You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

The Middy can frequently be empty.

Woman to woman, or man to woman greeting AND farewell.

Trying to learn how to properly greet someone in a different culture is always embarrassingly fun. Looking back on my time in Chile, I remember my host mom mentioning how cold Americans were in their interactions with one another in greeting or saying goodbye. Indeed, we offer a mere handshake and – if it’s someone we’d invite to watch a game with or would want at our wedding – a gesture as warm as a hug could be seen. In Colombia, as well as in Chile and, I imagine, in many other parts of Latin America and the wider wild world, the two meeting bodies are brought closer together. If you are meeting someone for the first time, whether the two parties are of the same gender or not, a handshake will probably suffice. But afterwards, if you run into that person at school, work, a party, or in passing, a more in-depth salutation is expected. These are split into gender and familiarity categories. 

Man to man greeting AND farewell.

So, if a woman greets another woman, they do what I’d call a mock kiss, which is to say, they touch their right cheek to each other and make a kissing sound without actually kissing each other (this also is expected when a man and woman are greeting each other). If the women in this half-baked instructional are very close, bffs, sistas, or similar, this mock kiss is either accompanied or replaced by a simple bear hug. Pretty universal there. If a man greets another man after they’ve already met, they can shake hands. However, it’s more common to clap your right hands together, locking thumbs with the rest of your fingers around the wrist of the other person. If you know this dude, but you aren’t besties, you can slide your hand away from each other and progress to pound it. If you consider this dude a real berraco, parcero, or amigo, instead of sliding your hands away from each other, you can bring each other in for a less intimate hug, holding on to their hand and give their back a good dab or two. So now that this mediocre cultural interpretation has gone on too long, this was my extended introduction in saying that I got a reprieve from all of those rules when I went north of Trump’s future wall to visit my fellow wildlings in Minnesota.

 *                                  *                                       *

 My school’s semester break is only three weeks – since we have around two months off for Christmas – and I spent just about all of it back home in little Collegeville. It started out by surprising my parents. I had told them I wouldn’t be able to get home until the night after Father’s Day, so they were a bit surprised – or, about as surprised as we stoic Roskes can be – when I showed up to their door for Father’s Day brunch with my brother, Ben, and his wife, Ellory, who had picked me up from the airport that morning. I even had to send them a fake itinerary beforehand to keep my mother’s keen eyes occupied until I was found waiting for her on the front porch.

I went into my three-week vacation thinking I’d have some time to finish an overdue lesson plan for my seventh grade class. But I was wrong, a phenomenon with a frequency that is shamelessly increasing.

The 2016 Camp Sunshine crew: Dan, Brian, Jake,
JJ, Ari, Matt.

After spending Father’s Day catching up with family that was out at the cabin in Cold Spring, I got reacquainted with my house real quick when I had to prepare a Boundary Waters trip in two days. Every summer for the last five years (except the summer of 2013 when I was on crutches post-knee surgery) I have taken a group of close friends up to one of my favorite places in the world, the north woods of Minnesota. This year involved reuniting with my freshman year roommate, Jake Park, a silly Korean dude who left SJU after our sophomore year to fulfill his country’s two-year military requirement, and whom I hadn’t seen in three years. As the group was formed over the course of a few days – Ari and Brian meeting Jake and I at my house to help pack, driving up to Matt’s house in Duluth, waiting for Dan on the dock of Snowbank Lake to take him to our campsite for the night – it felt like the soundtrack to The Boys are Back in Town should have been playing throughout, as everyone had their characteristic entrance. We spent the following four days in near pure bliss, laughing because of and in spite of everything we saw and did, enjoying the lakes, wildlife, and especially trees of that magical place most Minnesotans take for granted.

