Arriving
I remember arriving in Magangué. My 7-year-old daughter, my ex-husband who kindly accompanied us, and I traveled in a ’75 Renault 4 packed full with moving belongings. We’d had a good day. My daughter and my ex had just seen the ocean for the first time in Tolú. I can still see their expressions of wonder before that infinite lagoon of salt water. The joy of the first plunge, the fear of going deeper. With that fresh happiness, we arrived later at a city that looked at us with curiosity, people who offered directions, and before us the reddest, hottest sun we’d ever known.
Dr. Roberto Giraldo’s medical center operated in a large two-story house. Enormous green windows. Adobe walls painted yellow. Spanish tile floors that reminded me of Cartagena’s colonial churches. On the first floor, under the stairs, a pharmacy run by Álvaro. On the second floor, rooms and consulting offices (mine included). We couldn’t have received a warmer welcome. Sol prepared what would become the most refreshing drink we could hope for: her watermelon juice.
I won’t recount the five years I worked there, nor the health brigades from the river to the mountains bringing services where even the government didn’t reach. I’ll only say that in that place where the average temperature was 100-110 degrees F, the doors opened for the first time to a calling that had begun almost as early as medicine. The articles and interviews published in El Pequeño Periódico, a community paper, were left behind when years later I emigrated to this country. I know there’s an archive in some Colombian library that perhaps one day I’ll consult, just to remember the pictures we took, the people we interviewed, the editorials we discussed for hours.
Those years in Magangué allowed me to believe I had, as we say in Colombia, the makings of a storyteller. Though I’d been writing since childhood, only then did I start to believe my words could have impact, enchantment. Since then I haven’t stopped writing—first for newspapers and magazines, then for my own non fiction books. My first novel, published in 2024, takes place in a fictional town along the Magdalena River where that heat and those sunsets from my first day in Magangué are present. The city in the novel, Aguadal, is inspired by that port city over the Magdalena River, where I learned firsthand what solidarity means.