A friend was driving us back to Barranquilla from Cartagena, where I’d spent some of the weekend, and we decided to spot by a beach to see what it looked like — it was beautiful like so many beaches in Colombia, but this isn’t a blog about beaches. On the way out, we had an “orientation breakdown” and ended up taking a road that wasn’t the way we’d come. As the dirt road became worse and worse, we started to wonder how the car was going to make it out with five people in it, and when we came to a hill that I would have said needed a 4×4 before I came to Colombia, it was time for a friend and me to get out and see where exactly we were going. We ran up the hill and found someone working in the hacienda there — pretty much the only person we saw on the road. I asked him how the road to get onto the main road was and how far it was: I was told it was good and the main road was closed. Then I realized I was asking the wrong kind of question.

I’ve written before that almost every time we interview a microfinance borrower working as a Kiva Fellow in Colombia, we ask them what they think of their barrio and that the answer is normally that the barrio is “safe,” “quiet” or that the levels of muggings are “normal,” which often ends with a raised eyebrow back in the office. It’s not that I don’t trust our borrowers — I have no doubt that their barrio is safe for them but wouldn’t be for me — it’s more that their perspective is completely different and that more than often, you have to ask what other people think of their barrio to get a more individual answer.

Our journey from the beach was just another one of these cases. The proper question to ask was, “In this car, is it best to carry on this way, or go back the way we came?” It was better to turn around and go back.

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.

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.

One of the things that I most love about volunteering for Kiva in Barranquilla is that I’m in a city that (aside from Carnival) is unfairly maligned by Lonely Planet-wielding tourists—Lonely Planet is a dirty word amongst some of my friends here—and that I get to see every part of the city. I live in what I see as a safe barrio, a word which has no negative connotations in Colombia, but have a role that takes me to all areas of the city. The result of this is that I know several areas of the city better than some of my Colombian friends. Whenever I tweet that I’ve made a trip to a barrio like El Bosque, or parts of Soledad, a neighbouring municipality, I normally get one or two comments about them being dangerous areas of the city.

Only on one occasion have I actually felt threatened that I was in any kind of danger in these barrios, and that was during a visit to a borrower where neither I nor my colleague knew the area well. The loan officer (a local who usually would have accompanied us) was ill; we didn’t go to the barrio until the mid-afternoon; and when the borrower wasn’t at home and something didn’t seem quite right about the way that people were moving around us, my colleague and I left straight away and got into the first taxi we saw. This might make us sound like wimps, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve gone to similar barrios with one of the loan officers, I have yet to feel at risk. I think that this boils down to a few things:

* Knowing the area. The loan officers that I work with know the areas they work in, they know where they’re going and who they’re expecting to find there.
* Being known in the area. This is the other side of the same coin. If the community knows you as a loan officer of a microfinance organization, you’re more likely to be safe as people recognize you as a source of financing for their family. I also feel it’s rare for a supposedly dangerous barrio to be dangerous for its inhabitants. I am always struck by the number of borrowers who tell us that their barrio is safe, even when it has a really bad reputation.
* Getting out early. The foundation I work with has some clients in an area of Barranquilla with a particularly bad reputation where a loan officer has advised me not to take anything: no bags, no papers, nothing. The key to visiting this barrio, she tells me, is to be out of there by mid afternoon. As another colleague explained, potential muggers are lazy.

From my experience throughout Barranquilla, my view on favela tourism is positive if it’s done in the right way. If the tour proceeds go toward supporting local entrepreneurs, rather than people involved in the drug trade, then I think it can be a useful way of normalizing these barrios or favelas. I suspect that areas get more dangerous when people fear visiting them; though the initial fear may be a real, rather than imagined, one, I would guess that it becomes self-perpetuating. And if a tour ends up convincing local people that tourists (no matter how much you may try to protest, you are—and are seen as—rich) aren’t all bad, then it might contribute to social reconciliation in highly polarized Latin America, albeit in a very, very small way.

If you want to see what favelas are like and you do your research to find a trustworthy guide, then I would say go and take a tour. But don’t go on your own.

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.

The Colombian coast is famous in other parts of Colombia for being swelteringly hot, but ever since I arrived in January, I’ve yet to feel really very hot. Sure, a twenty minute walk to visit a client in a barrio in the south of the city is going to have me sweating, but at 28°C and sunny it’s just about fine as long as you aren’t carrying anything too heavy. But this is all because I’m here in the dry season, or winter, which runs from around November to April. The wet season is a whole different story and last week was just a foretaste.

