No Holds Barred - Learning Colombian Culture as a Teacher

Persistence

During our first few weeks at school, it became appartent that the woman the the Colombian Embassy in Canada was not unusually indirect or neglectful with her instructions on how to get a visa. (My apologies to those of you who had to listen ad nauseum to our stories of frustration. This process is still incomplete by the way, six months after beginning it). It wasn't that she was trying to push us around, she was just doing things the Colombian way. If you want to get something done, it will take a lot of patience, a lot of persistence, and some kind of "in" with the right person.

For example, the cord for the data projector in my classroom would not reach the outlet on the wall. When the maintence guy came around to have me sign for the projector, I asked about this. You will have to imagine all the following conversations in broken Spanish/English, with a lot of gesturing and potentially drawing a few pictures to explain.

 Me: Carlos, I can't plug in my projector and still have it project on the wall. Can I have a powerbar?
(Insert a long conversation trying to explain what a "powerbar" is.)
Carlos: Talk to Erwin. 
Me: Oh, thank you!

(Walk to the other end of the high school area to the supplies office.)
 Me: Hi, Erwin. My projector won't plug into the wall. Can I have a powerbar?
(Insert another long conversation during which I learn that a powerbar has several names in Spanish.)
 Erwin: Yes. You can have this powerbar. But you have to sign it out and bring it back after the class is over.
Me: But I will need this powerbar every class, because I will need to plug in the projector every class. Can I keep it?
Erwin: Sorry, but that's not how things are done. You can only sign out the powerbar for one class. Maybe you can talk to Xandra in Accounting.

(Walk to the edge of the school property at the border with the jungle path and the pasture full of cows. Walk into the little building looking for Xandra. Wait. Be asked to come back later because Xandra is in a meeting. Come back later. Be asked to come back tomorrow to talk to Xandra.)

(The next day)
Me: Hi, Xandra. I can't plug in my projector and my classes begin tomorrow. I am worried that I won't be able to use my projector and I need it for teaching. Can I have a powerbar... or an extension cord... or anything so that I can use my projector?
Xandra: Wait, I will talk to Carlos.
(Carlos arrives on the scene again.) 
Xandra (to Carlos): Lisa needs a powerbar. Can you give her a powerbar?
Carlos: Yes. Here is a powerbar.
(Carlos hands over a powerbar. Classes begin the next morning and I am able to show them pictures of what we'll be doing in class and where I lived in Canada. Problem solved.)

Everything here takes time and requires you to be very proactive if you want to get something done. It all can be done, but it will only be done if you make it happen. There is a lot of paperwork involved in everything. I've spared you the detailed story of how I got my school supplies. (Three whiteboard markers... check! One eraser... check! One pencil... check! "Why does it say six pencils on the list if I am getting one?" "When you finish with this one, you come back and get another one. You have six for the year. Sign, please.") No one is attempting to be frustrating, it's just that efficiency is not a high priority. Everyone works hard, but unless you're actively asking for something, your request will be put aside in place of those with people clamouring for attention.

There are two ways to go about life here.
1) Politely visit people that you need something from every day for a week. Give them a kiss on the cheek or a handshake. Ask how they are doing. Then inquire about the progress they've made with your request again and explain that it is very important to you.
    or
2) Relax. Drink a tinto (a black coffee) or an aromatica (herbal tea). Accept that what you want might not actually happen. Decide if you really, really need it to happen. If so, buy your own powerbar/extension cord/pencil and forget that you ever made the request. If you forget, they will forget, and you can still eat bunuelos for a snack together and have a nice conversation at recess.

Disobedience with a Smile

Classes began three weeks ago, so I've had a good chance to figure out what teaching Colombian kids is going to be like. The school day is longer and there is less time off than I expected. Classes begin at 7:25 and run until 3:05, with 30 minutes for recess and 45 minutes for lunch. During school holidays, teachers often are required to come in and work when the kids aren't at school. There will be less time to travel than we expected, so we'll have to make the most of the holidays in Decemeber and July.

The principal told us that you needed to be firm with discipline, so I went in with guns blazing. What I found was somewhere between the obedient docility of the students I taught in Vancouver and the defiant hostility I expected based on descriptions.

Colombian culture works both for and against you as a teacher. First and foremost, the kids are genuinely friendly and nice. They say "hello, how are you?" when they enter the class, see you at school or even run into you in the street. I recall running into my Math teacher in the grocery store when I was in high school. It was an uncomfortable experience and I ducked away as quickly as I could. How dare he have a life outside of the classroom? When I've run into students here (Armenia is pretty small and many students live in our neighbourhood) they give a wave and a hello and might ask about your day for a few minutes before smiling and moving on. When they leave your class, they almost always say thank you, even if you've had to give them some kind of punishment for poor behaviour.

Colombian culture also dictates that you, as the teacher, are the enforcer of rules, and they, as the students, are meant to try to find a way around the rules as much as possible. Self-discipline isn't the norm. If someone is doing something wrong or disturbing others, it's your fault as the teacher for not making them behave, not the fault of the person being disruptive. Your job is to force them to do the work, or take notes, or listen to the lesson. Any time you allow them to talk or play with the hair of the person next to them, it's your fault they're not learning, not theirs.

