Our wimpy 4x4 we rented--it had no guts, but man we would have never made it on some of those roads without 4x4. Leo was really worried about driving in Colombia, but he did great. Bogotá is a crazy city to drive in and navigation was hit and miss. We had a navigation system in the car that was good for getting to a town but not great for getting to a specific address. We used a combination of Waze (a Colombian app that crowd sources traffic info) and Google maps on two different phones and the car's system to mostly get where we were going. We did buy a cell phone plan for a cell phone while we were there because we knew we'd need it, but the cell phone was old and huddy because we needed an unlocked phone. So by the end we figured out if we hot spotted Leo's nice phone from that phone we could get around fairly effectively if I read out the directions in advance because there was a pretty good lag on google maps.
One of the houses on the side of the road to La Pena. We saw a lot of sugar cane processing mills, lots of sugar cane and actually a really nice basketball court (not only random but rare, usually there's only soccer fields). I have to say though, that Colombia where we visited on the whole looked way more prosperous than the Cusco area, and way more prosperous than when we had been there 9 years ago.
So we had four days in Colombia to do family history work. The first day was a bust. Leo had to go to get his passport paperwork submitted in downtown Bogotá. After he got back, we went to a nearby mall to to buy a cell phone plan and eat lunch at Crepes and Waffles and then we drove to Tenjo and got there 15 mins before it opened, but we were worried about getting to Pacho so instead of waiting we kept going, and then we got stuck in traffic and the rain and we got to Pacho 30 mins after that parish closed. Then we drove 3.5 hours to get to Villeta. I actually felt we were pretty blessed because despite getting lost, we found our way back and it was thundering and lightening which we could see yet we never had to drive through the rain, which I was really worried about because the roads were so terrible and we could barely see as it was. And the rain was pretty intense because we saw the aftermath of landslides.
The second day we went to Utica, and the office was closed (not what the website had said) but the secretary helped us find a few records before trying to get rid of us. On one of the records we found it said the couple was married by the priest from La Pena. So she suggested we drive to La Pena and check the records there--we wanted to be back at Utica at 2 PM and I thought it kind of a wild goose chase but she said it was just up the mountain and we assumed we could go and then maybe hit some of the other nearby parishes. As it turns out it took us 1 hr and 20 mins to drive the 17 km. But the secretaries were super nice there and despite going past their closing time for lunch they helped us look through all their records and we found absolutely nothing. So then we drove back to Utica just in time to get a snack before they opened. The secretary there quickly realized she did not want to help us and just let us look through ourselves like I wanted in the first place. We found a lot of names and went through most of the books--but we could definitely go back and look closer (females in particular and I think we missed a marriage book and maybe a death one) but we were looking intently the entire time the office was open. So then we got back to Villeta in time for dinner and I had an hour long massage which was nice.
The next day we drove to Bogotá to pick up Leo's passport. And then we went straight to Pacho and got there before the parish office opened. (Pacho was supposed to be where Leo's great grandfather was from.) There we waited for about 2.5 hours while the secretaries looked for us and found nothing. They absolutely refused to let us touch the books there. After a waiting so long we went in to beg some more and they finally were willing to look through the indexes like we wanted in the beginning and we found a whole family of Colmenareses, but not related, at least as far as we know yet. And then we drove to Supata trying to get there before it closed but missed that by 20 mins because of a big truck stuck in a mud hole on the road. So we went back to Villeta and went swimming. It was a bust of a day too, except for swimming.
The next day we were really bummed about our day before. And we had a couple ideas of where to go: Facatativa (the dioceses where we were hoping to find out where older records from Utica had gone) and Subachoque (we'd been there 9 yrs ago and found records and Leo had emailed and we knew they had more) or Supata (another place that Leo's mom had thought her grandfather was from but that's what she had said about Pacho). Leo wanted to go to Subachoque and I wanted to go to Faca but we prayed about it and Leo felt that we should go to Supata. So we went and when we got there the secretary was sick so the priest was filling in and he initially told us that we'd have to come back another day because he didn't know how the books worked and didn't have time to help us. Leo was really disappointed but I convinced him to give our sob story of leaving tomorrow and coming all the way from the US, etc. So after waiting for some people to buy masses he talked to him again, and the priest let us look at the books ourselves (huge blessing there) and so Leo started through one book and I started through another and almost at same time Leo and I both found the Colmenares family we were looking for in our respective books. We then spent the next hour and a half frantically going through the books taking pictures of the records, but we didn't even finish either book completely before the office closed. But now we know where to go back to. Yay!
That afternoon we visited Leo's grandmother Carlina and then we went and saw his uncle Eduardo and cousins Raul and Alejandra. Then we went to eat--it was 10:30 and we hadn't eaten since 7 AM because we had been flying from place to place. I think whatever food we had in Pacho made me sick too. I felt awful. Luckily by morning I felt better and we flew home.
Some of the records we found.
9 years ago
1 comment:
You guys are really really really really amazing!!!!
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