Medellin, Colombia

I'd like to begin by saying that there is someone brilliant in Colombia. Someone in this country decided next week needs to be a vacation week for schools. Hats off to that brilliant person. I am not saying I need a break from the students or teaching, but I need a couple days to sleep in. As I have said more than once, school here begins at 6:30 every morning with daily prayer in the teachers' lounge (not to be confused with the teacher's lounge, as the sign next to the door says); on Saturdays, I have begun teaching a 2-hour English course to girls in 6th and 7th grade, which begins at 8:00 a.m; and church begins at 9:00 on Sundays. For most people those hours would not be a problem, but I rely on my one-day-a-week-sleep-in regiment. So this coming week I am going to do everything in my power to take advantage of the break.






Enough of that...Let's talk about Medellin. Medellin is a city in the interior of the country with approximately 3 million people, making it about twice the size of Barranquilla. It is a beautiful, clean, and organized city. It is called the "City of the Eternal Spring" due to the weather. The city began in a valley, and as it has grown it has spread to the surrounding hills. It's quite a site to see. My pictures do not do it justice. Sometimes people from Barranquilla feel like their city is the ugly step-sister to Medellin. For me, although Medellin is a much more beautiful city than Barranquilla, I would not trade it for Barranquilla because of the amazing people here. The people in Barranquilla are incredibly open. They may not be as polite or patient as the people from Medellin, but they are fun and loving. They have made me feel like one of their own.





So why am I writing about Medellin? A couple weeks ago (yes, I am that far behind) I had the awesome opportunity to go to ExpresArte at La Ensenanza in Medellin with some girls from the school, Ana Elisa, and Milagros Tejada (one of the teachers, who happens to be awesome). All of the Company of Mary schools in Colombia were invited (although one of them was a no-show) to partipate in the 4-day extravaganza. Every school brought one or more performance pieces to share. Some schools danced, some played music, some acted, etc. The 18 girls from here danced (actually 17 of the 18 danced). Their performance was definitely the best. They began with a traditional Cumbia that morphed into 3 other Colombian dances. At one point the girls ripped off their long skirts to reveal super-short skirts that allowed them to do an awesome Afro-Carribean dance. I was videotaping the 10-minute (yes, 10-minutes) dance for one of the girls, so I did not get any pictures of the dance in action. In all, there were over 200 students who participated. Since all but two of the Company of Mary schools in Colombia are all girls, there were only 6 boys out of the over 200 students.


When we weren't in performances, we were having other adventures. We were the first school to arrive, so we got a personal tour of the ginormous school campus. I actually got a personal tour from Isabel (the woman who visited a few weeks ago from Medellin who I went to lunch with). Before Medellin, I thought this school was big; now this one seems small. Not only does the school there have 30% more girls, it is on a property that is at least twice as large as this one. It has a veritable orchard as part of the campus and there are two separate convents. All of the visiting adults stayed on campus in some guest rooms next to one of the convents. The visiting students all stayed with families of girls from La Ensenanza in Medellin. The first night we were there, the girls waited anxiously for their host families to arrive. They were supposed to be picked up at 6:00, but I waited with the girls until almost 8:30 and Alejandra still hadn't been picked up. Fortunately, she got picked up shortly afterwards. I kept telling her there was room in the convent, but she didn't seem to want to take my offer.







The next day began with a mass in the morning in which the girls from here did a liturgical dance. I really liked it. Most of the girls danced with flags while two of the girls followed with the bread and the wine. I thought it was interesting and well-executed.












After mass, we all went to the Botanical Gardens in the city. Beautiful!!!! All of the students had name tags with different colored lanyards, which put them in groups. Milagros and I joined one group for the beginning of the day through lunch and another after lunch. The students from the different schools got to know each other, played games, ate lunch, and then had a scavenger hunt with activities. It was great fun. I actually missed the scavenger hunt part because I was talking to one of the English teachers from Medellin. It started raining while we were talking, so we took cover under some sun shades where I found Maria Alejandra and Claudia who were not feeling well. I hung out with them during the rest of the scavenger hunt. After the scavenger hunt and a group picture, we headed out of the gardens. A group of us stopped to take a couple pictures on a kiddy train and somehow we lost the rest of the group. We found 4-5 other stragglers and Sister Gaby, but we could not see any buses to take us back to the school. Fortunately, Sister Gaby called someone who said they were waiting for us at the Metro. (Medellin has a very nice above-ground metro.) After making a couple wrong choices in getting to the right platform, we finally met up with the group and made it back to school.




