In this essay I will deep dive into the things I learned about the daily life in the country of Colombia with a focus on its efficiency.
I have been living in the beautiful country of Colombia since the beginning of this year. Of course for someone coming from central Europe this has been quite a shock. Don’t get me wrong, I travel a lot and am used to different places operating differently. But what intrigued me a lot about Colombia was their approach to doing the daily tasks of life very efficiently.
During the first few weeks I was amazed how loosely Colombians interpret rules and laws. As a German this is the worst thing you can do, rules are made to be followed exactly and strictly and there should be no room for interpretation. But here it is different and it works surprisingly well. This loose and flexible approach allows people to adapt to almost anything.
It got me thinking, if you can bend the rules can you be more efficient? To me it makes the impression that Colombians get more out of life even though they are not as wealthy. Just spend 10 minutes in Colombia and you will notice that the people are so much more open and happy compared to us westerners. Because they can’t buy everything they need they utilize what they have to its maximum.
This challenge to live as well as possible with the few resources you have can be challenging but life is a struggle and a good effort is it’s own reward.
Lets jump into some specific examples.
I used to work in a school there and was happy to see how you can be very effective while having few things.
In the West we currently have this obsession with “creative” and “out of the box” thinking, because the mammoth corporations have run out of ideas a long time ago and believe teaching students how to be creative on cue will benefit their bottom lines. This is the reason why almost all modern universities and a lot of schools have so called “creative rooms”. Filled with fancy furniture that can roll around and be adapted into flexible arrangements depending on the need. As a ballpark figure, just one of these “creative” chairs in such a room can set you back $500 or more.
And what? Usually these rooms are completely under utilized or rarely used at all. Costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per room. To me it seems simple, people don’t want to be forced to use something to be creative as creativity is something that unfolds naturally and you use whatever you have.
In the abundant western world this does not really matter, such a room is just another luxury item to own and to say: “Look at what we have, aren’t we the best?”!
In Colombia I was happy to see that here the setup is different. Students from a very young age use flexible arrangement naturally. That is all they know. They naturally form groups large and small depending on the use case. This goes so far that there does not have to be a permanent classroom at all, everything can be adapted.
A large group? Just build a multi desk setup. If more people join just add more tables. Really hot weather? Just move the lecture outside. Really bad weather? Just move everything inside again.
Best of all, the whole setup for a school of 100 students might cost less than just one chair in a fancy western university. Because the furniture is just simple plastic chairs and tables. Easy to replace and easy to get.
Some schools go even further and have flexible classrooms.
Another thing I noticed, next to that there are many public sports facilities, even the tiniest town has at least one or two roofed facilities, is that these facilities are multi purpose.Of course you can play soccer, but these facilities also double as basketball fields, or volley ball fields or as venues for events like concerts.
And yes, in the West such facilities exist, but they are usually very expensive building complexes. Here they are very simple steel structures, just a roof, a flat surface, some stands and benches that’s it.
Cheap to build, easy to maintain and open to everyone.Their popularity is apparent being busy all the time.
The same modularity we see in schools can also be found in restaurants and bars. First, a restaurant or a bar can be very tiny, just a single table on the front porch of a private residence can be a restaurant. Not these huge overblown establishments we are used to. Making it easy for people to open a hospitality business means in turn there are extremely many. A small town might have hundreds of restaurants.
Here we can see the same, small standardized tables and chairs that can be adapted into all kinds of arrangements. But that is not all, even the purpose can shift. What is a restaurant by day can be a bar by night. What is a liquor store can be transformed into a bar in no time. What is a nice restaurant during the week can be a crazy night club on the weekend
A big debate currently is happening about the use of public city spaces, especially the streets. As it seem that our current rules favor people driving really big and stupid cars making cities extremely hostile to pedestrians, cyclists and everything that is not a three ton SUV. Especially in rich nations this is a problem.
How they do it in Colombia goes mostly for small towns but can also be seen in large cities like Bogota.People just share the streets. There might not be a sidewalk necessarily so pedestrians walk on the street, cyclists as well. Life happens on the streets.
Coming from Germany I was very reluctant at first because in my country walking on the street means screaming and anger or death. Here they are public that invite everyone to take part. From cars, trucks, motorbikes, bikes to pedestrians and children playing.
