I’ve spent some time there. Bogota feels like NYC.
Medellin is a gem. Cartagena, Zona Cafetera, ...
When Americans talk about places like Colombia, it sounds like some dirt poor place. There is a healthy middle class
Colombia is a great place where many Americans are retiring.
I meant she had little money, not the country – $300 to be precise according to the article. Bad grammar on my part including spelling.
As a fellow immigrant, they do! Unfortunately it can also come with a lot of sour grapes.
“Heck yeah you’re going to USA!!” from your friends soon changes to “Bah USA, I bet it sucks anyway”
A person with a median income in the US probably lives much better than a person with a median income in Bolivia, yet they're both middle class relative to their own countries.
You’re right everything is relative, but I think US media often gives off the impression of South/Latin America as a completely poverty-stricken landmass that people can’t wait to escape from so they come by foot or boat from Honduras or Cuba or Venezuela or Ecuador or Nicaragua or something.
Also, I know people who own large properties in Colombia and a friend of mine owns a 500 cattle ranch in Bolivia (called La Pradera)... These folks are very well off, even by international and US standards. There is significant wealth in South America if you look in the right places.
And many parts of Colombia are very metropolitan and modern, which has come as a surprise to people I know in the US/Europe.
People think, oh, imperialists messed with you, no wonder you’re poor!
No, it’s local mismanagement. Look at Panama. From banana republic to a democratic republic. People have to work for it. Their government has to be more honest than not. Eliminate corruption as much as possible.
Conversely look at San Francisco. So much money and so much corruption and waste. A decent government and it would be such a better place for everyone, including the poor.
Things can usually be fixed at a more immediate level if one can absolve everyone else of blame and do the hard work oneself.
That’s not to say there aren’t large-scale problems which require collaboration to solve, though.
Either way, both spellings come from the same person (Christopher Columbus/Cristoforo Colombo).
Some random things I remember about Colombia:
* Cycling is big there. There are more bike lanes than pretty much anywhere else in Latin America. The practice of closing streets on a particular day for community cycling originated there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa); in pre-pandemic San Francisco you might have encountered this as "Sunday Streets". It was mainly inspired by Colombia. Colombia has also had an increasing number of competitors in the Tour de France, including the 2019 overall winner, Egan Bernal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egan_Bernal).
* It's very, very mountainous. People in the U.S. might know Peru (and maybe Bolivia) as Andean countries, but there are four countries in the Andean Community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean_Community) (which is primarily a trade bloc rather than a geographic designation), and the mountain range continues along the entirety of the west side of South America. Most of Colombia's population lives near the mountains, although the biggest cities are primarily centered in valleys, sometimes stretching far up into the hills. There are dramatic views all over the place. Three cities have aerial tramways (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerial_tramways#_Colom...) either for commuters or tourists. I also heard that, as in other mountainous regions elsewhere in the world, the major cities have maintained significantly different cuisines and dialects because of how much effort it took to travel between regions, even when they were pretty close by as the crow flies.
* There are lots of public parks in the big cities, and they get a lot of use, even long into the evening. It probably helps a lot that it's quite warm in Colombia, but I also felt that this was a cultural thing. I was impressed at how much safer I felt in parks in Colombia at night than I would in urban parks in the U.S., probably in a Jane Jacobs "eyes on the street" sense.
* There are well-attended tech meetups and conferences. :-)
* "El Dorado" was originally a person, not a city, although it's not clear if the person really existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Dorado).
* They make delicious things with corn (really, probably true of anywhere in or adjacent to Central America).
* Medellín (unlike other cities in Colombia) has a large, effective metro system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medell%C3%ADn_Metro).
Edit: A striking thing I forgot to mention is the calle/carrera system, where most cities make enormous use of numbered streets and avenues, to a much greater extent than ever I've seen anywhere else. Imagine if every city were like Manhattan, but with a numbered grid imposed over much larger parts of the city, even parts that weren't visually part of the main numbered grid. Colombian city streets are overwhelmingly numbered rather than named, and the Manhattan-style "5th at 40th" references are the norm.
I think celebrating diversity for the sake of diversity is stupid and the piece is probably PR for NASA.
But let me highlight that these sort of stories play a very very big role in many remote parts of the world (I come from one). The fact that someone owns a car, a house and has plenty of food on table can also be an inspirational story for many and I am not exaggerating.
I remember in my school when teacher asked us what our ambitions were our answers were "getting a job". One girl said she wants to be a "graduate" and the whole class laughed thinking she thinks too much of herself. So let us not downplay her achievement as "middle manager", I hope her story inspires more Colombians and let us hope that it also helps us think better of Colombia as a country and its people.
The site is "goodnewsnetwork.org".. This is consensual pandering.
It’s not like the article is claiming that this one success story means all of our gender and inequality problems are solved.
Wow, really need to throw some (what you think are) insults in there huh?