As a teacher, summers were sacred. They were this special, rare few weeks where 100+ names would slip from my mind and in its place there would be room, space for other ideas to occupy it. I’d forget the reports I had written and start to daydream about things I wanted and places I’d like to visit. I’d pick books to read for my own pleasure instead of through a literary lens for teaching. I’d operate on a new schedule not in 50-minute incremental blocks.
It was liberating yet fleeting.
And year after year my summers looked the same. Most often traveling home to visit friends and family I hadn’t seen for 10 months—a whirlwind of reunions, life updates, and coffee dates. Hardly the sandy, water-logged summer days of my youth but they had become routine. Which was exactly the problem.
Looking for more, looking to squeeze a little more joy out of the beautiful month of July, I landed in Medellin ready to dive in. I had been clear, I didn’t want to teach ESL while I was there, but I was ready to contribute and partner with the community in whatever way I could.
Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I was first greeted by my program director Lindsay with her fire-engine red hair along with what I would come to know as her signature smirk. After a brief tour of the flat and a groggy jetlag-laden introduction to Sarah, my roommate, it was time to begin.
In those first few hours we had a welcome dinner, 10 new friends packed tightly around a table, with our new community partners squeezed between us, knee to knee. We ate and pantomimed our way through those initial interactions—ripe with our attempts at Spanish and the first evidence of our community partners patience.
But we would spread out, and go about our work alone. That little group of ten, that cohort of like-minded people, dispersed across the city to start on their own projects. Lending our own unique skill sets. So, I took the gondola up into the hillside and nervously navigated narrow streets and alleyways to Fundación Huellas. A community center housed in a humble room that was too small to contain the passion and enthusiasm of its leaders. Quite literally we took our work to the streets and before I knew it, there was a sign advertising my pilates class and we had dragged mats out into the street.
And thus we began. I tried to teach the leaders some small movements and postures so they could lead classes on their own and modeled this foreign way to move one’s body in the name of fitness, mobility, and strength.
Other days we’d hop in a cab and find our way to some other backroad in the hills and arrive at another space where the women could come together. With my limited Spanish and their reluctant participation, this process wasn’t always easy. I questioned how much good I was really doing. The hurdles these women faced were much larger than your typical new year, new body kind of resolution.The hope was that movement would teach them about their bodies, give them back some of the power they lost, and find a way to appreciate what they could do. For many of them, their bodies had lived through the extremes of abuse and the beauty of pregnancy. Their bodies became vessels, for others, but rarely for themselves. Ultimately, there were moments where my own ego misinterpreted their hesitation as indifference. I may know a lot about the body, how it moves and bends, but I knew little of their lives and it took time for me to understand just what I was asking them to do. Me, an outsider, was asking a group of vulnerable women to roll around on a mat in the name of health. In the name of body awareness. Empowerment. Lofty goals for a 30-minute routine and one I likely did not achieve in the few short works I navigated that hillside.
But what I know, a lesson I have learned many times over, was that the takeaways were for me too. I’d like to think of volunteering, the act of giving oneself as an altruistic task, but in reality it isn’t, which is why I keep coming back to it. I give to understand. To learn. To grow.
In the end, I was humbled by the tenacity of this organization and its leaders—undeterred by roadblocks and limiting external factors. Instead, often reinvigorated by these hurdles and armed with a seemingly endless supply of creativity and compassion.
Admittedly, I don’t know what is happening there now. A quick scroll through their social media speaks to their continued work and in the background I see familiar spaces I once occupied too. But that’s also part of the process—moving on and moving forward. In the same way my life has gone down different paths, the organization has continued to forge ahead with the intimate knowledge of what their community needs. While I too have pushed forward, back home, thinking about the spaces I can occupy and how I can serve even closer to home.
Now, five years later, I think back to Medellin often—partially because my “VWI Medellin July 🇨🇴” WhatsApp thread still pings on a weekly basis with updates, pictures, and well wishes from the friends I made there. We’ve met up too—on the beaches of Kauai, nestled into busy cafes in the hilly streets of San Francisco, and in the snow-covered peaks of the French Alps. Had it not been for the pandemic, a handful of us would’ve summited Kilimanjaro together in summer 2020—a dream that we still share.
That one month, those few short weeks, even swayed my decision when choosing my graduate program. I ultimately chose Gonzaga because they offered a Colombia immersion and I wanted an excuse to go back.
Ironically, I am no longer a teacher. Those sacred weeks of summer I leveraged to afford myself this opportunity in the first place are now just normal weeks in my life. But when I was preparing to leave my career and explore new opportunities, I called Sarah first. Then Linda. And then the others—the whole VWI Medellin July crew. I sought their support, their encouragement, and their guidance. Collectively, they relentlessly propped me up, helped me network, and vouched for me during a season of uncertainty. They became my community, one spread out around the world, but still tethered in this shared desire to give, to understand others, and to grow.
