Shakira, Shakira!

November 16, 2006

Today I´m a little tired, since I got home last night at 1am! Last night Rachel, Billie, and I went along with friends from the seminary-university to the Shakira benefit concert here in Barranquilla. Shakira, if you don´t know who she is, well, just google her, or ask any teenager and they will tell you about her, is a Latina pop sensation. I first started listening to her music back in 1998 when I was starting seminary in Chicago and one of my roommates got me listening to her music. Shakira is probably the most famous-in a positive way-Colombian on the planet right now, and Barranquilla, where I am, is her hometown. As I was saying to some friends at lunch today, she is like the Queen of Barranquilla. Anyway, I´m a big fan, as is my four-year old daughter Sofia who loves to point out that she is exactly like Shakira because she is also from Colombia, speaks Spanish and English, like Shakira, and Sofia can do the Hips Don´t Lie dance, with her little hips, and some of our friends at home have been lucky enough to see Sofia do this dance, it is very funny. She was most recently doing it in the dairy aisle in Bogota the night before I came here because Shakira music was playing in the grocery store near my mother-in-law´s house. Shakira´s music, in my humble opinion is awesome, and I just love it. Juan and I have all of her albums, and so going to her concert last night was just pure joy for me. Rachel told me that a few times during the concert, I was the only one in our section dancing, while everyone was sitting. I was very excited.

Getting into the concert was interesting. The local paper said that over 1000 Colombian police and security were going to ring the stadium, and I was one of 70,000 people with tickets. Juan reminded me that the crowds can get crazy sometimes, to be prepared. It took a close to three-hour wait outside of the stadium to get in as we waited on line. At one point some people tried to cut in line and a bit of a scuffle ensued. At another time we walked past the makeshift police-army command post where we witnessed a group of police-army beating a man as they took him into custody. Standing a few paces ahead of us in line was a man dressed as a woman-and a very beautiful woman at that. She was very nice but as we got closer to the stadium we were separated into male-female lines, she got in line with us girls. We walked past a line of Colombian army officers who proceeded to harass her verbally and in horribly sexual explicit ways. I was really upset by this and by the beating I had just witnessed a bit earlier. At one point she rallied, threw back an insult at one of the army guys-a brave thing to do-and got them to turn on one of their own to laugh at. I got the sense that people in the line were ready to protect her. After we got into the concert all of the crazy on the outside went away and we were just able to relax and enjoy the beautiful music. But getting inside was a reminder of what life is like here in Colombia. At the same time I could easily see similar things happen in the United States but luckily I have never witnessed them firsthand, but have watched them happen on the evening news…