Colombia Here I Come

I am so illiterate.

I thought I would clear up where I am going on my upcoming trip:

Not Columbia, Missouri
Not Columbia, Maryland or South Carolina
Not Columbia, AL, CA, CN, IL, IA, KY, LA, ME, MI, NH, NJ, NY, NC, PA, TN, or VA
Not Columbia, District of
Not Columbia Medical School
Not even Columbia Music Record Club

That nice list of states with cities named ‘Columbia’ is courtesy of Wikipedia, which also warned me not to confuse “Columbia’ with ‘Colombia’, the country in South America. Shoot. I had no idea they were spelled differently. So much for being clever. It turns out I’m just ignorant.

Nonetheless I am going to Colombia, South America Mar 1-12, to visit our sister church in Bucaramanga. It is part of an MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) learning tour delegation, where we will find out what they and other worthy service organizations (like JustaPaz) are up to in Colombia. We will stay in Bogota for the first part of the week, before heading off to our El Divino Redentor, our sister church.

I've been a little nervous about the trip, and almost backed out, but now that I've bought my plane ticket, I'm getting excited about going. I loved being in Guatemala last year. The difference is that Guatamala has had 10 years of peace and Colombia is lucky to get 10 days in a row of peace. But, I trust the MCCers know what they are doing, and they seem to have managed to keep themselves safe.

I’m going with 2 other people at my church, Ken Moyer and Wilmer Otto. I like Wilmer’s attitude. He thought we should pre-collect ransom money from the church and take it with us, in case any bad things happen. If we can avoid being captured, we should be allowed to spend the money on whatever we want. I doubt that First Mennonite of Urbana will go for that, but it turns out not to be a great plan anyway, because we would have to spend all the money at the airport, to ensure it would not be needed later.

I do plan to blog while in Bogota, so the first part of March will be spent complaining about my discomfort and making my blog readers feel guilty about the opulence and splendor of their middle-class American lives. I thought I'd mention that now, so everyone can get whipped up into a frenzy of anticipation.