Losing our Humanity

I have only been in Colombia/Venezuela for a little over a month and I am already seeing the changes it has had on me. Holland once told me his sister was worried he was losing his humanity in Colombia. I’m not sure what he told her that deserved that reply, I forgot, sorry.
When I first arrived in Cartagena I was overwhelmed. I can’t say it was culture shock, but I think a better term is disgust. I could not believe humans allowed themselves to live in such terrible conditions without making an effort to change it. Local Colombians throw their trash wherever they feel like it, just to walk around the same pile of trash the next day until they are literally walking through a path carved through trash that should have been in a garbage from day 1. The half completed demolitions and partial construction projects were more than an eye sore, many of these buildings looked like they could collapse at any time. It appears as though a local found it, ignored the leaning brick walls, tossed a corrugated tin roof on top of it and called it home.

I wondered if I would ever be able to tolerate such an environment as my “home”, and although I’m still not sure if I can call it “home” it only took a few weeks for the edge to wear off. I still notice all the shit, but now it doesn’t surprise me. I step over the human feces on the sidewalk with the rest of them and dodge cars crossing 6 lanes of traffic with a bored look on my face.

A few days before I arrived in Merida, Venezuela a (British?) girl was traveling from Caracas to take an adventure trip to Los Llanos organized by our particular hostel, a 4 day South American safari. Bus drivers on night buses and the big intercity buses are supposed to drive to their destination without picking anyone up. Supposed to.. Nearly every bus driver tries to grab more people off street corners to make more money they don’t have to report to the bus company, as there is no hard proof there were any more passengers once the bus leaves the terminal.
The bus driver stopped to pick up some more customers, instead of taking a seat, they took the bus hostage and held everyone up. When told to hand over all of her belongings this girl clutched her bag and hesitated. Boom. They shot and killed her on the spot, I don’t know where they shot her but I hope for her sake it was in the head. If she lay there on the bus dying from a stomach or chest wound, she would have too much time to regret the decisions that lead to her being on that bus.

About 5 days later (my third day at the hostel) a Frenchman showed up with just a small backpack. On his bus from Caracas they were all forced to take all their bags off and run them through a mobile x-ray scanner—a big truck/semi thing the Venezuelan military drags around the country. All of the bags in the storage below the bus were lined up in the median between the two directions of traffic waiting to be x-rayed. A motorcycle with two people on it rolls to a stop, picks up his bag and takes off, the VE military was too busy to be bothered and did not do a thing to help this guy.

Yesterday I witnessed my first motorcycle accident. No less than 5 minutes after leaving my hostel for the first time in Medellin to take a stroll and explore the area I heard the *baawwwk* sound of a tire losing grip and beginning to slide. I turn over my shoulder from the sidewalk to see three people in the air and hit the ground like rag dolls. I didn’t pay too much attention to how they fell because the motorcycle was flipping in my direction but stopped about 15 feet away.

Two of the people in the air were policemen.. strange, I thought. They both stood up, brushed themselves off and walked towards the woman on the ground. It appears as though the woman chose a bad time to cross the street and was hit by the two policemen on the motorcycle, awkward/bad luck. She did a complete flip and landed on her left hip/elbow only a few feet from the curb. A few seconds after landing, she opens her eyes, looks around and starts to push herself up only to begin screaming and screaming. She collapses and her eyes close, with no more movement for the next few minutes. The two police are now standing on either side of her. I know it is bad to move someone who may be really hurt, but they didn’t even bother checking her vitals or anything. A man steps out of a shop behind me, “Ella es muerta?” (or something like that). I replied that I wasn’t sure, and that she had just tried to get up a few moments earlier.
Two more cops show up, take a cellphone out of her pocket and soon there are 5 people (4 of them cops) standing in a circle around this lady all on cellphones, not actually paying her any attention.

After focusing on her for a bit you could see she was still breathing, she opened her eyes a little after I noticed this. A big crowd of people appeared right behind her, with her cheek on the cement she was facing my direction ( on the other side of the road). When her eyes first opened they darted around, her body completely frozen. After glancing up towards the sky (probably looking for the murmuring voices behind her) she looks at me. Her stare hits me right in the eyes and she holds it for a few seconds before closing her eyes again. She does this two more times, more eye contact.

I won’t pretend that, “Oh man, Colombia has made me so hard brah” because I really did not feel good about meeting her eyes, but the whole situation felt so casual. A guy on a motorcycle had parked right next to me, he saw the crash too, started saying something about his bike. I was looking for a park when the accident took my attention, I asked the man where the park was and he gave me directions. We stood around a little longer but left before an Ambulance showed up.
I wonder if the woman lived, I mean if you’re hit in the pelvis/stomach by a motorcycle with two people on it at 40 mph, do a side-flip and hit your pelvis/stomach on the concrete again… there are probably some internal issues.

Later that day I found myself accidentally walking through a part of Medellin with a lot of Motorcycle shops. I stopped and took a peak at a Kawasaki store and went to the street bike section, with the image of those people rag-dolling through the air the motorcycle looked a little less appealing, but I had spoke with a Swede in Merida for a while about his 1000 GSX-R and I was starting to get hooked again.