AUSTIN VS. GUAJIRA

So yesterday my dad and I are talking. I’m laughing about how my degree from UT and job experience in several fields can’t even get me hired at a coffee shop in Austin right now.

He says it’s a bad time in the job market, and it was the same way when he graduated. He emigrated from Colombia when he got accepted into UT and earned a degree in engineering, even though he barely spoke English at first.

He tells me that his only job offer upon graduation was from Exxon. That doesn’t sound so bad, but then he explains that they wanted to put him in a region of Colombia called Guajira. He had been there before and knew that it was the kind of place to get yourself killed.

He said that the people who live there walk around almost naked, wearing a sort of smock. They barely have any possessions and live in a hut if they’re lucky, but they all carry machine guns.

They block off whole regions, hired by guerillas to protect secret cocaine factories and airstrips for illegal shipments. My dad said that once, the Colombian government discovered an airfield in Gaujira that could land 747s. The only other airport in Colombia with that capacity was the El Dorado International in Bogota.

I feel a little better about things because at least I’m not dying... or I feel worse... because I’m rotting away in coffee shops rather than dodging bullets in the Colombian desert.