Bailey
This is a fish tank in Doña Claudia’s house in La Cruz, a barrio consisting mostly of desplazados and overlooks the valley of Medellín. Doña Claudia’s home is modest, bright, and comfortable. The walls of the living room are lavender, the couch magenta and green, the curtains tied with floral ribbon. Photos of her beautiful baby, Marisol, decorate the walls of Claudia’s sewing workshop, from which she runs a business that supports her family. Doña Claudia has lovingly decorated this home just as she has lovingly built a new life for them in Medellín. She told me she likes the fish because of their colors; the way they light up the room. Her artist’s eye is evident not just from her interior decorating, but from the type of life she supports , the fish she voluntarily adopted and now maintains. I like this fish tank because it surprised me. It flaunted every stereotype of poverty that I had.
• • •
My time working in the neighborhood of La Cruz was made possible by my cogestora, or social worker, Viviana Estrada. On the first day of work, I walked to the metro by myself (nervous), got on the correct train (anxious), switched lines (scared), and arrived at the Prado bus stop (terrified). Viviana was there in her blue vest, waving. She ushered me onto the bus, and we began our ascent to La Cruz. Several impossible hairpin turns later, we arrived. As we disembarked, people began to call out to us.
The woman selling mango slices inquired with a smile, “Hola Viviana, como te fue?”
“Bien, Doña Rosa.”
The man fixing a rusty moto shouted, “Ay Viviana! Buenos dias!”
“Como está, Don Cesario?”
Everyone we passed waved to her, asked after her family. She was universally recognized, accepted, and loved. She addressed everyone with respect, young and old received the title “Don” or “Doña.”
When we got to the first visit of the day, I found myself sitting back and watching Viviana work. She was never in a hurry, happy to enjoy a cup of tinto and visit for an hour if that was what the other woman desired. The hours in the field slipped away scarcely before I realized. I was left with a number of images in my brain:
Doña Claudia is demonstrating the skirts she has most recently completed. Viviana praises them profusely then asks if she can put in an order.
Viviana with her tiny white laptop, expertly navigating the Medellín Solidaria website to find each family’s information, information she has been building over the last four years.
16-year-old Sofia confesses that her boyfriend has physically abused her. With both tenderness and resolution on her face, Viviana asks Sofia why she is continuing this relationship.
After each visit, Viviana fills out the required paperwork while continuing to converse. The discourse continues as she takes the woman’s thumb, rolls it gently on an ink pad, and presses it against blue carbon-copy paper.
There is only one chair in Doña Mery’s ranchito, which Viviana insists I take. She sits on the dirt floor, somehow looking poised even in criss-cross applesauce, her computer on her knee.
Doña Mery cries because she has completed any of the steps Viviana asks her about. Viviana retrieves a small book from her backpack, and without any introduction, begins to read from it. “Eres capaz. Eres fuerte. Eres mujer.” She reads until the tears dwindle to sniffles.
Viviana wears a lot of hats. She is not only a social worker but a psychologist, nutritionist, counselor, coach, mother, and friend. She is all things to all people, moving through this community that is not her own with grace and humility. As I disembarked from the bus (pensive), arrived at the metro (tired), and finally opened the door to my home (exhausted), I found myself with only one thought: I can’t wait to go into the field with Viviana again.
Browne
“How much farther?” I found myself asking my cogestora.
We seemed to have been walking up the same steep staircase for hours, and had made no visible progress. My cogestora motioned to the side of the staircase for us to take our third or fourth break to rest.
“Casi a la mitad.” Almost halfway, she said, panting, gasping for breath.
We continued on, taking another break, until our next family’s house was in sight. We arrived sweating, panting, and fanning ourselves with consent forms. A woman stood in the doorway of her house laughing silently to herself, waiting to welcome us into her home.
This “hike” was especially difficult for my cogestora. Earlier in the morning, she had slipped while slowly walking down a muddy crevice in a hill to reach another family for a visit. Due to the lack of stairs, and accessibility to the home, she had twisted her ankle.
