Perhaps the most obvious feature of Pasto is the gulf between the rich and poor.
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| Colombian GDP |
There is a measure called the Gini index which measures inequality in the distribution of income on a scale between zero (perfectly equal – everyone has the same income) and one hundred (completely unequal – one family has all of the income). According to the CIA World Factbook Colombia had, in 2008, a Gini index of 58.5 up from 53.8 in 1996. By contrast the same source has the UK having a Gini index of 34 in 2006. The index is telling us that the gap between rich and poor is very wide, and getting wider. I was alerted to this by a news report on student riots in Bogota which claimed that Colombia is the only Latin-American country for which the gap is growing. This in a country for which growth has been strong recently and is expected to be around 4.5% this year. The CIA also report that, in 2008, 46.8% of the Colombian population lived below the poverty line. The rubic to this measure states that "rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations" although what this means in the context of Colombia I couldn't say.
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| Nothern Pasto |
The road from the airport to the city passes through the town of Chachagui and elsewhere is lined by a sprinkling of dwellings. For the most part these are pretty rude in appearance, constructed of concrete frames with brick walls and with a flat roof or one of corrugated iron. These buildings, from houses to hotels, workshops to restaurants are in varying states of repair, but often look weather-beaten at best and sometimes decidedly tumbledown.
Buildings of a similar nature are the first signs one sees of the city itself, but are soon supplanted by an altogether different ambience. A forest of modern apartment blocks some still under construction, others recently completed and displaying a clean front to the visitor.
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| Living on the river in Southern Pasto |
There is an area on the road past the University of Nariño containing a number of very large houses – of a size where a single housekeeper would not be enough. By contrast, by the river there are people living in buildings that appear to be at best partially completed, perhaps even falling down. The displays of wealth in the city are generally fairly limited. It is the poverty that is visible daily in the city that highlights the gap between rich and poor.
Three times a week the dustbin lorry collects refuse from outside each property, but not before the scavengers have taken any recyclable materials to sell on. It is also quite common for us to see the refuse workers putting discarded items, such as shoes, to one side.
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| Reuse and recycle |
Shopping here is a very different experience from in the UK. For many items the brands seen in the UK as global are not available here (or are extremely expensive). There is usually though a large amount of cheaper merchandise available: sometimes made in Colombia; in other cases imported from China (notably). In the latter case I have noticed that some of the items appear to be goods rejected by another buyer as faulty. For example, we bought for my son a monkey that jumps: it was only after we got it home that I realised that it was singing the "Tigger Song" from Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" and that one of the tracks cuts off in middle. I suppose that items such as these have a market because there are some buyers that cannot afford better quality goods.
Other parts of the shopping experience hint at poverty in other ways. In December we bought curtains for our flat. We went and chose the material and then the shop sent someone to the flat to measure up the windows. This is already a pretty good service by UK standards, presumably possible because the person that does the measuring-up is, to put to mildly, not highly paid. But what happened next astounded me: within two days the curtains were ready! I forget the exact cost of this operation, but we spent less than a million pesos (£350) for perhaps 17 metres of floor-to-ceiling curtains (including net curtains). When it comes to furniture you can take the items in the shops as inspiration to create your own (often for little or no extra cost) as long as you are happy to wait a few days extra for your specification to be made and brought into the city.
There are a fairly large number of
desplazados in the city (people displaced by the FARC of government activity against them) and these can be seen begging around the city. Some station themselves at traffic lights, but if they are not at a particular set or lights you can be sure that other people will be. Often jugglers, fire-eaters or other entertainers (who may be merely practising rather than particularly poor), in other cases people selling small items such as snacks or decorations for rear-view-mirrors.
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| Washing day on the river |
It would be wrong of me to portray Pasto as some sort of ghetto - it is far from that. But by the same token it is clear that there are a lot of people that have rather more of a struggle to provide for their families that we in the UK. That said, the cost of living is somewhat less here than in the UK. However there is a minimum wage in Colombia: this year it is around 525,000 pesos (about £170) per month. All well and good you might think, but before Christmas the Pasto Government paid an artist to create some festive installations around the city. I have it on good authority that he was paying the people who actually installed the work about 150,000 pesos per month. A housekeeper here would probably not expect monthly to receive much more than half of the statutory minimum for six-and-a-half 12-hours days a week.
Perhaps the thing that most emphasises the poverty to be found in Pasto is the relative lack of visible wealth. This is not because there are only a few wealthy people, but more because it is not the done thing to display ones wealth. The main reason for this is that it risks attracting unwelcome attention, but security here is something to be addressed as a topic on its own.
