Anyway, my wife coordinates a project in the Tenza valley. She doesn't have to be there all the time, as she can monitor and direct her three team members via phone and internet, but my wife goes down almost every week for a few days to meet with local mayors, work out problems, get on-the-ground debriefings from people, etc. Since the round trip from our place to Tenza can be in excess of 6 hours, my wife often stays the night at a rented house in Garagoa, one of the region's major towns. But on last week's visit she had to get back to our home that same night, so I drove her so she wouldn't be tired after a half-day of meetings combined with six hours of driving.
My serving as driver reminded me of my boss's driver when I was doing research in Benin. In Benin there's a heavy presence of international development agencies, and the employees of these organizations live very comfortably. They have cooks, drivers, gardeners, guards, a whole team of people devoted solely to taking care of the daily chores that the foreigners are perfectly capable of doing themselves when they're in their home countries. But there's sort of a beauty to working as an employee of these development bigwigs. The pay is good compared to other local jobs, you have a certain amount of responsibility and control over your boss's projects, and as a driver one has access to a car to run personal errands and the like. Anyway, I thought of my friend Bernard the driver as I navigated the dusty, pitted roads of the Tenza valley.
Another thing that I thought about that day was the difference between working on development projects in one's own country as opposed to in a foreign country. When my wife works on a project, she feels a personal, national stake in it. Of course it's a job for her, but she has a very direct connection and a relationship as equals with the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the project. My wife speaks the same language, eats the same things, has the same cultural referents as the people she works with. It is very different from the sort of neo-colonial, almost slave-like relationship I saw at times in Benin between “developer” and local people.
When we ate lunch at a nice hotel in the town of Tenza, I was again reminded of the difference between my experience with development work in Africa and my experience in Colombia. My wife and I were talking with one of her team members about local affairs. He is from the zone and knows all about the local politics and history. He was telling us that until a few years ago each of the fourteen small towns in the valley had a full-fledged hospital. The universities in Tunja, the departmental capital, sent medical students to the Tenza valley for their residencies, where they were overseen by top-notch doctors. There were even people from Bogota that preferred to go to the Tenza valley for exams and surgeries, because they could go to just one hospital and get everything they needed, as opposed to many hospitals in Bogota where you had to go to one place for X-rays, then another for prescription drugs, then another for bloodwork, etc. Eventually though the state government cut funding and downgraded most of the hospitals to clinics. Now local people have to go to one of the valley's two major towns if they want quality medical care. The professionals and students that worked in the hospitals no longer live spread throughout the Tenza valley, so the economic base that these middle-class people represented for local economies has disappeared.
This story reminded me of the development industry because our friend told us that the hospitals were funded in part with resources from the Spanish and Swiss governments. I don't know if these countries withdrew their aid first, or if they were prompted to by the state government's downgrading the hospitals to mere clinics, but either way I can imagine what the foreigners working on the project must have thought. “It was a good project, but the local people just couldn't keep it going,” or, “Local people loved it, but the government was corrupt/misguided/lazy, and it fell by the wayside.” It must have been something along those lines. I've heard the same thing when working in other countries. Hell, I've thought it myself sometimes when a project I was working on wasn't received well by the local beneficiaries. But now I'm seeing it from below, from the inside, and it's interesting to hear a local person giving a critical, thoughtful treatment to the issue. Could it be that in my projects in the African countryside or in US ghettoes local people were engaging in a philosophical, civic-minded discussion about the merits and weaknesses of what I was working on from the outside?
Also, the hotel we were in reminded me of a hotel I sometimes ate at while I was living and working in rural Benin. Both hotels are elegant, breezy, simple, but the one in Kandi, Benin was catered almost exclusively to foreign development workers, while I think the one in Tenza, Colombia was aimed at the rare Colombian tourists that pass through the town. My wife said a place she used to stay while working in Vientiane, Laos, was also similar in its tropical, simple sophistication. But in her Laotian hotel there was a special section for development workers to sleep with underage prostitutes!
In Colombia the international development sector is nowhere near as visible as in Haiti or Benin. In the latter two countries, you constantly see trucks, buildings, and white people emblazoned with the logo of some major NGO or foreign government's aid program. My impression is that since the economies of many African countries are relatively small, the impact of aid dollars is really big, so development agencies and their employees are a noticeable and important part of local and national economies. In Colombia, however, we have a vibrant, big, diversified economy. I don't know how the absolute value of aid given to Colombia compares to that in other poor countries, but I'm sure it's nowhere near as important for the Colombian economy as it is in other places. Granted, my main experience is in the central region of Colombia, which has a well-developed economy and receives relatively little aid. Perhaps I'd have a different impression if I were living in one of the remote, war-torn areas of Colombia where people are poor and aid money flows abundantly.
On the way back from my Driving Miss Caro trip, we stopped in one of our favorite snack places on the way back from the Tenza valley. It's called “El Fresal”, or the strawberry patch, and they serve a variety of home-made treats from the strawberries, rhubarb, and blackberries that they grow on the farm. Anyway, as we pulled up we saw a big van, the type they use in Colombia for school bus routes. Inside El Fresal was a huge extended family, with various parents and children, and they were all munching on strawberry delicacies. They were clearly Colombian from the way they talked, but there was something slightly off. The kids peppered their conversation with correctly-pronounced US brand names, and everyone except the main dad was dressed as if they were going to the beach. The paterfamilias had on a linen suit with wingtip patent-leather shoes, which is not at all typical of our humble, reserved high plains region. The father's style might be at home in Cali or the Caribbean coast, but people from those areas likely wouldn't summer in the cool, high plains of central Colombia, and if they did they certainly wouldn't be dressed in short sleeves and short pants. Finally we figured it out, aided by the generalized corpulence and use of gym shoes by everyone in the group except the father. They were Colombian immigrants to the US, come back for a summer vacation, for which they'd rented a minibus. That explained the odd mix of Colombian dialect, obesity, and inappropriate dress. It was fun to see people that maintained the general trappings of Colombianness, but with a few US-influenced twists. Yet another flipping around of the view from inside and outside a culture.
A few months ago we visited Santa Maria, at the low-altitude, steamy tropical end of the Tenza valley. We went on a delightful hike along a river that tumbled down from the high rainy mountains surrounding the town. We saw well-coiffed farms with a collection of local varieties of heliconia flowers, lots of cattle grazing tropical pastures, and birds that live in saxophone-shaped nests hung from high tree branches. The highlight was crossing a roaring river in a steel cage that runs along pulley-operated cables.
This hike was fun, but as tired out as I was after only a few hours of walking up and down hillsides in the tropical heat and humidity, I began to think about how life must be for people kidnapped in Colombia by armed groups. They spend day after day on long hikes through mountainous jungle, often for years before they're rescued, traded, or killed. Pretty bleak. But I thought that perhaps the awful experience of kidnapping and forced marches might be an interesting theme for tourism. I have read and seen things about a theme park in Mexico that simulates an illegal border crossing for visitors. What about a themed tour that simulates capture by, forced marches with, and escape from an armed group? I don't know if I'd ever sign up for such a thing, but it's an interesting idea, I think.
A "Capture Tour" is a fascinating idea.
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