This is a lightly edited transcription of a hand-written journal I kept while adopting my son in Colombia back in 1993.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 if you missed them.
4 de Agosto
Much of the television and nearly all of the movies here are Made in America (so strange to watch a dubbed Captain Picard speaking Spanish), it’s nice to know that most of the music is Latin.
We’re getting towards the end of our stay here. Soon we’ll have the sentencia signed by a judge and an official of ICBF. After that we get a Colombian passport for Miguel, a visa for him to enter the U.S., and final clearance to leave the country.
5 de Agosto
I’m getting close to finishing War and Peace. There’s always a strange feeling as you approach the end of a good book — a mixture of curiosity about if and how loose ends will be tied up and regret that it won’t continue. Pierre, Nikolai, Natasha, and Boris seem like real people. I’d like to meet Denisov.
6 de Agosto
We went to Quinta de Bolívar today where Simón Bolívar lived from 1820 until his death. The house itself is rather unspectacular (and not all that large, he was a wealthy man and could have easily afforded something grander) but the gardens are lovely.
I spoke with Carlos today using my rather clumsy pseudo-Spanish. It turns out that he has travelled extensively throughout Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia. His brother is a captain in the Colombian Navy. I asked Carlos if he had been in Bogotá in 1948 at the time of El Bogotazo, the uprising that took place following the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in which the city was partially destroyed. He was seven at the time and remembers seeing fires in all directions.
Today is the 455th anniversary of the founding of Santafé de Bogotá and the 48th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
7 de Agosto
The differences between prices in Bogotá and Minneapolis don’t seem to follow any pattern. In general, locally produced things are cheap and imported goods are expensive, but not always. A slice of cake is 12 cents but Colombian shaving cream is two to three times as expensive as in the U.S., cars are expensive and gas is cheap.
8 de Agosto
Tonight’s dinner was a barbecue and party with loud music, beer, and aguardiente (a strong anise-flavored liquor). When I asked one of the maids what was the reason for the festivities she looked at me like I was nuts and said that it was Sunday. We’ve been here six weeks and they haven’t had a barbecue prior to this. It was really nice to see the maids open up and have a few with us. They work insanely long hours for not a lot of money.
Nagasaki Day
We signed the sentencia today. The office of Court #17 has stacks of paper everywhere, many of them look as if they’ve been sitting there since the Mesozoic era. We didn’t get to see the judge who waited until literally the last minute to sign it before the office closed for the day but we did hear a variety of animal grunts emanating from his office. Perhaps he has a pet mongoose or wallaby.
10 de Agosto
We got a copy of Nate’s birth certificate and a Colombian passport for him. Getting a Colombian passport is same-day service. The American bureaucrats could learn a few things from their counterparts here.
Met a woman from Michigan who’s down here with her two daughters who were adopted fifteen and nineteen years ago. On her first trip here she was in a taxi that hit and possibly killed a man. The taxi driver was just going to drive away but she made him stop and helped the driver put the badly injured man in the cab. She freaked out and wouldn’t get in the car because of all the blood but told the cabbie to head for the hospital. Later that day, the cabbie showed up at her hotel to collect the fare. Had no clear answer about the fate of the man he’d hit.
11 de Agosto
Went to the American embassy today to get Nate’s visa. I’d thought that it would be an office building built like a fortress, instead it’s a fortress with offices. Finished War and Peace today.
12 de Agosto
Finally made it to the Museo Nacional. They’ve got several works by Fernando Botero and many portraits of famous dead Colombians who I can’t begin to identify. The building used to be the city prison — there are grates for the guards to shoot through at the prisoners. Spent the afternoon packing, we leave tomorrow.
13 de Agosto
Up early. We were told to be at the airport at least two hours before our ten o’clock flight. The guard at the security checkpoint went through our carry-on bags in great detail while speaking very fast Spanish. At the airport I saw a wanted poster for Pablo Escobar- one billion pesos, no questions asked. Our flight was an hour and a half late because of a storm that hit Bogotá. Once airborne, the weather was fine. Our flight went just to the west of Barranquilla and then over Jamaica and Cuba (possibly Camagüey?) with only scattered clouds. We had expected to be picked over with a fine toothed comb in Miami but the customs checkpoint was perfunctory. The connecting flight through Detroit was delayed due to a thunderstorm in central Florida. Got to Minneapolis a bit after eleven. Nate has a new home.
2020 Postscript
27 years have gone by, so much has changed. Even prior to our trip to Colombia, Mary had been battling with bouts of depression. These became more common and, as Nate got older, she started having some really bizarre behavior. Our marriage frayed, then ended when Nate was 10. Things snowballed fast. One day there was a police-involved incident (I never learned exactly what happened) and she ended up in a locked psychiatric ward. For the next few years she was in and out of lockup four or five times with worsening paranoid schizophrenia. When Nate was 14, she took her own life by going out to the garage and starting the engine with the door closed. I raised him as a single dad through high school (oh yeah, that was easy) and then he left for college. He’s turned into a fine young man, did a three-year stint as a Phys Ed teacher at a bilingual English/Spanish elementary school, and is now a self-employed entrepreneur and the Hivelandian @comingalive
coffee bag image: Pixabay
Love this SO much. It reads like fiction. (Hey, you should write more of that.) And it's always fun and interesting to have a peek into the past, in a way that brings real history to life. Diaries are brilliant that way. I teared up when I read "Nate has a new home." What a feeling that must have been.
Can't wait to read the diaries of the years during which Mary's illness presented itself. That has to have been a roller coaster.
Unfortunately I did not keep a journal either before or after Colombia.