Eight months ago, Tim Warren boxed up his family’s belongings, put his car in storage and rented out his Camas home. He took a leave of absence from his job as associate principal at Liberty Middle School and prepared his two middle-school-aged children to be moved 4,000 miles from their friends.
Last August, the Warren family — Tim, his wife of 17 years, Diane, and their two children, 14-year-old Nicholas and 12-year-old Chloe — traded in suburban Clark County life to relocate to Bogota, Colombia, city of more than 7 million people.
“It’s really been kind of a mission for my wife and I,” Warren said in a phone interview last week. “We’ve always talked about ways to expose our kids to other cultures.”
An opportunity to provide his children with such an experience arose last year when Warren was offered and accepted the position of middle school principal at Colegio Nueva Granada, a private Colombian school modeled after U.S. preparatory schools.
“They were not receptive to coming here at all,” Warren said of his children. “Not because it’s here, but because it’s leaving (Camas).”
Despite being a bilingual school in Latin America, Warren said the two schools are similar. About 60 percent of the student body is from Colombia, 19 percent is from the U.S. and 11 percent are dual-citizens. But because it’s an American-style school, it follows a similar schedule.
The school year is 180 days with breaks at Christmas and Easter and two months off during the summer. Students take core classes of math, science, social studies and English, all of which are taught in English. They also take Spanish and Colombian social studies, which are taught in Spanish, and exploratory classes. Students from non-Spanish speaking countries, like Nicholas and Chloe, take two Spanish language courses.
The school also has a program that sends students on a weeklong field trip to a different part of Colombia. This year, Chloe and the sixth-graders, accompanied by Warren, visited the coffee region where much of the Colombian coffee tradition began, Warren said. Nicholas and the eighth-grade class traveled to the Caribbean coast to learn about coastal culture and environment, he said.
Outside of the school, though, life is more challenging. Bogota is not frequented by North American tourists, and few people speak English. Chloe and Nicholas are learning Spanish, Diane hired a tutor and Tim is mainly relying on his memory of high school Spanish classes to get by.
“We’re getting better, but it’s always a little bit of a challenge,” Warren said.
“I’m pretty good at ordering pizza on the phone,” he added.
Warren said his family has been able to live a lot like they did in Clark County; stores and shopping malls offer many of the same products in Colombia as in the U.S. One major difference, though, is the family’s living quarters.
“We live on the sixth floor of an apartment building,” he said. “I haven’t lived in an apartment since before I got married.”
“We’re used to living in the suburbs in our cul-de-sac in Camas,” he added. “And sometimes, you miss that.”
The family has also had to get used to armed police officers and soldiers walking the streets of Bogota, trying to make people feel safe. In the time the Warrens have lived and traveled in Colombia, they’ve never felt at risk or unsafe, he said.
“Although Colombia has some problems, in the last 15 to 20 years a lot has changed,” Warren said. “The Colombian people have gotten sick and tired of living in a war-torn country.”
Warren made a two-year commitment when he accepted the position, but, he said, his family’s stay is indefinite and largely depends on the U.S. economy. But already, Warren said he’s seen his children excel and embrace the culture around them, which was, at least partly, the motivation for the move.
“I brought kids who were convinced, literally, I was ruining their lives and wasted no time telling me that, who have come alive here,” he said.
“An experience like this really opens your mind and widens your horizons,” Warren said.
