Country of salsa, coffee and drugs: how Ukrainians live in Colombia - ForumDaily
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Country of salsa, coffee and drugs: how Ukrainians live in Colombia

Photos from personal archive

ForumDaily continues to publish stories of Russian-speaking immigrants who have traveled around the world. More life stories can be read. here.

Viktoriya Gershkul from Kiev, a translator from Spanish by profession, lived for more than a year in Colombia - one of the most dysfunctional countries in Latin America, where civil wars give way to wars between drug barons and the police. However, Colombians are friendly and cheerful people, and life in Colombia has its advantages.

Victoria told "Browser" how it got to this far country and that struck it most of all. ForumDaily publishes the text with the permission of the publisher.

Next - from the first person.

Moving history

I met my future husband, Aldo, through mutual friends from Ecuador. He is a civil servant in the city hall of Bogota, the capital of Colombia. We corresponded for several months, and then I decided to take a chance and fly to him.

I flew to Bogota and settled in the house of Aldo and his parents. After a while, I found a job as an English teacher in college (this is my second language as a translator) and then I was able to get a work visa already in place. To do this, you need to get a document from the future employer that he really needs you. But in general, foreigners are easy to find work in Colombia. There is a very low level of education, few people speak English; and for those who speak, the doors are open everywhere. Work visa is given first for a year, and then for five.

The minimum salary for the most unskilled work is 700 thousand pesos (3 thousand pesos = $1). Average - 1,5-2 million pesos. An official in the mayor's office in a serious position receives 4 million pesos ($1300). But to have such a salary, you need to have good education and experience. Plus luck.

Climate and first impressions

Bogota is a huge metropolis, one of the largest in Latin America. It is located in the Cordillera, at a height of 2600 m, so there is not hot. The first days I felt a lack of oxygen, it was harder to breathe than usual, but soon I got used to it and stopped noticing. In general, everything is very different from Ukraine, from Europe. Even the sky is different, low, gray, and the clouds are right above you.

There is almost no change of seasons, because Colombia is located near the equator. The weather is always about the same, it often rains. Dawn is always at six in the morning, sunset - at six in the evening, and there is no twilight - that was just what was light, and after a few minutes it got dark.

The mentality of local: pros and cons

Colombians are an open, friendly and hospitable people, everyone from the poor to officials and businessmen. Everyone loves foreigners.

Their lifestyle is characterized by a complete lack of personal space. Everyone lives crowded together, there are practically no yards, only lawns. Everyone shouts with their neighbors right out the window. In every house music is constantly playing, people are talking loudly. In many houses on the first floors, the owners open their cafes or shops where fresh salads and salads are sold. All greet each other, invited to visit, especially if you are a foreigner. To say hello, there are 5-6 in different ways, and they pronounce all these forms, that is, the greeting is very long. In general, there is no way to be in silence and loneliness, and it terribly depressed me.

The streets are very dirty, and people do not pay attention to it - they are used to it.

Everything you heard about Colombian crime is true. It is better not to walk alone on the streets, and it is definitely not recommended to appear on the street after dark. Robbery is an even better scenario.

But it is important in which part of the city or country you live. At first I lived in the south of Bogota, where there are many poor and many criminality. Robbers can go into the bus with a weapon, and until all the passengers donate money, jewelry and telephones, they will not leave. Therefore, in such areas, no one carries gold, and phones are hidden in the most unexpected places. The police are terribly corrupt, like all institutions in general. And he closes his eyes to many things: for example, if there is a fight in the street, they will simply pass by.

The most dangerous areas are the slums where the poor live. There at home can be cardboard, a pair of boards, or old wreck. The rich live in the north of Bogota (we lived there with my husband the last months before my return to Kiev) or in another major city, Medellin, in the homeland of drug lord Escobar.

Although the problems with drug trafficking have recently decreased a little (now Colombia still exports more coffee and coal than cocaine), there are still a lot of drugs. The most harmless is marijuana, it is legal, most people do not smoke tobacco, namely marijuana. Even in my house a pot of marijuana was growing on the window. Although I do not smoke. Colombians smoke everywhere - on the streets, in the movies, in the stadium, although it is forbidden. But the police pretends not to notice.

Working day and leisure

Since, as I have already said, sunrise is always at six in the morning, for most people the work day also starts early - at school, for example, the first lesson at 6-30.

Accordingly, the working day ends too early in order to be able to do something before dark. Most often, people dance and eat. Here they dance literally everywhere, for any reason and without it. If you go, for example, to drink beer, then this automatically means dancing: salsa, bachata, reggegeton, merengue. Everyone knows how to, from kids five years old to the elderly.

After dark, everyone sits in their homes.

Accomodation

Not many people rent apartments in Bogota. The most common thing is to live with parents and grandparents, in a big house on the 3-4 floor. Some homes are inhabited by three or four families, that is, a 20 person. Aldo and I occupied an entire floor, with a separate kitchen and bathroom, but I would, of course, prefer to live separately, so we rented a house with my husband for a while.

