I live in a concrete jungle. There are cement roads, homes, schools, stores, churches, factories, etc. Real estate is very valuable in Cartagena so every milimeter is utilized for residential and comercial space. My middle class residential neighborhood is about 75 cents from my personal paradise. Depending on traffic, in about 30 - 40 minutes on a bus, I can watch the sunset over the Caribbean, play tennis, go boating, and eat in 500 year old plazas from colonial Spain. I feel very lucky that I don't need to fly here or pay for an expensive hotel to enjoy such a beautiful place. There are many tourists from Bogota, Medellin, and Europe that have to do just that. School starts Monday so I will only be able to go down to Boca Grande and the Historic Center on the weekends or when you come and visit. Until then, my new paradise will have to be a 75 cent Coke at lunch time at my cement school.
9/26/2010 – 10/15/2010 C1 On September 26, 2010, I arrived along with 8 others to Barranquilla, Colombia to reinstate the United States Peace Corps . We are called Colombia 1 (C1) even though there were many groups before us from 1961- 1981. Peace Corps had to shut down its programs to protect Peace Corps Volunteers’ (PCVs) safety endangered by guerilla warfare and civil unrest. Now, we are back serve to Colombia`s northern coast, but are still proud to be former PCVs from Liberia, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Colombia. Our ages range from 26 to 69 years old. We are all are from different regions of the US and have different ethnicities. One PCV, Carolina, is from Bogota, Colombia, but moved to Florida when she was 17 years old and became a US citizen. Now, she is serving both the US and Colombia. Our oldest PCV, Philip, served in Colombia from 1963- 1965, returned home to be an ESL teacher in the Compton and Watts neighborhoods of Los …