Research notes from Colombia

As I hope you all know, this trip to Colombia is not just about tropical juice drinks and faking salsa moves, it's actually the key to me getting out of school with my damn Masters degree. So recent developments have been really exciting (for us, at least).

A few times in the last three months (omg I've only got 2 months left! Unless I change my ticket ...) Marguerite and I have interviewed people at the SENA, el Servicio National de Aprendizaje (aprendizaje = learning, for you monolingual philistines! Love y'all, of course). For people from my masters, it's essentially the Colombian ANPE. For anyone else, it's the national professional development agency that trains people in an incredible range of activities, from cooking to sales to graphic design (all for free). We've been talking with them because they oversee one of the legal migration programs with Spain that we're studying. Unfortunately, hard data on who left, when, what they're making in Spain, etc. has been hard to come by, despite the impressive array of other services the agency provides. Until this week ...

For whatever reason, they have now decided to let us pick through their archives and create a database of information we need. But since they also need this database (and we'll be working on it for free), they're giving us unlimited access to the documents we need, access to database engineers to make sure we do this right, helping us with data entry (we're gonna have our own interns!), giving us essentially unlimited access to an office, and in general just being incredibly cool. So this is a good thing, although it will mean tons of work over the next few weeks.

Now this isn't just any government bureaucracy, this is Colombia!

First off, I can't imagine bureaucrat in the US or especially in France opening their archives to two strangers who just happen to claim to have spoken with a bunch of people they know (at the IOM -- International Organization for Migration, at the Spanish embassy, the ministry of foreign affairs, etc.). I mean, we're looking at people's resumes (CVs) and copying down their national ID number and phone number. It's academic research and we would probably eventually be able to get access to this information through the university or the IOM, but damn, this is incredibly easy.

Second, every month they have a special lunch and party and concert featuring food, dance, and kiosks with local products, all from one of the regions where the SENA has offices (they're all over Colombia). Today happened to be Santa Marta's turn, which also happens to be where I went for vacation -- and I'm still planning to put up pics, by the way. So I got some good food and was pushed out of the audience to dance with one of the women from the department I'm working with, and then tonight, they were passing around rum and dancing (really well). Can you imagine this happening in the US? Or France? Rum? At a monthly party for technocrats?

Third, I was invited to a two-hour spin marathon. Spinning is a ridiculous (and exhausting) sport where you go to a gym and ride stationary bikes (SPINning the pedals really quickly) with a bunch of other people while listening to bad techno and trying not to look like you're dying. Oh yeah, and this was going to happen in the SENA's gym, which I now have access to as well. The marathon might not seem like much, but I'm just amazed that I was invited, and that I'll be able to go to the gym. These people are so damn nice and cool!

So that's it. I managed to survive the two hours of cycling but I'm fading fasssssssssssssssssssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ha ha, what a good joke, eh? Of course, if I'd really fallen asleep I wouldn't have been able to click on the button to post this. God, I'm so hilarious though.