first two weeks of work

This week has been interesting and challenging - interesting in that I've now had the chance to see both sides of Accion Social's operations, and challenging in that I've been confronted with a system in which I still struggle to see any clear role that I can play. The coming week is based on the development of a role description, so hopefully in a week's time I'll have a far clearer idea of exactly what I'll be doing here...

One positive to come out of this week was that we finally got a chance to work directly with victims of internal displacement; unfortunately, this was still in what was essentially an administrative capacity. The service that the UAOs (Attention and Orientation Units) provide is highly process-oriented, and the majority of the interaction between the staff (including myself) and the victims of internal displacement is based on the collection of documents and the completion of forms. To me, this isn't social work, it's administration, and it provides little scope for the provision of psychosocial assistance. This type of assistance (psychosocial) is supposed to come later - what the Territorial Unit and the UAOs provide is essentially an initial point of call and a future point of reference for the displaced population. Over the course of the next week I hope that, with the help of my supervisor, I will be able to define a role that allows for a combination of this kind of administrative work (which, due to the structure of the project, is unavoidable), and more hands-on work - possibly with a social worker or a psychologist. I'm still not sure if this will be possible, but I guess I'll know within a week...

my saturday afternoon

This afternoon (Saturday 14/10/06) provided what was both the most confronting and the most positive experience that I've had since I've been away.

One of the girls who works for AIESEC in Bucaramanga also does some work for a local church that works a lot with marginalised communities in the area, so I went along with her to see what they do. Monday (now today as I type this into the blog) is the international day of 'no hunger', so I went with Natalia and her group of volunteers to a poor (and I mean REALLY poor) community to deliver meals to the families and their children in honour of it being 'no hunger day' on the Monday. The community is only 20 minutes out of Bucaramanga (which is itself only a small city), but it could have been on another planet. The cluster of homes is tucked in behind an industrial estate and a truck depot, and fits all the stereotypes that come to mind when you try to visualise total poverty - houses made out of scraps of discarded wood and corrugated iron; narrow, unpaved, potholed streets; mangy, stray dogs wandering around or asleep under whatever shelter they can find; the ever-present smell of unnfiltered diesel fumes mixed in with mud; more people than there seems to be space; and more children than there seem to be parents. Of course, a lot of the parents aren't there because they're dead or missing, as many of these people are internally displaced - victims of the ongoing armed conflict between government forces (including the national police and the armed forces), guerilla groups, paramilitaries, and private secirity forces. What remains of the families (usually the women, the elderly and the children) flee the violence in the countryside to seek refuge in the big cities, only to end up living in squalor on the periphery of a society that has little room for them, and find themselves at odds with an increasingly industrialised and commercialised economy that has limited need for their skills, which are primarily in agriculture and domestic work. Some do find work; some try to sell newspapers and lollies on footpaths and at traffic lights; some become beggars; others... I'm not sure.

There is so much to be done, and so many people are affected by this problem, but what the church is doing - reaching out to people in need, and trying to work with them on their own terms (I could launch into a diatribe about the paternalistic nature of welfare, but I won't) - is a positive step, because at least it acknowledges that there is a problem. This experience really forced me to confront the situation that I am here to understand, and made me realise that, no matter how small what you do may seem, something is better than nothing - in this sense, despite the confronting nature of seeing such extreme poverty with my own eyes, today was indeed a positive experience.

work: week one

Well, I've had my fist week of work, and to be honest, I'm really not sure exactly what my role here will be. This week was based on learning how the UT (Territorial Unit) operates, so the focus was on administration and organisational structure. The UT here in Bucaramanga supports three UAOs (Attention and Orientation Units), which are where next week will be based. It's in these units that most of the 'coal face' work gets done, which interests me far more than anything that may happen in the central office - I came to Colombia to work with people, not with numbers, or names on forms. The UAOs are the key points of contact for internally displaced people that are seeking government assistance (I should point out here that to be eligible for government assistance the displacement must have been due to the armed conflict - displacement as a result of natural disasters, economic factors or development in rural areas doesn't count); from what I understand, the UAOs are over-stretched and under-funded, so working in them should be a real challenge. I hope that at the end of this coming week I'll have a better understanding of the full picture, and more of an idea as to what my role/impact here can/will be.

first week of the project

The first week of the project was spent in Bogota with all 25 participants (minus two from India and one from Russia who were having visa problems), and was basically a huge information dump about the issue of forced internal displacement in Colombia so as to bring everyone up to speed with the current reality in which we'll be working. It was all in Spanish, which was pretty intense, but after while it became more normal, and I was able to get an idea of the issue of forced displacement and what's being done to address it.

