the hustle…
It’s a hustler’s life here. I can’t help but observe this in each city and town I travel to in Colombia. Whether it is the little carts on the corner selling your assortment of lollipops, candy, to different types of cigarettes that you can buy one of the exact type of your liking, or to minutes on a cell phone from which you can call anyone as long as you pay for the minutes used. Every street has people selling chips, peanuts–sweet or savory–soft drinks, to an assortment of local food–all homemade–as well as the most amazing fruit, your choice as to whether you would like sugar or salt to accompany it. Anything you can think to sell, they sell on the street. Futbal jugglers as well as hand jugglers wait at stop lights to perform for the next giving soul. Don’t get me wrong; when I say it’s a hustle, I am not referring to it in a bad way. It’s purely an observation and truly a way of life in Colombia.
An interesting aspect of this hustle is when traveling on the buses from place to place. The hustle becomes systematic when people are employed to come on the bus with snacks and drinks selling what they can to the travelers. I thought at first this was all random, until after too many hours on the buses I figured out they are employed and are all given turns to come aboard, traveling from one location to the next, selling what they are given for that day.
The street hustle is different however, it’s constant. There are hustlers that will do anything to make an extra dollar. They see you as a foreigner with money and that is it. And after so many encounters with this type of hustler, you begin to become angry and annoyed at being taken advantage of for the sole reason of being foreign. However, one experience with this left me with quite a different take on the life of a hustler.
It started out as a day wandering around the city solo. I was taking a picture of a church and a man passing by made a comment about it thus starting a conversation which began my unexpected city tour. As we wandered the streets of Medellin, he shared with me about his family, what he was doing here in Medellin, and how he has lived in the States for some time when he was younger. Fernando is originally from Medellin, Colombia. He has lived in Venezuela for the past 20 years or so with his family. His profession is an electrician, but as of right now he is working as a tour guide up on the coast in Santa Marta because that is where the money is good. He told me story after story about helping tourists get out of drug situations with the local police, to how he smoked weed with Bob Marley back in the day. I am not sure if anything he said was true–I have learned to take what people say with a grain of salt–but what I did know was this man was taking me around this city and asking nothing of me in return. Now you may think, “This girl is stupid! Hasn’t she heard the stories?”–naïve girl from the States gets robbed while traveling in Colombia or better yet shot and killed because she trusted a man who she thought had good intentions–Well for some reason in my life I have yet to come across such a situation or person. Don’t get me wrong, I have been in situations I probably should not have been in and with people I should probably not have been with, but this was not one of those situations and Fernando was not one of those people.
As the tour of the city went on, he showed me the most beautiful parts as well as pointing out to me the not so beautiful, which he described as “caliente”. The police don’t even enter these areas, so neither would we. As much as I wanted to believe he was doing all of this out of the kindness of his heart, I could tell at the end of the day he was a hustler, just trying to make it to the next day. This was confirmed when at the end of our time together he asked for something, anything, so he could have a place to stay that night and food to fill his stomach. For a moment I was angry and very disappointed that this was the way our time would end, but then I was brought into the reality that I was in. It’s a reality that I can only visit. As a tourist, I can see what I want to see; I can choose to ignore the people on the streets asking for pennies. But the reality is, life is rough here. It’s a hustle, doing what you can to just make it to the next day unscathed. It’s a life I know nothing about. Even as hard as it was in the States, living from pay check to pay check, it still was nothing compared to the life that Fernando allowed me to visit this day.
We left each other’s company, Fernando’s email address in my hand and the money I gave him in his. With a kiss on the cheek and con mucho gusto, we parted ways. I walked up the stairs to the train passing back into my reality, but before I did I looked back and saw one glimpse more of this hustle. As I watched Fernando walk away, I realized we both interchanged realities that day. He in mine as a tourist and I in his…as a hustler.