But reading the Dao, watching the orange moon rise over the mirrored lake while struggling to keep our balance mesmerized on the cliff, jousting our canoes, having a tree fall on the path right after I had come back from the latrine, Ari asking if we can bring a third canoe to carry the weights, serenading each other with the ukulele, Jake failing to find the bathroom and utilizing the path instead, were all experiences that seemed to shoot past as if someone had taken out the cassette tape of my time back home and twisted their finger forward four days and put it back in the player. I blinked, and we had left Dan in Ely, Matt in Duluth, and Brian had taken Ari down to the airport to fly back to North Hollywood. Where our meetings had been glorious and exciting, our farewells were short and anxious, not knowing when we’d see each other next, but glad we had made another unlikely adventure possible.   

 

beer-lovin, bike-ridin', ass haulin' eco crowd.

When you call an ambulance
because your friend dislocated
his shoulder. Again.

The next week was a tug of war between Collegeville and the Twin Cities, first down for a Motion City Soundtrack concert with my brother, up for my post-BVC monastic stay reuniting with Spanish – excuse me, Catalonian, Craig, down for an evening with my fellow eco freaks, up for a night of debauchery in St. Joe with Brian and Jake – darts and Startree included, down for a high school reunion with Joe, Kuehne and Ben and a day in hapnin’ Uptown, before finally coming back up for Joetown Rocks and the Fourth spent with the majority of the Roske clan who was also around for our grandparents 65^th wedding anniversary.

I was able to connect with some of my favorite professors who, whether they know it or not, made tangible and irreplaceable impacts on my life and how I approach it. I managed to scrape together lunch dates with my advisor, Troy Knight, and a writing professor, Matt Callahan, who’s life trajectory is something I’m trying to scrape together to follow in my own way, and our conversations always turn north towards the woods, rivers, and lakes we both find essential to living. 

4th of July parading. Convinced Brian and Jake to join.

In order to squeeze myself into the agenda of Aric Putnam, a Communications professor whose class I had the fortune of finding myself in in one of my two open class options in four years of undergrad, I walked in the Fourth of the July parade with him and his posse to support his campaign for the Minnesota House of Representatives, catching up with him while waving and cheesing our way down West Minnesota Street.

Uptown with the gang. Some new friends, some old.

Overall, it was a joyous and exhausting three-week tour of nostalgic places and cherished faces. I got to canoe the Sag, run to the chapel, bike the Wobegon, play darts and pool until 3am at the Middy, bike the streets of Downtown, play spikeball on the shores of Lake Calhoun in Uptown. The list is infinite, the memories they brought back even more so.

If there were anything to win out against time spent with friends, it would have been the moments shared with family. While I’m honing in on my identity speaking Spanish in Colombia, my English personality and how it fits within the fabric of those I grew up with has never been tighter. Time away from it, to reflect and appreciate, has only made it more treasured to me. Each of us play an integral part of the whole, and we were fortunate enough to have that whole together for at least a few days, clicking on all cylinders.  

Ben, Michaela, Momma, Pops, goof, Molly.

To be sure, coming and going raises more questions than most are comfortable with confronting. Will my dog, Shadow, now forget me completely? Will my time here outlive my grandfather, Tom, whose farewell ended in a tearful “I love you too, J bird” with his stoic gaze locked on the wall where I had been sitting moments before? Who will still be interested in my life when it’s becoming harder and harder, through distance and time, to show them I still care deeply about theirs?

I’ll never forget my last conversation with my parents before getting on the plane. Since my return date is unknown, my dad simply said we’ll support you in whatever you decide, while my mom and I managed to keep tears yet inside their pooling eye sockets as she said we’ll see you when we see you. Not knowing can be painful.

Sometimes I feel like I’m riding this exhilarating and freeing wave, while at other times I can feel caught in some nasty storms. I guess the waters just get rougher the further from shore you go, and you really have no choice but to let the sails out - keep the hair long - pour the rum, and enjoy the ride.

 

O'hana.

