Basketball at Midnight

We have spent the last two days in Apia, the family home to my cousin Gloria.  Lucy, Gloria´s sister, has taken us in and along with Carlos and Marta, her cousins, Chava, her aunt, Diana, Carlos´s girlfriend, we have become well acquainted with Apia and the main aspects of village-based Colombian life.

During the weekend, the country people come into town to sell their produce and buy wares for the week, and thus it has been a bustling place so far.  Assuming I remember, I will comment later on how things change during the week.  People are extremely warm, and, surprising in contract to most small towns in developing and middle-income countries that I have visited, not very distracted by my foreignness.  Selby and I don´t draw very much attention, and we have rarely been approached by locals.

Gloria and Lucy´s families date back to the very beginning of Apia, over 100 years ago, and it seems that they are an institution in the town.  Last night, when we were in a small market, one of the workers asked us how we learned about Apia- when I told them about mi prima Luz (Lucy), he commented that her family is well known and well liked by the other villagers.

In other notes, we visited a coffee exporter that consolidates and sells the local coffee from the area.  He was recently Starbucks certified and does work with Green Mountain Coffee Company in Vermont, among others.  We saw the stocking house, which contained bins for Organic Coffee, Fair-Trade Coffee, Starbucks Coffee, Regular Coffee, and something I couldn´t translate and wasn´t concerned about as the bin was empty.  I asked what the difference was between organic and fair-trade and which he thought was better, but I couldn´t entirely understand his response.  He served us some of their coffee, roasted while we were there, and it was fantastically smooth and tasty.  I read that my coworkers replaced me with a box of donuts, and if not for that, I would have tried to bring some back.  Allegedly, the greatness of Apian coffee comes from the high concentration of manganese in the area, and if the schedule works out we may be able to visit one of the mines this week.

Carlos runs a monthly band in Apia for the country children who come to the town on the weekends to sell their goods, and early this morning we walked with him and a group of them about 5km out of town.  We ate some fruit along the way, and stopped when we arrived at a river.  After a few minutes playing on the rocks, one of the children jumped in and began trying to walk up stream and then float down stream.  Many of the other children joined in, and the rest of us wandered around the pasture and spent time under a gigantic tree.  It was getting on towards the time for mass, and so Carlos called back to Apia to send a jeep to pick us up.  The jeep arrived, and many of the children climbed onto the top or hung from the sides for the ride.  I, as you might expect, hung off the back  for the full on view of the universe.

On the drier, academic side of the world, I am cautiously asking about politics and economics, but don´t have enough to make a fair commentary yet.  More on this to come.