Among the many disappearing items in Venezuela today, the one that worries the most:  talented young people.

Slowly, we have learned to deal with the other shortages in our lives (i.e. almost everything that is simultaneously essential and hoard-able). What choice do we have if we are to survive?

No corn flour? Grow some. Grind some. No oil. Boil everything. No cooking gas? Gather some firewood. No sugar? Grate a block of raw sugar cane.  No cash at the banks? Trade food with a friend over the fence. No dog food? Cook vegetable scraps. No coffee? Simmer some lemongrass (hmm.. that one is definitely NOT satisfactory).

Some say we are healthier because of this food crisis.  We are eating real food.  We are growing lots of it ourselves. Diabetes and high blood pressure are being purged from our collective bodies. At our best moments we tease that we might just be probably the healthiest nation on the planet. 

Of course, it's not so simple. We are exhausted. And skinny. As I look at my neighbor taking up yet another belt notch to keep his pants from falling to his ankles, I know that malnutrition, then hunger, are only steps. away.  

It's been a testimony to parental love to see   my adult neighbors have all dropped 10, 20, 30  (or more) kilos, while their kids more or less stay the same. (One neighbor tells me that there are many days when he just eats a baby's portion of food - just enough to keep alive - so that the kids will have enough, )

But the rapid disappearance of our young people from our communities is what most worries me, and tugs at my heart. 

I don't have to look far. My own three adult children who grew up in Venezuela and love their country with a passion, have left. The last one to throw in the towel ( for the moment) is my middle son: a talented chef. But trying to set up a restaurant in a nation with no food is like trying to open a water park in the Sahara. 

They are far from alone. 

Statistics are hard to come by, but many estimate that over 2 million Venezuelans have left over the past year or two. That is close to 10% of the population and a much larger proportion of those in their 20's and 30's. The photo on the top of the page was taken of my daughter with her closest friends a few years ago. I realize that 5 of these 6 young women have now settled outside of Venezuela. 

 In addition to my kids, most of their friends have left, and most of the friends of friends. Auto mechanics, graphic designers, doctors, musicians, psychologists, dental students, filmmakers. That is just the list of young people I know personally who have left in the past month.  They have scattered mostly to other countries in the Americas: Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay., Chile. 

With most salaries i Venezuela currently under $100 per month (including professionals) it's hard not to look elsewhere. Add to that the grueling task of finding food. I've finally come to the conclusion that it takes less stress (albeit more energy)  to grow my own food than search for it in stores. But I have land to do so, which is not the case for most.

This story of mass migration is hardly even a story for many places across the Americas.

But it is a new story for Venezuela, a country that had been the destination of immigrants from around the Americas , Europe and Middle East for decades. Venezuela opened its home and heart to those fleeing military dictatorships, wars, and economic travesties around the globe.   I'm one of the many who was taken in my these big-hearted and generous people. 

Today I was saddened to learn about a march planned in Panama this week to reject Venezuelan immigrants. The main complaint, according to the invitation to march, seems to be regarding the abundance of arepas and tequeños (Venezuelan soul food) now being sold on Panamanian streets.

I can't help but wonder how many Panamanians received free eye surgery thanks to Venezuela, or cheap Venezuelan oil to power their cars.  Venezuela under Chavez oozed solidarity for its neighbors in the Americas and around the globe.

Some young people are opting to stay, even when presented with possibilities of moving on. Stay tuned for my next blog post, when I'll share some of their stories, that fill me with hope 

But for now I'll allow myself to mourn the loss of so many vibrant, talented, motivated young people who are leaving Venezuela in droves, giving the best years of their lives to other lands. 

And I"ll pray that my adopted nation  may find reprieve from this storm and set a course that works for all its citizens so that our young and talented youth may return before their  roots sink too deep in other foreign soils. Meanwhile, I send my support to all Venezuelans living in all corners of the world. Please share the best of who we are: fun, generous, loving, hard working and forever in need of an arepa or tequeño.  

I have learned to do a lot of things in my many years in Venezuela, including tossing out bunches of perfectly round arepas in a flash.  Three kids who had the habit of getting hungry three times a day will do that to you.

But these days my arepas are looking a bit wobbly:  less perfectly smooth and rounded. But then, so are Jenny’s and Chichila’s and everyone else’s.  But maybe -  just maybe - these wobbly arepas are one step in the direction of turning our food crisis on its head.

Walk down the street of almost any Venezuelan barrio or village these days in the early evening and you will hear the same sound:  a smooth metallic spinning that means only one thing: the hand grinding of a corn mill. Look up at front porch or balcony and you will see a child or mom or father or grandparent - or all of the above - taking turns to grind the corn for the evening arepas.  It’s a simple action, but packed with meaning.

