Category: misc.

By Brae:

In Colombia lots of people have magical beliefs. For example, lots of indigenous tribes believe a kind of God lives inside the earth that’s called mother nature. The Kogi people are an indigenous tribe that live in the mountains around Santa Marta. They have lived there since before the Spanish arrived in South America hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They were the only tribe not conquered by the Spanish who took lots of other tribes as slaves and killed lots of them. They believe that Earth is the great mother and it is their job to look after the planet. They think that lots of the other people living in Colombia are not looking after the earth well. The Kogi is also called Kágaba which means jaguar in Kogi language. We have seen lots of Kogi people walking around in the mountains and in the jungle (but we haven’t seen jaguars yet!). The Kogi are a bit different to other people we see. They live in huts in the mountains in the wild, and they all only wear white and most of them carry a special kind of bag made out of a kind of plant, with the strap over the top of their heads. The men live in different huts than the women in their villages.

Most Colombian people don’t believe the same as the tribes do but they listen to them and respect them. For example, they closed the amazing national park called Parque Tayrona for a month before Christmas, so that the indigenous tribes could come down from the mountain and give Tayrona back its magic. They cleaned it and said special prayers in it and did some things that they thought would give magic from mother nature and when all the people went away and the tribes gave it back the magic all the animals came down from the mountains. Maybe that meant that when we went to Parque Tayrona we saw all sorts of amazing creatures.

When we went to Minca again we did a tour to learn about Kogi tradition. We got some special red mud. We got it wet in a special Kogi place by a waterfall and rubbed it on our selves. Then we got some leafs and stuck them on us. After that we took the leaves off and let them go in the water. Next we climbed up a rock and washed the mud off in the waterfall.

This is a Kogi tradition that would make them well. The red clay is only found in one place in the whole of the forests around Minca.

This week, we also went to find a special village that was made by an ancient indigenous tribe more than 500 years ago. It was called Tayronaka. For centuries it was overgrown by jungle, then it was discovered and they cut down some jungle and so you can see what it was like. While we were there, we leant some things about the tribes and did some special breathing and listened to the sounds of nature and thought about the things that the tribes believe like mother nature. It made me think about all the things in nature and how amazing it is.

 

 

 

By Brae:

As I mentioned in my other post we can’t drink water from the tap but there are also other things that are different to England about the water.

Since a few weeks ago, at some times of the day we don’t have water at all, because there is a very big water shortage where we are living because it doesn’t rain for nine months of the year. Every day between 8.30am and 10.30am if we turn on any of the taps or showers in our house, nothing happens. The only thing that comes out is a hiss and maybe one drop. So, that means you can’t wash your hands, no showers, no washing up, no washing machine etc. We have to remember to fill up a large bottle of water so we can wash our hands when the water is off. Then the water comes back on but then it goes off again at 2.30pm until 5pm, and it goes off again 10pm and stays off all night until 5am.

We are lucky enough to have a swimming pool in our building but now they can’t fill it up with clean water so this week they filled it up with dirty green water and here is a picture of it before and now!

  

It has made me think about water. Do you?

For example:

• When you turn on a tap in England to fill up a glass of water, and you can just drink it without worrying if you will get sick, you don’t normally think you’re so lucky.
• Or if you turn on the shower and there is nice warm water, do you think you are lucky then?
• Or when you go to flush the toilet or wash the dishes and there is water, are you grateful?

When I go back to England I will try to think about water more.

You can read the first Bugs, creams and medicines post here.

By Oren:

In Parque Tayrona we were walking back to our cabaña after dinner one night, when I looked into the sky and was amazed to see the moon in the shape of a letter ‘u’ . It looked like a bowl shape and it was like the moon had fallen over. 

It was really cool to see it because I never knew the moon could look like that. Wherever I’ve seen the crescent moon it has always looked the same so it was a bit of a shock to see it like that.

When we got home we looked it up and found out that it was like that because we are near the equator and the moon has different phases depending on where you are in the world. 

You can find more weird stuff here.

