More than two months ago I arrived in Bogotá, the capital
city of Colombia, to do field research for my master´s thesis (more on that in later posts). I didn’t really have an excuse for not writing blog posts but after my
first year of grad school, I felt like a turnip; and as the saying goes, “you
can’t get blood out of a turnip.” Recently, I have been more inclined to write
but two reasons for not doing so are: I fell and hurt my right arm which makes
it hard for me to type and the ever-so-paralyzing question that plagues me “Will
people be interested in reading what I write?”
Despite the fact that I decided writing about my experiences
is for myself (or at least it should be), I still hesitated. However, something
happened today that I thought for certain people would be interested in
reading. We all love a story that makes us gasp – most of us know that feeling
that compels us to stare at a car accident or that undesirable desire to hear
the latest gossip, right?
Ok then, I’ll get to the juicy part of this post. Today,
after spending a significant amount of time in a country known most for being
dangerous, most of which has been in the capital with a population of over 8 million and relatively high street crime rates, I was almost
mugged. Despite robberies being a common occurrence here in the capital city of
Colombia, I’ve managed to not get
mugged -- until today when a young man approached me with sheets of stickers
that he was supposedly selling.
People
sell stuff, lots of random stuff, on the streets, in buses, everywhere. Usually
a simple “todo bien” (English translation: “it’s all good”) is sufficient to dissuade
a persistent street vendor from pestering you. After three “todo bien”s, the man kept getting closer with
his sheets of stickers. Jorge, in his firm (don’t f*&% with me, I’m because
I’m dead serious voice), said to the man “TODO BIEN Compadre!”
Meanwhile, my
subconscious mind was working fast – thinking to myself, this is unusual, he
should have gone away by now and he is awfully close. His stickers were hovering
over my purse so that could not see what he doing, a simple but clever tactic. Then, when I felt something rustling around in my purse, which was
against my body, I grabbed the man’s hand. He jerked it away from me but I
wasn’t going to let him go without seeing if he had successfully ripped my off.
So I grabbed his hand again (I know maybe not the smartest thing since he could
have had a weapon) to see if he had managed to steal anything. He was shocked (I am sure he had me pegged as an easy target) and my
heart was pounding out of my chest but the coast was clear.
I was lucky. My reaction was fast. All the scenarios I
had heard and stored away in the back of mind obviously served me well. It
could have easily gone bad but it didn’t. I am thankful for what happened
because it reminded me to be more conscientious (I have become more lax as I feel less like an obvious target) and it inspired me to put some words on paper which
I haven’t done much of since I arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment