We were taken there on motorbikes. It was too dangerous to walk. The excitement peaked immediately upon entering the neighborhood El Retiro, the retreat, a perfectly fitting name for an extremely retreated area. Already at the first street corner, the first stares met us from the eyes of local youth gangs, who didn't seem to have anything good at all in mind. The cold chills that flowed through our bodies were only soothed by the knowledge that our drivers knew the area and knew what they were doing. They had once been on the dark side as well, ruling the streets with their gangs.
Dora had said we could trust Juan and Carlos. We trusted her, so we trusted our new driver escorts as well. On a number of occasions already, Dora had sent us for school visits with other colleagues or friends, who themselves also showed great initiative in wanting to guide us in the areas they knew the best and had connections to. This automatically instilled a kind of trust in our guides, even when Dora herself wasn't there. They either completely replaced her on some visits or joined us so we could split into two groups.
It hadn’t taken many days before Dora learned to repeat my presentation of the purpose of the fieldwork by heart. She enhanced it with her own charm and was thus able to conduct interviews together with Patrik, who was responsible for the observations. In this way, we could visit schools more efficiently on the occasions when we had several guides with us.
This time, we didn't get to bring Dora to the visit. We had to rely on the initiative that Juan and Carlos had shown. At the same time, another feeling that facilitated the adventure flowed through, a feeling of positive adrenaline from the strongly contrasting image of us two "blondies" on the back of two motorcycles in an area full of very dark-skinned bandits and poor locals, who hardly dared to open their own house doors.
Stares were all that met us from everywhere, from steel-barred windows, balconies and, above all, from the piercing eyes of the street-corner gangs. Despite the generally terrifying situation, we couldn't help but smile at each other, when I looked back at Patrik to see that he was still there. As much as I wanted to, it wasn't the right time to take out the camera to capture the moment. For all I knew, if the motorbikes were to break down or get out of gas in the middle of the hoods, our entire project might have ended quite dramatically then and there.
We met el Señor de los Milagros, the Lord of Miracles, shortly after entering the school and receiving a general tour by a secretary. We enjoyed a long, fascinating conversation in Spanish-German with the great personality, Father Welker. He had come to Colombia in 1980 as a Jesuit missionary to help single mothers with micro-entrepreneurship. Since then, among many other things, he had built two large schools for the very poorest in Aguablanca, with the help of important resources from Germany. Everyone in Aguablanca knew him and his amazing work, with and beyond the schools. The rest, as they say, is history.
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming book “5 Years in Colombia - How I Reeducated Myself on the Streets of Laughter”. It’s the first book in a 15-year memoir trilogy, highlighting the educational adventures from the author's final years as a disillusioned top student to becoming a young professional with a purpose far beyond what he could have imagined. For more information, please reach out to the author directly.
Author: Joni AlWindi
Published by: Joni AlWindi
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