martes, 1 de diciembre de 2009

Similar but different


To Marisa…

¿Where are you from? ¿Colombia? Ah…

Every time that someone asks me about my place of origin, and I obtain an “ah…” as an answer, I do not know what to really think. The answer brings some kind of stereotyped remark, that it is “similar but different”. And yes, that drugs and that coffee…

Similar because it is nothing more than another bastion of human life; different because coexistence it is not something that characterizes us Colombians. Then, one starts to inevitably think how despite the “end” of the colonial world and of the Cold War, the discourse of a “first” and “third” world, of a developed world and a developing one, still persists. None of them seem to be clear.

Being in the “first” world one supposes that everything works smoothly. And well, here they have huge public libraries, a public educational system and an astonishing infrastructure, yet deteriorated, and of course the massive access to the world of consumption. That is if you have how and with what to consume.

But not everything is like that. In numerous times, when I take the subway, it is under maintenance. When taking a bus, a two floor bus that is, one must wait for more than twenty minutes. In a subway wagon, a fat black woman with a cane argues with a miniature Pakistani looking woman. “No, you are a piece of shit”, one says to the other. Are we in Colombia? No. This, despite being the so called “first” world, is a world operated by humans, a world where rats (literally) walk as owners of the place.

One misses, no doubt, the informalities of the “developing” world. To haggle, to bargain. The minutes you can buy in any corner of any street to make cell phone calls. Stopping the bus where and when you like, even in the middle of the road. The chaos through which in theory we are in transit towards development (?).

Yet you can also observe differences. Manual work has a value in the “first” world. Here, many build there own houses, repair them and develop a craftsmanship in the middle of the economical needs that brings each season. In Colombia, on the contrary, it is assumed that the work of the plumber, the locksmith or the construction worker, is a work that is worth very few or almost nothing.

Over here, in the big apple, it is also possible to observe useless and repeated jobs, as having to guards sitting in the same desk or several people in charge of serving “food” in fast food restaurants. Maybe its purpose is to generate income and even more debt capacity.

And walking through the streets it surprises that this first world, so into organic food, still produces tons of garbage because of a consumption served in plastic, carton and paper wrappers. It also surprises the possibility of shopping just walking down the block and scouting the garbage: tv sets, stereos, couches, coffee machines, beds, mattresses, among others, all of them condemned to the garbage world due to the lack of a culture of repair and reuse.

Definitely, I do not know yet what to conclude. Maybe that this is one same world, with different colors and landscapes, in which it is now time to know what development brings with it, for good and for bad. A world where similar, yet different worlds coexist.

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