Song in my head lately: I’ll be the first to admit hating the same droning songs on the radio. More often, I simply play music on my phone sitting in the cupholder. But in my many hours of driving whilst in Minnesota, I heard a new one (for me. Not sure how longs it’s been out. Just checked, it’s been out for more than seven months. So I’m a bit out of the radio game, okay??) by Ruth B. called Lost Boy. Anyways, she sings about being able to find a home in an imaginary place where before she felt alone. While I can’t relate with her on the latter, I feel like I’ve been able to find a home in two different places in my life now.

Spanish word of the day: This might be the most meaningless Spanish lesson of them all. When we want to explain something further, or in a different way, in English we’d say something like “rather” or “that is to say”. In Spanish you can say es decir (that is to say), but it’s pretty formal. More informally, you can say – and will hear more often in the streets – o sea (pronounced “oh say-ah”). An example would be “Vienen a pie, o sea que van a tardar media hora en llegar. (They’re coming on foot, which is to say that they won’t be here for another half an hour).  

La Gran Tomatina Colombiana

My eyes still stinging from the goop that had found its way down the side of my face after a ripe, red comet had smacked me upside the head, I glanced too long at another tomato lofted through the air before getting one right to the chest. Having grown up on the battlefields of Minnesota snowball fights, I should have known better. To hell with it, I’m goin’ in! But no sooner had I dropped my hands from covering the important northern and southern regions of my body to run towards the mountain of ammo than a red bullet hit me square in the neck. Shit, that hurt!! It was like a paintball, but four times the size. I dove into the fray, only to be pushed into the browning, red muck and covered in unseasoned pasta sauce bombs. I managed to roll/swim/crawl out of the way before a couple of hoodlums threw a poor lady into the pile, no doubt having found her in the crowd of onlookers and shouted, “Limpia!” at her before looking to add some color to the white shirt she was wearing. I finally slipped out of the warzone with a handful of ammunition alongside my newfound Dutch teammate, himself letting loose what I could only imagine were equivalent obscenities in his own language reflecting his pain and surprise at how crazy this tomato fight turned out to be.

Tomatoes. Lots of them.

Some time ago, I asked my friend, Steve, if he was doing anything over the next two weekends. Thanks to the close relationship between church and state here in Colombia, we get more than a handful of long weekends to celebrate religious holidays. Seeing as I’m headed home(!!) in a couple of weeks, I wanted to take advantage of some extra travel opportunities before taking a break from this beautiful country. Steve said I should come with him and some friends to a small town in the north, Sutamarchan, for La Tomatina, the annual tomato festival; the sort of thing that only happens in small towns and few others know about it.

The Saturday after witnessing the U.S. get trounced by my new home in the Copa America opening soccer rounds (an evening which provided its fair share of finding a sketchy unnamed bar where we were just told to “knock on the gray metal door to get in,” but turned out to be this random gringo haven), I found myself on a bus with two fellow Americans, two Brits, a Dutch dude, and an Ozzie, on our way to middle-of-nowhere Colombia, a designation used here as a term of endearment for places where everyone is insanely nice and you can get everything you need from one store (Loso’s anyone?).

Once settled in the countryside finca we rented we happened across three ladies traveling together whom we soon found went to the same university Steve had gone to back stateside. The coincidence grew when they discovered they all used to frequent the same bar. Small world, folks. We convinced them to join us at the finca to make our rates even cheaper (I paid $15 for two nights) and commenced the festivities, meaning we went to the only shanty store in the countryside to buy their only product: crates of beer. After shootin’ the shit, playing some games, and finding out one of the girls is actually from Minneapolis, we headed into town to enjoy the carnival festivities before catching the cattle truck back home. Though, our weekend driver couldn’t leave town because he had too much to drink. So while he slept in his truck, we ended up needing taxis to make the haul back out to the boonies.

