Weekend in Huila province

One of the professionals I have met here in Bogota, Natalia Jimenez, works at the Ministry of Tourism as a consultant for five of the country's provinces in their attempts to grow and professionalize their rural tourism operations. She has invited me several times to join her on work visits, but so far timing did not work. However, this past weekend of July 20 and 21, did work. We flew on Friday evening to the capital of the province of Huila, a city of about 150,000 called Neiva. From there we drove 20 minutes to a quiet mountain community called Rivera. Natalia had reserved two rooms in a small home-style hotel owned and operated by a fellow who moved from Austria to Colombia 20 years ago. He came to learn from another Austrian architect/artist and just stayed....

The place has been designed and build by the owner in a very artistic style with a nice garden area and interesting interiors. He only receives guests from referrals from previous visitors and many of them are Europeans. A nice start of the weekend...

Natalia and I went for dinner in one of the local "hot springs". We just enjoyed a very nice meal but lacked the energy to take a dip in the hot pool..... the photo of the pool is not very clear (night time).

Gold deposits in Colombia

Colombia is very rich in gold and other mineral resources. Once you get to know more about the mining industry, this is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because these resources can add significant value to the country's economic development. A (potential) curse because mining always leaves an environmental and social footprint. Can a balance be found?

Mario Escobar is an entrepreneur from Colombia who firmly believes that a balance can be found and that clean and socially responsible mining can be done. His company ASHMONT started a few years ago with a few Canadian investors. Mario worked previously at the Bogota Stock Exchange and became convinced that the country's mining industry needed a new and holistic approach. His company has a few licenses for gold and copper exploration in three different provinces. One of their projects is in Minas Santa Cruz, a community which I visited in February this year. A group of migrant artisanal miners started the community 24 years ago and it is truly a "wild west" town which could be found 100 years ago in western Canada. The local economy is almost 100 % informal.

Mario contracted a staff of about 30 to work in the community of Minas Santa Cruz. Half of them are geologists and technicians who test the ASHMONT concession on the content of the gold. The other half are a variety of idealistic professionals who undertake social projects with the community from a kindergarten with a playground made out of recycled materials, an organic garden as an environmental learning project for youth and adults, and food handling safety training for the small local restaurants where most people work without any formal training.

During the past two years the Ashmont team - which goes up & down every day in the local river boat (called "chalupa") - has worked to gain confidence from the local population. Later this year ASHMONT hopes to start a production unit which will be imported from Korea and functions as a "closed circuit" system, bringing no polluted water into its environment. The local miners will be encouraged to bring their rocks to this plant in order to start reducing the horrendous amount of mercury and other chemicals used in their artisanal (and very inefficient) way of production.

Time will tell whether Mario and colleagues can make their concept work which would result in a much cleaner mining processes and healthier work circumstances for the small scale miners. There are a variety of such initiatives in the country. One of such projects I visited is called the GRAMALOTE project in Antioquia owned by Anglo Gold Ashanti (South African mining giant) and operated in a joint venture by B2GOLD (Canadian owned mining company). I made a blog post about this project in March.

In a Colombian mining magazine one can find more and more write-ups about socially responsible mining. The article above describes a project in the Colombian Amazone region where of course the environmental caution needs to be very high. With a little bit larger scale operation and with the backing of CSR inspired investors, this exploration company has proven to cause a lot less damage to the delicate eco-system than the traditional artisanal local miners.

This article describes the need for the different national ministries to work much closer together than just in their own "tunnel visioned" traditional ways.

Would we be better off without mining at all? Probably from an environmental point of view, yes. But hundreds of thousands of artisanal small scale miners and their families make a living with mineral mining around the world. If we all would stop buying and using cell phones, jewelry and many other products, we could stop mining maybe. But I can just not see that happen....

So, just like we started 40-50 years ago to become more aware of the need to be more careful with our water resources and recycle & compost, we must continue the path to make mining a process as clean as possible and with true social responsibility. No doubt that we still have a long way to go, but professionals such as Mario are blazing the trail.

Our CIDA funded and ACCC managed program here in Colombia has as objective to contribute to this process by offering training programs to artisanal miners and their families & communities. It is a long term goal and will probably only change over generations, but we have to try.....