Of course, this is the impression I've had of the culture, not what the school is trying to enforce. Our principal is focusing on getting the kids to be more responsible for their own learning, but it's a battle. I've had to flex my classroom management muscles more than I've ever had to before, which isn't surprising considering the places I've taught. Your average Taiwanese kid isn't going to talk back to the teacher, nor is the upper-class female private school student. Here, there are constantly names going up on the board for disrupting the class. I give out lunch duties and take away participation marks. Next week, I anticipate owning several new blackberries and cell phones if they can't stop texting during class. I let a few things slide, and my classes are still much noisier and more disorganized than I've ever had before, but we're slowly coming to an agreement. While some of them might make fun of you in Spanish to their classmates, leaving you wondering what insult they just flung in your direction, others will also stick around to ask you all about your life or help you bring a butterfly cocoon down from a tree for your class. (Honestly, I found a cocoon the size of a small banana... it's now in a terrarium in my class. I have my guesses, but whatever is going to hatch out of it will be BIG.)

It will have to be a No Holds Barred style of teaching. But I'll give out consequences for poor behaviour with a smile too.


The Staff Party

Picture your last staff party. Was there a long awkward beginning? Did people stand in cliques and make offhand disparaging remarks about work? Did someone get drunk and say something they shouldn't have? There's always a staff party once or twice a year, and at private schools there's usually a welcome-back party. There's a good measure of opulence and everyone is amiable, but most are rushing for their cars at the first opportunity.

Now picture my welcome back staff party. Did we feast on giant platters with fried plantain, beans and crispy pork skin? Did it rain with such ferocity that it felt like being in a washing machine? Was it at a finca, a country farm with a swimming pool and a bar? Did we dance for FIVE HOURS without stopping? Did the PE teacher serve everyone beer but also cradle both a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of rum in his arms for much longer than necessary? Yes. All of it. And more.

In Canada, I've been known to shake my thing on the dance floor. My non-dancing friends have commented on my ability to jiggle what I've got with reckless abandon (and a little style). Moving to Colombia was like moving to Krypton - what might have been an unusually rhythmic ass in Canada is barely average here. I'm surrounded by Superwomen. Someone is always shaking it harder than you are, and chances are good they've got more junk in the trunk to throw around.

Colombians don't shy away from larger women. I didn't realise this before coming, but I've moved to one of the plastic surgery capitals of the world. The women here don't want to be prebubescently skinny... they want to be MORE womanly. Huge rack. Tiny waist. Big round ass. While purusing the stores in the shopping area downtown I came across an unusual undergarment. I can only describe it as a pair of bicycle shorts with the butt cheeks cut out. The assless chaps of bike shorts, if you will. What is it? A butt lifter. A bra for your cheeks so that your posterior jutts out at right angles to your body (which, if you're a decent good-looking woman, your breasts mirror in the top half). There's a few women I've met who could rest a full cup of coffee on the top of their rears and not spill a drop. While the booty is considerable, it is perfectly acceptable to not only wiggle at someone directly, but to grind with them within a circle of hooting coworkers. (Oh yes, we did that too.)

It was a great workout. My spanish may be lousy but my hips are considerably better at muddling along in a conversation. There was salsa, merengue, bachata, reggaeton, and, randomly, a few songs of Michael Jackson, the Village People and 60s rock, to which everyone did the twist. There wasn't a single staff member who wasn't dancing. The principal danced with all the female members of staff at least once.

According to one of our coworkers, the party was "not a very good one. It was pretty boring." Dear lord, if that was a boring party, what do we have in store for us at the next (mandatory) staff party?

Lunch at the Finca - Beans, egg, rice, sausage, avocado, tomato and chicharron (pork skin)

Rain at the staff party (before the dancing began in earnest)

Settling In

In the three weeks that we’ve been in Colombia, we’ve barely scratched the surface of its quirks. There are the typical stories we could tell of our initial transition to life as Colombians: the miscommunications in broken Spanish, the patches of seething jungle woven in between city blocks, the thumb-long cockroach scuttling along the edge of the kitchen counter. I’m sure they’ll all come out eventually. There’s both too much to share with you and not enough right now. Our lives have consisted of the everyday challenges of trying to feel at home and very little of exploring the sights of the country. It has mostly been mundane stuff, but the differences make household tasks feel so novel.

Here’s a snapshot of where we live now.

Armenia's location in Colombia

Close up of Armenia on Google Maps

We’re in the middle of the Zona Cafeteria (the Coffee Zone), which is a lovely area of Colombia. The distances on the map are deceiving. Bogota is about 8 hours away because the road twists and turns over the mountains. Cali, to the south, is only 3 hours away because there’s a nice straight highway leading there. If you zoom in, Google maps makes Armenia seem a particularly bleak destination. It’s not exactly high on the details. Likewise, the Lonely Planet describes our town as not worth visiting.

