Well, two months in, I deliver what will be my most brutally honest report about life in Colombia. I'm sorry but I'm not sorry: being Luciene's son, I guess I just don't know any other way.
Being a Fulbrighter is an honor and a hell of a lot of fun. It means taking on a life-enriching array of new cultural traits, educational endeavors, and social opportunities. Being a Fulbrighter also means sacrifice. The second part is especially true when serving in locations of intermediate development like Colombia, as opposed to highly developed countries like, say, Denmark. For me, one of the sacrifices, which I suppose stirs grief in all Claremont Colleges students after graduation, has been reducing the intensity of my social life. Sometimes, given the strain of exercising my tongue to imitate a Colombian Spanish accent 10 hours per day, and full days of mental work, I simply feel like a hushed old man and can't manage to do much but chill. This shakes my perception of self-identity because anyone who knew me in college knows that "chilling" was just not something I did. The Energizer Bunny bounce I have known for the last four years is turning rather into a workhorse's gait, a pace with which I'm not too familiar. The second principal sacrifice is being away from my loved ones, which causes a slight tremor under my foundation at least once per day. As a result of both conditions, I feel caught in a moment that requires the development of hyper independence, which is a demanding test to someone who was never much of a crowd follower in the first place. This process sometimes feels like turning my skin into an Argentine leather jacket, which may be necessary for protection but can also wind up being socially limiting. Never before have I felt such a pressing need to strike a balance between being vocal, either in expression of needs or in self-defense, and being intentionally pensive and introspective. In order to reap the most personal growth from this experience, a Fulbrighter must reach to exercise both elements.
One challenge staring me in the face is that the excitement of a new work environment abroad, so different from anything I've encountered in college in California or in any of my escapades into the over-professionalized bubble of Washington, DC, has compelled me to bite off more than I can chew. Although my contractual work commitments at the University are a (realistically slight) 20 hours per week, I am spending nearly double that on campus each week, meeting people, networking, trying to absorb a new cultural outlook on academia, and dreaming big about professional building blocks that will guide me to the stone blocks of Georgetown. For five weeks, my mantra became much like that of outgoing Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, perhaps the country's most lauded paisa in history for championing his region's folkloric spirit of "work, work, work." (This mentality seems to stem from the department of Antioquia's highly agricultural past, which engendered a 6 am to 8 pm work schedule that, despite the region's transition to a more information-based and industrial economy, has not changed since.) But the strange part is, I am not working for an hourly wage, so a rush-to-stack-time-cards mentality does not quite fit the unique parameters of my grant. The fact is, working without a specified hourly wage provides perverse and distorted incentives. That is to say, it makes it harder to distinguish between and keep track of which activities should be considered "work" and which ones "leisure." I've just recently gripped the fact that working with an Uribista mentality as a Fulbrighter would be illogical, and might even cause my senses to block out important social and culturally educational opportunities. So again, as North American emerging from a relatively workaholic past, herein lies the need to restructure the way I have been trained to conceptualize the world.
Still, I really do feel the need to make the most of my time here in Colombia, professionally and personally. Meanwhile, after nearly a three year hiatus from my birth continent, I feel the need to take it easy on myself in a manner that will allow me to more fully re-comprehend how Colombian and Latin American social life really work. Colombia has taught me how to accomplish this competing objective to a degree, what with Saturday afternoon pickup games of fútbol and lazy Sundays of sightseeing, grilled meat, and watching music videos with my local buddies. But at the same time it's been very hard for me to gauge an appropriate level of effort because I've mostly only ever known that of an overachiever. I continue, in theory, to want to be ultra-productive and to be the best all the time. But often the societal constraints of being in Colombia, a place where things move slowly and people have a true passion to live smiling, make the continuation of key parts of my North American personality, as I've known it, seem out of the question. This is confusing and sometimes scary. But if I can train my mind to think of those immediately perceived constraints as opportunities, then maybe I can also flourish.
