A few weeks ago I found myself in Medellín, Colombia, when I realised that up until then there was no interview with Cati Restrepo [es] on Gobal Voices. I decided to rectify this omission and got straight in touch with her and we met up in a place known as Pueblito Paisa [es], where I recorded the videos included in this post. The remainder of the text was completed in the following days. Of course, I am taking it as read that everyone knows @Catirestrepo, who was the natural leader and most public face of the project financed by Rising Voices: Hiperbarrio, a project which she left one year ago. Whilst she was a member of the project, Cati was the winner of the Miss Talent prize in the city of Medellín, which led her to front her own project known as Women and Digital Inclusion [es]. In addition to being an active Global Voices collaborator [es] she is also currently involved in many other things. I would therefore like to invite you to get to know her a little more. Global Voices (GV): Hello Cati, tell us about your life before blogs and social networks… Cati Restrepo (CR): It was really a fairly quiet, normal life. I was at school (I discovered blogs and social networks when I started university) and I basically spent my time doing all of those tasks related to being at school, or singing, playing my violin and reading any book I could find. So as you can see, it was a fairly simple life which was based around my family and academic projects and that library environment taught me responsibility and discipline and is partly to blame for the fact that I seem to go “against” my maternal Caribbean genes, they are lovers of vallenato music and seafood, which are things I struggle with now. Although the question of seafood is simply a matter of learning to enjoy it, my love for vallenato died a long time ago as a result of not being able to sleep in December with the rumba music coming from the neighbours’ houses. And well, if you're talking about a time “before blogs”, I was a keen hiker and early-riser so I loved to go out walking, making the most of the all of the greenery around me and soaking up the first rays of the sun. There are no more of those walks now. GV: Could you describe your area for those who don't know Medellín or Colombia? CR: I live in San Javier [es] – La Loma which is a neighbourhood located between the urban and rural areas of the city of Medellín. It is a meeting place between one dynamic and another which means that you can enjoy air which is much cleaner than in the city itself (Medellín being a fairly green city), but you still have the presence of a regional road which leads not only to the downtown area of the city but also other nearby towns. It is not an area with a lot of urban facilities – parks, libraries and that kind of thing – (partly because of the fairly mountainous geographical conditions, partly because of a struggle for resources) but about 12,000 people live there, divided among 8 fairly different districts. There are both clearly residential neighbourhoods and places where there are elderly people working on the land; which, as you can imagine, makes it fairly interesting to live here, or in Medellín in general where the same feeling exists: it is a service sector focused place (and previously a textile one), but whose outskirts are less urban and have a feeling of nostalgia for the rural lifestyle. So if you want a country atmosphere, just go a few minutes out of the the city and there it is. GV: You mentioned your love of reading. Could you recommend some books to us? CR: I'll name a few rather than recommending them, as books whose stories have affected me quite a lot, but that doesn't mean that this is the only type of reading I go for. First of all, I think that it would be good to read The Little Prince again. It's a book in which something different happens with each reading. As for Columbian authors, One Hundred Years of Solitude really stirs the emotions; and another which I discovered recently: Fragments of Furtive Love by Héctor Abad Faciolince, which is the story of a woman who has had many lovers in her life and who tells the last of these the story of one of her previous lovers after each time they make love. I could also mention some stories by women in Arab countries: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is really beautiful and 300 Days in Afghanistan [es], by the doctor Natalia Aguirre (which was made into a book after being published in a magazine) is a very human approach to the life of a culture which we know little about in the West.