2nd week of my experience

I moved into my house that I will be staying at for the rest of my traineeship. Its in a quaint little pueblo called Chía which is about 15 minutes outside of Bogota. It’s a small town with more city like parts, and some parts that are way more out in the country. My house is in the country. I live in a separate house that is on the same lot of land as the family that owns it. If you could picture those houses that are on bamboo stilts except not made of bamboo and way more modern, That’s what I live in. the first floor is completely open…with a few gates so the dogs don’t run upstairs and wake me up in my sleep. My back yard is litteraly the andes mountains.. like 100 ft away..its a beautiful sight and amazes me everytime I see it. At first sleeping was a challenge. In my neighbor hood there a bout 80 million dogs whhooo love to bark at eachother at night. Sometimes there will be complete silence then one dog starts barking ..and it’s a domino effect.. they all start barking and its complete chaos..Also the family has a rooster and chickens to provide eggs. Well their rooster (who I wanted to strangle by the way) woke me up punctually everyday at sunrise. Nonetheless the family living next to me told me I would soon get used to noises of the “campo”. I soon adjusted and the rooster nor the dogs bother me any more

In the family that lives in the house right next to mine there is a middle aged wife and husband one is psychologist one is a doctor, so the family is very well off. They have 2 children which I teach English to every morning M-TH for about 30 mins. In exchange they provide me with housing, aamazing Colombian food, and money for transport.


My traineeship takes place in Bogotá. So everyday I take one bus from chia to bogotá and one bus from Bogotá to the office. I work for a foundation called : La Fundación Seré. It is a fairly new foundation that has about 20 projects at the moment. There are two sectors one focuses on psychological research within Colombia (i.e. therapy with horses for kids with ADHD) and the other focuses on social development ( i.e. helping indigenous tribes that have been displaced from there homes do to the guerilla assimilate into Bogotá) My job is mainly marketing their projects and public relations. My boss is very understanding and has aaalot of conections in Colombia. She is introducing me to some big wigs in the marketing and pr business so I can shadow them and get more experience. Soon Ill have my own business card which is pretty sweet. Im also in charge of tweeking proposals to companies to make them look more appealing.
Bogotá is a whooole nother story. Bogotá in sum is, Chaos. Instead of a subway system they have buses with two cabins that have there own streets. The buses are aaaalways packed. Very rarely do I find a seat to sit in. If there are any old people, Disabled people pregnant women they get first dibs.
One day I figured I would beat rush hour so I could enjoy a nice bus ride sitting down. To my surprise the bus was dead! There were about 5 open seats (out of about 50) I waltz on over and take a seat. To my dismay at the next stop a rush of people come in, those of which 4 are pregnant and one is considerably old. I lost it and screamed in enlgish “DAMN IT! HOW MANY !$%@&!%$ pregnant people are in this *&^%^$ country Use a *%$%%$ condom for Christ sake!! The bus grew silent as a I relinquished my seat to a seriously pregnant women. I got off at the next stop for fear of my life. To say the least there are a lot of pregnant women here, the birth rate is very high, there are around 8 million people in bogota and it gets a little stressful sometimes.