I was living out my childhood dream
Until I had to press pause
Every time I bite into the hard chocolatey outside and soft crumbly inside of a Choco Ramo, one of Colombia’s most beloved junk food items, I feel like my 6-year-old self, running around my childhood home just-outside-of Bogotá.
I moved to the U.S. when I was seven-years-old. It was 1998 and Colombia was not exactly the most ideal place to be, if you had the choice. We were able to leave because of my mom, who is Cuban-American, and my mom’s parents, who initially took us in in Miami. Though I moved at such a young age, I spent my whole childhood, adolescence, and early twenties thinking about Colombia. The tie that I felt to the place- to my cousins, to the mountains, to the warmth of the people- was like a magnet pulling me closer. I knew I wanted to go back, someday, somehow.
That feeling persisted beyond my childhood. As a young professional in Boston, I was acutely aware that my life as a queer Latinx woman in a northeastern city was not and could not be my whole story. Colombia was calling. So, in July of 2019, just before my 28th birthday, I got on a one-way flight to Bogotá.
I lived out my childhood dream of returning to live in Colombia for a grand total of eight months. I started living the privilege of returning to my roots and- as the cliché would have it- of discovering myself within their tangled web. Then of course came the threatening, invisible wave that has changed the way every one of us lives our lives and makes decisions. The novel coronavirus reached the west and it was time to reconsider everything.
I already had a trip planned for March 14th to visit my mom in South Florida for her birthday. If you’ve ever flown Spirit Airlines, you know that everything about the experience is unpleasant. In December of 2018, their unbelievably flawed business strategy resulted in my flight being overbooked by 40 seats (yes, 40 seats). I ended up getting $1,000 worth of future flight vouchers in exchange for agreeing to go on a later flight. It honestly felt like more of a punishment than a consolation- it meant agreeing to fly Spirit for as long as it took to spend $1,000. I had to use my flight vouchers before they expired, hence the planned trip to Florida.
By March 11th, when the WHO officially elevated the epidemic to pandemic status, I realized I had a huge decision on my hands. A decision that could have significant consequences for the next several months and even years of my life. The options were: cancel my completely nonessential trip and stay in Bogotá, buckling down and hoping for the best, OR move ahead with my trip with the understanding that I would likely have to leave my childhood dream behind for the foreseeable future.
By the morning before my planned flight, I still hadn’t made a decision. I had a medical appointment for a simple lab test. Though I wasn’t so sure it still made sense to go, I took it as an excuse to go for a long bike ride from my apartment to the doctor’s office. As bureaucracy and inefficiency would have it, I left the appointment two hours later.
This is where it’s important to highlight the fact that I have one of the best health insurance plans available in the country. Contrary to popular belief, not all Latin American countries have model public health systems a la Cubana. Colombia, who has almost always been deferent to its patronizing northern neighbors, has a health system that functions much like ours. It is almost entirely privatized and those who can pay more can opt for more complete coverage plans. I recognize the immense privilege I have to afford one of these plans, a Plan Complementario. This is why I was so appalled to find that even the Plan Complementario wing of one of the best providers in the country was already overwhelmed by rescheduled appointments and an uptick in check-ups as people anticipated the pandemic’s grand arrival (at the time, there were less than 30 reported cases in the country).
Could I trust this healthcare system, which is routinely overwhelmed even outside of a pandemic context? I left my seemingly mundane lab visit feeling very unsettled.
As I biked home on Avenida Carrera 26, my rusty chain squeaking with each pedal forward, a surge of anxiety and indecision coursed through me. The 26, which has an extensive bike path intersecting its multilane traffic, is often populated by swaths of street vendors and the homeless. As I biked, I could see the Transmilenio, the city’s single-lane bus system (a profoundly insufficient response to the city’s major public transportation needs) running regular service parallel to my path. I could see swaths of people lining up outside and jamming into the always-overcrowded buses. Could Bogotá’s infrastructure and social fabric, already fragile and deeply unequal, handle the first pandemic of the twenty-first century?
When I got back to my apartment and mindlessly scrolled through Instagram- a misguided attempt to distract myself from the decision at hand- I stopped still. A local music venue had just posted a photo promoting an event for that night. It read:
“If dancing improves your immune system and alcohol kills the virus, we have the remedy for you!”
It was two days after WHO had declared a pandemic and this music venue was using the crisis to publicize an event. Not a good sign, I thought.
