My connection to Colombia follows a stream of serendipities…
In 2013, when I was organizing a conference in Iowa City, a team from Colombia
appeared on the registration site. Led by a pediatrician and a psychiatrist,
several other young pediatricians arrived in town, which led to my first trip
to Colombia to participate in a conference they organized in the summer of
2014. Since I visited Colombia in August of 2014, it has acquired a very warm
place in my mind and heart.
Weekend Bikers of Bogota occupying one of the major highways
Bogota with its old town, its political activism, its
university town atmosphere, its modernity to the extent to close off a main
highway every Sunday for its citizens to enjoy an enormous biking, walking,
running, scootering grounds that stretch for miles. Following my 4 days of
teaching in Bogota then, I had visited Cartagena and had one of the best
vacations there in its old town living in a tiny family hotel close to Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s home, strolling on the city wall every sunset and more… As for
any Izmirite, who grows up with stunning sunsets over the Aegean day in day
out, sunsets have been my inherently natural “seize-the-moment” stretches of
time. Meditating with the backdrop of sunsets against the Caribbean Sea had
carried me all the way back home filling my heart with peace…
Sunset from Cartagena in 2014
I am back this time for strictly teaching purposes to
establish child protection teams in hospitals and engage community agencies
with university hospitals. Trip starts with multiple delays in my flights.
Instead of 9:45 pm, I arrive in Bogota around 1 am the next morning. But, all
is well, seeing my friend Miguel and his wife’s warm, friendly faces even at
that hour of the morning with their kids alone at home warms my heart and all
the difficulty of the flight adventures disappear into the wet night of this
subtropical land.
Dear Miguel and Catalina at an authentic Colombian dinner
This is one virtue unique to Colombia. People, rich or poor,
under convenient or inconvenient circumstances, always smile, always friendly,
always warm. And it is not the Bollywood kind of jolliness, which almost
irritates me: Although I haven’t traveled to India, yet, I suspect Bollywood
movies caricaturize Indian lives… There is depth, elegance, transparency,
dignity, and ingenuity in the kind of warmth, welcome, and friendliness I find
in Colombia. The gentleman, Jairo, an employee of AFECTO, a child abuse
prevention NGO that is partly hosting me is an example.
Meat market in Bogota from 2014
He will pick me up from
the hotel to take me to the airport on my way to Peru in a few days. I will have
to use my little bit of Spanish since he doesn’t speak any English. And we will
connect instantaneously. I will learn later on what a warm, respectful,
protective and kind man he is with his soon-to-become very familiar Colombiano
elegance that I see in everybody around me. Miguel and Catalina are probably the best examples of such
Colombiano elegancy, ingenuity, and humility. And their warm hearts reveal
themselves one more time with an invitation to their mother’s day lunch, which
is tomorrow. I am thrilled that they think of me for their family lunch and am
looking forward to seeing their three wonderful children again.
Bogota from the terrace restaurant of Hotel Charlotte
Finally, I am at my humble hotel room, one of the hotels,
Hotel Charlotte across the university campus, where our teaching course will be
held. It has a theme or ornamentation from the entertainment world, with
pictures of all classic figures of the world from Beatles to Marylin Monroe,
from Laurel and Hardy to Charlie Chaplin and many other figures that I can’t recognize.
The hotel staff is beside themselves in trying to make my stay comfortable.
None speaks English, another opportunity to put my Spanish to work. I will be
amazed with how much my Spanish has improved at the end of the two weeks in
South America. So much that, when it comes to saying thanks and good bye to our
trekking team in Peru, our tour guide recommends me to make the speech!!!
Our chef cooking eggs!
The breakfast hall is on the terrace of the hotel,
beautifully furnished. Most importantly, the staff are the nicest Mestizos,
always with a warm smile, willing to teach me Spanish words to describe to them
and their colleagues how I’d like my egg in the morning. They learn quickly, I
don’t drink coffee and bring me herbal tea every morning. It is so clear that
their smile and warmth is not for a tip, they get surprised and refuse it at
first when I give them a tip to share among the server, the cook, and the
bellboy.
My mestizo waiters were just like these ladies, except they were male (too bad I didn't take a picture of them)
It will be somewhat different in Peru, where, the commercialization of
Machu Picchu and us Americans instilling our ways into at least Peruvian guide
culture, I will see again the expression in the eyes of most of our American
waiters and waitresses that tells me “the role I am playing is to get the
biggest tip you can give”. I think, tipping is an American invention to shift
some of the responsibility of business owners of paying their workers well to
the customers, which to me eliminates the social innocence of relationships
between customers and servers by bringing direct money exchange into the
equation.
The lady that fixes a beautiful flower vase for Catalina
I take a long walk on Avenida 26, hoping I can get to the
Old town and back to the hotel after a brief visit there. It is not possible.
After walking an hour and enjoying the bikers and strollers, and scooters
alongside me using the entire width of the avenida except for the bus lanes, I
get as far as the flower market: In fact the last kilometer of my walk, I had
started seeing native women with flower and green buckets preparing simple and
small bunches of flowers for mothers day gifts. None of them is at the quality
I’d like to give to Catalina during our lunch. Once I get to the flower market,
though, I am stunned with the elegance of the bouquets and vases of flowers
artistic Colombianas have put together and on display. Yes these are the ones I
can choose from. After I have secured a vase of assorted flowers, I decide it
is time to go back to the hotel. Miguel picks me up with his family. It is like
a family reunion since I had met the entire family in 2014, then all except for
their oldest son in San Francisco in 2015, when Miguel was at the University of
Iowa.
Flower market from where I bought Catalina's gift
It is very clear that everybody is
happy. I sit with the boys in the back and catch up with all of them one by
one. Their oldest is planning to do a master’s degree on videogame engineering.
Samuel is in high school, has a girlfriend. The little one is going to Canada
soon on a school trip. All of them speak English beautifully. And they are
typical Colombians, warm, loving, innocent, sweet, and welcoming. I have communicated with my mother and the rest
of my family, with my daughter and exchanged loving mother’s day wishes. When
we get to the old Spanish colonial building, where we have our lunch Catalina
loves the flowers I give her. We have the best time as a big family enjoying
our mother’s day. I don’t have any deprivation feelings. My heart is full of
warmth and loving kindness for this chosen family of mine in Bogota as well as
my lovely offspring and other family members of my own blood across the ocean.
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| Meeting my mother will wait until the end of June... |
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