Project planning

Today we had a long day of project planning work. I was picked up by Bibiana Pinto, the academic leader of our project work in the Bolivar province, at 8 in the morning. We drove to the SENA training center for mining & agri-business which Bibiana manages, and we started our work at 9 am after being joined by Juan Guillermo Carvajal, the manager of a similar training center in the neighbouring province of Antioquia. If you have followed my posts from late May and early June you might recognize Bibiana and Juan Guillermo, because they both joined me for a visit to Canada

We were also joined by Sandra Castaneda, who is the project coordinator for SENA in Bogota, and by two of Bibiana's program coordinators. The discussions centered around a reflection on the work done so far and on the visits to Canada, on the terms of reference we are working on for the five to-be-selected Canadian colleges (to work with SENA on the project implementation from early 2014 to late 2016 during three years) and on a number of activities scheduled for the period from August to December this year. The discussions were sometimes "heated".....

... but without a good amount of passion for this social inclusion work, one will never get any results under the challenging circumstances. We planned & schemed....

... and compared with theoretic models from the national Ministry of Education....

One of the challenges in our project is that the target population has a very low level of formal education and most of them therefore miss what we call in Canada the "essential skills", the levels of reading, writing and math required as a starting level for most of the SENA training programs.

Sandra and Sandra offered many good arguments as a trained lawyer (and now passionate advocate for social inclusion) and mining engineer (Sandra Torres lived and worked in the south of Bolivar for eight years right after graduating from university), and of course Bibiana and Juan Guillermo can put these suggestions in a good perspective with their many years as managers within and outside of the SENA organization. This team "rocks"....

Exactly 12 hours after leaving my hotel, Bibiana dropped me off again at 8 pm. A long but productive day. I decided to treat myself on a nice crepe in the restaurant "Crepes & Wafles" which is a national franchise with not only lovely food but also an excellent corporate social responsibility agenda and reputation. They hire for the serving (and most kitchen) staff only single mothers....

Tomorrow back to Bogota.

Pizza in Cartagena

Cartagena has many nice small restaurants and I have already enjoyed many wonderful fish dishes. Last week my colleague Bibiana took me for lunch in an Arabian restaurant with delicious original food combined with a sniff of Caribbean elements. Tonight I had a great pizza with Arabic toppings. There you go: pizza has become world food in many forms and with many spices....

This small gourmet pizzeria is located at a small square with arts & crafts vendors. Any day of the year there are people in this constant tourism location. On this square also the horses & buggies in front of one of the fanciest hotels of the old city....

And an hour later after my stomach is more than full with that pizza & wine.....

Most Latin Americans eat late. One wonders if they ever sleep..... :-)

Hasta luego

Long weekend in Santa Marta

The coastal town (on the Atlantic Ocean) of Santa Marta is apparently where the famous "liberator" Simon Bolivar died. I am here during a long weekend in between project meetings in Cartagena. It is a four hour bus ride between the two cities.

The small beach in the downtown is nothing too special and I think it is mostly used by local people. The tourists seem to go to the bigger beaches north and south of the city. I always like the beaches used by local people. Lots of atmosphere:

To the left of the beach is a nice marina, a permanent crafts market and a few big new buildings with apartments under construction. I hope they will also invest in renovations of the old downtown which has a nice character but is in need of some serious work. To the right you see an important harbour:

This was one of the first places in Colombia the Spaniards landed centuries ago, and till today the maritime business is an important sector of the local economy.

Walking around I watched for a while the taping of a documentary. Interesting to see how many "takes" it takes to get a small segment right. I also loved watching a bunch of old guys discussing whatever it was they were discussing.....

All together a few nice relaxing days here in Santa Marta. Happy Canada Day to all the Canadians!

Gender mainstreaming

In all the projects and programs CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) finances, we work on gender "mainstreaming". That means that we always try to promote and when possible create equal opportunities and access for women (of all ages) for economic development. In our project between ACCC (Association of Canadian Community Colleges) and SENA (Colombian National Training Agency) this means that we try to stimulate access to training and professional training for both women and men. We "mainstream" it in all our activities.

Today I attended a session for industry representatives at the SENA Training Center for programs for the petro-chemical industry in Cartagena, in the north of Colombia (Cartagena is the capital city of the province of Bolivar, where we concentrate our ACCC-SENA program).

The session was to explain the options the new "applied research" laboratory of this SENA campus offers for their industry partners. The Manager of this laboratory is an expert in chemistry and a female professional (she is the one presenting in the photo above). Her Manager is also a chemical engineer and among the students starting to do applied research in this laboratory the balance is almost a perfect 50-50 %. SENA is already leading the way in gender mainstreaming in this field and maybe some of our Canadian colleges can learn some lessons here... :-)

I took these photos at the beginning of the session and afterwards some more industry representatives arrived. I counted at a later moment 9 visitors of whom 6 were female and 3 were male professionals. A few of them were HR Managers of local companies and others were Managers of Quality Control departments. They were all very enthusiastic about this new applied research facility, because so far they were sending some of their staff to the US and Europe for training on the displayed equipment.

