Rosales in Bogota

This morning I made some photos to share with you. For starters, this is an impression of the Rosales area where I now live. In the background you can see the mountains against which the east side of the city of Bogota is built. Rosales is next to Chapinero where the SENA offices are where I work.

This is the gym where I work out every other day. It has four floors with different stations. The top floor has daily spinning classes. Not ready for that yet. Bogota is at 2,000 meter altitude and your body needs some time to adjust to that. But I do every other day my 2 km on the rowing erg plus some upper body instruments. Little by little I will get in shape again....

As you all know Colombia is famous for its coffee. There are many small places, all with great coffee, and then there are the Colombian franchises. "Juan Valdez" is probably the Colombian equivalent of the Canadian "Tim Hortons" (don't think Juan was a hockey player though). This Juan Valdez is the closest to my apartment; about 3 blocks. There are hundreds of them in the city and throughout the country. In Canada I need 4-5 Timmies per day to get my "caffeine fix". Here I only need 1 or 2. Paul Brennan (of ACCC) and I will one day open a Juan Valdez franchise in Canada...

"Zona G" or "Zona Gourmet" is right around the corner of my apartment. There are some 40 or so restaurants with good Colombian food and also with food from around the world. You can't really get this restaurant area in one good photo, but there are 5 streets like this full of restaurants. I try to be disciplined and cook most of the time for myself. There is a wonderful little "farmers market" just down the street from a cooperative "Finca" just outside of Bogota. All organic stuff.

This is a view of "Carrera 7" to the north. Bogota is super easy to find your way. All the streets going north to south are called "Carreras" and the streets east to west are called "Calles". Carrera 7 is one of the larger streets. On Sundays part of the street is blocked off for traffic and thousands of cyclists, walkers, runners and roller-bladers make use of that wonderful city offer. At Calle 72 it veers to the left (to the west) and then it continues on Carrera 15 all the way north till who know where. This lasts from 8 AM till 2 PM. Tomorrow I will be one of the thousands of runners there!

This is Carrera 7 to the south, the direction I walk from my apartment in Rosales to the SENA offices in Chapinero. As you can imagine in a city this size (about 6 million) almost everybody lives in apartment buildings. The house market prices have been going up steadily the last few years, partly influenced by a growing economy and partly by a larger influx of "gringos" like me...

The walk from my apartment to the SENA offices is about ten minutes. I already bought a good big umbrella because in February and March the rain comes down here steadily most of the days. Below are a few photos of the SENA administrative buildings:

This is the main entrance. SENA offers training and education to millions of Colombians each year from short 2 week training programs to 3 year diplomas. Very much like the Canadian Community Colleges. These offices are the SENA headquarters and only administrative staff work here. In the city of Bogota there are numerous training centers, and also around the country. All training and education is free, so SENA is 100 % dependent on the annual government budget. The vast majority of the thousands of teachers and instructors go on year to year contracts. During the coming months I will share more details along with my own learning process about the SENA operations.

One last photo for this entry: my "Bancolombia" branch across the street on Carrera 7. Maybe not such an exciting photo, but an interesting experience to open an account as a foreigner. Good service but also a charge for every single transaction. That is the world of the banks, eh?

A little bit more about my work (building on my entry of a few days ago). About 700,000 people in Colombia have formal or informal work in mining and related service industries. One of the current challenges of the Colombian mining industry is that about half of the estimated economic activities in the sector are informal (and a fair amount of that are illegal operations). A lot of work needs to be done by the Colombian government to change as much as possible of the informal activities into formal businesses. That way the crime will reduce, the workers are better protected, the small scale miner associations will have more access to business loans and in general the expectation is that it will also improve the environmental control on this industry. A better balance between increasing the economic potential of the mining for the country and protecting the rich eco-systems of the country needs to be found. The main results will flow from more access to and improved training.

Between 2004 and 2011 the gold production in Colombia increased from 38 ton to 56 ton, and the estimate for 2012 is 62 ton. A huge increase without enough "checks and balances" so far. Canada represents 52 % of the foreign investment in Colombia for mining research & exploration. So we also have a role to play in improving that balance as desribed above. The plan is to move to more "responsible mining" or also called nowadays "sustainable mining". The challenge is of course the pressure of the world market. Gold prices increased from $300/ounce in 2002 to $1,500/ounce in 2011. The increase of production has been both with more larger corporations and with a lot of small scale operators. The informal mining takes mostly place in remote and isolated areas of the country, such as the south of the province of Bolivar where we intend to assist with our EFE/EPE program co-funded by CIDA and the Colombian government.

In these rural areas at this moment the formal education of the people is on average only five years. So we must describe these miners (and miners-to-be: youth and teenagers in these areas) as what we call "non-traditional learners". SENA is starting its outreach of training programs in these areas, but most of their curriculum needs to be adjusted to non-traditional learners. It must include much more life skills, work skills and awareness about citizenship than they do in the urban training centers.

The second focus of our EFE/EPE program will be on small scale agriculture, husbandry and (river) fishery. Not everybody in these rural communities should have to become a miner. At the moment the agriculture in these communities is under-developed and too much food needs to be imported from elsewhere (which makes the cost of living higher than is needed).

SENA has already a few years ago declared that this work will be one of their priorities. The cooperation with the Canadian ACCC and its member colleges is very much welcomed. In Canada many colleges work in rural regions and train thousands upon thousands of Canadians for both large and small scale operations in mining and agriculture. There are numerous "lessons learned" and best practices which we can try to transfer to our colleague teachers and instructors of SENA. One of the examples already mentioned is the fact that in some Canadian conservation areas there is actually small scale and responsible mining taking place. With its share of the revenues of this mining the park management supplements its limited government supported budget and that allows them to for example build "green bridges" over the highways through park areas (which offers the opportunity for animals to migrate more between areas and accelerate eco-system restoration).

Not all the Canadian practices will right away be applicable in Colombia. SENA is still a very centralized organization with all of its curriculum development taking place in Bogota. We will work hard with them to create more decentralized models so that local SENA training centers can better react on the local training needs. That is the model which was designed right from the start with the Canadian community colleges in the late sixties. SENA was created in 1955 and in line with the then government policies, it was created as a centralized organization. Old habits change slow, but the SENA strategists have declared also this decentralization (and internationalization) process as one of their priorities. Let's see whether the Canadian involvment can function as a catalyst in that process.

More next time....