We said our farewells to the family at the top of the never-ending staircase, and began our descent. We joked that we had just run a marathon and deserved an award for reaching the end, or at least some water. We also, however, came to the difficult realization that this was just a daily walk home for so many families living in the area. For their children to go to school, this hike was completed multiple times a day. To leave home for food, a trek is required. Groups of small children, some in diapers, some barefoot, ran around carelessly free, sprinting up the staircase, hopping between muddy hills. For them, this was daily life. For us, this was a challenging feat. Suddenly, that walk to the gym doesn’t seem so bad.
Elysia
This picture was taken just as I was leaving the home of Maria Enid, one of the women I interviewed. She runs a jardín, out of her home, where she cares for thirteen kids each and every day. She told me that some of these kids don't have food, don't have the opportunity to learn to read or write at home, and she helps (with what she can) to provide them with some of these opportunities.
Here, each of the kids had just been given a piece of pineapple, and most of them are all happily gnawing away. I think this photo shows not only a little facet of Maria Enid's work with these kids (from the fruit in their hands, to their drawings that decorate the walls), but also how carefree children can be. Most of these kids come from families with very poor backgrounds, but from this picture, you really wouldn't know - they're just kids, eating fruit and watching TV.
Jack
This is Juan Pablo Duque, the cutest little kid in all of Medellín. I was fortunate enough to visit him and his family twice: on my first trip into the field and on my last. The first time, I was more nervous than I had been the whole trip. For me it was like walking into an orgo midterm, times three. Before big tests I listen to obscene songs by Ludacris and Soulja Boy to calm my nerves. Unfortunately in this context that wasn’t an option, so I was on my own. I was nervous that they would treat me like an intruder, that I would tense up and forget all my Spanish, or that my nerves would come across as rude. As soon as I walked in Juan Pablo looked up at me, smiling as big as the sun, and all of that faded away. His smile was warm and inviting. I suddenly forgot about all the ways I could mess up, and was in the moment with the Duque León family.
I figured it would be easier the second time, but as I started walking down the wood plank stairs to their home, the feeling came back. What if my questions don’t make any sense? Are they going to be mad that they have to do this again? Did I bring my camera? Where’s Ludacris? As I took the last step off the stairs and into their home, Juan Pablo looked up at me and gave me the same huge smile. My fears receded as quickly as they did the first time.
When Juan Pablo was 6, he was diagnosed with Leukemia. Although he was responding to the treatment, Juan Pablo suffered difficult relapses. At one point during a round of chemotherapy, he entered a coma and was given three months to live. He recovered, and eventually beat the cancer altogether. Juan Pablo now lives cancer free, and dreams of playing for Nacional, his favorite soccer team.
At 20 years old, I haven’t seen anything like what Juan Pablo has seen. In the scheme of the problems he’s faced, things like being nervous about messing up Spanish grammar are immaterial. Juan Pablo has suffered more than I can even imagine, and he keeps smiling bigger than I ever could.
Nicholas
Now that I am just about to leave Medellín, crossing the bridge to the next path in my life, I feel as if there is something that I should have learned from all of this. Something huge. And yet, right at this very moment, I don’t think I could possibly take these past two months and have a truly cathartic experience. But I believe it will come, in time. I have visibly and emotionally changed in these past two months. Of all the things that have affected these changes in me during this trip, the one moment that has had the most impact on me is illustrated in the photo above.
I’m going to digress before I talk about this photo, just to describe a bit of the journey I’ve had here in Medellín and how I’ve progressed. Bear with me.
My life, for the past two months, has been dedicated to understanding what Medellín Solidaria is, how it works, why it does what it does, and for whom it serves. I have essentially eaten, slept, and dreamt that. To my surprise, upon viewing this picture, I felt as if all of these questions that I was asking were answered. To me, Medellín Solidaria, as its name suggests, exists for the people when everybody else cannot, or will not, be there. It represents the empathy of humanity, and it painfully reminds me of how easily I, as a member of the human race, and humanity itself, can forget that we are all brothers and sisters, that we are all human. Deep inside this machine, amidst the gears and heavy machinery of Medellín Solidaria, lie veins and arteries, and at the center, a beating heart. This is a rarity: a government organization that has a heart? That cares about its people on a personal level, to the point at which people are employed with government funds to personally assist the destitute and option-less citizens of the city? I’d never heard of one until I met the men and women of Medellín Solidaria.