The basic idea of the project (called 'Alcance Social') is to create awareness of the issue of forced displacement in Colombia (forced displacement, as defined by the Colombian govenment, is displacement that has come about as a result of the internal armed conflict in Colombia - basically, people who have fled their homes in the countryside due to fear of death at the hands of armed groups and have come to the cities to seek refuge). The idea is that each Colombian intern will be paired up with an international intern (I'll be working with a guy called Andres), and the various pairings will work with the government programs that work with displaced people in 10 different cites around Colombia.

We got a lot of info and it was a pretty intense week, but it was also great to meet and get to know all the other participants, who are a great bunch of people. The days were hard work absorbing all the information, but the nighttime activities were all based around getting to know the city of Bogota, as well as each other. We did some tourist-like stuff, as well as hitting a good selection of bars and clubs so we could get to know each other in a less serious environment, which was good. The social highlight was Friday night's trip on the 'chiva', which is a party bus that you can hire out that drives around to various nightspots in Bogota until the driver finally gets sick of all the drinking and dancing and music and drops you off at the main nightclub strip. 40 plus people drinking and dancing in the back of an old wooden bus is pretty crazy, and there's always going to be casualties: one poor girl fell while she was dancing and hurt her leg... she had a nasty bruise (and a nastier hangover!) the next day...

Saturday was the last day of the conference, and that afternoon/night we all split up in our pairings to go to the cities where we'd be working. With Andres, I got the bus from Bogota at 10pm, and slept all the way to Bucaramanga, where we arrived at about six in the morning. The AIESEC members picked us up at the bus terminal, cooked us breakfast, then left us to rest, cause the next day would be the first day of work...

First few days in Colombia

My first few days in Bogota went something like this:

Thursday night (28/10/06): arrived at the airport where I was received by people from AIESEC (the organisation that's oganising the project I'll be working with). They then took me to a guy called Felipe's place, who was my host for the first few days. That night I went out with Felipe and some friends of his to a bar nearby, where I had my first taste of aguadiente, which is a spirit made from cane and flavoured with aniseed. In bars you buy it by the bottle then just serve yourself shots, so it can fuck you up pretty quick!!!

Friday: Felipe showed me round downtown Bogota, and we took a cable car to the top of Monserrate, which is about 3000m above sea level (Bogota is about 2500m), which gives a pretty awesome view of the city. We then walked around the old part of the city (La Candelaria), where we drank a chicha, which is a homemade drink made by fermenting fruit or maize in sugar - the right combination can be pretty nasty, and it's one of those bastard drinks that gets you drunk from the toes up, so you don't realise how smashed you are till you try and get up and walk out the door!!

Saturday was a bit more tourism, then a night out at a salsa bar so I could practice my dance steps...

On Sunday it was time to stop playing tourist, cause it was time to go to the hotel where all the participants of the project would be staying for the first week... The first afternoon was just a meet and greet and pretty relaxed. It was a good chance to get to know the other people that'll be working in the project (25 people from 12 countries - 10 Colombians and 15 internationals, who'll work in groups of two of three in 10 different cities around Colombia).

To sum up the first few days: it was great to have a look around Bogota and meet some great people... and a massive thanks to Felipe for being an awesome host...

The flight and Argentina

Hey, this is the first entry I've made since I've been away, so I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit...

I left Sydney at about 9am on 26 September, then spent the best part of a day in a plane somewhere above the Pacific Ocean en route to Buenos Aires...

Buenos Aires: I was in Buenos Aires for about a week in 2003 (I think it was 2003...), and to be honest, not much has changed... The peso has lost a bit of ground on the dollar, which I'm assuming accounts for the ridiculous amount of bad mullets around the place (no money = less to spend on haircuts), although what they don't spend on haircuts they seem to spend on cigarettes, which are everywhere... Maradonna is a God, and so's Che Guevara (don't bother trying to debate either - turns out the rules of soccer actually DO allow for the ball to go off the attacker's hand and be counted as a goal) ... It's a very European-looking city compared to other parts of Latin America I've been to, and it was nice to spend a day or so walking around... The best bit for me was the Recoleta Cemetery, where all the really rich and important people in Buenos Aires move when they die. It's huge, and is more like a little town than a cemetery... The monuments are as tall as 20 feet, and you feel like you're walking through well maintained suburban streets, not a graveyard... Actually, I reckon the rich of Buenos Aires live better in the next world than most of the rest of the population do in this one...

After a day and two nights in central Buenos Aires I got the bus back out to the airport to get my plane to Bogota, which will be the next post...

Oh yeah, a tip for anyone planning on going to Buenos Aires: Ignore all the taxi drivers at the airport offering you a good value taxi fare to the centre of the city - the fares they offer are reasonable, but there is a local bus (#86) that goes into town for about five percent of what you'll pay the taxi driver...