Tuesday, November 24:

I was invited to tag along with Andres (#1 son) who plays field drum in the high school band.  Andres’ high school band includes two trumpets, one sax, one trombone, two bell lyres (glockenspiel), three field drums and a bass drum. They have memorized a couple songs and a marching cadence. I took quite a few pictures, video and sound recordings. 

The band organized at about 7:30 AM, but really didn’t have anything to do for an hour or more. They/we sat in a park outside the high school. They goofed off, played their music, and flirted. I stood around awkwardly. I do that a lot here. It was interesting to see the parents dropping their kids at school. I don’t recall a single car. Some parents walked their kids, many kids walked on their own, but many parents also dropped their kids off by bicycle or motorcycle. I didn’t get a single good picture, but it was not uncommon to see a family of four on one bicycle or one motorcycle. It looks incredibly unstable and dangerous, and it turns out that it is. That evening I chatted with a nurse that works in a clinic in nearby Fundación. All they treat at that clinic is broken bones, mostly from bicycle and motorcycle crashes.

They had a big gathering of marching bands from five or so local high schools.  It was very fun, if mercilessly hot in the stadium before they paraded all around town. Most of the bands are more drill team than musicians. Each band formed up, played a bit and then marched out of the stadium, then up and down through town stopping traffic as they all tended to play just as loud as they could. I dropped out at 10:00 and headed to work.

I worked a couple hours in the Acaldia, at a plodding pace. The head of planning resigned today. He would have been forced to resign in a month anyway. I never met him. Some of the other staff will be forced to resign in a month too, so the atmosphere is pretty strained. The new Alcade (think Mayor) is already beginning to reorganized the staff.

I rode with Manuel to an outlying part of town while he was running and errand. I need to go back into that area as part of my mapping project. All of the barrios in this part of the city were created through the process of ‘invasions’. I don’t understand the full context, but during periods of violence many people were displaced and their land taken. Others lost their land to money lenders or because they needed money and sold it. These groups of landless people organize an invasion, planning how the roads will be built, who gets each house lot, then in one night the move into an open piece of land, layout roads and build temporary structures. In many case they have won title to the land. Some areas have well designed grids while others are more chaotic. This neighborhood has some small hills making a simple grid network of roads more difficult.

In the evening I sat in on a high school band rehearsal. The instructor would sing out a passage for each instrument in Do, Re Mi, and the students would play it back. In this way they build up relatively simple melodies with more complex underlying rhythms.  Everyone was working at it and making progress. Like the marching bands, there only seems to be once dynamic, loud. I got a chance to check out the great big Houlton Tuba.

Wednesday, November 25

I visited the town library and got a sense of what they do. It's a nice air conditioned space with some computers, but not many people were there. The strangest find I made was a book on how to play the bassoon. I doubt there are any bassoons on the Atlantic Coast of Colombia, but certainly none in Aracataca. They also had a pretty good selection of books by home town favorite Gabriel Garcia Márquez, all written in German!

Thursday, November 26 (Thanksgiving)

My host family found out about Thanksgiving and was hoping to do something special. I opted out. It's 90 degrees out and I can't imagine wanting to spend time in the kitchen. In the end I purchased some pastries from a local bakery and we called it good. I need to work on the diet issue, they don´t know what exactly what I want, so I´m getting a lot of boiled and fried green bananas, fried fish and rice. Generally I think I´d be fine with what they are eating, but I´ve confused matters.

I'm creating a GIS for Aracataca using Google maps, earth and fusion. It's on the very fringe of my job description, but when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Next month the local political leadership changes. I'm hoping to participate in a four year economic development plan at that time. Nobody in this town has the least idea about GIS.  Some of my maps are available online at www.madfisher.info/Colombia/geography. 

The planner I'm assigned to work with does not have a computer either. I'd love to get one for him if I can figure out how to duck import duties. Prices here are a little higher than the US at least for the smaller netbooks and laptops. Actually, I think I may be banned from giving things away too.  There are lots of rules.