de julio ,

Dear friends,I have been thinking about unex-

amined dimensions of the theory of relativity. Although I only traveled fi ve hours by plane from the southeastern United States—hardly a trip into the stratosphere—my experience of time has changed. I left Atlanta on June and have now been in Colombia a little over six weeks. But it feels like more than six months, sometimes much more; when I return to the States, will friends and the landscape have aged beyond recognition? Will I have any connec-tion at all?

Since coming to Popayán I had been look-ing for work teaching English, something to extend beyond my volunteer assignment with Sueños Compartidos. � e volunteer phase ended July. Two weeks ago I was off ered a position at a private colegio, or high school, and decided to stay at least until December. My host has off ered a room in her house. I also have two private students, a -year-old and a -year-old, and will continue teaching ten local English teachers two afternoons per week at Asoinca, the teachers’ syndicate in Cauca.

I do not have extraordinary events to nar-rate—no last-second escapes from the or torrid aff airs. I did see a horse separated

from its driver streaking in panic the wrong way down a thoroughfare leading to the Pan-American Highway. It pulled a cart that, as motorcyclists swerved to get out of the way, sideswiped a commuter bus and smashed the front window of a taxi and caved in its hood. � e horse, cart still attached, sprinted out of view, its hooves clapping the cement. Shouts and horn blasts followed it. No one was hurt, but everyone was stunned by the capricious-ness of daily traffi c that must accommodate pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, buses, trucks, and animal life. Together the various modes of transportation create one heaving, chaotic lump.

� e house I live in with Luz Dari and her family is in the barrio named after Camilo Tor-res, a revolutionary Catholic priest. � e barrio is on the city fringe, abutting the small airport. � e neighborhood seems to be in process, piles of sand and mortar on the sidewalks and streets that end in vegetation or heaps of rubble. � e football fi eld a few blocks away falls off on one side into a valley of tall grasses and grazing horses known as “the hole.” It’s a dump-ing ground for garbage and, if the wind is right, smells of raw sewage that courses through the river and culverts after rain. � e Puracé volcano to the east creates a dark backdrop for the dome of Popayán’s white cathedral. � e clouds that usually obscure the volcano’s peak glow red

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when the sun sets; rainbows appear then disappear in the green mountain crevices.

� e neighborhood comes to life early, around .., although roosters start crow-ing around : or . � e man who operates the small bakery across the street is always at work. I admire his industry and even envy the predictability of his routine. Every day he is there, shaping pastry, stuff -ing empanadas, frying them in vats of oil. Every day the same. Appearing in slippers and house dresses, as if they were wandering through their own living rooms, women stop to buy his bread. Teenagers on their way to colegio at : slink by, morosely, the girls’ hair still straight and damp. � ey are dressed in school uniforms with checked skirts, white socks pulled to their knees.

Music is distorted and persistent, Latin instrumen-tal recordings at hyperkinetic pace coming from an unknown source—from the open bays of a car repair shop? from a neigh-bor’s courtyard? from a street

vendor’s megaphone? Ampli-fi ed voices, sometimes live, sometimes recorded, bellowing between snippets of annoying tunes like “� e Entertainer,” sell newspapers and pizza and fruit. Raucous laughter spills into the street, onto Carrera in Camilo Torres, and it is at such moments that I want to refer to Clarice Lispector’s descrip-tions of Brazilian life. So much was happening in Brazil, she said, so much dance, so much commerce, so much football, that she felt “diminished by my smallness.”

I know what she means. I admit to great discomfort at being in a culture oriented around joy, raucous laughter, celebrations, dancing, week-ends, holidays. I’m not accus-tomed to it. I’m an anti-Tolstoy, terrifi ed by vitality but, at times, an eloquent author of pain. I hear laughter everywhere, and I feel excluded from almost all of it, staccato Spanish idioms fl ying by unparsed, exploding in peals of glee. Sometimes I pre-tend to understand, sometimes I look gormlessly toward the

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wall. � is happens daily in the sala de profesores at my colegio. Between pe-riods the teachers gather and sit for-mally at white school desks, drinking coff ee served by kitchen staff . I keep busy preparing class materials but sometimes, after screeching and chortles, sense I am being discussed. Almost always, though, Colombian curiosity and openness toward the stranger bridges the distance. � is past Friday I arrived at school to fi nd all grades, fi rst through eleventh, in quasi-rigid formation out front, listening to the Colombian anthem blare from loudspeakers. As usual, I had no idea what was going on. One of my co-teachers saw me standing apart at what turned about to be an awards ceremony for the previ-ous semester and took my hands in hers—“Don’t stand alone. Keep me company,” she said—before rejoining her ninth-grade biology class, which was dissecting bovine brains.