By Brae:

A while ago my Grampa made a comment on the blog and he said that maybe we’re getting so used to things in Colombia that we don’t even think about some of the things that are different in our life here. He said:

“Maybe you could do a blog entitled: ‘Now I think of it… here’s what’s different about an ordinary day in Santa Marta… I already take these things for granted, but now I think about them, they’re like nothing I’ve seen or done before…”

We thought this was a good idea so this week, just when we were going to school as normal, we tried to notice the things that we’ve got used to, and remember that they really aren’t at all like life in England. My dad asked us to look for things that would not be normal if we saw them in Norfolk!

1. We see pelicans flying past and iguanas and lizards on the walls
2. I haven’t worn long sleeves or trousers for 8 weeks, even when we go out at night!
3. Like I told you, people sometimes ruffle our hair as they walk past us
4. Having a cold shower is just completely normal!
5. The road to school hasn’t been built yet so it’s all dust
6. We see stray cats, ducks, chickens, geese, big packs of dogs and donkeys all the time on wrecked streets (there is really a lot of rubbish here). These photos were taken on our way to school:
7. Arepas, patacones and empanadas just seem like really normal food now. As normal as toast, chips and pizza!
8. It seems normal to buy our breakfast at the side of the road on the way to school
9. We don’t really think about not having a seat belt in a taxi or the crazy driving and beeping horns. By the way, you can have as many people in a taxi as you can squeeze in – sometimes 7 people in a tiny car!
10. People here don’t talk about the weather because it’s always exactly the same. Boiling hot.
11. We have got used to having bug spray and sun cream as soon as we wake up and now we do it really quickly
12. If someone has no crash helmet (and no t-shirt on!) on a motorbike we just look at it like its normal now. (But we’re still not completely used to seeing small children and babies on the front of a motorbike, even though that happens a lot too!)
13. We eat mangos and pineapples and passionfruits all the time, even on our cereal
14. When we go in the sea we never, and I mean never, get cold, and there are tropical fish swimming all around your legs
15. There are huge cactuses and palm trees everywhere
16. On the way to school we see mangoes on the pavement where they’ve fallen off the trees and we just step over them like rubbish. 

It’s weird how we were really amazed by lots of these things when we first arrived and it all seemed so strange and sometimes even made me a bit nervous but now it seems normal. I’m going to try to remember that when I am doing something new that I don’t really want to do, because now I know that I should just try it and I’ll get used to it.

I’m even used to getting up at 5.45am every day!

By Oren:

In Colombia, you have to be a bit careful what you do as some things that aren’t rude in England might be rude in Colombia! There are different rules about what is rude or what isn’t.

One of the things that is fine in England but is rude in some parts of Colombia is measuring with your fingers. For example, my teacher Mr Frost really likes fishing and if he caught a really big fish and then showed you how long it was using his fingers you would think it was normal. But in some parts of Colombia the people here would be shocked about how he was measuring things! I don’t know why but doing that means something really rude. The way to measure things in Colombia is by putting one hand up your arm and the distance between the tips of your fingers and your hand is how long the thing is.

One of the other things that isn’t very rude in England is beckoning with one finger.
It means something rude too but I only discovered you shouldn’t do this here recently.

The last thing I found out was that if you show how tall someone is with your hand horizontally, that’s rude too. You have to have your hand vertical because you only have your hand horizontally if you’re talking about an animal. So if you do that about a person then they think you’re calling them an animal and they really don’t like it.

There are also things that would be rude in England that aren’t in Colombia. One of the things is that waiters in restaurants clear your plate as soon as you finish your last bite, before anyone else has finished! The other thing that is not very good manners in England is people saying they’ll do something ‘ahorita’ (now) and then not doing it for hours or days, or saying they’ll do something ‘mañana’ (tomorrow) and then not doing it until next week, or never!

The first weird stuff post can be found here.

And in case you don’t already know, we’re now trying to do something amazing and really help children in Colombia. Check out our fundraising page: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

By Oren:

In Colombia the value of money is very different. They have pesos instead of pounds and one pound is five thousand pesos! Things in Colombia usually cost at least one thousand pesos, but you can still get things for much less than you would get them for in England.