Colombia is teaching many of the other Fulbrighters and I to slim down our expectations about most anything. But that is a tall order for a flock of people who have arrived where they are, thriving, by holding supreme expectations about everything. Colombia teaches, or rather forces, me to feel that I just have to be okay with seeing things that should be simple to accomplish just not happening. Or, perhaps only happening at "God's will." Now, I know this is going to be exaggerated, but I must be frank in my perception of the disconnect between my drive and the pace of Colombian society around me. It is as if every week, I go through a radical rollercoaster ride of brain bursting thoughts of new professional projects, research-enhancing travels, and networking activities, often to only have my NASA shuttle of objectives suddenly crash somewhere in outer space. Why? It's hard to feel that it's not because things are happening too slowly around me, or my understanding of the predominant Colombian social attitude contradicts my personal plans. I'll offer a couple of examples. My stipend funds from the Fulbright Commission keep arriving at the last of the five-day period during which the Fulbrighters and I were warned they would be transferred. Now, by Colombian standards, this may seem okay, but in the States, when a client is told that funds will be transferred by the 5th day of the month, he or she should reasonably suspect they will be there by the 3rd. Back home, this results as a matter of socially engrained capitalist instict and concern for punctuality, stemming from the Puritan ethic that founded the United States of America. So naturally, transfer delays here keep many of us Fulbrighters, especially those not conveniently sitting on thousands of dollars of travel-worthy savings, biting our nails. People have to pay rent. Specifically, I have to pay my rent no later than the 5th of each month as to avoid getting my utilities shut off. Now imagine what getting my utilities shut off would mean. That would mean I would get to work without showering, unkempt, and poorly representing the United States Department of State and Institute of International Education in perhaps the most image-obsessed, hygenic, and ostentatious city on earth. This would mean that in the event I had an emergency in which, say, my passport or American credit card were robbed, I would not have access to Skype in order to inform my mother, or the proper agents back in the States (I maintain a monthly rolling account with Skype exactly because calling the States from Medellín usually requires tracking down a hole-in-the-wall agency that charges a fortune per minute). I don't care who you are, but when one is living alone and disconnected in a country rocked by decades of social distrust, fueled by civil war and formerly by some of the highest rates of kidnapping in the world, these prospects are nerve-wracking! A second example of Colombian inefficiency is in order, pertaining, again, to the world's machine lubricant: financial security. Last week, given the rapidly rising prices of airfare for the holiday season, friend Alec Lentz and I decided it was urgently time to purchase tickets to Cartagena, the celebrated tourist capital of the Caribbean coast, for our New Year's Eve vacation. One can only buy reasonably priced airfare in Colombia online. So we began looking on Monday. Then I needed to wait overnight for my stipend transfer. On Wednesday, we tried again. But once we finally found attractive fares, I couldn't purchase using my Colombian debit card, because there is an additional wall of security--the requirement of a secondary PIN--built into the airline's website. (Many Colombians will argue that this is absolutely necessary in a country with as volatile of a criminal past as theirs.) To frustrate further, I learned only through trial and error that the secondary PIN cannot be created through Bancolombia's online account management page. The next morning, I learned that it can neither be created by calling the bank's customer service number. So, my only choice was to burn another one-and-a-half hours physically waiting in line at the bank on Thursday afternoon, creating the secondary PIN in person. By Thursday night, Alec and I succeeded in purchasing our plane tickets. A process that should have taken 30 minutes took four days. If I must leave the execution of my plans up to God's will, then Lord, please forgive me if people trained in Economics wind up sounding bigoted. But sometimes I am just astounded by how many obstacles there are to doing business in Colombia. This reality, I have grown to swallow, is just typical procedure in my host country. In response to these logistical shortcomings, I will insist on twice quoting my valued fellow Fulbrigher Gabriel Hurst:
1) "Underdevelopment is not an attitude. It's a behavior!"
2) "COLOMBIA GET IT TOGETHER!"
How can so many institutions function at suboptimal capacity in Latin America's third largest nation, a society of some 45 million residents? At times, the voice of the narrator describing these scenarios in my head goes a little something like this: "Here are your Fulbrights. Now go forget everything you've ever known." Unfortunately, telling a bunch of lifetime over-achievers to suddenly lose their sense of professionalism, stop valuing punctuality, dumb down their expectations of productivity, and just "go with the flow" is like telling Southern Californians to start liking rain--fat chance! But when things go wrong, us Fulbrighters are pressed with stomaching Colombia's most popular term of ostensible regret: "Que pena." "Que pena," the street equivalent of "sorry," literally means, "what a pity." That is to say, a person who knows he or she is inconveniencing another, perhaps intentionally through laziness, thinks that the act is a shame--but he or she may or may not really be personally remorseful. NONSENSE! Now, if you anthropologists out there want to talk about the way language reflects culture, then here is your prime case study. When doing another wrong--as when a taxi driver heads in a roundabout circle to overcharge his "gringo" passenger, when he could have used half as much gas simply by driving north to the same destination--could there by an expression that removes accountability MORE than "que pena!?"
