La Guajira´s look

by Nana López (Colombia)

Making a local connection Colombia

I was looking into her Coca-Cola eyes when it hit me. Everything I knew, everything I learnt back in school in this medium-size city with an original name but with a not so original culture, turned into a different color. Her eyes too, they weren’t Coca-Cola anymore; her eyes were the color of the anthracite that was found in her birth home: La Guajira in Colombia. I lived all my life in the interior of Colombia, in Bucaramanga (Try to say Bucaramanga out loud, I believe it leaves a unique feeling in your mouth after you say it) that it’s located right beside the last of the three arms that Los Andes has at the north of the beautiful and rich continent of South America, the East mountain range. So growing up in a place that is surrounded by mountains gives you a sense of direction, you just look up and every bump in the background has a distinctive cardinal point, getting lost in this city is almost impossible. But culturally speaking we don’t really know where we are. For example, the classic Spanish architectures in the old places of the city that are surrounded with tall buildings that look like action figures of the most impressive Manhattan's skyscrapers. To make things more autochthonous, we put a cute Colombian flag in the entrance. I grew up in a cultural soup, one that doesn´t preserves its original flavors. So when a friend of mine told me she was going to La Guajira, to visit and help one of the strongest indigenous tribes that still remains in the country, the Wayúu, I quickly decided that I wanted to go too, to see for myself what an imperturbable Colombian community looks like, with no foreign contaminations, with a unique sense of authenticity. So a bunch of motivated college students joined forces to plan a trip to a little school called Majayutpana located in the middle of La Guajira. The plan was to build a rustic auditorium so the Wayúu kids could have a space to share their cultural heritage. We traveled by land, it took a whole day to get to the nearest city. The bus couldn’t pass through the unpaved road that led to the school, so we took a bunch of vans and we arrived to Majayutpana with no problem. On the other hand, the truck that had all the construction materials got stuck in the middle of a 2-hour drive. The issue wasn´t the lack of pavement, it was the trees, their strong and sharp branches didn’t let pass anything taller than 6.5 feet. The next day we decided to cut by hand all the branches so the truck could pass, we later regretted that decision. The night experience has never felt so real to me than when I was there. The wind blew violently but the sand would hit with such a delicate softness in your skin. There was no electricity and it really didn’t matter because the moon and the stars flicked the switch all night. Such a strange place, with lack of water resources, but filled with magical ones. When we met the Guajira's morning we couldn’t believe that it was the same place where we had slept the night before. Everything was so alive, the clayed colors so intense. Not only the clothes of the tribe matched perfectly with its surroundings but also their personalities too. The strong and dry look on their faces and their arid body language told us to stay reserved, but as soon as we approached to the kids to talk and play, they showed us the fertility of their souls. I talked to an elder Wayúu leader who offered me watermelon. I asked her where it was from, because it was really odd to me that a fruit that has such a water content was there, in a deserted land, and she told me they cultivate these mini watermelons not so far from where we stood, near a brook. The most deserted land growing watermelons. My eyes didn't saw the same colors since that day. I now see Colombia as an inextricable piece filled with abundance.