Oz in Bog Febrero 2004

The year has begun rapidly. Still we are forced to wait for all kinds of things to happen, including documents to come through.  Such is life here. The good news is with Matrix Digital Design we have a few new contracts on board, some with a radio company, and a new ad on a national network to get more work with architects. 

I am working as a teacher of English with a company run by an excessively large Italian former-sailor who calls me his Aussi Señorita.  Thankfully I have a car to get to the locations. I have executive staff at a concrete factory (they have 60 thousand employees in Colombia) which is a long way away.  Yesterday was NO CAR day in Bogota which is a bit of a joke because it makes no difference to the traffic, largely composed of the masses of buses and taxis. We couldnt take the car out after 6:30am.  It was my first day with my basic English group at 7am, so Hernan came with me so I wouldnt get lost. After Annie got on her 6:10am bus for school, we got a cab to the place and even he didnt know where it was. Bogota is a maze of numbered streets, roads and cross-roads calles, carreteras, and diagonals or transversals so it makes directions kindof directionless.  We found the factory no worries, but getting home by bus!

We walked two blocks (Bogota blocks are about 800m square) to catch a bus which took us god-knows-where downtown into the heart of Cartucho where the people who choose to take bazuko and glue live in piles of rubbish.  The council has tried a range of rehousing options but always the people go back to the area.  The last mayor razed the area and has commenced building a park, so the people moved to the pavements and then into the streets, leaving one lane only in a four-lane road for the cars to pass. Hernan panics in areas like that and holds onto Annie and me.  I quite like it all the faces and I am tempted to talk to some of the people.  However, I did that once with a bad result.  People on bazuko and glue become quite violent quickly.  Once a young man tried to grab the car wheel and another time another guy tried to rip the mirror off. So since then I havent engaged in much conversation with people who look a bit out of it. 

This year Annie has a new rector at the school who is a bit fierce, and a new English teacher (a German!).  She is doing Philosophy (Aristotle etc), Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Tech Drawing, Spanish, Sports, English, and Economics in Practice wherein they work in groups of three to design and run a small business in the township.like making and selling pictures or sweets or icecream.keeping the books and writing contracts and so on. This subject is taken by the old rector who has stayed on at the school to help. He is a lovely man.  And we three are taking on some enthusiastic kids to produce a short version of Shakespeare´s As You Like It in Spanish for the school, with narration in English and Spanish.  Could be a disaster but it will be fun and it keeps Annie´s hand in with her love of theatre. 

Well, back to the slog.We have a CD to deliver by lunchtime.