One Month Update.

More than a month has past since I left Melbourne early on New Years Day but it feels more like a year. I have traversed continents, across time zones (back 16 hours) and traveled from sea level, to an altitude of 2625 meters and back down to sea level.

After arriving in Colombia on January 4^th, I spent my first two and a half weeks in Cota, a small town just outside of Bogota where I participated in the WorldTeach Orientation program. Here I got to know my fellow volunteers and learnt about Colombian culture, economics, history, politics and the education system as well as intense TEFL training to prepare me for my role here as an English teacher. During that time we all got to know each other well, and very quickly- something that is almost unavoidable when spending all day every day with 36 other people and sharing a room with five others. The group is diverse with various educational, work and life experiences, amongst us- three married couples, more than a handful of people over 30 and two Aussies (including me!) Of these 36, half would be staying in Bogotá and the interior, and the other half would be spread across the coast, with eight of us heading to tiny Santa Ana, a town of around 5000 on Isla Barú, about an hour and a half from the beautiful colonial city of Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast.

On January 22^nd, the eight of us left cold and rainy Bogotá and flew to the lovely warmth of Cartagena. From Cartagena we enjoyed the luxury of an air-conditioned car ride to Pasacaballos where we took the ferry across to Barú and proceeded to drive on the unpaved streets taking in the barren landscape on the island that would be our home for 2012. After an hour and a half of travel we arrived to the intense heat and dusty, unpaved streets of Santa Ana where we were welcomed by the beating, hot sun, loud champeta music and inquisitive stares from the locals. We certainly made an entrance as our two vehicles tried to navigate the flooded swamp that is the main road of Santa Ana, a challenge to cross with anything other than a motorbike. We managed to find our way around the lake and onto the grounds of Fundación Instituto Ecológico Barbacoas, our new home and my workplace for the next ten months.

The campus consists of open-air classrooms with trees surrounding them, providing shade for relief from the sun. Most of the staff here commutes from Cartagena or Barranquilla and stay here on campus from Monday to Friday, traveling home to their families on the weekend. They live in the Casitas, located at the back of the campus. Beyond the campus lies the Villa where we, the volunteers, share the two storey building with the doctors who work at the Medical Clinic during the week. We have a common living space and kitchen, and each of the volunteers shares a room upstairs, with a bathroom. Our rooms are simple with tiled floors and consist of bunk beds, two fans, a closet and a deceiving air conditioning unit which doesn’t work. We are told from last year’s volunteers that each room has it’s pros and cons, I’m sure we are bound to find out what they are as the year goes on!

We are now in our third week of teaching and it has been challenging so far. That, however, is another post entirely.