And then the rain came, and the clouds hadn’t reached the western skies. The sun shone through the heavy rain until it exhausted its early vigor and reached its steady maturity. Then through the first clouds to cover the sun shone that weird twilight, and the city standing in the rain, and then the swifter darkness.

And we went through the darkness, across the wet field (why?), me following a 70 year old man (waiting to cross a street we did not need to cross, returning), the puddles, and all the while the rain. Into a concrete canyon and up to an iron door upon which we rang as the rain was finishing.

The son-in-law appeared, but from without and with a bag and opened up the door and sent us along the dim stairway and into the apartment. A baby played on a mat, a television flickered, a living room withal, a dining room beyond, and a kitchen around the corner. A light bulb was installed after we greeted the convalescing man, his wife, the daughter.

The daughter now . . . after she served china plates bearing greasy empanadas and a steel cup full of cola (yes, resting on the plate), sat behind an armchair leaning over it. Her dark hair fell feathered on her forehead and her eyes peered at us from a the distance of strange generations. The meat in the empanadas was something like pig, and I thought perhaps a chigüiro was a kind of wild boar. But it is a large, aquatic rodent, wild and from the vast plains reaching all the way to Venezuela.

We sat in that typically bare Colombian apartment. A clock for decoration on the wall, a calendar, plastic chairs around the table, ancient and unpolished wood upon the floor, the unprotected light bulbs, dark brown faces with generations of the jungle for generations imprinted in them. The chigüiro was from the department of Arauca, so I gathered they had some connection there and descended from its ancient dwellers. The convalescent, I learned, had worked in the slaughterhouse in Bogota since he was 19 years old (stunning the cattle with a hammer from above and jumping down to finish them off with a knife to the jugular). Plutarch is his name, Plutarch; and his son’s.

Oh history! Oh country! Oh planet, this!
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Üpdates on the ü provided by a fine, ES keyboard.

Here we are in the third world in the year 2011. What does it look like?

The trash was taken out. They don’t take cans out because those would be stolen, so they leave the bags by the side of the road. The garbage truck comes around sooner or later and all is removed.

There is a whole industry for people who are known as ‘recyclers’. They pick through the unsorted trash and reap the benefits of cashing in on what is recyclable. So they go through the bags sitting by the side of the roads before the garbage truck hauls it away.

I just watched one pick through the trash in front of the church, and at the end he reached into an inner pocket and pulled out his cell phone. Then I saw the headphones. Then I realized he was changing the music. And last of all I was struck by the incongruity of it all.

A line was forming–after they had absorbed the first and early morning line–when I got there. They are processing a lot more, at least at this time of year, and it was standing room only up in the Ministry. There was a Uruguayan guy ahead of me, most friendly and helpful; beyond him an Italian a la mode and between me and my compatriot a plain, French woman. The line, of course, stretched out behind us.

Chamorra is the name of the large black security guard who monitors the entering, and he somewhat resembles Obama. I do not know the name of the small woman who was his counterpart, but she was always the more aggressive. They let us in to crowd the waiting room. I had #204 and when I got in they were on 163. It took about an hour and a half to get attended.

A Venezuelan woman was in the crowd. Polite and insistent at first. She wanted student visas for her two sons. Turns out their father is Colombian and the functionaries at the Ministry, quite reasonably, pointed out they did not give visas for Colombians to be in Colombia. The mother, in a reasonable tone, said they of the Ministry were not entitled to determine the nationality of her children who were quite decided on being Venezuelans. She was trying to use the Ministry to get around duly registering her children with the Colombian government according to all the responsibilities thereof. She left in a state of indignation, so worked up she slightly raised her voice and twice uttered the word “Respeto”, only without really pronouncing the S, just hovering over it with a soft velar fricative since she was from Venezuela.

There was among the Californians there, one having explained to him that you need a letter from your bank stating your income, and of course you can’t present it in English, of course you can’t get it translated by a translator not recognized by the Colombian government, and when that’s done you take the translation to another branch of the Ministry for them to look up the translator in their files and stamp it, and then if you want to give us a copy of all that, have it notarized. He wrote it all down and then humbly asked if there was anything else–must have been his nth time at the Ministry since he appeared to have reached the manageable, docile stage Americans do not always achieve at first.

A Swiss couple–I gathered–were having the same difficulty. They had all these ATM receipts, but that is just not going to cut it with the bureaucracy here. Not stamped, not translated, not legalized, and probably not the right color. They didn’t get their visa that day and they probably had wads of cash in their Swiss accounts back in Zurich waiting to be spent on Colombia.

Among the Californians were two talking about the good life: concerts, parties, sex, drugs and beaches. After a while one of them got concerned about how long he had been waiting. (Mine took five hours and he was there both before and after me that day.) “Why is it taking so long? I ain’t been to jail in this country yet.” This to the other guy who’s first question on entering had been if any of the functionaries spoke English, which was promptly answered in the affirmative.

The Italian guy had already bombed out, the Uruguayan guy had already bombed out, and the French girl was about to bomb out, not to mention the Californian bombing out, the Equadorians refused, the nuns and even a monk with all the trappings who did not that day obtain their visas. I was there so long I saw that less make it than bomb. There were two German girls who had been rather desperate earlier on and had been attended notwithstanding. One was energetic and the other was quiet. The second was waxy-pale, like a china doll, with an upturned nose and curly hair and awfully narrow eyes. She had green socks and dirty white sneakers, a phone just like mine, read a book in Spanish some of the time, sat quietly most of time–almost without moving–drank a little water, and near the end listened to music from her phone. I managed to find out her name was Maria. She sat beside me twice.

