A letter home from Colombia

By Amy Elizabeth Ritterbusch MA ’08, Ph.D. candidate, International Relations

My trips to and from Bogota begin and end in Colombian Customs and Immigration. The process always makes me nervous because I don’t feel like a ‘real’ Colombian when I enter the country. The customs agents look suspiciously at me when they see my passport (BIRTH PLACE: Bogotá, Colombia). Each time, I have to break down my life story in 30 seconds so that the agent doesn’t prolong the process and my bags don’t get ‘lost’ in luggage terminal limbo.

At first glance, most agents take me for an elitist Colombian-American who refuses to travel with a Colombian passport in order to exercise privilege. If they only knew the depth of what I do here. The last agent questioned me, “So do you have family in Bogotá?” I replied no.

Seemingly unconvinced, he prodded some more, asking who lives at my address. “I do, sir,” I replied.

“Well, where’s your family?”

And then I had to tell him: “I don’t have family here. I was adopted by an American family at the age of one month and grew up in the States.”

The last time I arrived back in Bogota after a visit home, my voicemail was full of messages from my informants. Diana Marcela had called, devastated by the disappearance of her brother. Viviana was at the hospital from a stab wound. I changed into a hoodie, torn jeans and high tops, my “uniform” for street outreach. I work in the evenings to catch the most lively moments in the prostitution zone.

The next day, a fellow outreach worker and I took an eight-month pregnant, 16-year-old sex worker to the hospital. We found Angelica with her teenage friend, also pregnant, standing in front of the brothel that is notorious for youth prostitution. Angelica was so deteriorated from inhaling shoe glue all day that you would never know she was pregnant. She hid the tiny bulge with a fluffy pink jacket and little white spandex. Her side ponytail made her look innocent and yet damaged at the same time. Her pimp and/or drug-dealing boyfriend came with us to the hospital. He didn’t say a word. We just stared at each other.

There are no words to describe the pain I feel for these girls. They are so hardened that they flit around the streets with giddy, stoned smiles as if the pain rolls off them. The scars are so deep and have so many layers. How can one begin to start healing these wounds?  This is Angelica’s third child. The baby will be born into a brothel unless seized by the state. Or maybe the child will grow up adopted, wondering, perhaps in a far away land, what her mother looks like.

When I think about it, the exposure to violence, babies, sexually exploited young girls and Colombians has really done a number on me. But I try not to dwell on how it has affected me. Instead, I have thrown myself into saving others. One of my informants is a former youth sex worker with a fifth grade education who now sells magazines to earn money. We are talking about her return to school. I want her to succeed so she can show others a better life is possible.

My hope is that my research will make a change for the better in the lives of these young women. My research is guided by training in international relations and geography (human, critical and feminist) and the ongoing personal and intellectual support of my adviser, professor Patricia Price. My experience working as a research assistant on professor Price’s NSF-funded research in Little Havana and taking Dr. Price’s ethnography course provided me with the methodological edge and critical sensitivity defining the contours of my activist-scholarship on the streets of Bogotá today.

I always dreamed of living in Colombia and listening to the music, dancing salsa, exploring its pristine beaches, snow-capped mountains and rolling coffee hills. The real experience of living here is more human, more complex and yet it tops any of my early romantic dreams of Colombia. On the way to the grocery store, I looked around at the people walking the streets, people who kind of look like me. Out here on the streets, I feel I am home in this paradoxically foreign but not-so-foreign place.