The original crew in our weekend transportation:
Steve, JJ, Dani, Kev, Sarah, Brendan,and Jordan

Sunday started out with yet another showcase of Colombian generosity. With a crate of eggs ready to scramble in the morning (or poach, in the Brits’ case), we ventured to our mini hodunk country store to see if they sold butter so we wouldn’t ruin the pans. Upon hearing our request, the little old lady at the store said, “Oh you’re making eggs? Well, we don’t sell anything else here [besides beer], but let me see what I’ve got [in my personal fridge].” When I made it back to our kitchen, I had my hands full of tomatoes, onions, and garlic, with a mug of oil hanging precariously from my pinky.

During the free-for-all that was the tomato fight later that day I came to terms with how much bullshit there is in Hollywood war scenes. William Wallace catching an arrow with his shield before turning around to decapitate an Englishman behind him? Bullshit. Legolas, in between arrow loosening, uses an arrow to stab an orc behind him without even looking? Elvish bullshit. Leonidas dancing around, twirling his weapon and killing numerous Persians? Probably-killed-a-teammate-or-two bullshit. The point is I had never been more paranoid or aware of my surroundings in my life. When juicy red shrapnel is flying everywhere, there’s no way to avoid it while also attempting to attack. None were spared; men were thrown into the pile and trampled, women were pelted left and right, children had tomatoes crushed over their head and smeared over them. It was a terrifying scene. That everyone loved. If a bystander was carried into the fray, they hardly resisted. Everyone understood the risks of attending a tomato fight. The occasional sandal would fly into the air amongst the tomatoes, and I thought of how there’s no way an event like this would fly in the States.

The after party for Sunday was much like that of Saturday, you just have to add a handful of arepas and empanadas, a pocketful of free beers – courtesy of friendly Colombians towards the ladies in our crew who simply gave them to us, and a few hundred people, and you have a pretty rockin’ evening. Things really got interesting when they asked for volunteers to go up on stage and dance with the band. I was watching the two brave souls up there dancing away when I saw one of our group talking to the guy next to the stairs to get up on stage. I looked up on stage, glanced at our crew, and thought to myself, Well, shit, I’ll never be here again, and gathered the preverbal Rohirrim. No less than thirty seconds later, I found myself front and center on a stage dancing in front of a few hundred Colombians.

Not even going to try to get everyone's name here.

Returning from an adventure often makes me feel like Bilbo Baggins. The echoes of my keys opening my door rattle through the long haul of the guesthouse, I set my dirty backpack down in a room I meant to clean before leaving, an overly dramatic sigh escapes me as I open the curtains and wonder when my next journey will begin. As I begin to convince myself that this weekend did indeed happen, I can’t hold back from feeling that this was the most fun I’ve had in a while. But as I explain this to friends, I realize that I'm saying this at least a couple times a month now. It makes me wonder if it’s as simple as Colombians knowing how to have more fun than their American counterparts to the north. My sixth graders like to write yolo whenever they get a chance to write on the whiteboard, and while I wouldn’t bring myself to make that reference more than once, I do think life is too short to worry about getting drilled in the face with a tomato.

I have to admit I was a bit weirded out by all the English happening around me. My English practice here is limited to short chats with Devon and any Skype conversations with friends and family back home. So when I was thrust into a nearly all English atmosphere – like Saturday night hanging out around the finca – I was a little taken aback, often not knowing what to say. It was as if I’d had a temporary lapse in how JJ acts in English. Spanish speaking JJ is a little quieter; I tend to listen more, trying to absorb as much Spanish as I can while also avoiding unnecessary attention from those who might not take kindly to a loud gringo, which is most likely English JJ. And that’s the other thing: we are loud. On our bus to Sutamarchan on Saturday, my eyes caught on the screen of a girl’s phone who was sitting in front of me (creepin’, but my gaze only stayed because the first word I saw was extranjeros – “foreigners”). She started out her message with something like, “I don’t get it. Recently, I’ve been seeing more foreigners in Colombia, and on this bus there are more white people than Colombians.” She was writing to a friend about how much we were talking and how loud our laughs were. But she concluded her novelesque message almost proudly. “I don’t know what it is that’s making them come here more, but maybe they’re finally starting to see the beauty that we’ve seen all our lives.” Well, strange girl who’s private message I read the entirety of on a bus, you’re right on many counts. First, we are loud. Our laughs boom, and we often try to talk over one on another in an effort to be heard. And yes, we enjoy exploring your country because it’s incredible. Not just the scenery with the vast mountain ranges or the peaceful towns where you can while away the day chatting with a neighbor. But also the warm wind blowing off the coasts into the hearts of Costeños, the singsong Spanish of the Paisas, or the gentle pride of the Bogotanos. But this is one gringo who’s not looking to change any of that. 