For example, a few times a week we go out to breakfast to an ‘arepa’ stall and the last time we went, Brae’s breakfast was an arepa with sugar and aniseed and it cost 500 pesos (ten pence) and mine was an empanada stuffed with meat for 1,000 pesos (twenty pence). Also, you can go out for lunch and get a pretty large set meal with a soup, fish, coconut rice, salad and patacones with a lovely fresh tropical fruit juice for between 7,000 and 15,000 pesos (£1.40-£3)! Lastly, this ice cream cost me 60p!

At first we were just thinking how cool it was that things were so cheap then I found out that some of the parents of the children we met at the football game, who come from La Lucha, only earn about 5,000 pesos (£1) a day. So they might have to find cheap food, and lunch for 7,000 pesos doesn’t sound so cheap any more! So now we realise how lucky we are.

So, if you think about what people can buy here with just a few British pounds, your donations to our fundraising page could really make an impact on these children’s lives, even if it just seems like a small amount to you. So please keep donating if you can. Here is our fundraising page: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

Thank you!

 

By Brae:

The reason I wrote this post is because my class in Norfolk (Emerald class) are learning about Colombia for their topic. I am really happy that my friends are learning about Colombia so I wanted to help them by telling them about Colombia’s history. Last week we went to a place near where we live that told you all about the life of someone called Simón Bolívar and I learnt lots of things about Colombia. There was also a really cool tree there to climb on.

Before 1499, there were lots of tribes living in Colombia. They didn’t all live together, they lived separately. They believed different things and they spoke different languages and some hunted their food and travelled around following after the animals they hunted.

In 1499, some Spanish explorers arrived in Colombia on boats. The head explorer was Christopher Columbus but it was some of his friends who actually came. They built Santa Marta as their first city.

The Spanish saw that lots of the tribespeople had gold and emeralds and jewels. They wanted to find the gold city and take all the gold and jewels back to Spain. The Spanish beat all the tribes and called Colombia theirs. They named it New Granada and they built more great cities like Bogotá that is now Colombia’s capital city.

For 300 years Spain ruled Colombia (New Granada). The Spanish called in thousands of slaves from Africa, so Colombia was then a mix of 3 different people, the Spanish, the tribes and the Africans, and the Spanish had all the power.

But some of the people were not happy with what the Spanish were doing. One of the people who was not happy about it was called Simón Bolívar. He got himself an army of rebels and called war on the Spanish. He wanted Colombia to be in charge of itself instead of Spain ruling it.

Simón Bolívar took down the Spanish and in 1821 he made a new country called Gran Colombia but it was much bigger than Colombia is now because it covered all of Colombia and Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela and some bits of Peru and Brazil.

But later on he fell ill from an illness in his lungs. They sent a doctor to him but when the doctor arrived he was already too ill so he died. We went to the place where he died and it is now a Simón Bolívar museum.

When he died he thought that he still hadn’t done his mission. His mission was to make Gran Colombia a single country that was really big and powerful but when Simón Bolívar was dying all the people were planning to break it up into smaller counties (like it is now).

I think that quite sad that Simón Bolívar fought all his life but then when he died he still felt bad.

When you walk around Colombia you see statues everywhere and museums about Simón Bolívar and lots of parks and streets named after him so he must be a very important person to Colombia. People think he is a hero and that he freed Colombia from the Spanish.

I might not have wrote down everything about Simón Bolívar but I think that what I have written is true and I wrote this completely on my own.

 

And in case you don’t already know, we’re now trying to do something amazing and really help children in Colombia. Check out our fundraising page: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

By Brae:

Sometimes ladies on the street smile at me and Oren and ruffle our hair when they walk past us when we are on our way to school. Other times, like once when I was in the supermarket with my mum, the lady behind us in the queue was telling the check out lady and the man who was helping with the packing to look at the colour of my eyes and my skin and freckles. She was doing it in a nice way because our eyes are a different colour than the people here, because nearly everyone in Colombia has brown eyes.

