Revista Los Nogales no. 5 - Septiembre 2015 | Page 49

Caminatas / Colegio Los Nogales

was intriguing and to my surprise, quite pleasurable. I kept running and I got
better at it. It was fun. I began to look
forward to going outside and running in
the park, looking at the trees go past me,
listening to my breathing and finding its
rhythm, seeing how my body changed
and how strong I was becoming. I stopped going to museums and art galleries
every Sunday and instead spent more
time outdoors finding places I could run
in that were not in the city, small roads
and tracks. It became a kind of obsessive adventure, to go places and push my
body to get better every day. It had never
really occurred to me that the outdoors
could present a possibility to explore the
world, and I was hooked.
I worked as an educator in an urban setting for years and had tried to motivate
my students to explore the outdoors—
my new found love—with me. My students were not entirely convinced but
I had a few converts—two really—and
together we went on small hiking trips
around the city. They tell me those expeditions changed their lives, that they
showed them a new way to relate to the
world, to know it. I tell them it changed mine. We would explore places and
ask questions about them, and when we

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did not have the answers to those questions we would look them up and talk
about them in our next encounter. We
were learning together and that is what
made it most exciting for all of us. And
so our friendship grew out of exploring.
We are still very good friends today these two students and I, and when I look
back at my teaching days in NYC it is
those hikes with them that I hold closest
to my heart.
I came back to Colombia to work at
Nogales and one of the things I liked
most about the school was its caminatas
program. I now had the physical ability
to walk long distances with students, I
knew how to pitch a tent, how to navigate inside nature, how to be an explorer. I couldn´t wait to go out with them.
And so, when I found myself in front of
those three beautiful snow peaks on that
early morning in Boyacá on our way to
the Ritacuba Blanco, I knew how lucky
I was, how absolutely lucky I was to be
able to be on this trip, with my Nogales
students, how walking alongside them
was a gift and a blessing and the most incredible opportunity I had been offered
to get to know them in a different context, to learn from them, to get close and
explore the world along with them. ◉