Life from Canada to Latin America, one word at a time.
Facebook tells me that exactly three years ago today, and three days before I left Mampujan, Juana finally taught me some basic quilting. As she frantically packed to leave for another meeting in the morning, assuring me that she would say good-by, I stitched a tiny pink, naked looking figure into the corner of a
Almost five years ago to the day, I arrived in Managua, Nicaragua for MCC orientation. Equal parts anxious and excited, I did my best at making awkward small talk with my new colleagues and trying to figure out how I could best fit into this strange new world. I had no idea that I would
My first MCC retreat was also the first time I ate a Jet chocolate bar. Even sandwiched between a burnt marshmallow and a graham cracker, the waxy-sweet chocolate flavour stood out just enough to make Jet bars my go-to cheap Colombian treat. I ate around 15 at this last retreat, the taste as familiar as
This has been a week of hope and despair. On Wednesday, the ELN and the government announced the start of formal, public, peace talks and I got to call various spokespeople and ask them for statements on our radio show. On Thursday, I spent a couple of hours frantically trying to translate a public letter
I just came back from a fabulous ladies weekend in Boyaca. We found a cabin in the mountains and laughed, ate and almost blew ourselves up trying to light the propane hot water heater. On the bus ride there, passing through Chiquinquira to Tinjaca, I lisented to Brene Brown on On Being, reflecting on the
I can’t stop thinking about a story Larisa told me at the end of November. I was about to leave on a work trip and the conflict in the Montes de Maria in the early 2000s was furthest thing from my mind, but I ended up carrying it with me through Central America and back.
One of my first memories from my orientation time in Bogota involved walking towards the MCC office on my first day in the city. As a coworker and I got closer, we ran into another MCCer on the street. She greeted us with a smile and remarked that it was easy to spot newcomers when
To get to El Carmen from Cartagena, you have to take a bus. Despite my best advice to myself, I ended up sitting right behind the driver a couple of weeks ago. I hate sitting where I can see the road, watching as the van careens past fuel trucks and semis, passing on uphills and
It turns out my dad is allergic to Bogota. What was supposed to be a relaxing Christmas vacation, therefore, filled with hiking, coffee and urban exploration morphed into Anna’s Grand Clinic Tour of Colombia, Christmas 2015, complete with ambulance rides and blood pressure machines. Thankfully, after various tests to determine if anything was wrong with
like jumping off a cliff the lip of the mountain into the roiling volcano below & find there among the lit up bleached bones & smoke & ash a narrow opening through solid stone into another world expanding rapidly into rooms & more rooms filled with laughter & feasting & song the transformed heart of
Anna L. Vogt 