WELCOME TO COLOMBIA

Welcome to Barranquilla – the home of Shakira…and 1.1 million other people. No, to be more serious, Barranquilla is the capital of the department/state Atlantico and the port city of Colombia, the birthplace of Colombian aviation, and the major tourist area of the Caribbean Coast.

I arrived January 3^rd after a two and a half hour flight from Miami and a long trip from Missoula. The flight was uneventful and Avianca, the national Colombia airline, was just great. We, 13 other volunteers and I, were picked up at the airport by the Peace Corps staff and some Colombia 1 volunteers. It was a muggy 80 degrees and quite rapidly the sun began to set, 6ish. We are staying in Buenavista, a nicer area of Barranquilla in hotel for the next three weeks. Monday-Fridays 8-5 and Saturday 8-12

are spent in a room doing training. We can walk pretty freely around the neighborhood in our free time and there is a nice park nearby for exercise with even Colombians running there, very different from my experience in Paraguay.

Some background -

In 2009 former President Uribe invited Peace Corps Colombia back to the country after leaving in 1981, so a 29- year hiatus, with a specifc goal of English assistance and the hope of expanding to other areas as soon as we got established. Peace Corps is based out of Barranquilla in the Northeast Caribbean Coast, one of the four regions that were deemed: One, safe for volunteers and two, had population and support for the programs, ie Ministry of Education and s

chools. The initial group in September of 2010, was 9 Peace Corps Response Volunteers and we are the second of 14.

What am I doing?

Our training consists of preparing us with Teaching English for Livelihood (TEFL) workshops, and brief program, medical and security talks. The actual positions that

we are preparing for primary, secondary and teaching college positions – where we work with English teachers. The slight background is that Colombia, in 1994, nationally mandated that schools have bilingual education by 2019. What that actually means, in the case of what bilingual schools is that it can be any language where they teach in two languages more then the ‘language class’ but also math, science etc… The reality is that school started receiving support to begin this process in the 2000s and more achievable goal might be to teach a second language, encouraged to be English, in that language…so speaking only English class. Another aspect of the reality, as told to us as we have not been to a class yet, is that most English teachers do not speak English well or are still stuck in a grammer-translation style of teacher. That would be, dictation, reading and translating sentences/words without expanding on creation or production. I’m learning all sorts of new terminology.

The 14 Volunteers are from varied backgrounds, ages and Peace Corps experience. I am the most recent Volunteer since I completed my service a month ago and we have several from the 70s but most are in the past five years. Country-wise we have South America to Africa to Eastern Europe and teaching experience of 30s in ESL to me…ie little experience. Though my lack of exposure is making me a bit nervous, I will have great support from the Peace Corps Office and the other Volunteers.

Currently, we are just trying to survive the workshops and get out a bit to actually see a bit of Barranquilla. We will find out our sites (Santa Marta, Barranquilla or Cartagena) tomorrow but it is expected to be in the poorer areas of these towns, estrato 1-3 (economic levels 1-6, 1 being the poorest) with under funded public schools but with motivated and excited teachers! All of us will have host families either in the school community or one nearby and nearby other volunteers.

I am sure my reality will change a great deal once we finish training because we are in the protective Peace Corps bubble currently. But I am excited to find out what my site will be and what really Colombia is like.

Marcy

The photos are - a view of flying into Barranquilla, and the map on the airplane; A group photo from when we just arrived; A street view from the hotel; and our group swearing-in as official volunteers (we will do it again in a ceremony with our contacts.)