Tag: Chacho En Bogota
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Chacho En Bogota: El Fin
I’m sitting in the El Dorado airport in Bogota, waiting to board my flight. I’ve been here for 100 days, and I must say it will be bittersweet leaving Colombia. I met some great people here and got to live in another country and culture for a prolonged period, which has always been a personal…
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Chacho En Bogota: The Napkins Are Free, Right?
So in the time of my last posting, two milestones were passed: the one-month-left-in-Colombia date, and the 55th anniversary of lightning striking the Hill Valley Courthouse clock tower on November 12, 1955 at 10:04pm. I’m here, I’m a nerd – get used to it. In other news, on Friday Jorge brought out the ping-ping table…
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Chacho En Bogota: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Extend My Visa
I was technically an illegal alien for a few hours yesterday. I forgot to renew my tourist visa until a day after it expired, so I was nervous going downtown to the DAS office (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad). After a two-hour wait, I got fingerprinted and a woman looked over my papers, stamped my passport,…
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Chacho En Bogota: SpongeBob
Matilde, almost 4, came to my room to show me her new SpongeBob Squarepants band-aid and this conversation followed: MATILDE: That’s Patrick and this is SpongeBob and they live underwater. CHAD: Yeah, they do. MATILDE: Do you think they have special beds? CHAD: Yeah, they probably have special underwater beds because they live in the…
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Chacho En Bogota: Fortuitous Times
I took a cab by myself (in a foreign country) for the first time yesterday. I was going to an English tutoring session for two 13 year-olds and was going to bike there, but then it started pouring so a cab suddenly looked a lot better. I ended up walking back after the session, which…
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Chacho En Bogota: The Cows Are Off To Pasture
SuperVacas has ended. Ninety kids showed up on Friday. Monday there were about 50. It’s incredible how good news travels around the neighborhood. A lot of the kids were first-timers. It was an exhausting week because there were only 10 adult workers for the 90 kids that showed up, but everything got done and the…
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Chacho En Bogota: Blessed Indeed
Some 70 kids came to SuperVacas today, which means the good word is spreading ’round the barrio. The kids played ping-pong and soccer today – I pinged a little pong before they did and remembered how much I loved playing. My backhand, though, is much stronger than my forehand. The Encisos invited a boy from…
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Chacho En Bogota: Cows That Are Super
Today was Day 1 of, as Jorge would say, ¡¡¡SUPERVACAS!!!! It’s basically an AWANA-type day camp hosted by the church from 9am-12 every day this week. About 60 kids showed up today in total, so it was a lot of controlled chaos. It definitely brought me back to my days as a counselor at Lake…
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Chacho En Bogota: Flea Market
I played drums this morning for church – the first time I’ve done so while I’ve been here. It’s been a while since I’ve played and it felt pretty good. After church, a couple of people from the singles group, plus the Encisos and the adopting family, visited a flea market not far from our…
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Chacho En Bogota: Adorable Babies
It’s quite humbling to get schooled in a pick-up soccer game by a kid more than half your age. That happened to me yesterday when I brought a soccer ball out to the kids who live in the orphanage around the corner from the Encisos. I was doing pretty well, but this one kid –…
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Chacho En Bogota: Arm Wrestling
Last night, I’m doing laundry, getting ready for bed, when Jorge tells me to get my “party clothes” on because we’re going to a surprise birthday party. OK. We get there, gather with the other party attendees, climb silently up the stairs to his apartment and sing him Happy Birthday, en español, claro. We eat…
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Chacho En Bogota
Hola amigos cerca y lejos. I’ve officially been here for a month now, which means I’m almost a third through my time here. It’s a strange thought because it means eventually I’ll have to start thinking about what I’m doing to do when I get back to the States. I, like many people, will need…