Colombia

Damon Williams-Roulston |

Colombia

|

250 730 491 |

Population (2013) | 48.9 Billion |

Population Growth Rate (2009-2013) | 1.3 Percent |

GDP Per Capita (2013) | $12,226 |

GDP Growth Rate (2009-2013) | 4.2 Percent |

Infant Mortality (2012) | 15 per 1000 |

Adult Literacy Rate (2012) | 93.6 |

Life Expectancy (2012) | 74 |

GINI Coefficient | 53.9 (High) |

HDI | 0.711 (Med) |

% Below Poverty Line (2012) | 32.7 |

Key Statistics

My grandmother, Ana Ines Flores, was born in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula in 1936, and lived the entirety of her youth there, in what is currently the world’s most violent city with an average of 3 murders per day in 2013. At age 11, she moved with her family to the small Ecuadorian mining parish of Portovelo, escaping some of the drug violence typical to the area but not completely leaving it behind. It was there that she met my grandfather, Kenneth Williams, a Toronto-born gold miner working overseas. When my grandfather’s mining contract in Ecuador was finished, he decided to accept another one, located in the tiny rural town of La Sierra, Puerto Nare, Antioquia, Colombia, and it was here, in 1960, that my mother was born. Unfortunately, this was not a good time to be in Colombia. Between the years of 1948 and 1958, the rural countryside of Colombia was lashed by an orgy of guerrilla warfare, murder, torture, and numerous other terrible human rights violations now known as La Volencia, a period of violence now marked as the beginning of the continuing armed conflict in Colombia.

In 1962, my grandma was on a bus on route home to La Sierra, after a visit with her sisters still living in San Pedro Sula. After several days of travel, over land and water, she boarded the final stage of her travel- a Puerto Nare-bound bus leaving from Medellin. After driving for several hours, the bus suddenly slowed down to a crawling speed- something unheard of on the dangerous rural roads of the Andes Mountains. Curious...