To buy, say, a two-room apartment, you need at least 120 million pesos. The cost of a communal apartment in an average house for a family of 5-6 people: 60 thousand pesos for electricity, 50 thousand for water, 30 thousand for gas, 40 thousand for the Internet.

Food and prices

The main food for Colombians is rice and meat. They know how to cook meat in many different ways. Raw vegetables are practically not eaten, only in the form of soup. They eat a lot of fruit and drink fresh fruit, as well as a lot of coffee. There are a lot of fruits that I have not tried before: lulo, guanabana, tamarillo, churimoya. Of them usually make juices.

Breakfast is usually scrambled eggs and juice/arepa (cornbread) with egg or sausage and hot chocolate/chicken or fish broth. For lunch - rice, meat, guacamole (an appetizer of avocado with vegetables), sometimes meat soup, and juice for dessert.

Rice is often served with pasta and small potatoes, which are not considered a full meal, but only as an addition to rice. At dinner again, rice and meat, although they often do not dine at all, are treated with some kind of fast food on the way home from work. The most important thing is lunch, the whole family is going to follow him, people come from work on purpose.

Dairy almost do not eat - that's just in the form of dessert. Milky sweet rice. We have this in kindergarten eating, and they have this delicacy. It is only made with canelone (sweetness from cane sugar). In supermarkets you can find yogurt and cheese cutting for sandwiches; to find cottage cheese, I somehow traveled around half of Bogota. I also have never seen any cereals except rice. I was told that they are on sale, but only in special places and very expensive.

All the food sold here is either local or American made. Colombia is, in a sense, under the patronage of the United States, that’s why it is so. Moreover, prices are low and food is cheap.

Rice - 3200 pesos per 1 kg, potatoes - 4000, onions - 1000, bananas (platanos) - 1000, avocado - 2000, chicken - 8000, sweet water (1,5 l) - 2500, sunflower oil (3 l) - 11.990. Bread in the same form as ours is not sold here, only small buns for breakfast, and even then not always. They practically do not eat bread.

Family relationships

Many couples do not live in an official marriage. Perhaps because they don't want responsibility. And, it seems to me, this is why they have so many single mothers or mothers with children from different dads. A single mother is not a death sentence; most likely she will meet a new man. By the way, even if a couple just recently started dating, they call each other “wife” and “husband.”

The men there are very domineering and jealous. Women are formally respected, but very often limited to the impossibility of seeing friends. Familiar women to whom I offered to go together in a cafe or cinema, often refused, explaining that the guy does not allow. A man can make a woman a comment, if he believes that she is too openly dressed.

In society, women with children are respected. In the bus, no one takes special places for women with children, even if the bus is full and there is not a single woman with a child in it. In banks, institutions and stores there are separate queues for women with children, pregnant women and the elderly.

At the same time, maternity leave does not exist. After giving birth, the allowance is paid for three months, then most women go to work, leaving the children with nannies or grandmothers. In general, grandmothers willingly look after children, but since they give birth here early, many grandmothers are still very young and work.

Education and Medicine

The school year begins in February, ends in November. All education is paid, including schools. There are few public free schools, but in them the level of education is absolutely terrible, and often there teachers sell drugs to children.

Private schools can also be bad. English teachers in schools do not speak English. A class can have a 40 person, even in a paid one, and in a free one, all 50. Many children do not complete their education until the last grade, and if they finish school, most of them go straight to work.

Medicine insurance. All workers pay insurance, approximately 200 thousand pesos per month. Without it, they will not be served in the clinic, and in general there is a lot of insurance where people ask, for example, when granting loans and hiring. Even when buying a mobile - this is the whole thing, you need to collect a lot of documents and register the number for yourself.

Even with insurance, one has to wait a long time for admission to certain doctors - usually for at least several weeks. True, you can contact a private clinic, but it is expensive.

Transport

Due to difficult natural conditions (mountainous terrain, mangroves, frequent earthquakes), land transport is poorly developed in the country. There are no railways. In Bogota, instead of the metro, there is a network of bus routes. There, too, you pay once for entry and change from one bus to another, and they run according to a schedule. It's called TransMillennium. This is convenient, including because these buses also go outside the city, not like the metro. But they cannot cope with the flow of passengers: during rush hour you can only get on the 10th or 15th bus. The ticket costs 2.200 pesos.

Most ride cars or motorcycles - motorcycles are more convenient because traffic jams can be driven around.

Why i'm back

It is very difficult for Ukrainians to get used to the lifestyle there - noise, dirt, crampedness, arrogance. And medicine, and education there at a low level, so I did not want to give birth to a child in Bogota. In the last months of pregnancy she returned to Kiev, gave birth to a son, who was named Mark-Samuel. Now my husband and I are separated, he does not want to go to Ukraine, it will be difficult for him here, if only because of the language; therefore, soon we plan to move together to Spain.

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