Mining and Disparity

Hopefully by now you have caught on to the fact that we are having a lot of fun during our time in Colombia. We are seeing and experiencing some beautiful and amazing things. A lot of our experience of learning about Colombia has been fun, but some of it, like any other country, is also sad.

While in Medellin, Jessica (the MCC SEEDer) was a great source for learning about some of the injustices going on. We noticed that in Medellin, there were some pretty impressive social resources. There was a big library, a large "stadium" area that had lots of exercise resources (multiple swimming pools, soccer fields, etc), and an excellent public transportation system, to name a few. We commented to Jessica about how impressed we were with the public services, and she said that it is not as simple as it appeared. On the one hand, she really appreciates the services that are free of charge. She went on to explain how the Choco, located on the Pacific coast, is the poorest region in Colombia. She told us that it is also one of the richest. Choco has a lot of gold and other minerals and oil. Mining is a big industry there. When minerals or oil are mined from the land, regardless of who does the mining, the region that it comes out of is given monetary compensation (from the government or the company, I'm not sure). Antioquia is one of the richest regions in Colombia (Medellin is in Antioquia). Somehow, people in power in Antioquia make it seem as though the gold that actually comes from Choco is coming from Antioquia, and then the Antioquia region receives the money from the gold instead of Choco. While eating breakfast one morning with Dhira (Jessica's roomate who is from Choco), she told us about how her home is very beautiful but also very poor. She confirmed that many people mine for a living there, but although there is gold and other natural resources, they are still poor. After this, we viewed the rich resources of Medellin in a different light.

Jessica had also recommended that we take the metro to the metro cable, and take the metro cable to the end of the line to La Aurora. She told us that it would take us through the poorest part of Medellin and we would be able to see the disparity in the city. We listened to her advice and were indeed stunned by what we saw. There was indeed some extreme poverty in this area. We saw houses cramped together on a sharp incline that were made of many different random things, but nothing terribly secure. What was most shocking was what was at the top of the hill. We had been confused when we only saw people who looked middle class using the metro cable (since we thought it only went through poor parts of town). We realized why when the line ended and we found large, modern, and new apartments, with more new apartments in construction. We realized that the metro cable was only made because there were wealthy people at the top of the hill that needed to get down to the city. The metro cable passed not through the poor part of town, but over top of it, a literal and physical separation. A second physical separation was on land. The poor houses ended and then there was a large green area with no buildings before the new apartments started. It seemed clear that the city had gotten quite full and needed to expand, but the outskirts were poor. So what do you do? Make a big enough land gap between the rich and the poor so they don't have to see each other, and then make a way for the rich to get back to the center of the city without ever interacting with the poor. The disparity was tangible and shocking.

We know that the country we come from also has great economic disparity, and in that context, we are the middle class who benefit from the disparity. This is not an injustice that only exists in far away lands, but also in our own home. We were challenged to think about the gaps between rich and poor in our society as well. There are many questions and few answers.

-Krista and Josh