Adapt or Move Again?
Posted on October 12, 2018 by Andrea Lawson Jaramillo, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
A perspective of when family stability is prioritized and you opt to stay amidst bomb attacks.
“Choose where you want to live – you leave in a week”. Those were my dad’s words when he got into the car as we picked him up at the Bogotá airport in 1989. Pablo Escobar had recently declared war against the government and began killing influential people and setting off car bombs, terrorizing the population. While my dad was away on business he learned that Drug Lord Pablo Escobar had assassinated Luis Carlos Galán, a promising young presidential candidate. For my dad, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He was going to protect his family and get us out, preferably that week.
My mom, sister and I started crying on the ride back from the airport. Insistently, my dad kept asking us to choose a country where we wanted to move to. Reluctantly we said Argentina, our last posting.
We had been in Colombia for about a year and were beginning to feel comfortable. The last thing we wanted to do was pickup and go. I was dating my first boyfriend and had started meeting people beyond my school. I was invited to the prom and was having a dress made. I was reconnecting with my mom’s extended family and my cousins. I was starting to understand what it meant to be Colombian.
That night in the car, my mom gave me and my sister the “look”- the one she gives us to let us know she will handle things and calmed us down a bit. Over the next few days she slowly started inventing excuses on why the move had to be postponed. The departure date was pushed first for a few days, then for weeks and eventually disappeared. In the meantime, we adapted to living in Bogotá where the security risks had escalated exponentially over night.
How smart or rational can this decision seem to an outsider? I am not sure. However for us it felt right. We preferred to adapt to living in a city with violence than to be uprooted once again and so abruptly.
Before we realized it, we had adopted new behaviors in an attempt to keep safe. When it was “bombing season”, we knew to stay away from shopping centers, movie theaters, or places where large groups of people gathered. Instead, we would get together at peoples homes, play board games, listen to music, and cook as a group.
When the “bombing season” would end, we were allowed to go back to restaurants. However, we were instructed to sit towards the back in order to be safe in case a car bomb was set off on the street. We were to sit in a place were we could see the entrance to the restaurant and be attentive of what was going on. We were to call each time we arrived to our destination or were going to leave. At night, we wouldn’t stop at streetlights, to prevent getting high jacked. We were weary of motorcycles with two passengers; it was well known paid assassins often rode two per motorcycle. We became very alert of our environment.
In retrospect, others could perceive my parent’s decision as reckless. However it was the right one in terms of our emotional wellbeing. Although we hadn’t really talked about how we were adapting or coping with the recent move to Colombia, I think my parents could see it had been hard and decided to give us a chance to recover before having to pick up again.
