A life in Cali, Colombia: The trek there

I’m typing this in the sala of Villa Javier, a residence set just off the campus of Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. I’m here with five American university professors, three from Gonzaga University and two from Seattle University, to study Spanish and do other stuff that I’ll get to in a minute.

So no pithy remarks about movies for a while. My intent is to document my experience as well as I can over the next month, trying to bring a little of life as I experience it here in South America’s northernmost country. I’ll begin with the notes that I took during the long trek here from Spokane to Seattle to Atlanta to Bogotá to, finally this morning, to Cali.

6:33 p.m. June 19 – Soaring above Atlanta, having taken off in a packed Delta 757-200 (Flight 443), I notice that we’re running about 90 minutes late.

So much for our connection in Bogota. The culprit: not weather or equipment failure (as in the airplane) but the computers that Delta uses to keep track of the baggage loading. Because of the computer failure, they have to do everything the old-school way. By hand. So we sit on the tarmac long after our scheduled departure.

The good news in all this is that MP (my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart) and I have been, unaccountably, been bumped up to First Class, which means that MP has been drinking some cava before we take off, an activity that smoothes out the late Georgia afternoon as she reads her trashy movie/gossip magazines (“the scandals,” as she calls them).

Now we’re off, though, and I can see far off into the distance, only a hazy cloud cover and the occasional cloud clumping to spoil the view. I turn on Delta’s personal entertainment system and switch on ESPN to catch the closing moments of the U.S. Open’s first round. I’d been watching the early play on the flight from Seattle and was anxious to see what had developed (looks like Mike Weir has taken the lead by shooting six under par).

We’re on our way to Cali to spend a month taking Spanish courses at Javeriana University. We’re here courtesy of Javeriana and Gonzaga University, where my wife teaches at the law school and where I am an adjunct writing instructor. Gonzaga is interested in pursuing a partnership with Javeriana that – everyone hopes – will result in some sort of ongoing series of exchange programs between the two Jesuit schools.

I have hopes of starting a project that will result in a bilingual journal of students from both universities writing in their respective languages. I hope to pair it with a class that GU journalism professor Susan English will be teaching in the fall. In any event, that proposed project, plus my relationship with MP, got me here on my way to Cali.

Now all we have to do is complete the journey.