The state-of-the-art testing equipment will be very beneficial to control the quality and safety processes of the local petro-chemical industry in Cartagena and Barranquilla. SENA Bolivar has also already signed a partnership agreement with one of the local Universities to have their students and staff use the laboratory for some more advanced primary research projects.

The balance of female and male professionals in this field and sector can only result in a safer and hopefully cleaner industry. That is the end-game of gender mainstreaming. Not only to make sure that we do a better job integrating both men and women in our economic life, but also to make that the industry becomes a better corporate citizen. Gender mainstreaming will the only hope to get there....

For the south of the Bolivar province - where we hope to implement our ACCC-SENA partnership programs for the small scale gold mining sector - the progress on gender mainstreaming will take a bit more time, because it is such an informal sector there. But SENA already understands the need and principles of gender mainstreaming well. A good start... !

I will leave you today with a beautiful sunset in Cartagena over the Atlantic Ocean....

Halfway the year in Bogota

Going towards the end of June I have already been here in Bogota for almost half a year. While battling a bit of a flu this week, I had to get outside today and enjoy the nice weather. This photo is a view of the street I live on since April; up the hill, I will take you there in a moment...

To the left of where I took the first photo is the grocery store I mostly use, one of the many "Garulla" outlets. It has literally everything you could be looking for. I don't go out that much, but when I get together with some people and/or when I want to watch a good soccer game in a fun environment, I go to the "Bogota Beer Factory" pub, also just around the corner of where I live:

Just a block further is the street I mostly walk down on my way to the SENA offices or to the closest shopping mall. On the sign you can maybe read that just down the hill it crosses the "septima", the "Carrrera 7" which runs all the way from the south (the old city center) to the north, where most of the newer suburbs are built.

Turning around from that same point you get a view of the street up towards the hills. That way I do regularly a walk in a small park. Let me take you there:

This little park has a stream coming down from the hills and it really right away takes you out of the big city atmosphere. I like to do this walk during mornings when I work from my apartment and on nice days during the weekend. A few snapshots of the park:

This is a photo at the top of the park when it crosses the Carrera 1 (or "circunvular"). At this road that also runs from north to south they have built apartment buildings which have a very nice view over the city of Bogota. Here a few impressions:

I made this (not so pretty) photo to show you the street signage. It is all a grid and quite easy to find your way in town. All the roads going from north (with the newer parts of the city) to south (where the old town center is and beyond) are called "Carreras" and number 1 is up on the hill (where I am standing while taking this photo) to number 100 something near the airport. All the streets going from the east (up the hill on Carrera 1) to the west (where the airport is) are called "Calles" and they go from number 1 in the old city center to number 200 or so in the newer areas of the city in the north.

After going up, there is always again the going down. A view of the walk down....

This is the last part of my street up the hill. Behind the steep grass hill is my apartment building. I walk this up every day 2 or 3 times, and it is a great daily work-out... :-)

The entrance of the building. It is on Calle 72 close to the Carrera 1. The SENA buildings are at Calle 57 and that is a good 20 minute walk. The Canadian Embassy is at Calle 115 and that would be about an hour walk. The Embassy is right across from Usaquen where they have the Sunday craft markets of which I made a post in January. Here is a look of my apartment:

And my little home office. This is where I spent most of my time plotting & planning the project work. With the help of e-mail and Skype it is really a nice way to communicate across the country and with the colleagues in Ottawa. I do go almost every day to the SENA offices, but more to attend meetings, to catch up with people and to join them for lunches.

The work of project start-up goes slow. Too slow for an impatient person like me. But it takes time to get everybody to agree with a Project Implementation Plan which at the end of five years is the basis on which the project results will be measured against. The coming month will be the final part of that planning and later in August and the months of September, October and November we will see again a lot more concrete action. I will try to keep you updated with ongoing posts.

Being away from home now for almost six months brings me to a few early conclusions. It is a very different experience than when I did this in my early thirties as a single professional. I miss Mary, Hilary and Mark much more than I had expected. For that reason alone, I would not do again a year away like this. The travelling work will hopefully always be part of my life, but ideally that is done from the home-base in Niagara....

The work experience is fantastic and of course one learns so much more from a country and its cultures when you live there for a longer time than the 1, 2 or 3 week visits. I have met already a lot of fascinating and intriguing Colombians through both work and social activities. I will do my best to share as much with you as I can of those people and their realities as I can through this blog.

Right now I have to get rid of this typical "Bogota gripa"(flu) through lots of sleep, vitamins and what they consider here the magic solution: "canella con limon". All the best & be good!