For a few days, the rumour had been going round that it had rained in Soledad, Malambo, Sabanagrande or another town to the south of Barranquilla and the leaden skies seemed to confirm that it was going to rain sometime. Then colleagues started telling stories about when it rains in Barranquilla you’re going nowhere and the streets become rivers: something that a friend from another part of Colombia had already told me—and I’d been warned by street signs saying Arroyo peligroso (Dangerous stream) with a picture of a car being washed away. When the rain finally came, I was at work and by the time I wandered outside, the streets were a lot more puddle-like than riverine. And the main response when I tweeted the photo above was “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” I had expected things to be a bit like my previous home of Hong Kong in a typhoon: according to this video, an Asian typhoon doesn’t even come close.

I’ve lived in London and Hong Kong, two cities which alternate between what can only be described as beautiful days and days which are depressing beyond belief: if you are lucky enough to be in either city on a run of good weather days, you’d think these amazing cities were perfect. What it does go to show, is that no matter how much you think you know a place, until you’ve seen it in all types of weather, you really haven’t.

Luckily for you, Latin America has some of the most outgoing people on the planet. I’ve found people in Colombia to be incredibly friendly — it was a lot more difficult to get to know people on my previous placement in Kyrgyzstan where friendships seemed to take more time to develop. Of course, this all depends where you are located: your experiences in a very rural area are going to be completely different from a large-ish city like Barranquilla where I’m based. These are a few things I’ve tried over the course of my Kiva placements:

* Friends of friends. Colombia is a country with a huge diaspora of around 3 million people, but even knowing that was nothing to prepare me for what happened as soon as my friends found out I was heading to Colombia: I lost count of the number of people who put me in touch with Colombian friends living in or visiting Colombia and the offers of help I received from them. While none of them are in Barranquilla, it’s great to go to other cities and realize that you know people there.

* Twitter. I personally find that Twitter is a scary way to meet people, especially because from the reactions to the words “I’m going to meet someone from Twitter,” a lot of my friends seem to think that I’m going to meet someone really dangerous. Of course, he wasn’t dangerous.

* CouchSurfing.org. This has easily been the best way of meeting people in Barranquilla and in Colombia in general. Apart from the couchsurfing aspect, there’s a social networking side to the site that is huge in Colombia, especially Bogotá, where there are activities pretty much every day ranging from film nights to walking the nighttime streets in groups giving agua de panela and conversation to homeless people.

* Being that guy in a bar. A tactic of desperation I’ve yet to try in Colombia, but going into a bar and starting conversations with anyone who cared to listen was hit-or-miss in Kyrgyzstan. I’m not sure how much I’d recommend this in Latin America though — it might not get you too far unless you’re an expert at dancing salsa, vallenato or merengue.

This is definitely not a complete list. If you have any more, please add a comment.

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.

As Barranquilla’s most famous daughter, Shakira once said ¡Mira, que en Barranquilla se baila así!

An advantage of being a volunteer in a city with such an enormous and inclusive event is that you can really take part: through friends and the organization I’m working with here, I’ve been able to take part in a comparsa, a group that dances in a parade and have been given an insight into the storytelling traditions of Barranquilla’s Carnival and Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The folclor of Carnival has become one of the most fascinating and rewarding parts of carnival: the musical and story-telling traditions of the Caribbean coast permeate the festival and have their own cast of characters. Here are a couple of examples:

* In the comparsa I took part in, we were all dressed as monocuco, a masked, veiled and hooded character based on stories from colonial times of rich gentlemen disguising themselves so they could pursue women from lower classes.
* This year’s symbol of Carnival is the coyongo dance, where the participants wear enormous cones with bird’s beaks and their dance symbolizes birds being chased by a hunter: the people saw their own exploitation at the hands of the Spanish mirrored in the dance of the bird and hunter.

The part of Carnival that I’ve most enjoyed though is the letanías, groups of minstrels dressed as university professors with scripted or improvised rhymes that subvert and criticize everything in Barranquilla from political figures to individuals who just happen to be watching. The tradition began as a way for barranquilleros to let off steam. I love it for its inventiveness and because they speak a brutal and honest truth; barranquilleros regard the letanías as the true personification of the spirit of Carnival—four days when normal rules are turned on their head.

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.