Life from Canada to Latin America, one word at a time.
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
Last night, the Women Weavers of Dreams and Flavours of Peace of Mampuján won the National Peace Prize. These are my reflections after the event on the various definitions a peace prize can hold. A peace prize is a piece of paper with handwritten words on it. It can be held to to the light
At one point during a discussion on development paradigms at the last MCC retreat, Terry directed us to divide into two groups, depending on our first instinct when entering a new group of people or situation. In one group were all the people who immediately look for the power structures. Who has control and who
“To care is neither conservative nor radical. It is a form of consciousness.” -John Ralston Saul. For most of my fellow Canadians, election season ended Monday night. My news feed is slowly returning to its normal fare of cat videos and pictures of people’s babies. Yet every time I shut off my facebook and walk
I was in a grocery store in a small Colombian city the other day, hoping against hoping to find the elusive holy grail of imports: cheddar cheese. While I did not find any cheese, what I did come across was even more unlikely. There, in the middle of the bakery section, were stacks of boxed
For not being at all Catholic, Saint Francis of Assisi keeps appearing in my life in strange ways. The first time was during my freshman year at university, when I went to a meeting of the International Social Justice Club. The leaders passed around green cards printed with the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Anna L. Vogt 