Seconds after, I'm certain we got ambushed.

Spanish word of the day: For some reason - I have yet to look for the linguistic roots - Colombians' slang word for "kid" is chino or china. It's also what they use to refer to a Chinese man or woman, so I'm unsure of where the derogatority began on that one.   

Song in my head lately: Of Monsters and Men is always good when you need things to slow down. We Sink is one such option. There are always a lot of subtle musical tweaks to OMAM's songs, so try to listen with good headphones as speakers don't necessarily transmit subtleties. 

Silvestre and Jango

          Last weekend I found myself at a Silvestre Dangond concert, which probably means zilch to anyone reading this because if English is your first language, chances are you don’t listen to Vallenato. Literally, “born of the valley,” vallenato is a Colombian genre of campesino folk music that became more popular after the infusion of the European accordion, which is now a staple of modern vallenato music. Anyhoo, some of the more popular vallenato singers are Carlos Vives and Diomedes Diaz. But probably the most recently popular guy is Silvestre, who happened to be in town a couple weeks ago. His 2015 hit, Materialista, is probably my favorite song down here, and I wasn’t about to miss out on his show. However, acquiring tickets proved to be a trial and a half, including a trip to one mall whose tickets were sold out, getting to the other mall, needing to wait for the salesman to get back from lunch, finding out the cheapest tickets were gone and needed to buy 80 dollar tickets, making the hour trip back to the monastery, only to have the salesman call me and tell me he gave me the wrong voucher, requiring me to return, making what would have been an hour-long trip into a tour of nigh on 5 hours). Was it really worth it? Hell, yes. Vallenato concerts are infamous for starting late and going later, and Silvestre didn’t disappoint, as the openers didn’t even finish until midnight. So until well after 3am, Tatiana and I, half asleep, danced and sang and somehow survived the night after not forking over the hefty cash needed to buy any refreshment at the concert. The bitter sweetness of that evening can’t be overlooked, however, as it was our last hoorah together before Tatiana left last Thursday to pursue her acting career in Mexico. But what a way to go out! I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Silvestre Dangond with Juancho de la Espriella on accordion. 

Living in a large city has its drawbacks. I’m no longer a short walk away from the shafts of sunlight breaking through the pine curtain of the Arboretum, the water down my shower drain is always some shade of diesel thanks to the garbling tailpipes of supply trucks, and petty theft seems to be lurking around just about every corner (There have been a string of muggings reported recently from our students as they cross the railroad to get to school in the mornings, and Alex was telling me how a neighbor who he could always count on to help him with any handyman job was stabbed just the other day up in the Codito hills). But despite all those fun things, there are actually quite a few advantages to the urban life. One plus is that Bogota is a setting off point for South America. I’ve been able to reconnect with Zach and Serina we met hiking to Machu Picchu, Leroy and Jess who we met outside our hostel in Cusco when they asked to take a picture of them, Californian Adam met at a restaurant in Cusco, Jaime on his way to the states from Viña del Mar, and Stephen who I met camping in Chile and is also now teaching English here in Bogota. But you are also always meeting someone new. In my case, there’s Omar who taught himself English with a dictionary and a selection of classic British literature, Plinio from the Amazons region who went from steering canoes to driving the monastery van, or John Freddy whose family has a boa constrictor that they found one morning with a trespasser inside of her. The list here goes on and on, some with more exciting stories than others.