Arepas are those a hot corn cakes filled with anything (or nothing) that are our ultimate comfort/soul food in Venezuela. But also our ultimate energy food that keep us walking, working, dancing, dreaming.  Arepas are the sun of our food universe here, around which everything else spins.   Without them, well, there is sadness. And – sometimes – there is hunger.

For Venezuelans of recent decades, arepas came from a bag of pre-cooked, dried, refined corn flour, to which you just added some water, salt , performed some minor league kneading and voila: a dozen arepas placed on the grill.  

My kids, like all barrio kids of the past several generations, had the task of going to the corner store to buy a bag of corn flour at our beck and call (for which they usually earned a lollipop). It was cheap, always available and literally omnipresent in all of our lives.  The LAST thing we ever imagined was that it would go missing.

Until it did.  The story of the Disappearing Bags of Arepa Corn Flour offers clues to decipher Venezuela’s food crisis, and for overcoming it as well.

The story goes like this: Venezuela has lots of oil.   That brings in lots of dollars.  Which makes it cheaper to import food (like corn) than to produce it.

Companies that market corn flour import the corn (or much of it),  take all the nutritious stuff out and put what remains  into a plastic bag.  Because corn flour was deemed a basic necessity, the government “sold” dollars to these corn flour companies  to import corn at about 20 cents for a dollar (or less). The one condition was that the company had to sell the product at a very cheap regulated price to the public.

Take two: oil prices drop, dollars become scarce, companies decide (illegally) to use their reduced dollar allotment to import  items more lucrative than corn.  Or, they take the dollars and run (to the nearest foreign bank).  All of which emptied our little corner stores of those omnipresent bags of corn flour. Add to this scene a whole cast of unscrupulous characters who grab up the remaining corn flour and sell it from their back door, for a fortune.

This same corn flour tale can be applied to the other staple items gone missing here in Venezuela: oil, sugar, rice, beans, etc. Except that remember: arepas are the sun of our food universe.

But, like a page out of  Garcia Marquez’ 100 Years of Solitude, we suddenly experienced a collective memory here in Venezuela: arepas are made from corn!  Let me tell you, there is nothing to spur a gardening revolution like hunger.

So, corn started sprouting up, literally, in the most unimaginable places (like in my own backyard!) Then people started digging out their grandparents’ corn grinders that were rusting away in patios as plant holders or bird feeders or door stoppers.

Soon, corn sellers began to appear on the streets, selling bags and bags of it (at reasonable prices) and big pots of corn were set to boil along with the morning coffee (which these days has become the morning lemongrass tea).  And neighbors who didn’t have corn grinders were borrowing corn grinders of neighbors who did.  And suddenly, everyone was growing corn, boiling corn, grinding corn, kneading corn and eating pure corn arepas.  Which come out a bit warped and wobbly since all that rough good stuff is still intact.

Not all of this arepas-from-scratch tale is a cake walk. This takes time and effort and produces sore muscles (as I discovered last week trying to grind the 6 kilos of corn to accompany our weekly gardening kids’ soup). But, it also brings folks together, and it delights the heart and palate and pocketbook.

AND, it undermines the core problem that has been driving this food crisis that is trying to be taken advantage of by so many different interest groups (and governments) that are using Venezuelans hunger for their economic and political advantage .

I recently read a quote posted by a beloved Earlham professor Howard Richards:

The key solution is to make our physical existence less dependent on capital accumulation strengthening other ways to meet the needs of life

As our corn grinders spin, we are strengthening those “other ways”. The road is a long one, but this is one giant step. Eating REAL food that comes from our backyard, or neighbor’s yard, or neighboring community plot, or somewhere in … VENEZUELA!  Maybe this is the real revolution we were hoping for, and thought we were building a few years ago.

Hunger, anger, lines, disappearing kilos and unscrupulous characters still are hanging around in a nagging way, but maybe - just maybe – their grip is loosening.  Stay tuned!

I was going to begin this blog by writing about Fabi. She is the one who inspired me to grow food. 

After helping me dig yet another hole for yet another tree on my  little farm, she asked me why I didn’t get down to business and plant black beans  and corn.  Or something whose turn-around time to becoming food was a bit quicker than another mango or orange tree.  

My excuse was that the only remaining empty land was a sad, scruffy, sandy patch that didn’t even produce weeds.  But Fabi was unconvinced. This is a ten year old who frequently skips school to catch fish for lunch for her family (of ten), while somehow topping the class achievement roster. She manages to DO things.

So, I wasn’t surprised when Fabi showed up the next day at 6 am with a sack of goat manure.  I pulled on my rubber boots and donned my straw hat. And I knew there was no looking back.

