Saturday, 14th November, Pasto: divorce lawyer
We’re back to driving. We want to get to Ecuador today so we spent yesterday and all of today on the road. It’s some of the most beautiful driving of our trip so far, unexpectedly verdant and hilly. The road hugs the edge of the rippling, velvety green mountains and we weave our way through the clement, almost Swiss, setting for miles.
The morning starts sadly for me. I get news that the father of one of my closest friends back in England has died. I had been struggling with uncharacterist homesickness for the couple of weeks after Costa Rica, and the thought of my dear friend going through this makes me want with all my heart to be back with her. I’m so torn, because on the one hand, I know that I’ll never have the chance to do a trip like this again and I should be relishing every minute of it; on the other hand, I long to be able to give her a huge hug, and that thought overrides the experience I’m living through. Her father was a wonderful man, a stoical, charming Brit, and a figure throughout the nearly two decades that she and I have been friends.
I spend our drive in deep thought, ruminating on the man that is now gone and what my wonderful friend is living through right now. Head in England, body in Southern Colombia. Disorientating and hard.
There’s work to be done. We come to a town, Pasto, which actually seems Swiss: nestled in a valley, surrounded by green hills and Milka cows. Sunny, but with a cool, Alpine breeze. We pull into a petrol station and make enquiries, and a local lady takes us under her wing. It turns out she is a defence lawyer in family law for the State. We have a number of errands which she helps us with (yesterday, we appeared in a surprisingly long article in the national paper El Tiempo, so we manage with her help to find a copy of that and then to laminate it – to brandish at future non-believers) We then ask her if we can interview her on the state of divorce in Colombia.
She talks about the rise in divorce in this country, the negative effect it has on children, the lack of seriousness about commitment from the start, the occurence of domestic violence and infidelity. No cold hard stats, but a very interesting interview nonetheless.
We leave Pasto, and Colombia, totally smitten. What an amazing country. The people are warm and friendly, the place works well and knows what it’s about, the world of drugs we’d heard about is so far from the truth of our experience that I want to holler from the rooftops that everyone should come to Colombia. I loved it.
