La Vida Idealist

After three months of volunteering in Colombia and with one left, I’m starting to put my time here in perspective, think of what motivated me to come here and what I’ve liked most about being here.

Whenever I think of this, I keep thinking of the opportunity I’ve had over the last three months to speak pretty much nothing but Spanish. When you live in Barranquilla, a city that sees very few tourists outside of Carnival, you’re unlikely to find a gang of foreigners to hang out with: so much so, that on a recent trip to Cartagena, Colombia’s tourism hub just 90 minutes from Barranquilla, I found myself staring almost open-mouthed at all these people speaking English as their first language. To summarize, I really like speaking Spanish and one of the many reasons I wanted to come to Colombia was for its reputation as being one of the places in the world with the clearest forms of Spanish in the Americas.

Like all stereotypes, you can only take this so far. I personally find the Spanish of Bogotá to be quite clear in that they pronounce all of the letters. But what I’ve liked most about Spanish in Colombia is its enormous diversity in the country: from the Barranquilleros love-hate relationship with certain letters of the alphabet, the same letters that the Cartageneros seem to have ditched complete, to the raspy accent of Medellín, which I still have difficulties with.

The only complaint I have is to do with what to call other people. I learned my Spanish mainly in Mexico and Spain, where you refer to pretty much everyone with the informal form, tú. In Colombia, it’s a lot more complicated: tú reigns where I am in Barranquilla and there are pockets of vos (Argentine and Chilean forms) spread over the southwest and far northeast; but the strangest form to my ears is the way the supposedly clear-speaking Bogotanos and Santandereanos have to refer to each other. They use usted. Coming from Mexico or Spain, where you only really use usted when you want to be really, really formal with someone, it comes as a bit of a shock to find parents and children, and married couples talking like they’re in a costume drama. And one of the strangest things I heard was on the streets of Bogotá where a passer-by tried to calm a crying baby at a balcony by saying the unfortunately almost translatable sentence: “No llore, ya viene su mama.” It means “Don’t cry, your mother’s coming soon.”

Rob Packer is currently working as a Kiva Fellow with the Fundación Mario Santo Domingo in Barranquilla, Colombia. For more on his experiences, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.

Latest posts by robpacker

• Asking the Right Questions - April 6th, 2010
• Working in the Barrios - March 17th, 2010
• Day in the Life: Times are Changing - March 9th, 2010
• Amigos - March 2nd, 2010
• Day in the Life: Barranquilla Carnival - ¡Quien lo vive, es quien lo goza! - February 16th, 2010
• Weird Words and How to Learn Them - February 9th, 2010
• Living in Two Worlds at Once - February 2nd, 2010
• ¡Por Fin, Me Quejo! - January 26th, 2010