cafe de Colombia cup and saucer

Reentry, readjusting, reintegrating, reflecting back home

My previous entry was on my leaving Colombia, though it was actually, emotionally drafted a bit before that final day. It’s now been about three weeks since then– three weeks since I’ve been back home in the Boston area. What happened in those last few days of life in Bogotá? What’s been going on in the meantime since returning? And what’s coming up next with my Fulbright work?

After I got back from Pitalito and it was raining, my top floor ceiling to my flat started to take in water and start leaking. It was ironic that the reservoir was still flat at around 17% capacity, and it was my flat’s day to have water rationing measures, yet the water was dripping all over my floor… from the ceiling. Fortunately I was able to pull out enough Spanish, plus Google Translate, to get things squared with Jorge so they could put in a temp fix and I wouldn’t have to find a third place to live with eight days before I left.

That night was also the first night of Passover and I had registered to go to the seder at the Asociación Israelita Montefiore. I made it there in time for mincha/maariv, followed by the seder, which had about 120 guests from the temple’s community. As when I went there for Purim, it was a real trip to know that my family was 2600 miles away doing the same thing at almost the same time as me. All of the haggadah was in Hebrew with Spanish transliterations. The melodies were the same. With some Sephardic twists, the seder plate was the same. Despite some political differences on Israel, all was the same… but the people were different and the native language was different. To me as an American Jew– especially in an utterly chaotic time where philosemites are dictating the terms of antisemitism in the US— it gave a real sense that “am yisrael chai” is about the people, not necessarily the state.1

The next day, I went to a Fulbrighter day of events. First, we went for a guided tour of the Jardin Botanico de Bogota.

botanical garden greenhouse pond

Then we had lunch together, then went for a coffee tasting at Cafe Monstruo.

Barista pouring a v60

Then in the evening, we had a dinner with some folks from the US Embassy and ICETEX. After about two dozen Fulbrighters presented their projects in Spanish during the dinner, my hand was kind of forced into sputtering out some Spanish. I could’ve presented in English, but after French immersion, I knew that growth in language skills only comes from facing fears of making mistakes, rather than taking the easy way out. So despite still not really learning verb tenses/conjugations, I was able to give my three synopsis in front of an otherwise sympathetic crowd.

Over the next several days, I spent time working on my capstone presentation, making my way around various parts of the city I wanted to re-visit once more before I left, and working on a revision of our manuscript on consumer activism in response to disruptive innovations in the neoliberal marketplace (aka, the “cashless sweden” paper).

A panorama of Monserrate from 79 with 11 by Universidad Ean

On Friday, I walked down to Cl 69 to Cafe Cultor to visit Gonzalo (the first barista we met at the beginning of January), one more time for coffee and to sort of share my presentation.

On Saturday, I walked up to Cl 121 to the Mercado de Pulgas in Usaquén one more time to meet Andrés for a cupping at Catación Publica, to meet some of the Marketing area faculty for a farewell lunch, and to look for some gifts for Judi.

tinto carts by a string of office buildings in Usaquén

On Sunday, I took a cab down to La Perseverancia and got some of Tolú’s “best ajiaco in Bogota.” I then walked all the way down Carrera Séptima one last time to Bolívar Square and the museum district. I hadn’t really gotten to see all of the Botero Museum, so decided to do so before it closed and I left.

As well, one of my favorite architectural buildings (rotated/cropped pic):

So with the exception of a few streets in the middle (Cl 35 to Cl 67), over the span of a couple days, I had basically walked the length of Bogotá from Cl 12 to Cl 121.

Then on the last day, I gave my “capstone seminar” presentation, “Specialty Coffee: Emergent Themes on Inequity in the Coffee Value System.”

This presentation was effectively a culmination of our four months of interviews, fieldwork observations, participant-observing, etc., as we noticed various themes starting to emerge from our data. The resulting themes are likely going to be driving analytical coding of our qualitative data (also, factor in about 1500(!) pictures I took over four months) and likely turn into academic manuscripts and hopefully, a non-academic book. We’ve got more than 45 hours of deeply rich recordings to go through and code, alongside the photos and videos and memos (such as these blogs), etc.

After one final chemex with Andrés at Azahar, it was time for me to wrap up final packing and cleaning up the Airbnb. I had to buy a suitcase for my sombrero, but moreso the 18 bags (well, 28, including gifts) of coffee I brought home, so things were pretty tight. However, I made it through about five layers of security, flew to Atlanta, where I was extremely grateful for getting Global Entry and basically bypassing all of passport control/customs. It was my first time using it and, even if I never use it again, it was worthwhile just for that day alone. Since I had so much coffee, I was afraid when I was basically whisked to recheck my bags that the bags would be pulled for further inspection and wouldn’t make it on the plane with me. But the flight out of Atlanta went AOK, and I was off again, this time to Logan for the first time back to Boston in 118 days.

Things had changed, but they hadn’t. It was very weird to go from being almost exclusively by myself (or at least, not a part of Spanish-language society) to being home with everyone again, while at the same time, having a lot of past-due deadlines to meet (a revision and two reviews were both due around when I was departing Colombia).

Almost immediately, it was back to school concert, student art show, soccer games, a PWHL Montreal game, getting to have Pepe’s Pizza again, checking out a new Revival Cafe in Lexington (my first non-Colombian coffee in four months was a Kenyan), the first time I got to see the aurora borealis (despite having traveled to Iceland back in 2019), dance recital, and visiting a bat mitzvah venue for Lucy in 2025. Plus, my article, “@Brand-to-@brand: the value co-creating impact of social media interactions on consumer–brand evaluations,” was finally published (over 10 years, it was submitted 10 times to 8 journals, rejected by 9 and desk rejected by 8) and the work on the cashless Sweden paper was wrapped up and this week, accepted for publication (and now needs final edits for publication).

aurora borealis over our house

Next week, I’m presenting some of the early thematic work in the Sustainable and Equitable Coffee Markets Research Group. And in a couple of weeks, I’m presenting some of it at the AMA Marketing & Public Policy Conference. At both of these, I’m hoping to pull some feedback for deepening our data analyses. Over the next several months, I’ll be reading up on how to analyze qualitative data, watching tutorials on how to code in Dedoose, and working with Andrés to start turning that information into impactful deliverables. After all, that was the whole point of this Fulbright: to collect the in situ data that could be turned into new knowledge that would be impactful both to theory and to practice. I’m also thinking of other outlets and ways I can expand on that research to answer more questions– ways that I can incorporate it into potential courses at UMass Lowell, and ways that I can work with industry people and organizations to improve what they do for equity in coffee value chains.

I wanted to post-tenure pivot my research context and methods. It’s finally starting to happen…

me, wearing an "it's colombia, not columbia" t-shirt

  1. For more, I highly recommend Shaul Magid’s “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance,” which is probably one of the closest articulations of my personal stance as an American Jew on Israel/Palestine, evolved over the past 25 years. ↩︎

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