawls into my ear tonight!
haaaha. love the pics! and thanks again for helping me salvage my humble abode from turning into a kitch nightmare! Though there's no telling quite yet how the purple and electric ice blue will turn out either...
ReplyDeleteDang dude, it sounds like you're having a blast. As I write you from my host family's living room in South Korea, I can't help but think about how different yet equally dynamic lives we are living. I look forward to sharing our Fulbright adventures in the year to come!
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