Carmen Sandiego

Colombia is infamous for its long and bloody history of drug wars, cocaine and narcotrafficking.  But there is another substance dangerously abundant in this fertile land, churning the wheels of the economy as it is exported to desperate American addicts who light it up and inhale it every day.

Oil.

Petroleum and its derivatives make up 40% of Colombia’s GDP and the industry employs almost a quarter of the population so I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that my own life has become indirectly entangled in various corners of the oil web.   Maybe I played too many Carmen Sandiego computer games as a child, but I can’t help but fantasize that if all of the coincidences of my “involvement” with Colombian oil were somehow serendipitously interconnected it would make an epic Hollywood movie.

The protagonist: A white girl in Colombia who knew too much...

I was hired (and overpaid) to translate an 80-page business plan for two men in suits who wanted to make a few million dollars.  The first few pages were an explicit (and threatening) confidentiality statement so I can’t disclose anything about the document, but let’s just say it had to do with black stuff underground. 

I was also hired (and overpaid) to teach english a few times per month to geologists who work for a multinational oil company.  We practice the kinds of conversations they will have in meetings with their American, Canadian and Australian associates about project proposals, new explorations and most of all, contract signing.  ¿Cómo se dice, “Show me the money?”

The plot: a CIA conspiracy to use an unsuspecting exchange scholar to acquire top secret information about new oil discoveries.  

My boyfriend works for the telecommunications department of an oil drill company.  One time he snuck me in the office and had me answer a phone call from Texas on the tech support line just for fun.  All I had to do was read through the steps in the instruction manual but...

The drama: What she assumed was an innocent phone conversation was actually an orchestrated and surveillanced covert experiment to test her ability to unwittingly infiltrate key information systems.  Next They would need to her to get access to the oil rigs themselves...

Last weekend I went to go visit my friend Oscar who recently took a job in “The Field.”  Outsiders aren’t allowed in the oil rigs (although I don't think there are many tourists wanting to spend 16 hours in transit being jostled around like a popcorn kernel in order to arrive at a whole a lot of absolutely nothing... but I suppose a couple decades of paramilitary warfare justify the xenophobia).
Thus I was disguised in a men’s large button-up denim shirt, yellow galoshes with three inches of wiggle room, sunglasses and a hard hat.  Surely no one noticed that I was not a real engineer.  Or that I was a foreigner.  Or a female. 

[Side note: In the film version of this story the disguise will involve a wig, a mustache, and a fake ID card.  The scene will also include a moment of suspense where the girl is almost discovered by an armed security guard who calls out after her, only to inform her that she dropped her pen.]

In the truck on the way to the tavern/hotel offsite (disguise no longer necessary), my off-the-shoulder T-shirt shirt quickly became a draped-around-the-elbows shirt as we bobble-headed down a road constructed of basketballs and turtle shells.   The extra skin exposed on my back and arms was an unnecessary cherry on top of the fact that I was the only female under the age of forty within a thirty mile radius of the god-forsaken flatlands.  And since the men working in The Field live lives of all work and no play (high salaries and nothing to spend them on)  I was up to my eyeballs in free beer, despite the fact that I had lost all three games of pool.  

The climax: In the bathroom hiding from the debauchery and overwhelming machismo at the camp, the girl looks in the mirror and discovers a recording device implanted in her eyebrow.   Her mind flashes with the "coincidental" events of the past few months (the translations, the English classes, the phone call, Oscar) and she is suddenly aware of her unintentional role in the CIA plot.  

Since the year 2000, the US government has spent over $6 billion on an initiative called Plan Colombia for the War on Drugs (ranking Colombia third in US foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt).  The operation has done little to reduce the cultivation and distribution of narcotics (coca production actually increased by 25% in the first year of implementation).   The whack-a-mole strategy to rain down herbicides from Air Force planes on suspicious crop areas has proved to be about as silly as it sounds.  

However, the Plan has been extraordinarily successful one area: killing rebels. 

With special military training and equipment from the States, the Colombian army has cut the size of the FARC rebel group in half over the past decade.  And what do you know!  The 150,000 square mile region formerly occupied by paramilitary drug lords has been invaded, shot up, cleaned up, and now is being poked with giant metal American straws eager for slurping the sweet black juice below.  

The ending: Despite the danger involved in foiling a billion dollar corporate-political scam, the protagonist manages to outwit the government spies and leak the entire scandal to a major news source.  Back in Bogotá, wearing oversized sunglasses and a long white trench coat, she puts out her cigarette on the concrete with the point of her high heeled boots and walks past a television airing the news of the massive uncovering tipped off by an anonymous source.  She strolls inconspicuously into the airport and boards the next flight to an obscure Caribbean island.

Día de La Mujer

According to my roommates, International Women’s Day is a conspiracy fabricated by scheming capitalists to dupe the masses into spending money on frivolous things on an arbitrary date without any real significance or meaning.  That may or may not be true.  But I, for one, am not going to protest receiving chocolates from random friends on a Thursday.  

Perhaps at the ripe age of 22 I’m already becoming jaded with the youth counterculture, but it seems to me that shopping malls, golf courses and commercialized Christmases aren’t going anywhere so we might as well just enjoy them for what they offer and ignore the people who let themselves get hypnotized by sparkly kaleidoscope illusions.  Thus I have declared myself justified in soaking up Women’s Day for all it’s worth and, cliché or not, dedicating this post to the fabulousness of femininity. 