I will offer another pivotal example of my recent social unease, an admitted low point in the undulating waves of boom and bust that describe the emotions of a human being living abroad. Last week, I felt anxious about a financial transaction delivered by the Fulbright Commission, in which my impulse told me to think that I had stipend funds withheld from me for a misinformed reason. After responding passionately and somewhat erratically to a perceived injustice in letters to Commission and Embassy Staff, I now know, after a weekend of reconsideration, that I over-elaborated and poorly targeted my concern. What really happened was I chose the wrong channel through which to express my frustration. It was not the misgiving of the Commission or Embassy Staff that really had me upset. Instead, it was a feeling of living within a cultural framework of vanity, unpunctuality, unaccountability, and impending physical insecurity that really threw me off balance. Feeling pushed to the edge, I focused on the wrong incident toward which to retaliate, while I was really just feeling irritated toward my perceptions of much broader and systemic restraints on the smooth functioning of society.
...
Another of the frustrating things about social life in Colombia is that it often seems nothing can be done without a consideration of class. Take a simple outing out to one of my foreign friends' favorite spots, Papayera, a mom-and-pop spot that offers live Cuban Salsa on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I have learned that because Papayera is located in downtown, a district with a crummy reputation, many from wealthier, posher neighborhoods sneer at invitations to even check the place out. I have experienced this several times when inviting many of the higher class students from my University to have a look at the place.
To add bitterness to these sorts of constraints on social life, male-female relations in Antioquia are shrouded in a veil of conservatism and traditionalism that sometimes makes me feel like I am living in the 1950s American South. Colombia's continuing culture of cowboy chauvinism means men are required to plan everything, pay for everything, and protect everything, whether just friends with or dating a woman involved. Any concept of financial or logistical responsibility sharing across the genders is not really ever even considered, as far as I can tell. Now, I know it's easy to respond by uttering that this is the way of the Real World. But coming from the US West, the last place on earth to be conquered besides maybe Alaska, Hawaii, or Australia, a bastion of progressivism and fluffy liberal thought (as well as tofu and granola), is not coming from the Real World. So by default I am at a disadvantage to accept complacency when viewing gender inequality, even if that is what Colombian society expects. So I'm sorry to say I still get shocked sometimes when viewing how slanted power roles are across the genders in Latin America. Needing to choke on this reality every day is a source of identity crisis because it causes me to question whether prejudice is as anachronistic as I was raised to think it is, or if I just grew up spoiled and sheltered... Maybe both things are true...?
All of this is nothing to say of my unfolding stress regarding security in my neighborhood. This past week, three either residents or friends of my building suffered robberies within five days of one another. The perpetrators seem to be some hijo de puta and his buddy wandering around on a motorcycle and threatening people with a knife. One victim was my friend, Carolina, who was robbed by this criminal while, regrettably, waiting for me for five minutes to pull up to the front of the building in taxi, arriving from visiting another friend at the Estadio. Carolina got her entire purse taken, including her beloved Nine West wallet, her BlackBerry, her nice clothes she was waiting to change in for Saturday night's festivities, and her iPod (which, as the first toy she had ever bought with her own money when working retail in New Jersey last year, held serious sentimental value). I know that these are all just things. The important part is that nobody was physically hurt during these incidents. But losing nice things in a society where far fewer have them, where imported goods are systematically overpriced in order to keep the working class and poor marginalized, is especially painful to experience or to witness. To make matters stranger, I find this all profoundly ironic because just the day before, I had completed jumping through legal loopholes to secure my own BlackBerry. At long last, I would become part of the Colombian BlackBerry Messenger craze, and avoid the country's exorbitant rates for conventional text messaging. (For absence of having a local credit history, a requirement of opening a monthly mobile account with any brand in Colombia, I had to ask my landlord the grand favor of opening my line in his name... This is, again, one of those baffling barriers to doing business in Colombia which makes me ask the question, Doesn't anyone want to make money in this country? I know that common Colombian mythology predicts that people in Medellín are the country's most entrepreneurial, but much of the evidence I've seen continues to contradict that claim.) One day later, one of my good friends and key BBM contacts became incomunicado, at the hands of a stupid burglar. How can I possibly respond to this? I've already spoken with the private security force that patrols our hood on bicycle by night. But they only work in the evenings, and do not seem to be so attentive. Many people, including some taxi drivers frequented by us, seem to know there are at least six "gringos" (a word I've absolutely grown to hate, by the way) living in my building. This makes us a potential target for any number of offenses. Apparently there is not much to do but be vigilant, increasingly so because a number of the people I've told about these incidents explain that thefts always increase in Medellín as the holidays near. After speaking with my landlord about the matter, who admitted that a year ago he had his car robbed from under him on my street in the middle of the day, it seems the only solution is use our senses with enhanced sharpness and to WATCH OUT when cruising the streets. That is, we must refrain from dando papaya, or giving papaya--Colombian slang for letting one's guard down. Well, from here on toward New Year's Eve and beyond, though I may continue my preferred diet of chewing one avocado per day, I will have no choice but to stock zero papayas...
