What not to follow

by Emer Murphy (Ireland)

Making a local connection Colombia

Sonia is seated behind a wide grey desk, a hefty monitor in front of her and a bowl of cinnamon candies nestled between pen holders at her side. She doesn’t speak English and I speak only broken Spanish, but, on finding out that I’m from Ireland, she’s discovered some common ground. Both her English boyfriend and my brother live in London. We talk about my regular visits to my brother’s flat in red-bricked Cricklewood, and she tells me she’s going to visit her boyfriend soon. His Spanish is better than her English, she jokes. Hers is the second desk I’ve sat in front of today, and she is the fourth recipient of my tale of woe, rendered in garbled Spanish and slowly decreasing shock. We sit in a large, drab building somewhat outside the centre of sprawling Medellín; not quite the outskirts, as I can still see the glut of houses through the window, crawling up the mountains like colourful ants. I have seen them every time I look up this week. Sonia is taking my report so that I can claim back on my insurance. I had not expected this type of bureaucracy as I wandered through Medellín’s crowded public spaces, admiring corpulent statues of animals and people by the city’s second most famous son, the sculptor Botero. But I have been mugged at gunpoint and, despite no real expectation of catching my assailant or getting my things back, I am at Sonia’s office to file my report. It’s taken three hours to reach her desk. Take a number, wait your turn in the rows of plastic chairs joined by metal bars. Sit in the back as you watch the denizens of Medellín do the same. Signs taped to the windows tell us we cannot bring guns or use mobile phones – ironic given that I’ve been relieved of one by the other. The mugging was anti-climactic; I was out on my own after dark and walked into a man holding a shiny black pistol at the level of my stomach. “Los platos, los platos!” I didn’t know what los platos were but I opened my wallet and gave him what I had. “El celular!” When I copped the reality of the situation, I started to hyperventilate, at which point he persuaded me to be “tranquila, tranquila!”, had a feel around the bottom of my handbag for anything missed, and then disappeared into the night, or rather the getaway taxi waiting for him at the corner. He told me not to follow. I explain all this to Sonia, who makes sympathetic but unsurprised noises. She and I know Medellín’s reputation; only days previously I had sped around Pablo Escobar’s private island, where paintball stains on the walls now replace the blood and money that once reigned here. Abandoned and burnt out, a playground for gangsters is now a theme park for backpackers. Colombians have worked steadily to rebuild their country’s reputation after the drug lords and the guerrillas; I am complicit in an unhelpful type of tourism. Now I am the only tourist in a crowd of Colombians reporting their crimes. Sitting on my own in the back of the room, feeling lost and alone, I am determined not to cry here. As a sheltered European, I don’t even know if it was a real gun – the only ones I’ve seen before were in museums. At Sonia’s desk, I answer her long list of questions. I accept her cinnamon candies, though I hate cinnamon, and quickly realise the measure of her popularity; colleagues pop into the cubicle to interrupt my denuncia for a chat about the weekend and a sneaky sweet. They laugh about things I can’t quite decipher, and I try to remember what colour his jacket was and his hair and if he was taller than me. After maybe an hour, we are done, and Sonia has typed up the document in block capitals, giving me a copy and assuring me that she will email a confirmation. I thank her, wish her the best for her trip to London, and step out of the grey building into my own getaway taxi, wondering if her boyfriend lives near Cricklewood.