So finally to this picture. The image depicts two cogestoras (social workers for Medellín Solidaria that go from house to house and personally guide the families, to which they are assigned, out of extreme poverty). It’s such an interesting photo because the woman on the right was the cogestora of the women on the left, Maria Antionetta, at one point.
This is to say that Maria Antionetta was once a beneficiary of Medellín Solidaria, but now she works for the program.
Now, the beauty of this photo is that these two women come from completely different backgrounds – Maria Antionetta was a desplazada, which means she was forced to move from her home due to excessive violence in her neighborhood, and the other, well, was not – and yet, here they stand, together, both working as cogestoras, on a (seemingly) more or less equal playing field. Not all of the beneficiaries of Medellín Solidaria get to work for the program – this isn’t an organization that gives money or free hand-outs. The fact that Maria Antionetta works as a cogestora now is a testament to her character, to the amount of incredibly hard work she has put in to improving her life, and a good reflection upon the excellent guidance that Medellín Solidaria was able to give her. I interviewed Maria Antionetta for 30 minutes or so, and I can attest: she has worked, from my perspective, an equivalent of a few lifetimes. She has seen things I can never dream of, and likely done things that I would not have been able to do. By this I have been humbled, and as such, I continue to marvel at this organization. I feel like I’ve found a wonder of the world.
So as word spreads that Medellín Solidaria is truly an organization that can effect change and improve the quality of life of the extremely poor residents of Medellín, the chain will grow and eventually all of the barrios of city will have touched the helping hand of the program. Never have I been so proud to work with, study and familiarize myself with a group of people than the men and women of Medellín Solidaria. I think that what they are doing is a phenomenal feat, and I hope that this documentary I have made will make them proud of what they do as well as show, to the world, how special this program really is. They give everyone they touch hope. Even an outsider such as myself, who couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies and behind the scenes activity of the incredibly complex situation that is Medellín’s division of extremely poor residents, I have hope that with an organization such as Medellín Solidaria in motion, the city is in great hands.
• • •
Although I did not work directly with cogestoras or cogestores, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the administrative building of Medellín Solidaria, called Sede Prado. The building was the old mansion of Sergio Fajardo, but as of late, it has been converted into the headquarters of Medellín Solidaria. It’s beautiful, with air-conditioned and spacious courtyards and office rooms, and comfy arm chairs in the reception area. The room that this picture was taken in houses the communications division of Medellín Solidaria. I don’t really know everybody in the picture too well, but I know I will get to know them better as I spend more time with them. Oscar is in the back with his hand up, and Lucho is the guy standing on the chair. These are two of my closest friends and mentors in the program at the moment. Oscar helps me with essentially anything and everything I need concerning the interviews, and Lucho is always there to ask me how my day is going, chat about music (he loves Pink Floyd – great choice) and help me if Oscar isn’t available. This picture was taken on Lucho’s birthday, and I got a ton of footage of the shindig – I told him I’d make a quick, short video for him. I choose this image primarily to remind me of how fun these people are, how the Colombian culture permits fun and hard work to coexist, and how included I felt in this office. I was treated like part of the family. Everyday I see these men and women working until the drop, for the betterment of people that they may never meet. Of course it’s a way for them to make money, but I believe that this is more than a job to them. To Oscar and Lucho, it definitely seems so. I think that one of the best things Lucho said to the group at his little party with threw for him was: “Soy joven en el espíritu.” I am young in spirit. I think that if I learn to live with that attitude, I’ll be set in life. He’s a wise man, that Lucho. I am so happy that I get to spend the next few weeks with these wonderful people. I really hope that I can make them proud with the final product. I believe that I’m starting to understand what this program is about, but I’m definitely in need of a deeper perspective if I hope to create a half-thoughtful video. We shall see.
Nikita
If there is one thing I can take away from my experience here with DukeEngage, it is my friendship with Lina. Lina is my cogestora (social worker), who I work with when I go into the neighborhoods to interview families. When Lina and I walk through the unpaved streets, and climb precarious steps to get to the homes that rest atop the mountains of Medellín, children playing on the street stop to run to her, women on balconies call to her, and the old men who sit at every corner shop speak to her. She has made it a point to blur the line between her professional and personal life. Every neighborhood that she visits has become as familiar to her as the back of her hand, and every family she helps has become a part of her own. This is immensely helpful because I am able to enter these homes with no formality, and blend in at Lina's side.
