My mother always made it a priority to visit family in Colombia.
Whenever we could afford, we would travel for the summer to my motherland, specifically from where we came: the state of Santander.
In early 2022, my uncle opened a rural road restaurant serving truck drivers and townspeople with local dishes like Changua. When I visited a strong storm damaged and flooded the restaurant, incapacitating and damaging parts of the restaurant. My uncle asked my mother and I for help: How can we prevent the restaurant from flooding from the recurrent storms with the limited resources at hand?
So we all met alongside the restaurant employees to draft a strategy. Our decisions included rearranging the place of kitchenware under more sheltered locations, establishing a protocol for protecting from storms, and redesigning the draining system.
I was responsible for designing and landscaping around for optimal drainage of water. We identified that the restaurant was at a uneven slope, the dining area was next to a steep mound, and the drain was hidden under vasts amount of mud and debris.
It was clear that the area next to the dining area needed to be adjusted such that all water was channeled into the drain at the bottom of the slope. I began working on it …
After 2 days of work we quickly made the changes stated. Now, we only had to wait for a big storm to hit to test our reforms. Specific to the drainage system, we wanted to test its effectiveness before pouring the cement to fix the drain path.
3 days later the storm came …
After the storm we checked on the drainage system and found that the change in design prevented the flooding of the dining area but eroded some of the draining structure since it was made out of clay. The new landscape design was a success. Now all that was left was to pour the cement.
Also, our protocol and rearrangement of kitchenware reduced the damages to 0, although we all got soaked …
Overall, it was amazing to work as a team, and hear about the challenges beyond the restaurant of women in the town (they made up all the workforce). I was familiar to many of their issues since I had known some of them since I was born; most of them related to poor sexual education, faithlessness and low access to education.
To put it in perspective, I taught one of the workers in their 20s how to use a computer … she had only used it twice in her lifetime.
There is so much beauty in the rural lands of Colombia, but they remain plagued with challenges that place a ceiling on the women and men living here.