Despite the unflattering descriptions, Armenia is a decently sized city with some interesting features. There’s a nice pedestrian shopping area. There’s a great market just outside of the city. And the sidewalk becomes fair game to any number of vendors selling anything from cell phone covers to fruit to mirrors. It’s safe to walk around --particularly with another person-- and cab rides are cheap as long as you can muddle out directions. The cab drivers will usually give you a little Spanish lesson on the way to your destination if you can ask the right questions about how to say something. I don’t have a nice picture of the city, but I snapped one on the bus ride to school, which is outside of the city limits. The scenery is truly lovely.

Countryside just outside of Armenia on our route to school

We’re living in the posh neighbourhood in town. It’s certainly the wealthiest area I’ve lived in and the largest apartment by a long shot. Most houses have a guard that sits outside at night to keep an eye on things and all of the apartment buildings have doormen. We have two doormen who alternate between night and day shifts, Juan Carlos and Leonel. They control all entries and exits from the builing. In fact, if you want to leave and  one of them happens to be away from their post, you can't get out. Both are extremely friendly, helpful men.  Juan Carlos in particular has been wonderful by helping order bottled water for us, showing us around the building and speaking in very slow, clear Spanish. Of all the locals I've met so far, I understand Juan Carlos the best. His job must be incredibly dull but we've tried to spruce it up a bit for him. There is a large patch of jungle across the street that is too dense and too deep to be developed. A big valley runs through the bottom making it difficult to build on, so it has remained untouched. Apparently Scarlet Macaws and other exotic birds fly in and out regularly, but without a balcony we haven't been looking out often enough to spot one yet. Rather than put our compost in the garbage, we've been crossing the street to chuck our fruit and vegetable peels into the bush. Each morning when we wait outside for the bus to school, we look at the spot previously piled with carrot peels and passion fruit pulp and it has disappeared without a trace. Juan Carlos assures us that the animals have been enjoying it thoroughly. He watches them during his night shift. I hear there are squirrel-like animals the size of housecats.

Our apartment in Vancouver was a little more than 600 square feet; enough for a nice bedroom, bathroom and a living room/dining room/kitchen combination. Perfectly comfortable. When we arrived at our apartment here, it took us time to even find all the rooms. For the two of us we have three large bedrooms, two full bathrooms with showers, a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen with an area for laundry, another full bathroom attached to the kitchen, and a random empty room for hanging laundry (our best guess) just past that. The furnishings provided were very sparse and with tile floors, the place echoes like an enormous bathroom. A whisper reverberates throughout the apartment.

There’s a lot of space, but it has taken work to make it feel comfortable. We’re only using some of the rooms. We have a nice bedroom with a built in closet. It floods with light at six a.m., but it’s one of the few cozy rooms since it’s the smallest. We use the bathroom closest to the bedroom in part because of its location but also because one bathroom is missing the knobs on the shower faucets, and the bathroom by the kitchen is too derelict to use comfortably (it has been relegated to storage). One room is our “office” with a desk, so far. The guest bedroom is sizable and we’ll make it comfy when visitors come but for now,  it has only a double bed. The kitchen has a square foot of counter space, quite literally, but has a nice gas stove with four burners. The fume hood had bare wires hanging from it and had clearly been involved in a fire of some kind, but we were fortunate enough to get it replaced when we pointed out the obvious hazard it posed. Our electrician (who speaks perfect English, luckily) tested the wires by holding them gently between his fingers while Dan flipped the breakers. He explained that he was waiting for the "buzz" of electricity to stop so he could tell which breaker went to the fume hood. "Isn't that a little dangerous?" Dan asked. "Only if you hold the wires too tight," he replied. So much for safety standards.

A little paint has gone a long way to make our apartment more liveable. The entire place started off completely white. We’ve added a bright yellow wall to the dining room area and a warm milk-chocolate colour to the living room. We were hoping to make the place look a little smaller so it didn’t feel so empty. It seems counter-intuitive, but necessary. Finally, this place is starting to feel like a home.

Before and After shots of our living room and dining room

The best purchases by far have been plants. Shopping at the garden store was honestly one of my highlights  of life in Colombia so far. It was a frenzy of “oh my god, look at this one!” and “that’s the weirdest plant I’ve ever seen, can we get it?” The plants are all cheap, lush and delightfully exotic. We have a papyrus, a giant bushy palm and a small tree with a trunk as thick as my calf in our dining room. A freaky bromeliad, a “plumosa” with flowers that look like feathers, a Christmas cactus and a plant with hairy textured leaves are by the window. Dan even got a tray with a stand for growing herbs for the kitchen. If we remember to water them, my guess is that they’ll be huge in no time. If I don't hold myself back, the line will soon blur separating our apartment and the jungle outside. There's no differentiation between indoor and outdoor plants. They can all thrive anywhere.

We have already started school and have had a few adventures near Armenia, but at the very least you've got an idea of our living conditions. Welcome to our blog. There's more to come soon...