○One night in 2008, a group of joyriders stole our van, called The Columbian, on the street outside Wellington, New Zealand. Her sister-in-law was the first to notice and alerted her husband Ant, who immediately drove off to look for her. He spotted the van parked on the beach and called the police, who chased it as it drove away. After running several red lights, the joyriders lost control and crashed into a building. The front of the van was crushed from both sides and the driver’s door was completely torn off.
We woke up to an email from Ant titled “Rest in Peace, Colombians.” The email detailed the ordeal he had gone through the night before while her husband Dave and I were sleeping peacefully in our apartment in Bogotá, Colombia. Police arrested six joyriders. There were six people in total: three girls in the front and three boys wandering around in the back. Thankfully, the last words of the email were, “Not a single criminal was harmed in the production of this drama.”
This van meant so much to us. Two years ago, my boyfriend at the time, Dave, bought it and converted the backyard into a small house before I went to visit him in New Zealand. The bed folds up to become a sofa, and the cooler box comes out of the cigarette lighter socket. Portable gas stove. We spent his 2006 and his 2007 summers on a road trip through the South and North Islands.
Colombians were at the center of it all. At night, as we parked on the beach and watched the impressive sunset, we made plans for the future. We were in a long distance relationship for a year. We soon said goodbye again and headed back to my home country of Colombia (hence Van’s nickname). I had never thought of living outside my own country, but after traveling to New Zealand, I fell in love at first sight with these two tiny islands at the edge of the world.
We decided that Dave would join me in Columbia later this year and that we would move back to Wellington together once I finished my undergraduate degree. This van was so important to us that we decided to keep it as we would be moving back to New Zealand in a few years. The van remained parked at Dave’s sister Rachel’s house, registered to her husband Ant and kept moving.
The van theft changed the course of my life. We were in Bogotá and planned to move to Wellington soon. “Without a van, there’s no commitment to rush back to New Zealand,” Dave told me one day. “What if I moved to London for a year or two to get some European experience?” At the time, I didn’t realize how big of an impact that move would have on our future, so I was like, I answered as if he were asking, “Do you put milk in your coffee?” I said, “Of course!”
The first few years in London were not easy. Every door I tried to open closed in my face. It took me two years to find my way and three years to feel like I belonged. After that, I felt that the city that had been against me was finally on my side. So I had no intention of leaving this city. “Now that I know how difficult it is to start a life in another country, I have no intention of moving to New Zealand and starting over,” I told Dave. “London is already home.”
He almost fell off his chair. London was supposed to be a stop along the way, not a destination. A month later, after he thought about it and analyzed the prospects for London and Wellington (probably spreadsheets were involved), he came back to me and said:
It’s hard to imagine what my life would have been like in New Zealand if my van hadn’t been stolen. I moved to London by chance, or rather an accident. I arrived as a Colombian. In the UK, my borders expanded to include Latin Americans as I connected with and developed friendships with the city’s large Latin American community.
During this time, I became a journalist and a mother to two wonderful boys. I found community in my area through a network of neighbors and parents through my school, daycare, and local library. My first few years in London were filled with anxiety, but after 15 years I realized I was growing.
We never returned to New Zealand. If losing my van taught me anything, it’s that unexpected circumstances can lead to exciting new paths.