Sometimes a small restaurant or food carts pops up on the curve and people turn the street into a communal experience.
Colombia does not need special lanes for every kind of transport, one street for all and everyone is paying attention to everyone else. This is how it should be and the only sensible way forward for our overcrowded western cities as well.
There are many big vehicles. Pick ups, SUVs, Semis. As in almost every country. But still the mayor traffic on the roads is due to motorcycles. They are affordable, easy to fix, require little energy to move about and are very efficient. You can cover all your local transportation needs with a motorbike. For long distance it is convenient to take a bus.
When it comes to cars, commercial ones are quite small. Especially the taxis which are everywhere in Colombia. These are small beat up cars, but they do the job. No need for a giant expensive vehicle. This in turn also makes using taxis quite affordable for everyone. Because here the functional use is front and center and not the comfort or the prestige. Common taxi in Colombia, small and beat up.
These vehicles are being utilized to its maximum. It is not uncommon to see 4 people on a scooter. Maybe with one or two dogs as well. People transport five boxes of beer on a small scooter, or gas, or meters long steel rods. It all works. Even the telecommunication technicians drive around on a motorcycle with a small trailer that holds a latter and their tools. Fast and efficient.
One day we had a clogged drain in the house and someone came on a scooter with an air compressor to unclog it.
The same goes for cars. What might seem dangerous or outright stupid to a person from the West is absolutely normal here in Colombia.
Well they use masts. That is probably the simplest and easiest piece of infrastructure ever invented. Of course bigger cities have more power and internet lines underground but in general masts are everywhere. This has a couple of advantages.
If something breaks it is easy to fix, be it the internet or the power. Second it is easy and very fast to hook someone up to a mast. Meaning getting fiber glass takes just a couple of days, the same goes for power.What takes years or decades, especially in my country of origin, is in Colombia quick and easy.
Yes it might be not as beautiful, but no one seems to notice and it makes it so much more convenient compared to buried cables. It lets you be flexible to changes in technology. All in one picture: Street live, electricity and internet masts and simple buildings.
Due to having frequent black outs Colombians have adapted to it. A lot of people and almost every store has a generator they use to make power. For convenience reasons many are hooked up to the fuse box and during an outage an easy switch is possible. What would take forever and would be very expensive if not illegal in Germany is just a quick half hour job of an electrician.
During an outage it is common to walk through streets filled with gen sets. The sounds and smell is terrible but is does the job. Grocery stores run in minimal mode, with few lights and other electricity consuming appliances. Generally stores have few to non freezers that carry food and fridges are only for cold beverages. Nothing can spoil.
The cinema in my town runs of a small gen set, powering the whole thing. The utilization of resources is amazing.
Houses are usually very small. With just the space needed. Especially in rural areas they are constructed from the simplest materials like red brick and corrugated sheet metal. Easy and fast to build, cheap and simple to maintain.
Well in this action focused final chapter there might be less action and more introspection this time. There are no personal or group based action steps but rather points I noticed that we can keep in mind and ask our self why we are doing it this way.
Things I noticed that are different between Colombia and wealthy western nations like the US, UK, Germany and so on. Here we go:
We are extremely arrogant. Which leads us to discard solutions that might be extremely simple or not in our periphery. We seek complexity. Our thinking goes that the more advanced a culture is the more complex the solution to a trivial problem has to be. Everything that comes across us that is simple, we ignore or actively discourage. We live in a very wealthy and abundant society. We can afford to overspend on everything. We don’t need to utilized things to their full potential and we don’t have to be content with under engineered solution. We can have a complex over engineered thing for everything. We like to pay high prices for so called “innovations”. Most of the time these things have existed for decades and are marketed to the public and to governments as new and innovative. Be it a creative chair, a modular house or a fast and efficient way to connect houses to internet fiber.
Here in Colombia it is not the objects that are being used make daily life go round, but the people using them. It is a flexible and open minded behavior that can only be found in a society that did not grow up through generations of unprecedented wealth.
There are no silver bullets and not one product will solve a problem 100% of the time.
What we as a society need, is to look at things how they really are. What is the real underlying problem and how can we solve it? If looked at it unbiased it is easy to see that there are plenty of simple and affordable solutions that have been in use for a long time. Solutions that work.
The West just has to look, unbiased and without ego. If we can do that.