         But equally as exciting is meeting a Bogota resident while traveling outside the city. I’m always trying to meet new people to hear their stories, practice my Spanish, and expand my circle outside of monastery and school (though those are indeed some dear circles). A weeklong trip down to southern Colombia back in January with my friend from the states, Amber, is how I met one of my best Colombian friends. From the start, Tatiana’s family became like my own. She had graduated college the year before and started acting in Mexico before coming back home and doing some traveling of her native country, like in Mocoa where we met. She was scheduled back in Mexico this May, and decided to reconnect with friends and family while traveling instead of getting a temporary job in the months between. Her younger sister, Valentina, had just graduated high school and was taking a gap year, most of which will be spent with cousins in New York. This means they both had a lot of time, which they randomly and generously used to hang out with a strange gringo dude.

What quickly became a tradition was going to a movie on Wednesday nights, which are around 1 US dollar those particular evenings. What filled in the weeks were going to plays, dancing, hiking the surrounding mountains on the weekends, or game nights at her folks’ place, where their mom and I would trade tiles to try to fend off Valentina’s Rummy prowess. Tatiana taught me how to dance, how to make arepas, and how to better navigate through this often-crazy city. But some of the more indelible memories were made simply just trudging around Bogota running errands, like when we got soaked by a bus speeding through a nearby puddle and I found out she liked Frank Sinatra, or when we’d run into someone she knew (which felt like every outing) and I could see from the joy on their faces that she had affected them as similarly as she did me.

Jango during the first week.

       

  If I haven’t made Tatiana’s generosity clear, I should probably point out that she devoted over a month of her time back here in Bogota to taking care of a sick puppy she rescued from the streets. Severely underfed, this little dude could also barely walk thanks to some mange that left him with little hair on his legs to protect him from Bogota’s chilling evenings. So she did what every other human says they would do but doesn’t act on: for a month she fed and bathed Jango, named for how tough he was through everything. She also made sure he had positive experiences with other dogs and humans, since he had probably only known rejection and spite. 

Jango after a month, eventually adopted by
a family who lives in the country with
plenty of room to roam.

We took him to the park often to try to get him to play with other dogs. We would bring Limón along as well, the family dog, to show Jango the ropes of fetch, public urination, and other animal practices of which I proudly claim to be an expert on. One such occasion brought us to a dog mall, which was exactly as absurd as it sounds. Apparently, every so often, you can bring your dog to this strip mall sort of set up geared specifically to your canine pets, replete with toys, accessories, and other smelly friends to make. It didn’t take us long, however, to realize that our little scrapper mutt might have been a little out of his league amongst the show dogs whose owners actually frequent that sort of stupidity.  

         Tatiana’s character is assuredly in part thanks to her parents, Beto (short for Alberto) and Betty, who were always trying to feed me and let me crash on their couch on numerous occasions. One moment I hope to never forget was Tatiana’s going away karaoke party the other Saturday. While, Betty made the rounds with beer and snacks seemingly every five minutes, Beto was filming everything (and I mean the whole night) with hilarious commentary and in-your-face angles that I thought only Michael Roske was capable of. He was also the unofficial master of karaoke ceremonies for most of the night, making sure there was always someone screeching into the microphone. And at the end of the evening when the majority of the gang was filing out and saying goodbyes, I could still hear someone singing. I looked back and there was Beto, half asleep, singing some soft Spanish ballad to himself, knowing that if the night ended, that brought his daughter’s departure one day closer. So, naturally, I grabbed two beers and went over to finish the song with him.

The world is full of good people. But I found it surprising that such a good person stumbled into my life and made such a positive impact in such a short amount of time. Tatiana understands most of my blogs. But, just in case:

Otra vez, gracias por todo lo que hiciste por mi. No me pegues (muerdes) en diciembre solo porque escribí un blog sobre ti. Ya te había dicho lo que siento, así que solo voy a seguir escribiendo en español para que los amigos y familiares que no hablan el idioma tengan que poner mas y mas en sus traductores muajaja best teacher.

