As A Little Girl Growing Up In Colombia -

I never did. Our house in a small pueblo outside Bogotá had no central heating. It didn’t need it. The cold came straight from the páramo , biting my ears as I walked to school in a navy blue skirt and wool tights. But the cold was a friend. It meant my mother would make chocolate santafereño —thick, with cheese melted at the bottom of the mug and a chunk of almojábana floating like a treasure.

, I didn’t have a phone, an iPad, or even a color TV for most of those years. But I had that. And that was everything. The Myths We Believed We believed that El Hombre Caimán (The Alligator Man) lived in the Magdalena River and would turn you into a reptile if you bathed after 3 PM. We believed that finding a mopa-mopa (a sticky tree resin figure) in your shoe meant good luck for the harvest. We believed that if you didn’t finish your caldo de costilla , the Patasola (a one-legged forest spirit) would lick your ankles at midnight.

As a little girl growing up in Colombia , the world felt both impossibly vast and intimately small. Vast, because the Andes mountains stretched beyond the horizon, and the Amazon rainforest whispered secrets in a language I couldn’t yet understand. Small, because everything that mattered—family, faith, food, and the fierce rhythm of cumbia—happened within a few blocks of my grandmother’s tiled courtyard. as a little girl growing up in colombia

So if you meet a Colombian woman today—if she offers you coffee even if you said no, if she talks about her mom like she’s a saint, if she tears up at the sound of a tiple —now you know why. She was that little girl once.

Were we scared? Yes. Deliciously so. But those stories were our inheritance—more precious than gold, more binding than law. They taught us to respect the jungle, the river, the mountain. They taught us that the world is alive, and hungry, and watching. Eventually, like so many Colombian children, I grew taller than the guayabo tree. I learned English. I learned to code-switch between the warm, lyrical Spanish of the interior and the flat vowels of the north. I never did

Silence was suspicious. Silence meant someone was sick, or the power was out, or—worst of all—that the coffee had run out.

The backyard held a guayabo (guava) tree that sagged under the weight of fruit. My cousins and I would climb it to spy on the neighbor’s rooster, whispering about which one of us would move to “the city” first. We believed Medellín was a fairy tale kingdom and Cartagena was underwater. We weren’t far off. Colombia in the 90s and early 2000s was a complicated quilt. As a little girl growing up in Colombia , I learned early that adults spoke in two tones: one for inside the house, and one for when the news came on. I learned to read the tension in my father’s jaw when he heard a motorcycle engine too loud, too late. The cold came straight from the páramo ,

But here is what I also learned: resilience is not a grand speech. It is my mother waking up at 4 AM to sell empanadas at the bus terminal so I could have a new notebook. It is my abuela turning a single chicken into a three-course meal (soup, main, and fricasé leftovers). It is every costeño on the Caribbean coast laughing harder than anyone else the day after a hurricane.