Being a cogestora for Medellín Solidaria can be both emotionally and physically difficult. Lina and I spend hours in each home, long after the paperwork is put away, to sit and listen and enjoy the company of the families we are with. Yet, to get to these houses, we must climb steep terrain, and Lina's joints have been bothering her as of late. So, for the past few weeks, I have been accompanying her to a small home that serves as a nutritional center for HerbaLife. The first day, we walked into the small, crowded room to find at least ten people sitting, sipping their HerbaLife smoothies, and talking. Oddly enough, people generally assume I am Colombian when I meet them. I go through entire conversations with people, and as long as I speak very little Spanish, they cannot detect that I am an extranjera. So, Lina has taken it upon herself to introduce me as Nikita, from India. This is completely accurate, but it leads people to believe that I have come directly from India to Colombia. I have been shocked by the reactions because every person I have met here has had a genuine interest in learning about my culture, my beliefs, and my country. Without Lina, I may have gone through this program creating unequal relationships with the families and friends I have encountered. I know their stories and their backgrounds, but now, they know mine, as well.
The people in the room were all looking to lead healthier lives through the help of HerbaLife, and Lina mentioned I was a vegetarian. People generally have adverse reactions to this. Generally, people try and become my nutritionist, tell me how delicious meat is, or just find it very odd. Every single person in the room asked me legitimate questions about my lifestyle, and how they could incorporate aspects of it into their own for health reasons.
This has happened every time Lina has mentioned I am from India. I have had intense, amazing conversations with the Colombians I encounter about poverty in my country and poverty in theirs, women's rights, domestic abuse, arranged marriage, child pregnancy, and beyond. I have never had these conversations with people who actually face these issues as their everyday reality. When speaking about early marriages and the lack of opportunities for women, I am speaking with a woman whose 14 year old daughter is struggling with this very issue. When speaking about domestic abuse and divorce, I am speaking with a woman who has had the strength to leave, when I know many back home who cannot due to cultural implications.
When I originally starting looking at DukeEngage programs, they seemed to be in faraway countries with cultures and issues different than my own. Yet, there are three programs just in India. The faces used to advertise international aid, volunteering, poverty, and crisis are often foreign or exotic, but many times, they are faces similar to mine. I am grateful to Lina for allowing me to foster these relationships and conversations with the people I have met in Colombia. I have come to know them thanks to DukeEngage, and they have come to know me thanks to Lina.
Ryan
I took this photo with my iPhone, after the cogestora I'm working with told me it was safe, so it has a fairly wide angle. From the bottom to the top of the image, as the vibrant, vigorous plants in the foreground give way to the houses that make their way almost to the top of the Andes mountains, you can see both micro and macro aspects of the neighborhood I'm working in. I think the colors, elevation, and type of homes are a good representation of what you might see walking around the community.
But what interested me about this scene actually constitutes a fairly small portion of it—the sign right in the middle that says, in English, "my neighborhood is full of life." My first reaction to the sign was cynical: That's just like saying "my beach is full of fun," I thought, or "my city is full of intelligence."
But then I noticed the rope.
The sign is attached to what appears to be a stake, but instead of being placed in the ground, it's neatly tied to a tree. The logos at the bottom show that it was sponsored by the Alcaldía, the mayor's office, but the sign's positioning implies to me that someone outside of the city government either brought the sign to this location, or wasn't satisfied with its initial placement. Either way, the sign's elevation, and its deliberate framing with neatly-trimmed plants, seems to show that someone cared enough about its message to make sure it's not only visible, but noticed.
The US has signs with normative messages like this too, but ours tend to be negative, in the sense of telling people not to do something: Don't steal, because there's a neighborhood watch program; don't just walk away when your dog uses the bathroom. To me, this sign has a similar moral connotation, but expresses it in a positive sense. And although using a first-person perspective can often feel artificial, I think it adds a sense of responsibility to this sign: "this is your neighborhood too, and don't mess it up."
The message also seems to reflect how the six families I've interviewed feel about the neighborhood. Nobody said it was perfect, but some noted its evolution in the past two decades, and everyone talked about its respectful residents and beneficial community programs. That is, it doesn't seem to be a sign that the government placed in a random location, either as a propagandistic reminder of the city's services or as a heavy-handed attempt to coerce some sort of positive change. To me, it feels like something that residents—or at least one resident—has adopted and truly believes.
