So I took a tour to a small family owned coffee finca about an hour and a half drive southwest of Medellin. There we learned the entire process from planting coffee trees to picking the red fruit to processing the beans. After we were served an authentic Colombian lunch, we were taught how to judge the quality of coffee. It is similar to wine tasting, complete with rinsing one's spoon between cups and spitting out the coffee so you can taste more.
The most interesting thing I learned about Colombian coffee is that the average Colombian does not know what good coffee is. The best coffee is sold for export while Colombians are sold the coffee too low quality to sell. In our taste test, Cup A scored only 10 on a scale of 100 and is the coffee sold to Colombians. Cup B scored 85 and has won local competitions.
Today I was back walking around Medellin with another excellent young guide, Diometer. Although the tour was named Barrio Transformation, Dio was not quite as optimistic about the transformation of Medellin as my previous guides were. Dio insisted on telling us the official story and then the reality.
The barrio we explored is the somewhat oddly named Moravia, but it is clearly not Czech. In Spanish the name vaguely means a place to live one's life, and apparently was a rest stop at the end of the line of the previous tram. Rest stop? Place to live? It's a stretch.
Moravia used to be on the outskirts of Medellin and was created by two phenomena. First, when Medellin had no trash service in the 1980's, Paisas used the lake that used to be in this area to dump garbage. Second, the unrest in the countryside drove many farmers and rural people into the "safety" of the city. But since they had no skills to earn a living in the city, they could not afford better housing. So they settled on the mountain of garbage that had grown to over two hundred feet high, recycling whatever they could into building materials.
In the 2000's when Medellin was resurrecting itself, the government offered to give new apartments to the residents of the hill of garbage. The residents accepted, moved to the new apartments, and lived happily ever after. That is the official version. But Dio told us that the reality is a little different. Ninety percent of the residents did accept the new apartments but they are small and much farther north - on the current outskirts of the city. The rest refused to move, either because they did not like the new apartments or because they were revolutionaries when they lived in the countryside and still don't trust the government. So while the hill has been mostly transformed into a garden, hundreds of holdouts still live in shanties a few feet above the garbage dump.
Dio continued to walk us through the rest of Moravia, a bustling barrio that is not built on the garbage dump, always explaining the reality of life. For example, every employee of a company has four percent of his salary deducted for medical care and the employer matches with another eight percent. Those who are not employed receive free medical care. What about those who are self employed or selling on the street? Well, that's a problem. Dio said that half the population does not pay into the system so it is collapsing on itself. Those with private insurance get premium services and everyone else waits hours for service and is relegated to inferior rooms in the hospital. Hmm... sounds familiar.
Employees also have four percent of their salaries withheld for retirement and another four percent for enforced savings that can only be used for purchasing or remodeling a house or paying for the university. How is the money invested, I asked. There's the rub, said Dio. With widespread corruption in the government, the money is often just taken by public officials and Dio does not believe he will ever receive his retirement savings. Hmmm.
Then Dio took us to a community center built with private funds that houses a music school and provides services to the children and families in the neighborhood. We visited in the afternoon and many school children were there doing homework or just hanging out. I may have found a place to volunteer.
Dio did not even bother with the reference to "he whose name cannot be spoken." He assumed we had all read Harry Potter and just said, "I'll refer to him as Voldemort" without any segue. We all followed. He took us to a futbol pitch in the middle of Moravia and told us an interesting story. At the height of the cartel violence, Voldemort (Pablo Escobar) went to a neighboring barrio disguised as a woman and invited the rival gang there to a futbol match. The gang's leader agreed but only if the players were dressed as Escobar was that day. So a famous game was played between two gangs with all of the players dressed as women. The game was so popular that it is still played every year but the time and date are never announced. These are gang members after all. One day twenty men dressed as women show up at the field. Word spreads through the barrio and everyone comes to watch.
We finished the tour at the hothouse on top of the hill. Dio pointed out that a hothouse seems like an anomaly in this climate, but it is designed to collect rainwater and channel it back into misters over the plants. Many of our roses on Valentine's Day come from Colombia.
I had already learned that there are still gangs in many of the barrios, and Dio told us that there was a something going on that day in Communa 13 where two gangs were fighting for control and the police were trying to get rid of both of them. Interesting, since I had signed up for a graffiti tour of Communa 13 for the next day, a tour that was to show the transformation of that barrio. So I was not completely surprised although I was disappointed the next day to learn that our scheduled tour was going to another neighborhood because Communa 13 was not safe. I said I would be happy to wait till the next week to take the tour, but they said they didn't know if it would be safe in a week either. So maybe Dio is right that the transformation of Medellin is far from complete.
The alternative tour was just okay but we did go to a part of the city that I had not yet seen. I also had a chance to ride two more parts of the transportation system: the tram (light rail) and then the cable car. The latter is just like a ski lift with each gondola holding ten people. It was a great way to get up the mountain but I can't see that it is a very efficient way to move lots of people for commuting.
On my last day before classes start tomorrow, I spent the afternoon with an American expat, his Colombian wife, and their two sons age two and a half years and four months. They took me to a crowded mall where we ate lunch in a crowded (Colombian) chain restaurant. The mall and Communa 13 could not be more worlds apart.
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