Introduction

This first commentary will be repetitive for those of you who got my email last week.  But -compulsive me - I'm going to start at the beginning:  January 12, 2011.  

Things got off to a rocky start in Detroit, but, in spite of the best efforts of an overly zealous counter agent in Detroit, I was finally allowed to board.   The agent had first decided that I was not an "American National", even though she didn't know what an American National is.  Nor did any of the supervisors on duty that morning.  A call to someone off-site cleared it up for her (I still don't know the definition) and she was off to the next hurdle:  because my flights in and out of Bogota are 4 months apart and we from the US can stay in Colombia only 3 months, she said it was not legal for her to let me go. And my explanations that I was staying in Colombia only 2 months, then traveling elsewhere until time to fly back, were irrelevant because I couldn't produce any booked travel tickets or itineraries to prove it.  Finally, an unidentified off-site official gave me the green light - with just minutes to spare. Fortunately, customs in Bogota had no concerns.

Unbelieveably, today is Friday, January 21 - day 10 of this venture! 

I've included a few pictures of Giradot, Colombia - my temporary home town - swiped from their website. (Giradot is pronounced "here-a-doe").  They don't convey the reality of this place, but I haven't been out with my camera yet, in part because I'm living smack-dab downtown and the only thing I could take pictures of are the throngs of traffic and crowded store fronts.   Giradot is far from the small bucolic village I had envsioned - the population is 450,000 people!  It's very hot - temperatures so far have been in the high 80's, with substantial humidity.  The mountains around the town are pretty impressive, but the town itself is quite flat, and very green with acacia trees in abundance everywhere.

Giradot spreads out from the Rio Magdalena - see picture.  One would not voluntarily enter this water.  I don't know yet what the source of pollution is, but it's major.  To the right of the bridge is Giradot's sister city, Flandes.  I've been told not to go there because it's dangerous. 

This last picture begins to convey a bit of the flavor of Giradot.  It's a poor city,

and the downtown seems always teeming with people and motorcycles.  Especially motorcycles - I swear every citizen must own one.  The problem with the traffic is that although there are a few traffic lights, about 95% of the streets have no stop signs, so it's chaos!


So far it's not clear exactly what I'll be doing, but we had a really promising meeting last week with a local social worker who's also involved with the local school.  It's looking like I'll be assisting the high school English teacher in the mornings, then having two small groups of high school students to or three afternoons a week, to give them an opportunity to practice conversing with a native-English speaking person.  The ability to speak English is highly valued here, but none of the English teachers here are native to the English language, so even their best students have terrible accents and speak poorly.  In this entire town, there's no ESL program - I'm sure a person could set up shop and make a fair income if they wanted to.  Which I don't - it's just too hot here.

One story and I'll call this quits.  The first full day that I was here in Giradot, their maid/cook asked me - in Spanish - if i liked soup and of course I said yes.  Then she ran a list of ingredients past me, and I thought I had understood all of them and kept saying yes, yes.  But when the soup came, it was clear that I had missed one very important ingredient, big time.  The soup had garbanza beans, some veggies...with pieces of meat that were clearly not muscle-based, and I knew I was in deep doo-doo.  I tried the beans/veggies part - fabulous - then tried really hard to chew the "meat" but just could not - it was way too grisly.  Got most of it down by swallowing pieces whole.  Later learned it was stomach soup.  I refused to ask from what animal...some things are better left alone!

More Later...