And now a little side note to illustrate how amazing the girls here are. As I have shared before, the students of El Bosque are some of the poorest of the city. As a Company of Mary school, they too were invited to the ExpresArte extravaganza. Because they really wanted to go, two girls from La Ensenanza (Angie and Julieth) volunteered to help them prepare for a performance in Medellin. Every Wednesday for months, Angie and Julieth went to El Bosque on a bus and spent the afternoon teaching the girls all about acting and performance. As for the performance, all I can really say is "WOW!" They did an incredible job. They created their own version of Cinderella, which included lip-synching and dancing. It was terrific!!! Angie's birthday was on Friday while we were in Medellin, so the girls bought a cake and surprised her. The smash-someone's-face-in-her-cake-tradition seems to be alive and well here.











That night the girls from here had their big performance. There were other groups who danced, as well, and several musical performances. Some of the performances were local teenage bands. The girls seemed to like them, but I couldn't understand a word they were saying and they were singing in English. After the performances ended, Ana Elisa, Milagros, Gaby and I sat around talking for quite a while. It was fun, but I probably should have been in bed.















The next day, there were several performances during the day, but we also spent about 3 hours going to "classes." Milagros and I chose a group to be with and we participated in all the classes, too. One class was on recycling. In one part there was skit in which Aura played a tree, and Maria Isabel and Milagros played recycle bins. After the skit, Vidrio, a big green recycling creature, visited the class. We sang and danced with him. We then went to a craft class where we made a macrame thing-a-majig. I kept messing mine up, so by the time class was finished mine was only about 1/2" long. It's sitting in my bedroom waiting to be finished. We then went to a class in which we made kites. The man who taught how to make the kites was quite funny. He also gave us all a cat's cradle string, but I couldn't remember how to do anything. After that class, we flew our kites. There wasn't really wind, but we ran around and pretended to fly the kites. Our next class was one in which we had to make up a commercial for some object we had on us. In my group there was a girl who had a bracelet that we decided could be a spiderman-type web slinger to allow people to climb walls. Our commercial was great because we sang and danced. We then went to a class where an extremely handsome (read: HOT) man taught us about music. He had us sing in rounds and in Latin and we all enjoyed it far too much because of him. I really wanted to take a picture of him, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without it looking like I was taking a picture of him. Naddia actually took a video of him while he was teaching. The last class was one in which we did a lot of moving. We played several games to get our hearts moving. In one of them we had to face someone and both of us would do a move. If our move was the same, we had to clap our hands together; if our move was different, we kept going. I was playing with Claudia and we had the same move six times in a row. It was funny, but scary that we kept doing the same move.




That night we had another evening of performances. This time, though, the rock bands were students from Company of Mary schools and their music was danceable. Unfortunately, that meant I was dragged onto the dancefloor. For the first time ever, I learned the basic Salsa dance step from Isabel, Mary Moli and Milagros and danced my own special version of Salsa. Of course, I have lead shoulders so I could do none of the shoulder moving, but I kind of got the hip part going. At one point, the band played a very 80s-type song and I got my skank on. Somehow, Andrea knew how to dance how I was dancing, so we had our own little dance party. I was having so much fun dancing, I was still dancing after most of the girls had left with their host families. Milagros stayed and danced with me, but she kept doing moves that were impossible for me, so I just laughed. It was a super fun night.

As is obvious, I had a wonderful time. The girls were amazingly fun. They all took care of me, making sure I knew where to go and had a group to go with, especially Valeria. I felt like she always had an eye out for me. We laughed a lot (sometimes at the wrong times - Natalia and Maria Isabel), played a lot, and got to know each other. I can't think of anything better than that. Everyone was extremely impressed with the girls' English, including one girl who kept staring at Claudia and me one evening while we were having a conversation. It was as if she couldn't believe we were actually speaking English.


I have to give props to a few more girls. Claudia, Maria Isabel, and Aura all had to sit next to me on different legs of the flights. Because they had to sit by me, they had to speak English the entire flight. All three of them kept up with me perfectly. Oh, and a shout-out to Mafe, Mary Moli, Aura, Claudia P, Claudia G, Natalia B, Maria Isabel, Valeria, Giannina, Alejandra, Naddia, Daniela, Andrea M, Adriana, Maria Alejandra M, Maria Alejandra F, Natalia C, Andrea G, Milagros, and Ana Elisa who showed me love the entire 4 days.