Month: June 2013

No nos consideramos pobres

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Hoover came to Bahía Málaga as a community organizer from Buenaventura to help organize the effort to gain title to the land on which the people of La Plata, Mangaña, Sierpe, and Miramar had lived for decades under the collective property rights granted to them by Ley 70. He fell in love with the people of the bay and decided to stay and now serves as the legal representative of the Consejo Comunitario de Bahía Málaga. Wearing his distinctive rasta-colored beanie, people would recognize and call out to him from hundreds of yards away. It was clear that he was a respected leader in the community.

In the first week of our stay in La Plata, Hoover was our main point of contact with the community. One night about a week into our stay, Rosángela – a fellow student from UniAndes – and I were up late taking to him. Rosangela, who was not one to mince words, asked pointedly about poverty in the four veredas (towns) of the bay. “No nos consideramos pobres (We don’t consider ourselves poor),” he responded poignantly.

In many ways life in the bay is rich. The people are happy and friendly. Malnutrition is nonexistent due to the ready supply of fish, piangua (a species of mollusk), and fruit (mostly plantain). The conflict between guerrillas and the government barely touched this region, largely because the bay is surrounded by military bases. Life here ebbs an flows with the rise and fall of tide. There is no 9-5 schedule, but the people are often up before dawn to do one of the four main economic activities (all four of which are extractive/not sustainable): fish, gather piangua, cut wood, and hunt forest animals. The organization I’m working for this summer is fostering ecotourism as an alternative to these traditional extractive industries, to preserve the distinct culture of the bay and to conserve the environment (more on this point later).

Below the surface, however, there are numerous weakness that reduce the quality of life in the bay and result in negative development indicators. Chief among these debilities is difficulty in transportation, which has cascading effects on all other aspects of development. The high cost of petroleum (propellors use a lot of gas) limits mobility between veredas and reduces access to markets outside the bay (primarily in Buenaventura).

Health is another concern. The four communities share one promotora (the Colombian equivalent of a community health worker) posted in La Plata who rarely makes the costly trips to visit the other three veredas. The nearest community health center is in Juanchaco – a nearly 45 minute boat ride away – and due to a lack of capacity, maintenance and supplies it is scarcely better than no health center at all. In an emergency, members of the community rely on the good graces of the naval base – a 30 minute boat ride away – but the relationship with the naval base has been strained lately due to a tightening of budgets that has limited the capacity of the base and the lack of a legal mandate for the naval base to attend all but the most severe medical emergencies.

While every vereda in Bahía Málaga has a school, education is another factor that has severely limited development in the bay. In most cases, there is only one teacher per school (only La Plata has two teachers) who must teach all grade levels at once. If students wish to finish secondary school they must take classes in La Plata, and if they wish to finish high school they must move to Buenaventura. Classes are only in session for four days a week (Mondays and Fridays are half days) and are frequently canceled due to inclement weather or other factors that inhibit the teachers’ ability to make the trip from Buenaventura every week.

Finally, most veredas in the bay lack basic sanitation. The only house in La Plata with a septic system is the tourist’s cabin. The negative impacts of a lack of sanitary systems are mitigated in the communities that lie at the water’s edge because twice a month the marea alta (high tide) inundates the ground underneath the stilted houses, washing away most of the disease-bearing refuse. Communities built on higher ground, like La Sierpe and Miramar, are less vulnerable to weather-related disasters, but are at greater risk sanitation-related problems. Miramar, the newest and most organized community, has attempted to solve this problem by installing latrines in every house. All three veredas have raised rainwater collection tanks, but because they depend on rain for drinking water they are vulnerable to drought.

Health challenges in Bahía Málaga

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Before leaving for Colombia, I reassured my family with the fact that there is a naval base within sight (about a 30 minute boat ride) from the community where I would be staying. And if anything were to happen to me I would be a phone call and an airlift away from the best health care the Colombian navy could offer.

Today, I got a first-hand reality check on how naive I had been and how truly difficult healthcare is in the four communities of the Community Council of Bahía Málaga:

After lunch, a boat arrived at full speed. My first thought was that my fellow students were retuning from a trip to scout out a land-based route to the Sierpe waterfall, which is only accessible by boat during high tide (marea alta). When the whole community came running out of their homes, it became clear that something was wrong.

Men, women, children, and even dogs crowded the dock to find out what had happened. A man had been hit by the branch of a tree as it fell, splitting his head open. The boat he had arrived in was old and the motor didn’t have enough fuel to make it to the naval base.

Fifteen minutes and quite a bit of drama passed before the group decided not to transfer the wounded man to another boat. Instead, they filled the engine of the existing boat with gas and sped as fast as the crippled craft could take them toward the naval base. My mind returned to a lesson that my Global Health Systems Professor, Dr. Singh, had taught about how time was a critical consideration in the creation of responsive emergency health systems. There are no community health posts in the Community Council of Bahía Málaga and La Plata, the community in which I reside, is the only community with a “promotora de salud” – Colombia’s version of a Community Health Worker. And the disorder at the dock made it clear that there was no emergency response protocol.