So here is one result of all of this class confrontation madness: I am realizing that one thing Colombia can do in quite little time is make a person obsessed with security. As a result, one may become compelled to act in a highly strategic manner about all of life's decisions, even the most mundane--like what hour of the day to step out and shop for groceries. I see this in the way that in the upper stratum neighborhoods, like, sigh, my own, nearly nobody walks. As my mom put it, living in a removed and isolated place like Conquistadores is NOT like living in a lower stratum neighborhood where people have no reservations about being out and about, chatting on their stoops while they drink beer, play cards, barbecue, and listen to Reggaeton at high volumes. A visitor will hardly ever see this sort of activity in my neighborhood. Instead, people are surrounded by the comfortable insulated walls of their luxury apartments, sitting quietly while they sip their burboun and punch into their Apple laptops booking flights to Miami for Christmas shopping. (This helps explain why only one of my neighbors cared to call the police in response to Carolina's screaming after she got her belongings jacked.) I've known my entire life that the class divide in Brazil is among the world's worst. Views of deep inequality there have torn my heart to shreds since I was a pre-teen. But the wealth discrepancy situation in Colombia must be equally, if not more, downright bizarre. Welcome back to Latin America.
In my understanding, Colombian classism is one lingering effect of the peak years of Drug and Militia War era: people just don't trust a lot of unfamiliar locals enough to strike up friendships outside of their rather immediate circles. But again, I am trying to push the seams of the envelope on this issue. How have I responded to Medellín's class dilemma? My policy of hosting one demographically melding house party per month has been one of my most rewarding social experiments in Colombia thus far. By inviting a number of people from across town, whether students or professionals, with intentionally little regard to social convention, I have helped bring together crowds that may have never had the chance to interact otherwise. Take last Saturday night's get-together at my apartment, my second such event since I moved in. Around one dinnner table we had one young lawyer, two young teachers, one 30-year-old beer salesman, one 44-year-old Fulbright visiting Professor, a German exchange student, a "gringo" freelance English professor, a 25-year-old Alabaman using his US unemployment compensation to hang abroad learning Spanish, a young female paisa psychologist in the midst of her Master's, one Universidad de Medellín Econ major, and at least eight other UPB students representing three different faculties. Seeing all of these people gathered in my dining room, laughing while swapping silly nightlife stories and career ambitions, makes me feel like my work as a cultural ambassador is at least partially accomplished.
In light of all of this confusion, I am experiencing something that every boy must learn on the way to becoming a professional man: when the timing is right to heavily restructure priorities. Colombia teaches one to be not impulsive, but prudent. As a passionate Brazilian and pisces, I have always recognized the existence of the latter mindset, but have been more inclined to practice the former. But never before in my life have I felt so compelled to think twice--if not five times--about each of the minor decisions I make. This could be about something as seemingly trivial as how many times I should ask a colleague how they are doing (Colombians have a habit of asking up to six greeting questions in a row that all mean the same thing), for fear that if I don't come off as sufficiently cordial, my acquaintances may think that I am apathetic, juvenile, or worse--culturally insensitive. So is it not paradoxical that a country that after two decades of violence has grown security-obsessed still strikes up such a feeling of personal insecurity? Or maybe it's just me. Either way, welcome to the life of a young scholar and cultural ambassador in training abroad. Welcome to the world of rethink everything.
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