Watching Venezuela's collapse in slow motion

Several weeks ago El Negro sent me a message to say that his house had fallen down. The mud holding the old adobe blocks together gave way after three days of torrential rain, collapsing walls and roof. Thankfully, his three children were sleeping in the one room made of tin, that held firm. As a single dad, his world was these kids, and I could hear his relief in that part of the message.

I read his words while sitting on my porch, contemplating the majestic Fumarola mountain before me, mentally contrasting Venezuela’s natural beauty with the ugly chaos of its society today. El Negro had built that porch a month earlier, along with other projects in preparation for my son's wedding. 

As I received this news, El Negro’s collapsing home suddenly felt like a metaphor for Venezuela’s collapsing society. The image of the tumbling adobe bricks reverberated in my heart. Crash! Food disappearing from the shelves. Boom! Cash disappearing from the banks. Woosh! Young people disappearing from the country. Clang! Democracy disappearing from “elections”, Kaboom! Human rights disappearing from public discourse and action.

Unlike my doubts about the reconstruction of this decaying Venezuela, my hope in El Negro wasunflagging. This was a man who rose each day at 4 am to cook breakfast and lunch for this kids, before setting off for his morning job as a garbage collector. He never missed a day – even though the job paid less than a fifty cents a week, always holding out hope he might find a discarded pair of shoes to fix for the kids, a half-used pencil. After finishing his first job of the day, he set off to his second job of building.

I often wondered how he accomplished so much in one day as I
struggled to do so little: dig one more hole in this hard red dirt for yet another banana tree, plant a few more quinchoncho bushes then spend hours in line to (try to) get gas to cook them. Then more hours searching the almost empty hardware stores for a few nails to fix my chicken’s coop to keep them safe from the marauding opossums. I always fall into bed exhausted, but with so little sense of accomplishment.

On the days that El Negro came to work at my house (always accompanied by one or two of his kids), we would pause in the late afternoon to share a cup of coffee. At that magical hour I felt their incredible bond, and the mystery behind the source of his boundless energy was solved.

Not surprisingly, El Negro built a few small adobe rooms for his children within weeks. While cooking the evening pot of beans over an open fire, his bare feet stomped the red earth to a gluey mix. Adobe brick by adobe brick, he raised the walls in the light of the full moon. Neighbors and friends rallied, and the solidarity he always showed to others was returned.

I can’t help but wonder: who will rebuild this Venezuela that is, literally, collapsing in front of me. Collapsing and crashing down over the heads of friends and neighbors, such as my friend Milagro, a single mom of two. Last month, her daily wage as a laborer in the potato fields was 8,000 bolivares per day, the equivalent of 20 US cents. Last week it was the equivalent of 8 cents. . This week it is worth 4 pennies a day. Next week? Like most of my neighbors, she toils in the sun all day, returning home with enough money to buy one tenth of one kilo of rice. She tells me that nightly her tears mix with the rumbling of her belly.

Collapsing and crashing the dreams of K, a newlywed, and one of my daughter’s best friends. As an obstetrician at the public hospital, she makes less than the bonus provided by the government to the pregnant women whose babies she delivers (about $8 per month) As she leaves work after her 24-hour shifts she tells me that she can barely walk straight , her exhaustion blurring with confusion about how to stay in this country she loves and start the new family she desires. She doesn’t want to follow the mass exodus of her colleagues.

Even for those who manage to make enough money to survive, they can’t access their money. My neighbor Vicente raises pigs, but can’t really use the money his clients pay him by bank transfer. It costs him 30,000 bolivares (about 9 US cents) to take a bus to his local bank, where the maximum daily withdrawal is 30,000, He doesn’t even have enough funds to return home

And for those who actually have some money and can access it, there is often nothing to buy. My compadre Ever joins most of the 1,000 households in my town in getting in line every Friday at 2 pm. at the town square. There, he deposits his ID card in a cardboard box held by a representative of the local coop, and says a prayer. If he is one of the lucky 250 people drawn by lottery, he can buy food at the coop at the weekend. If he is one of the unlucky 750, he will have to perform magic to feed his family. Scrounge some potatoes or black beans from already harvested fields.

As I witness this collapse of Venezuela -my home for three decades, and home to 28 million others, I look with desperation for our El Negro. Where are our architects, the engineers, the builders? Instead of being armed with mortar and bricks, they seem to be bearing sledge hammers, determined to finish off the destruction.

Bang go the sledgehammers of massive corruption and mismanagement by those at the helm.  Crash go the jackhammers of infighting and violence by those who long to be at the helm. Smash go the bulldozers of the giant to the North that threatens oil sanctions, in hopes of dislodging our foundation. Nearby nations stand by in muted shock, trying to absorb the mass of fleeing residents.

In this long dark night, in which master architects and builders have
warped into master destroyers, my faith in them has forever shattered. But as this blue blood moon rises, so does my faith in those who I always have known as builders. In El Negro. In Milagro and Vicente and Ever. Guided by the moonlight, and by the love for their children, and for this beautiful land, they will raise the new Venezuela. It will be a long long arduous labor of love.