As the boat sped away and I felt a sense of relief. Maybe they could make it to the naval base in time to save that poor man’s life. My heart sunk when, fifteen minutes later, the boat returned with one person bailing out water. The pin that holds the propellor on had broken. The community again gathered around the doc and a man from the community who had already the mad the sprint down the beach with a motor once before – during the cacophony of the boat’s first arrival – made the trip a second time, mounting the motor on a newer boat. Fifteen more minutes passed before they were off again, en route to the naval base in the hopes that they weren’t too late to save the man’s life.

Update: the man made it to the base, was attended, and is in stable condition.

Arriving at La Plata

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The landing gear extended as the small propellor airplane prepared to descend into Buenaventura. Looking out the window, I was struck by the drastic change of scenery. The andean highlands of Bogota, characterized by vast urban areas and extensive agriculture in the valleys between steep mountains, was replaced by a dense tropical paradise that looked more like a diorama than a real city. From above, I could barely pick out the brown houses within the thick layer of green.

Even before the air-tight seal of the airplane cabin was cracked open, I could feel the heat penetrating the windows. Colombians divide their territory into two categories: the andean highlands are known as tierra caliente and the tropical lowlands are known as tierra fria.

The hour-long boat-ride from Buenaventura took us through the choppy water of the Pacific, around a jagged coastline that reminded me of Thailand, and into the flat, calm waters of Bahía Málaga. Getting up to speed, our boat jolted to a stop. We had hit the bajos – an enormous area of the bay that is just barely covered with water during low tide. After calling for a rescue boat, we waited nearly thirty minutes for the tide to rise enough to inch our way through deeper channels of the bajos.

Arriving to the community of La Plata, the first thing you notice is a sky blue fiberglass dock that is moored in place with fluorescent orange polls. Wooden houses dot a 300 yard stretch of beach on the island. Walking down the dock, you must pass by the restaurant. Hungry from an early morning and a long day of travel, our group (two Columbia students, and six UniAndes students) were treated to a generous helping of piangua ceviche – a mollusk that grows in abundance among the mangrove forests of Bahía Málaga. The cabin, in which I would be spending the large part of the next two months, is about thirty paces from the restaurant. A quick glance around the cabin revealed enough room for approximately twenty visitors, two toilets with a working septic system, a sink, four showers (two per gender) with rain-water fed showers, and mosquito netting covering each bed.

After a few days it became clear that the promising shower system was rarely functional, but each shower also comes equipped with a drum filled with rain water and plastic bucket that work nearly as well and use quite a bit less water. Bahía Málaga is one of the wettest places on Earth and therefore does not require a complex water system to provide fresh water. Rooftops and barrels throughout the town are modified to collect as much rainwater as possible.

The two Colombias

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It was already dark by the time I arrived in Bogota. I was extremely grateful that Monica, the sister of a friend of a friend in Boulder, had agreed to wait for me at the airport. The flight had arrived 15 minutes before the scheduled 9:35pm arrival time, but because of walkway malfunction, it wasn’t until well after 10:00pm that I was able to get my bag and find Monica waiting patiently in the airport lobby. Luckilly my letter from the Universidad de los Andes (UniAndes) – one of the most prestigious and expensive universities in Colombia – made my passage through immigration and customs easy, otherwise I might not have made it out of the airport by midnight.

I apologized for the delay and told Monica about the broken-down walkway. “Bienvenido a mi país desordenado (Welcome to my disorganized country),” she said as she explained that the airport was brand new, but that things rarely run smoothly in Colombia.

This fundamental contradiction between development and inequality, discord and prosperity is a theme that came up again and again throughout my first few days in Colombia. Everywhere you look there are two Colombias, the one for the rich and the one for the poor.

This stark divide is visible across the city: in the heavy security that separates the city from UniAndes (which Monica described as another world “otro mundo”), in the squatter neighborhood that stands like a disorganized pile of rubble against the backdrop of a billion-dollar residential development, and most dramatically in the north (rich)/ south (poor) divide that splits Bogota in half.

Monica, while dropping me off at my hostel in La Candelaria, told that she rarely ever goes to the center of the city, and while she didn’t say it explicitly she implied that the area to the south of the center was not an area she would consider visiting.

Later, on top of Monserrate, after hearing of the north/south divide from our tour guide, Andres, my fellow classmate and traveller, Olivia Snarski, waxed philosophical: “That’s so interesting, I want to wright a novel about a tragic love story between the north and south,” she said evoking images of in my mind of Romeo and Juliet and he West Side Story – classic tales if star-crossed lovers.

The socio-economic stratification in Colombia not just informal, it is also institutionalized in the country’s progressive tax code. People receive a tax ranking on a scale of one to six, one being the poor (like those living in the squatter settlements I described above) and six being the ultra rich (those who can afford to send their children to UniAndes without a scholarship). This score is based in part on ones income and in part on the neighborhood in which you live. Andres said that even if his ecotourism business were to take off and he started making fistfuls of money, he would still be considered a level two because he is a rent-payer living in Candelaria. Both Monica and Andres used this scale to describe the neighborhoods we passed as we traversed the city on our respective tours.

It has only been a week since I landed in Bogota. First impressions abound. Ask me again in two months whether these impressions stand up to the test of time.

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