Neither Colombia’s national government nor Bogotá’s local government had implemented any restrictions by that point, so people were still circulating freely without much reservation. There were still a lot of naysayers. My social media feeds and news sources, including news from my best friend in Madrid and my sister in New York City, had me on another, more worrying wavelength. The inevitability of it all made me feel like I was in another world from the people around me. Colombia would soon be forced to admit and then respond to the impending threat.
That night, instead of dancing to boost my immune system as Instagram had suggested, I went to see my guitarist cousin perform at a small café bar in my neighborhood. To my relief, the café was small, so there were few-ish people there and decent airflow. Though plenty of people were still out and about, there was a palpable sense of anxiety coursing through the otherwise chill vibes. A kind of dull buzz of uncertainty and reluctance thickened the air. My cousin’s cannabis-loving musician friend- let’s call him Jaime- was sitting at a table with my friend Jenna. He didn’t seem as carefree as usual. He and my cousin had recently been notified that their upcoming 6-month contracts to perform on a cruise ship had been canceled. They were stung and disappointed that they were missing out on the experience, but mostly, they were worried about their wallets and about the future of the gig economy.
The conversation at the table got apocalyptic pretty quickly. Jaime scratched his head and squinted as he tried to wrap his head around the fact that the cruise job was no more. How would he make money? Would the world ever be the same again? I stared into space, watching the smoke from a neighboring cigarette dance in the air above me. I had already started mourning my Bogotá life.
I made my decision about 12 hours before I had to leave for the airport. There was no time to make strategic packing decisions or properly say goodbye to my extended family throughout the city. There’s no telling how long it will be before I see them again.
I decided to leave because, despite the ineptitude of the man in the White House, I still felt like the U.S. would be the safer place to be. I was confident that one of the most developed and organized nations in the world could mitigate the crisis better than Colombia, a South American country marked by a decades-long conflict and slow-to-implement peace deal. Now I’m thinking that I might have been wrong.
Less than a week after I left, Colombia started responding to the pandemic by implementing serious containment measures. There were fewer than 100 cases when the government declared a nationwide quarantine. Meanwhile, the U.S seems incapable of sweeping federal action because of its own obsession with decentralized government, even under unprecedented circumstances. Colombia acted swiftly because it knows its infrastructure can’t handle a pandemic. It’s a country roughly the size of Italy but with a much smaller healthcare system. I sincerely hope that early action pays off.
I’ve been in Southwest Florida for three weeks now. My dad lives in a mid-size suburb of Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. The town is a collection of wide streets lined with shopping plazas and gated housing developments. My dad lives in one such housing development where he is easily one of the youngest residents.
The area is best known as a tropical winter playground for elderly snowbirds from the midwest and the northeast. It is less well known for its significant population of Central American migrant workers. My dad teaches their children at the local elementary school and like hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world, he is unable to reach many of them. They don’t have internet access in their homes.
As a young, healthy, dual national during this pandemic, I recognize my innate privilege in it all. Unlike most Colombians, I had the option to leave Colombia. I also recognize that arriving in a state with the second-oldest population in the country was potentially irresponsible. I did my best and spent my first two weeks in Florida in cautious self-isolation. Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican governor refused to declare a shelter-in-place order until April 1st. We drove past beachfront restaurants that were open for business and teeming with white-haired guests, crammed in to enjoy shrimp cocktails with a possible side of COVID-19. It was unbelievable.
I’m starting to consider that, developed country or not, the U.S. may be one of the worst places to be right now. I blame it on the government but I also blame it on a deeply misguided collective belief in “freedom” often used as a proxy for stubbornness and denial. It’s fear disguised as patriotism.
I think about what is and what could have been as the sun beats down on my shoulders and I run around and around and around the perfectly manicured paths of my new surroundings. I’m sitting in the patio trying to summon a sense of gratitude for where I am now over a sense of grief for the life I left behind.
The whole world has been put on an indefinite pause.
On days when I’ve read too much news coverage and I’m feeling fatalistic, I hope that at the very least, when circumstances allow it, I’ll be able to go to Bogotá to pick up my stuff and stop paying rent on an apartment I no longer live in.
On other days, when I’m feeling more optimistic, I try to imagine myself picking up a remote control and hitting play on my childhood dream-turned-reality. Picking back up where I left off except in a new world order where governments prioritize people over profit. Where street vendors don’t have to choose between dying from hunger or dying from a pandemic. Where we can remember who we were in the before and use it to influence who we are now, in the after. In a better world.