One Latin American guy got mad at the runaround and became indignant with the hot-tempered functionary who had had to deal with the Venezuelan woman earlier. She–the functionary–lost it and angrily invited the guy into the back to argue, which apparently they did. She came out not altogether satisfied, it seems, and shortly after that attended me in a tight lipped and curt manner. The man who made her mad–dogmatic glasses, hat pulled down to the top of the glasses, unshaven and tedious, tedious, tedious–was back and complaining later on. He had a tattoo of the devil but he didn’t believe in the devil or God, but if he had a religion–he told a woman listening to him–it would be Lutheran.

The problem there is that it is not the living functionaries’ responsibility to explain the requirements. That is the responsibility of the website. That creates frustration for both of the parties meeting in the installations of the Ministry, you see. They used to provide a person to explain, but that wasn’t any better, as exactly what they require nobody there seems to be too eager to risk asserting. I don’t blame them for that, but I do think they might cut down a bit on the requirements and just charge more.

Lots of people bombed out. If they charged for applying regardless of acceptance or denial the way the USA and Australia do, then they’d have enough money. As it is, they don’t have enough money to use the archives, so that function is out of commission at present. There was an Italian there who the previous year had established some connection by giving them the original of his marriage certificate, which of course they kept–anything you give them they keep, which is why you copy it and notarize the copy and then give them that. He was, of course, rejected that day for not having the original and unfortunately, even if they had wanted to check the archives . . . well, they couldn’t have. I’m thinking he’s going to have to get another copy of that from wherever in Italy it is they keep those records.

That’s what I had to do last year, and luckily I had already realized they keep everything. When I showed them the raw copies, that’s when they told me about notarizing them.

Are you still reading this? That’s what it’s like at the ministry, and the waiting in that dreadful room while all around you people bomb out, loudly or quietly.

One guy there knew how to do it–a blond American dressed not altogether casually: quiet, cynical, talking to the people around him, waiting. He even got a laugh at one of the functionaries’ expense when she tried to pronounce his polish name as something-whisky. He got his visa. But for all I know it was his nth try, like it was my 12th time there in my life. Maybe he had even been there the day before when they had a rat gnaw through a power cable and shut the whole operation down . . .

We have a strange situation with security in the neighborhood of our church. Every block that is worth living in usually has its own security guard–which is why most Bogotanos prefer apartments nowadays: a watchman at the door 24 hours. Our church is in a nice neighborhood with houses all in rows and parks, and so in the parks there is a guard shack and a guard. The neighbors pool together to pay someone to watch. And it came to pass that they set up a new situation with the guys who watch our street, and payment was altered and whatnot.

So the guard came to ask me something and wanted contact information for the deacon who handles all that, and I gave him what I could find.

When the deacon came to church last night for the meeting he told me never to do that again. The thing had been settled previously, the phone number had been the wife’s cell phone, the deacon is a bit protective about his family, and the security guard was just hassling stupidly. He’s a very good and busy deacon and I felt low. At one time they didn’t even give church directories to non-members and have had many problems with phone numbers being abused in the past. I should have known, being here for long enough to know that if you don’t know what a person is up to, you assume the person is up to no good. It is a bit like when the Rabshakeh tells Eliakim, Shebna and Joah that Hezekiah has removed the altars of YHWH on the high places and that as a consequence YHWH has sent him to take them out: something like what went through their minds at that point should have gone through mine.

Anyway, I had a strange nightmare last night and I think I’ve figured it out. I felt so bad that I was punishing myself about defrauding the deacon. I dreamed the devil had come (or maybe I was visiting certain regins of the planit) and he kept replacing the money in my wallet with fake money. The thing was, I kept putting my wallet on the table and having other transactions with the devil in which for some reason I handed him real money and he always replaced some of it with counterfeits and then denied it. Maybe we were playing Monopoly, but that isn’t clear. Another member had recently remarked that the devil always plays dirty. I’m not even sure how I knew it was the devil, but it was, with long sleeves, and a button down collar and his hair combed from left to right. And I kept handing him a fan of bills, and leaving my wallet on the table and giving the devil every oportunity.

I think I understand a little better today why Colombians feel guilty if they’re robbed or give villains an opportunity. They have an expression they use: di papaya–I gave them a chance, and by implication they mean: I deserved it.

I have to get a visa, so I was rather in the midst of that uniquely Colombian experience this morning.

No dice on the visa, and when I asked what exactly the problem was the person was not forthcoming. So I have to guess and try again, and that’s just Colombia. That’s not the passivity with which an American takes things, but that’s the passivity with which a Colombian takes things and . . . well, with that attitude things aren’t going to change soon, so a foreigner has to do the same.

So after striking out I went to McDonald’s where I know how things work, just as a matter of relief. Ordered a #1, which after a blink the attendant figured out was a Big Mac meal.

Here are the differences:

1 the fries are different. I understand that McDonald’s wanted to use their own potatoes originally and Colombia said no way because the potato crop here is important. So they use Colombian potatoes and it is a bit different, not as powdery inside and a bit more solid altogether (I used to be a manger and I know the criteria).

2 the drink is smaller, but that´s because it comes without any ice. That is very natural, and I think an improvement. I do not understand why Americans compulsively put ice and lots of ice in everything. If you were to look in our freezer right now, you’d probably find no ice and we regularly drink things at room temperature including soda.

3 the ketchup is made in Chile. Hard to get ketchup not based almost entirely on sugar here. Not big in the use of the tomato, Colombians.

4 the mayonnaise packs you get with a meal. They love pink sauce, and if you mix ketchup and mayonnaise you probably get, if not pink sauce, something that will kill you as soon.

The Big Mac was the same and I was in and out in less than 5 minutes, which is grand. That’s because I went shortly after noon and not after 12:30 when they all start eating and it gets packed out.

Now to recover all the lost time.