Colombia is not only a microcosm of Latin America, but of the World. Its diverse physical and human geography open the foreign visitors’ eyes to memories of various pasts. Each morning, I walk towards the 9th avenue to catch the bus to the university I teach at, I am look at the mountains, and reminisce my childhood in Ethiopia, a country also of mountains and mystery.
Memories are triggered of my life in the States as I think of how the culture here is sandwiched between antiquity comparable to that of Ethiopia, with deep faith and modernity of the States with fine four by fours, youngsters seeking refuge in Ipods and MP3s. This is a blend of the world, masked by negative media reports and fear, which are true to a point, but far from reality. Geographically one may be out of the States, but in many ways one is very much part of US life, particularly when one teaches courses in English and prepares students to for exams such as the TOEFL.
I moved to Bogota about ten years ago after marrying a Colombian who I met at graduate school at the University of Northern Iowa and we came down for a year. At the time, Colombia had undergone constitutional changes, opening its economy to neo-liberalism in order to unleash itself from the tentacles of a highly localized bureaucracy and hop on the bandwagon of globalization.
For a country that has had a rich Castilian Spanish academic tradition in both, the natural and social sciences, the need for incorporating English into the curriculum became imminent. Throughout the Twentieth Century, there have been a limited number of bilingual schools - largely for the expatriate community and later on for the social elite.
Resulting from this socio-economic change I landed in several English teaching positions in spite of the fact that I was trained in Geography. This change of careers has not just been limited to expatriates such as me, but also many Colombians who had lived and worked in the United States with degrees in areas such as business and administration.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not of Spero News.
RSS