Fast forward six months and Fabi and I were knee deep in a mini food forest of bananas, black beans, passion fruit, papaya, broccoli, lemon grass, spinach, pigeon peas, yucca , and much more.  Our two pairs of hands had multiplied by 20, many of them smaller than hers.  Club Conuco Colibri  (Hummingbird Farm Club) was birthed in kind of a natural evolution, a group of kids who just showed up to garden by our side.  Kind of a ragtag 4H club and CSA all wrapped into one. (check out the video of our kids' food garden project in this link.  Although we already met our goal (in one day) the story will inspire you I hope)

 But, Fabi won’t be the protagonist of my first blog post, because well, Fabi has left.  A month ago her mom farmed her out to a godmother in another village.  In spite of the growing harvest of our own mini food forest and Fabi’s fish, there just wasn’t enough food for a family of ten.  How I miss those 80 pounds of sheer determination!

Fortunately, ten-year-old Franger has stepped up to that role, in his usual unassuming way, tens parts action, one part words.  This Sunday afternoon he called me to the chicken wire fence dividing our two yards, as I was planting squash among the pigeon peas. He offered me a spoonful of what he was eating from a well-worn plastic cup: a powder of roasted grated corn with a splash of cinnamon (because, he told me, there is no sugar anywhere). Surprisingly delicious.

Franger is a member of our kids gardening club (somehow that term smacks of white gloves and pink lemonade, but the reality is a bit more ragged and colorful )  That same morning we had poured sweat and muscle into deep-digging a new vegetable bed and hoeing the hills for corn.  We had each eaten a small bowl of soup at midday, made smaller than usual since 40 instead of 30 showed up to garden. I knew that Franger was returning home to slim pickings, like all the kids, and the small bowl of soup wouldn’t go far.

As the late afternoon wore on, all I could think about was the corn gruel. It was so tasty and I felt my body craving the calories it packed after a full day of physical activity. My own cupboard was bare, although the garden had lots of tomatoes :) 

 As the sun dipped low, sending crimson rays over the Fumarola volcano, Franger called me over again, and unceremoniously passed me a little bag of the gruel. Knowing that it came from his tiny share, I was moved. 

I went into my house and mixed the gruel with water and it boiled and thickened. I sat on my front porch and devoured the steaming treat,watching the sunset close the curtain on my mountain backdrop. How good it is to eat when you are hungry.  

Never was there a finer feast, nor a more gracious giver. And that is the story I want to share as I open this blog.

There are numerous political and economic groups who have staked their interest in Venezuela’s hunger. In Franger’s hunger. In Fabi’s hunger. Even in my hunger. Among these groups are unscrupulous elements in the Venezuelan opposition, the US government, the Venezuelan government,  U.S. Southern Command,  armed forces in Venezuela, the IMF, the OAS, ExxonMobil and Wall Street, just to name a few. It is in the interest of many in these powerful groups, that we go hungry here in Venezuela.

In Venezuela, a nation of enormous commodities, hunger has become the commodity that trumps all . In this land that holds the world’s largest oil reserves. That contains a large share of the continent’s fresh water supply and untold pristine reserves of precious minerals.  In this the land that inspired democratic people’s movements throughout the South, In this land of waterfalls and liberators and classical music and beautiful people. In this land that covers my hands and boots at the end of each day.

Hunger is the Queen of Hearts, the Ace of Spades, the all-powerful god that promises to bring people to their knees and drink from their cup. Whether that cup be the overthrow of socialism. The savior of an entrenched political elite. The rise of a new political elite. The enriching of mining companies. Billion dollar drilling rights.  Scandalously lucrative loans. Bursting bank accounts for black marketeers. And so on.   

Except that – so far – the Venezuelan people haven’t bent at the knee to drink from anyone’s trough. At least not yet. Against all odds. Against a battery of State Department staffers, oil and mining company accountants, writers and editors from the mass media (the same ones who were silent when Venezuela was producing more affordable homes and college students and community doctors per capita than anywhere in the Americas ).  

 And the reason this hasn’t happened, well….. it’s all Franger’s fault.

Franger and several million Frangers here in Venezuela. Who grind dried corn to mix with water when there is nothing in the store. Who use and reuse a cinnamon stick instead of sugar. Who pass scarce amounts of food over the fence to a neighbor.  Who rise before the dawn to plant something to eat in the most inhospitable of soils.

I don’t want to deny the many shoulders on which lie the blame for this hunger. That’s for another story. Right now, I’ll offer Franger’s and my shoulders: some 50 years apart in age, but both trying our best to carry what we can in this strange new journey.

Stay tuned for more. abrazos, Lisa