Just as Bogota can be a setting off point, I hope it will also be a reconnecting point one day.

Smiling remains a challenge for me. As does taking a good picture
remains a challenge for my Colombian phone.

Spanish word of the day: I feel like I included a decent amount of Spanish in this post, but we’ll add in cachorro, which means puppy.

Song in my head lately: This one’s easy, considering the concert, and that I’ve been looking forward to including this song for months now. I have almost all of Silvestre’s Materialista memorized, gunna pull it out at the next karaoke. Also, Silvestre is the dude in the interesting robin hood cape. The other dude is Nicky Jam, famous in his own right.

On Being Crippled Me

During my senior year of high-school, our AP English teacher – Mr. Menard – gave us the traditional writing assignment of describing something that identified us. For example, a red-headed buddy of mine, Joe Griffin, titled his piece "On Being Ginger Me," and wrote about the undoubtedly profound ups and downs of having red hair in today's world (I know this because he wrote his essay right before class on notebook paper, and I somehow ended up with it, vowing to gift it to him at his wedding. Joe, if you're reading this, I still have it, and plan on carrying through with my plan!) Anyway, amidst the identity crisis that is adolescence, I was stumped. My solution was to turn to another "crisis" in my life at that time. It was the beginning of my senior year, and I had a stress fracture in my left foot (cue Daniel Day-Lewis), sitting me out for essentially all of my senior year. So in arrogantly dramatic fashion befitting only a teen athlete whose life is sports, I titled my piece "On Being Crippled Me" and described the subtle depression creeping into my life as I was ending my high school career on the sidelines. But the truth is, while my various instances on crutches have indeed been the darker moments of my life, they are probably the reason why I consider myself a pretty positive person. Because in the end, feeling sorry for yourself isn't going to make things better. That, and someone else has always got it worse, so count your blessings, suck it up, rub some dirt on it, etc. Ultimately, I concluded my masterpiece writing assignment by claiming that temporary immobility did not, in fact, define who I was as a person, and that the other advantages - dare I say blessings - in my life at that point were near innumerable.

Well, that got melodramatic real quick. Don't feel bad if you rolled your eyes or even skipped that part. The intended segue is that I was back on crutches again this past week. And, like most stories ending in crutches, it's not a glorious memory like parkour gone wrong or an accident with a rusty bear trap would be. I was playing soccer with Alex and some of his friends from high school, and we had just agreed to add ten more minutes to the second half. Not because we were young, spry, and energetic, but because the opportunity to play on a full sized field in a huge city is a privilege that doesn't come often. My team was on the attack, and I was racing a crowd towards the loose ball in the box. Another in on the chase was a hefty teammate approaching two hundred pounds. He attempted to slide tackle the ball to just tap it in while I got a nice shove into his legs from the goalie in his own attempt to stop the ball. I ended up tripping over my leviathanic teammate after his tree trunk legs slid into my feet, in a graceful sequence I'm sure rivaled the beauty of a swan's dance. My first two thoughts after pathetically crumpling in a dog pile of has-beens on the field were a) confusion as to why this mammoth decided to launch himself at the ball given his size and proximity to other forms of life, as well as b) wow, my foot hurts. After the game, I gave up going out for drinks with the guys, which should give those who know me best a good measure of how much my foot was hurting.

The dream team.

I couldn't be sure what exactly happened, but seeing as I'd broken that foot before, I wanted to be. The next day I headed to La Clinica Santa Fe, one of the best hospitals in the city, with Brother Jorge, the monastery medic. They took X-Rays, which determined that my left foot had merely suffered a bad sprain. They wrapped it in a soft cast, which was basically every layer of a normal cast except for the hardened shell. My instructions from the signed hospital documents told me I couldn't take the cast off for a week. The next sentence proceeded to direct me to ice my foot every six hours. Faced with such contradictory remedies, I looked to Jorge, who was shaking his head and holding back from laughing as if to say, Welcome to Colombian healthcare. It was then that St. Cloud Orthopedics crossed my mind. I've seen worse, I thought to myself.