Where I grew up in Protestant Republican Land, “girly” was an insult on par with “dumb” “lame” and “gay.”  And in my Northwestern liberal arts university, things like fashion, makeup, and daily showers were considered vain excesses.   So despite the ballet classes and my ultra-feminist phase after a Women’s Studies class in college, I estimate very few people would use the word “feminine” to describe me.  I maintain, at least in theory, the philosophy that gender is a spectrum and there are no black and white differences between men and women as a whole.  But, I must admit, my roommate’s complete repulsion at the idea of a Women’s Day aroused my inner lionness. 

I bleed internally on a regular but unpredictable basis, goddamnit.  Do you have any idea how annoying that is?   I can’t wear spandex running pants without getting honked and hissed at by every truck driver and construction worker in the neighborhood.  The Pill makes me fat and Colombian’s aren’t ones to let that go uncommented, so I diet on orange-halves and “wheat” saltines (...and chocolate. Ok, I admit it!).  I spend an entire day preparing for a dinner party--shopping, calling, cleaning, chopping--and my boyfriend has to leave the kitchen after two minutes because the stove is making him hot.   

All of that is not to say that I live a suffered life as a woman.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  But--corporate conspiracies aside--I fully support a day to honor the unique, and sometimes misunderstood, aspects of Womanhood.  We are pretty awesome, after all.  

American invasion!

“No, I’m serious,” Paul said. 

It was a casual invitation, but I was also being sincere.   “No problem,” I replied almost as a dare. “You can come visit whenever you want.”

Six months later, he did (proving us both right).  

It was 1:00 in the morning when he showed up at my door, but his eyes were brighter than a boarding school freshman stepping onto the train platform.  I was determined to be a good hostess in order to pay forward all the karma I had accumulated during my own travels, however I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up the Super Extrovert Tour Guide act for very long.   But his enthusiasm was unavoidably contagious and when I greeted him my voice came out an octave higher than expected.  “Hi! Welcome!” I exclaimed with involuntary pep, foiling my plan to make our first encounter as mellow as possible.  

But I couldn’t help myself... 

We hit the ground running and within 48 hours we’d hit up all the major Must Do’s--downtown, the university, the hike to the church on the mountain, the city lookout, public transportation, street food.  I never realized how self-absorbed I was in my own world until Paul temporarily popped my bubble.  As we were twiddling our thumbs one afternoon he asked me what I normally did on Sundays.  Run, write, read, internet, eat raw oatmeal in milk out of a mug... Not the most company-conducive activities.  By day 3, we were like my family at my grandma’s house the day after Christmas: everyone sitting around the table taking the last bites of breakfast and someone asks, “So what’s the plan for lunch?”  The only interesting thing left to do was eat and talk about eating.  

But then my apartment flooded and we were occupied with the task of finding a place to sleep.  An eight-hour overnight bus seemed like the perfect solution, until we realized that the highway between Bogota and Manizales was the inspiration for The Matterhorn ride at Disneyland.   I would have put my hands in the air to maximize the thrill of hurdling around hairpin curves down a mountain in the middle of the night, but unlike a real roller coaster, there were no lap bars on the bus.  I white-knuckled the arm rests to prevent myself from flying down the aisle and through the dashboard.  

I imagined that Paul, who had been concerned about packing the right clothes and finding a hostel--the kinds of plans I intentionally avoid making--was realizing that those were the least of his worries now that his body was on the brink of being throttled over a cliff.   We bonded.  But once the solidarity of our shared near-death experience wore off,  different aspects of our contrasting personalities became more apparent.  

If all of my trips in Colombia were published in a travel book, the subtitle would be: “Everything happens exactly as not planned.”  Expressing the beauty of this approach to a financial accounting major whose universe revolves around order, statistics, and predictions is not easy.  

If I go to a movie, I refuse to watch the trailer.  It’s an almost neurotic obsession with not creating expectations.  Paul, on the other hand, is the kind of person who will read the Wikipedia article on the history, economics, and politics of Hawaii before going on vacation.  

If there’s one thing I’ve held onto from my Christian upbringing, it is that the Bible says that all food is good to eat.  Amen!  This philosophy is difficult to share with someone who is nauseated by vegetables and deathly allergic to anything in the birch family.

If I go on a diet, it will last one day and in those 24 hours I will cheat at least twice.  Paul uses his iPhone to keep track of every calorie, monounsaturated fat, and gram of protein than enters his body.

But despite the chasm between our personalities, we actually had a great time.  I didn’t even want to suffocate him with a plastic bag after hanging out with him for ten days in a row--a feat few humans have accomplished.  We each made adjustments to make it work (he pretended to be stoked about bowling and leftover pasta to make me feel better and I euphemized translations when the campesinos were making fun of him in Spanish to make him feel better).  But overall it was surprisingly effortless to relax and have fun.  

I was proud to show off the awesomeness that is Colombia--where you can spend one night in a metropolitan city and the next day picking bananas from trees in the mountains; where a three course meal costs less than a gallon of gas in the States; where perfect strangers will welcome you into their homes and shower you with fruit and chocolate.  

I think he liked it.  

 Apartment flooding...

So much butter...