We think that everyone knows that we are English.

Imagine if everyone in Colombia did not like us or gave us funny looks or were unfriendly because our skin and eyes were a different colour. That would make our trip to Colombia not fun at all. I wish that everyone in the world was like Colombian people because they seem to be friendly to people even if they look really different.

Here are some photos of different Colombian faces that my mum took at carnival. You can see that they don’t look much like me but I like looking at all the different faces here.

 

 

 

 

 

And in case you don’t already know, we’re now trying to do something amazing and really help children in Colombia. Check out our fundraising page: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

Here’s a quick update on our blog statistics. Thank you to everyone who has helped us colour in some new countries on our world map!

As well as all the places we told you about in the first ‘World Famous!‘ post, people are now reading our blog in Argentina, Israel, New Zealand, Japan and Spain. Awesome!

We now have 310 readers in the UK and 110 in Colombia!

If you know anyone who might be interested in our adventure who lives in a country that is still grey on our map, please tell them about our blog.

And in case you don’t already know, we’re now trying to do something amazing and really help children in Colombia. Check out our fundraising page: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

You can read the original World Famous post here

By Oren:

This is a special post as this isn’t just for fun. I’m not just writing this blog today to tell you what we’ve done this week. I’m writing it because I want to help some Colombian children we met and we need your help.

While we are in Colombia, my mum is volunteering at a charity called Tiempo de Juego (Play Time). Tiempo de Juego help children who come from a poor neighbourhood of the city near us, called La Lucha. Lots of children who live there have very different lives from me and Brae and most of our friends. They don’t have water or electricity in their houses or doctors if they get sick. Also, lots of them don’t have a dad living with them and their mum has to go to work to earn money so they don’t have anyone looking after them after school and there are some scary and dangerous things happening where they live.

Tiempo de Juego organises football clubs for children, so that they have something good to do. Also, when they go there they can learn from older children that joined the football club when they were young who can tell them how to keep away from the bad things in their neighbourhood, stay safe and have a better life.

Because my mum is working there we got invited to a charity football match. It is quite interesting as when they play football in their clubs the games have three parts. First, the children in both teams agree on some rules at the beginning. Everyone has to come up with the rules and there is no referee or grown up to decide the rules for them. For example, they might say that a girl has to score the first goal (loads of girls play football in the clubs), or that play stops if someone gets hurt, or that everyone in both teams has to celebrate when someone scores a goal, and things like that. Then they play the football game. Then the third part is when the teams get together to decide who has won, and it’s not necessarily the team that scored the most goals! It is also about which team followed the rules best that they agreed at the beginning.

So, last Wednesday we went to a special pitch (it was special because the famous Colombian footballer Carlos Alberto Valderrama, otherwhise known as Pibe Valderrama, played on it when he was a little boy) and we watched another charity play against Tiempo de Juego. In the middle of one of the matches the team instructor came up to us and asked if we wanted to play! We were a bit nervous at first because we didn’t know what the rules were, but we soon got the hang of it and before long we felt really part of the team.

In my match my team played well but the other team scored more goals ☹ but after the match we talked about who followed the rules best and we gave points. The score in points was, us: 7 and them: 5, so we won! ☺

I wonder if Mr Brown might want to do a match like this in training to see how it goes?

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot about these children and I feel sad that they don’t have the simple things they need in life. So Brae and I have made a fundraising page and we really, really hope that it can make a difference to their lives.

Here is the link for anyone donating money in the UK: EverettsInColombiaFundraising

Or if you are in Colombia or somewhere else, you can give money directly to Tiempo de Juego: DonateTiempodeJuego

If anyone felt that they could make a donation we would be so happy and we’d feel like our blog was really doing some good, apart from just talking about our adventure.

We hope to see our new friends from Tiempo de Juego again so we will tell you more about them next time.

Thank you, friends, family and all our blog readers that we haven’t even met yet!