• • •
"You probably didn't expect to come all the way on this trip and make donuts," said their neighbor, leaning on the doorway as I clumsily molded the golden-hued dough. Just a few minutes earlier, Guillermo—whose business making and selling donuts and churros is the family's main source of income—asked if I wanted to learn how to make one. It looked simple enough, so I handed my camera to Sandra, my cogestora from Medellín Solidaria, and went to the kitchen to wash my hands.
But as soon as I started flattening the ball of dough with the rolling pin, I realized replicating the rhythm that Guillermo has developed over five years would be impossible. I had filmed this process from above, from behind, and close up, but even with Guillermo's patient, repeated instructions, I was surprised at how clumsy my hands felt in shaping this tiny piece of dough. In the end, my donut looked pretty similar to the others, although I'm sure Guillermo could've made a donut in just the time it took me to scoop and spread the arequipe.
Over the course of the visit, he mentioned many times how important it was that each donut weighs the same, has the same yellow color, and is shaped the same way—customers won't want to buy the disfigured or flimsy anomalies. In a business where each of the 200 pastries he makes daily is important to the family's livelihood, letting me shape some of the dough was truly an act of trust.
And that small moment of trust is, for me, what makes work like this so special. It wasn't about the documentary—the camera wasn't even in my hands, and I wasn't thinking about how the shot would be framed—and only tangentially was it related to the narrative that, just minutes before, I had been thinking about how I might assemble. It was a moment when our conversation was unencumbered by a camera between us, when he could look at me without staring into a giant lens, and when I could look at him without wondering if he was in focus and listen to him without being concerned about the audio levels. This was storytelling in perhaps its purest form, a physical transfer of Guillermo's story from his hands to mine.
Vaib
In any given direction and at any given time, a flight of stairs is only a glance away when one is in the barrios. The unnoticeable essential of this environment, a remnant of the once lush, steep landscape, these flights are anything but the archetype of a staircase. The randomized heights and widths of steps take all newcomers to the barrios by shock. While the sights of barrio life distract them, they narrowly avoid tripping down flights of stairs. The perilous nature of these stairs beguiles these folk, myself included. In a layered manner similar to MC Escher's Relativity, the flights lead circuitous routes, taking me up, down, and across the corridors of Comuna 3 life. In this image, two sets of stairs give credence to the many shapes and designs stairs take on in this environment. The symbols for barrio life they have become. Regardless of what one has in his or her own house, one's stairs truly reflect your mobility in the barrios: from mud pathways to rotting wood steps to a cement form to a tiled beauty, add the additional railing or two, a ramp for your motorcycle. Different from a stairway to heaven, these stairs benefit from the ideal of permanence, as each one supplants the formation of a home and a community. With each new staircase built, a community gathers, and the barrios become the slightest bit more habitable for the residents themselves. Truly a window the the homes and the families behind them, stairs, despite their ubiquity, add not only class and inequality to the barrios but a solace for community.
• • •
This is Marta, a member of the first family I interviewed here in Medellín. Marta began studying English two years ago, and cites her life dream as mastering English and traveling to Miami and the rest of the world. Beyond these dreams, Marta works in the small ice-cream shop inside her house, having already raised two kids. This is her after she just finished her interview. This is her after her first time talking to an American.
Education serves as the focus of many Medellín Solidaria programs, whether for general wellbeing or for worldly knowledge everyone should know. But who draws the line of purpose? Should Marta really be learning English, or should she be concentrating her efforts to ameliorate her life in the barrios?
This past week, I've listened in on discussions about the extremely successful Projecto Boston Medellín, where a number of Colombian artists are helped through the US visa process to get the chance to show their art in Boston. I've gleamed so much more about the harsh and cruel nature of US visa applications, especially for Colombians. Colombia has one of the highest visa denial rates in the world, but still, within the small world of the barrios, Marta still dreams of the USA.
I find it astonishing, the power that English holds on Medellín. From the highest social classes to the less fortunate people of the barrios like Marta, English offers an opportunity to join American businesses and to progress or create a new life for oneself.
