Mi primera vez en Yopal (My first time in Yopal)

Part 1.  Excitement.  Joy.  Right now might be the first time I have really felt these things since I came to Colombia.  Not that I'm unhappy - by no means.  It's just that most of the time I'm a little nervous and a little lost.  But right now, this moment, is excellent.  I'm on a tiny plane flying to Yopal for the first time - the place where I will spend my entire upcoming year, where I will teach my students and share in their lives.  The people who know Yopal keep telling me the biggest danger is falling in love with it and never leaving.  In this exact moment, as I see the Andes fading into foothills and foothills into the green sea of the central plains, I think maybe they could be telling the truth.


Part 2.  The drive out to Utopia took about half an hour from the airport, not including the stop we made so Br. Carlos could buy Angela (another visitor to Utopia) and I rubber boots.  Yopal is a city of about 150,000; but it doesn't feel that way at all.  Something about these places, maybe the lack of any particularly tall buildings (?), makes them feel very small.  But anyway.  The drive out takes you down this one long road, Matepantano I think, away from the city.  For a little while the road is paved, but it soon turns to dirt and rocks.  Br. Carlos said "Bienvenido al mundo tercero.  Welcome to the third world."  


At first, it doesn't seem so different from many places in Montana.  Barbed wire fences run along the road, separating it from the cows and from the crops.  When a truck comes down the road the other way, you slow down, move over, and roll up the windows.  Then you suddenly see a bright yellow bird, or notice that the cows have these long faces, loose skin, and horns that curve backward, ... and that was when it struck me how little I know about this familiar scene.  The rapid banter in Spanish that filled the truck, the banter I could only catch short phrases of, complete the brick-to-head feeling I was having.  As we pulled up to the gate, a solid gate 10 feet high with a guardhouse on one side, I watched with my eyes and my heart as Br. Carlos greeted first the security guards and then every person he saw with a warm smile and a hearty handshake or kiss on the cheek as he called them by name. 


The compound itself is beautiful.  Low, white-walled buildings with tile roofs sit demurely at the end of raised cement walkways, and lush greenery meets the eye at every turn while the smell of fresh dirt assails the nose.  Frogs call back and forth in the oncoming evening as students sit down to dinner in the cafeteria, and night's song continues until the sun begins to rise and the birds take over.  Perhaps someday I will tire of the remoteness, or the heat, or the mosquitoes, but for right now, this is what love at first sight must feel like.