Dear friends,

If you’re *really* interested in our path towards service in Colombia, South America, please read on. This Baer-Family briefing on our visit to Medellín last week contains concrete details.

If you’re only *a little* interested, this would be a great time to nail that ‘DELETE’ key and wait for a more polished summary email in a few days.

To make sense of what follows, you’ll need to know that ‘Junior’ is Karen’s nickname in the Baer Family in order to distinguish her from my older sister also named Karen Baer.

Thanks!

David (for Karen)

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Dear Baers,

I know our hearts and minds have been very much on Grandpa Baer’s health and Grandma Baer’s efforts (supported by Sissy and the Langhorne Baers) to respond to this health crisis.

Without detracting from the urgency of that situation, let me fill in a few details and next steps for us IndyBaers while memories of our last week in Medellín, Colombia, are still fresh.

√  Our travel from Indy to Medellín (via Chicago and Panama City) and from Medellín to Indy (via Bogotá and  Newark) was uneventful, except for the fact that Junior’s suitcase apparently never made it out of the Medellín Airport during our return. They’re ‘looking for it’.

√  It was a fantastic week. We were so well taken care of by the seminary. Many of the faculty and administrators are long-time friends of mine, but I was still blown away by their warmth and kindness. Junior fell in love with the seminary community, and expressed some regret when it came time for us to return home after just five full days on the ground there. I definitely married up, and have no idea how I ended up next to this amazing woman. We plan to be back in Medellín for a week in late January/early February in connection with a project I was helping to run while still with Overseas Council.

√  Medellín, at maybe 4 million inhabitants, is Colombia’s second city after Bogotá, with perhaps 9 million. Medellín occupies a long valley (Valle de Aburrá) in the northernmost Andes. It’s in a high and very green area. Although it’s considered a well-ordered Latin American megacity, the fact is that for North American eyes it’s very congested and very loud. It is a happening city in terms of culture, including fashion, music, art, cuisine, and a very ahead-of-its time governance model that has produced the cleanest metro system we’ve ever seen, which now intersects with gondola/cablecar lines that bring the poorer communities on the valley’s steep sides into economic and social connectivity with the more prosperous parts of the city. It’s amazing to see. Other cities around the world are beginning to copy this model. The people of Medellín (and of the state of Antioquia to which it belongs) are called ‘paisa’ people. They are industrious, friendly, people who are very proud to be paisa. Their relationship to Bogota, the immense capital city, feels a bit like how Bostonians feel towards New York City. As a Red Sox fan, I get this.

√  The seminary has a walled campus and lies pretty high up the steep hills of one side of the valley. It sits in a mostly poorer neighborhood, so security needs to be managed well (and has been). Medellín long ago placed the violence of the drug-cartel years in its rear-view mirror, but petty crime is still a matter to be taken seriously, as is true of most Majority-World cities and some in our own country.

√ The work the seminary is doing and its vision for continued development are simply heart-racing. We can’t imagine any place in the world that aligns more closely with our own hearts and our own purpose in life as individuals and as a couple.

√ I taught a class and endured/enjoyed countless interviews. It was all incredibly exciting. The seminary is humming with new horizons and initiatives and many of them are things that I could really dig my teeth into and be quite happy doing so for the rest of my life. It’ll be important to prioritize, and I have the president’s commitment to support and advise as we do that. I estimate that I have time and energy for 20% of the responsibilities that might otherwise fall to me. Their board will vote on my candidacy as a prof within 10 days. We anticipate a positive outcome. Karen’s vision for spiritual development and care of persons also deepened and broadened as she laid eyes on the concrete realities and opportunities of our future place of service. And she can’t wait to get her arms around those babies.

√ We just love our future colleagues and students, and their families. There are currently eight pregnant women among the student body and three pending weddings. The place is pretty much awash in cute little kids and babies.

√ We stayed with a magnificent couple (Guillermo is Colombian, Wanda is North American) who I imagine will be life-long friends. To our surprise, we got to watch Game Seven of the World Series with them. Since I knew more baseball than the other three, I got to narrate strategy as the game developed. It was one of the rare opportunities I get to feel like the smartest guy in the room, so I was not about to let it slip by.

√ We chose the apartment where we’ll live. It’s at the highest part of the seminary grounds and has a jaw-dropping view of the massive city below. It needs work and will soon be our own beautification project. We can hardly wait. We’ll have a guest room. Warning: the apartment is very small (minuscule, in fact …) and we’ll all share a single bathroom. Junior and I will get used to this very quickly, but it won’t be Shangri-La for our guests. There may also be options for lodging visitors in apartments that can be used as ‘guest houses’. This will make things easier for those who prefer loud bathroom noises and late-night squabbles about who was supposed to pack the hair dryer.

√ Very important: We discovered a superb language-learning option for Junior that will be based on one-on-one instruction at the seminary with a Spanish teacher named Magdalena. In fact, Junior and Magdalena will begin by Skype next week … !. We had not known this option existed. It’s now very likely that we will not detour to Costa Rica for nine months for Karen’s language school, but will move directly to Colombia instead. This may be a disappointment for Christopher/Sheena/Connor-Monster and Johnny/Lauren, who have expressed interest in visiting us in Costa Rica. Come to Colombia instead! This change cuts nearly a year off of our transitional time and eliminates Karen’s need to learn Spanish in a Costa Rican dialect and then re-set to the Colombian dialect of the language. And, as this goes with language, so with culture. It’s a more direct (and cheaper) route to immersion in our future context of service.

√ We are currently at 27.98% of our support-raising goal/need. It’s moving a little more slowly than we had anticipated, as is the sale of the house. We lowered the price again on the house today as we ‘probe for the market’. At this point, nearly all issues of timing are a function of (a) when we can sell the house and (b) when our support target has been met. We still plan to move to the Haven House in Millersburg after the house sells and complete our support-raising push from there.

√ We will be safe in Medellín, as much as anybody can make predictions about physical safety. Any predictable risk is closer to how things were during sixteen years in Costa Rica than it is to the Medellín of the bad old days of the drug barons. We are greatly at peace (though we’ll be careful and diligent in how we live there) with this reality. We will not be living under an elevated threat. Plus, we’ve racked up a career-long track record in avoiding unnecessary risk while serving in the Majority World, so we understand how not to be stupid about such things.

In sum, this is a very rich and alive moment for Karen and me. We have miles to go before we sleep, but—to borrow a turn of phrase from the Psalms—the lines are falling to us in pleasant places.

Love,

Dad/Dave (and Junior)
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