I have spent more time by myself this past week, trying to keep up with class preparation, grading papers, and editing and writing as-

signments from the States. Luz Dari sensed this and yesterday suggested I go with her brother’s adopted daughters to a sport fi eld near their house. We played basketball and fútbol de salón for almost two hours. I felt more connected and felt that I had burned off at least part of the day’s lunch of lentil soup, rice, fried plantains, egg, tomatoes, and masa morra, a cold soup of milk, congealed corn fl our, and sugar cane.

I feel the absence of my friends and co-teachers Randy and Martina, who left July for Venezuela. � ey had done many gracious things for me—providing me organic health supplements when I was sick in late June and even an English-language book, � e Kite Runner, when I told them I had lost all my books on intercity buses. I have fi nished � e Kite Runner now and have down-loaded free English e-books, includ-ing Moby-Dick, of which, I confess, I have only managed to read half after assorted attempts.

On the last excursion with Randy and Martina we hiked to a

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La vida es una oportunidad, aprovéchala.

La vida es una belleza, admírala.La vida es un sueño, realízalo.La vida es un reto, afróntalo.La vida es un deber, cúmplelo.La vida es un juego, disfrútalo.La vida es preciosa, cuídala.La vida es riqueza, consérvala.La vida es amor, gózala.La vida es un misterio,

descúbrelo.La vida es una promesa, págala.La vida es tristeza, supérala.La vida es combate, acéptalo.La vida es una aventura,

empréndela.La vida es felicidad, merécela.La vida es vida, defi éndela.

—Madre Teresa de Calcuta (on the wall of la sala de

profesores, Colegio Gimnasio Moderno, Popayán)

More writing from ColombiaSee “In Colombia, a Soccer Paradox,” New York Times, July .http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com////in-colombia-a-soccer-paradox/

thermal spring in Coconuco, an hour outside Popayán, near the Puracé volcano. It was not the conventional tourist experience. Friends from Martina’s English classes led us along a cow path and over a mountain ridge for several kilometers until we descended to Agua Hirviendo, one of two springs operated by an indigenous peoples’ organization, not unlike attractions in or near Native American reserva-tions. � e springs, which are open twenty-four hours, leave the skin smelling of sulfur, or like rotten eggs, as Luz Dari said. Here a restau-rant served one of the best lunches I’ve had in Colombia: sancocho followed by fried trout, rice, plantains, french fries, salad, and a blended pear and guava juice.

So far the transition from volunteer Eng-lish teaching, which is what I had done for the most part in Atlanta, to a paid experience has been diffi cult. � e diff erence, I suspect, is in the shift from students whose sole motivation is to learn—whose lives, in some sense, depended on acquiring the language—to students who have to learn English as part of a curriculum that also includes mastery of the Spanish subjunctive and the anatomy of cow brains. For teaching seventh through eleventh grades I will be paid one million Colombian pesos per month, or

about . � is is an extravagant amount for a schoolteacher, more than three times what some public-school teachers make here. Colegio teach-ers, at my school and others, comment on the culture of student indiscipline, which is certainly not endemic to Colombia. I would guess that my students have seen numerous movies and televi-sion shows about American student malaise and mimic what they see. One seventh-grader asked me if American schools really had combination lockers in which students could keep their books and clothes. He seemed quite envious about this. Primary- and secondary-school students do not have books, not even in small, affl uent, nomi-nally Catholic colegios such as mine.

� is isolated passivity should not distract from the overwhelming resilience I witness in Colombia. For each teenager who responds that her greatest desire in life is “to fi nd the perfect man” there are dozens of others who bear extraordinary grief, such as the orphans we met who lost their parents during a hazardous bridge crossing. Love, celebration, and self-regard are things I continue learning. � is is not a society of mourning or diffi dence. Colombians have learned to fi ght for themselves and for their rights. So often they have seen them abused.

Abrazos y besos,

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