I wasn't strictly told to keep all weight off during that week. But, given my unease with the hospital's diagnosis (I say hospital instead of doctor since I talked with around five different people) and considering I couldn't fit any shoe on over the cast, I decided to play it safe and just crutch it for the week.

Getting picked on, as always. 2011, foot.

If you've never experienced the joys of using crutches to walk, imagine needing to use your shoulders and arms to walk instead of your much stronger legs, which makes every short walk a workout that leaves you panting and sweating upon arrival. Also, depending on the quality of the padding on your crutches, you could end up with blisters on your hands and bruises on your sides. Besides blisters and aches, walking on crutches gets you two other things I despise: attention and pity. The sequence of what people do when they see someone they know on crutches is comically predictable. As soon as their eyes slot machine their way up from assessing the the situation with a level of scrutiny no doubt challenging that of Gregory House, they invariably ask how it happened. You then end up spending a majority of your waking hours recounting the ever so glorious tale of maimery until the majority of those you see on the day-to-day are familiar with your riveting memoir. I sound spiteful when, in reality, people are just trying to be nice.

Another way people show their kindness is in their pity. Holding doors, patiently waiting at the top of the stairs, or plastering themselves against hallway walls to leave you space, the fun really never ends. As nice as it is to not have to worry about spilling an aluminum lunch tray with cafeteria food carried by a dude who looks like cafeteria food as he tries to balance on two aluminum sticks, the level of helplessness and ineptitude reaches heights normally reserved for infants. Again, my complaints are not at others’ kindness, but rather at my own situation in those moments.

Adorable puppies help anything. 2013, knee.

Working with kids helps alleviate the self-pity and attention, mostly because they are so into their own lives and dramas that they don’t care. Some of the younger ones are also so unaware of personal space to begin with that it becomes comical when I need more of it to simply maneuver essentially four legs. It should be known that I get mobbed by 10 year olds every morning, asking questions they should know the answers to, asking others they shouldn’t know the answers to. Frequently, I simply weave my way through them while firing some sassy remarks back and forth. But ‘weave’ is not in a crutch’s vocabulary, so I end up standing there and enjoying the kids’ faces as they realize I can’t get past without a Mosesian parting of these tiny Colombian seas.

Overall, crutches suck. I don’t like the attention or pity that comes with physical ineptitude, preferring my more clandestine and numerous mental ineptitudes. It made for a long week, especially trying to command forty kids’ attention when my mobility was limited. But I am now off the crutches, walking almost normally, with some in-house physical therapy to keep me on my toes (HA).

"Hey, we won our basketball game today.
No thanks to you!" 2016, foot.

I’d like to think that Colombian sass had a lot to do with my positive spirits this time around. What followed the “How did it happen” question was usually another comment that was more along the lines of, “So, when are we going dancing?” or “I’ll race you to lunch!” Of particular mirth to my coworkers, since they’ve now seen me dance on multiple occasions, was to sarcastically claim that I’d already learned to dance the Patacumbia, which is a kind of Cumbia dance that essentially does look like you have hurt one foot and are hopping around on the other. Such wry, sometimes cruel humor is a favorite of mine, and is much preferred to the babying often received, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Even the kids got in on it. As I was leaving the school one day, scampering through the light rain that was beginning, the kids on the basketball team yelled after me, “Corre, Forrest!!"

Spanish word of the day: Medical terminology! Yeso means 'cast', while hueso means 'bone'. Also, muleta means 'crutch', not to be confused with maleta, meaning 'bag' or baggage. Spanish continues to fascinate me.

Song in my head lately: Carlos Vives wrote La Tierra del Olvido a while back, but recently collaborated with most of Colombia's other famous singing corps to create this phenomenal collaboration video. While I haven't been to a lot of the locations shown, this will probably always remind me of Colombia and its awesome people.