Reply #12: The frustrating part for me

[RagingInMiami]

Is that I have a very large family down there and they insist on never letting me out of their site for a single moment for fear that I will get robbed, kidnapped or killed. I know things are dangerous down there, but they do tend to get exaggeratedly overprotective of me.

I'm pretty street smart and know how to take care of myself, especially when I'm out taking photos, but it was impossible for me to break free from any of them to go wandering and discovering, which is when I take my best photos.

And it's pretty hard to take photos of something when I have an uncle or a cousin waiting for me and asking me "ya?" as in, "are you done?". I'm the kind of person who can photograph something for an hour just to get the right shot, but there was no way for me to do that in Colombia because I always had an impatient family member around.

Nevertheless, I got some decent shots in Cartagena, but not a whole lot in Bogota because I had spent three days with an uncle running all over the city trying to secure my Colombian national ID in order to get my Colombian passport, which would enable me to enter Cuba as a journalist once Castro dies.

I used to have dual citizenships when I was studying down there at the age of 15, but that expired because I never applied for the for the national ID like all Colombian citizens are supposed to do when they turn 18.

So I was able to get my temporary national ID when I was just there because they still had me on record from when I was a minor. Now I have to wait a few months to get the passport, but I'm going to see if my uncle can pull some strings to make it quicker.

Then the rest of the time was spent at my uncle's ranch outside Tenjo, a small pueblo outside Bogota, where we spent Christmas Eve and Day and New Year's Eve and Day.