History of a Gringo in Venezuela

HOW TO SEE WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF

Four years ago I embarked on a journey that has been changing my life ever since.

Many Americans become bored with everyday life in the United States and wish that they could go somewhere else, do something else, and be someone else, but few ever actually take the leap of faith required to make that drastic change.

I did.  And this is the story of how I did it and of the life that followed.

About 6 years ago I became dissatisfied with many of the political aspects and inequalities present in the United States, but I have always been of the mindset that if you don’t like something change it, get out of the situation, or shut up.  So I began studying other political/economic systems than capitalism.  A lot of my inspiration came from a renowned intellectual and author named Noam Chomsky.  I decided that I liked the socialist political viewpoint more than others.  I began devouring information on international studies, specifically in Latin America.  After a couple years I made the decision to take the big step and move to another country.

I chose Venezuela.  I had read and studied a lot about Venezuela online and from those studies figured that they had a fairly progressive socialist government.  The Venezuelan government under President Hugo Chavez was setting records with the number of social programs he was instituting.  Free medical care, education for the poor, free housing, low-cost food distribution programs, just to name a few.

If I could go back in time there would be of course some things I would have changed.  I would have taken more money, and I would have learned Spanish first.  I probably would have talked to some Venezuelans living in America also, to get a better feel for what I was getting myself into.  But, alas, we can’t go back in time, and so I learned everything the hard way… But sometimes the hard way is the one that teaches you the best and gives you the most motivation to improve things.

[Courtesy of Google Maps]

My plan was as follows:  Land in Venezuela, go to a small town named Machiques, get a place to live and a job, learn the culture, travel around and have fun and an adventure.  I chose Machiques because it is a smaller city, or large town, whichever you prefer, near the Colombian border.  The big cities in Venezuela are very dangerous places for the average Venezuelan, needless to say more so for a Gringo who didn’t know anyone and who didn’t speak Spanish except with the help of a Spanish/English dictionary.  So I picked someplace smaller.  I decided on the Colombian border mainly in case I got in some kind of trouble in Venezuela, I would have the option of jumping borders fairly quickly, and besides doesn’t it just sound more exciting to say, “I live on the border of Colombia?” Ha, ha, ha.

1st Week:

[Caracas at dusk from the bus terminal]

I landed in Caracas.  A Canadian who I had been talking to on the plane trip showed me how to exchange my money on the black market, to get more for my money because of government currency controls(I will go into this in depth at a later date, its complicated).  I had to spend the night in the Caracas airport because there were no flights to Maracaibo until the next morning.  The lights from the barrios on the mountainsides are beautiful.  It looks like the stars in heaven came down to rest on Earth for a while.  A girl had her purse snatched in the airport.  I slept with one eye open and used my bags as a pillow.

The following morning I asked someone where the domestic flights were and they told me, “In a different building.  You have to take a taxi to get there.”  And being the very nice guy that he was he helped me into a taxi which drove me around the block and dropped me off at a different entrance to the same building.  So in essence I got hustled for a few dollars.  Welcome to Caracas.  There are lots of people in the airport in Caracas hustling, some of them are ok, some of them are bad.  I asked an airport worker where I could catch a flight to Maracaibo, and he helped me get a flight but the flight had already stopped boarding!  He told me not to worry, that he, “knew a guy”, I gave him some money to pay off the gate guard in the terminal and the guard promptly let me through to board my plane.

When I landed in Maracaibo the first thing I noticed was that it was HOT!  And I don’t mean hot like on a summer day in Georgia sitting on the porch drinking sweet tea hot… More like hot like the devil’s butt crack while he’s sitting in a sauna type of hot.  In the part of Venezuela where I stay, if you are out in the sun for more than a few minutes it feels like your brain is starting to boil.  And if you are walking down the street your body unconsciously does zigzags looking for the shade under trees.  The average temperature at night is in the 80s.  In the day it ranges from upper 90s to 110 Fahrenheit.

I found a taxi in front of the Airport and asked him what the best way to get to Machiques was.  He said that there was a bus terminal in Maracaibo, but that since I didn’t know Spanish it might be a little dangerous, and that if I wanted he could drive me to Machiques.  I opted for him driving me because I was wary of the big city still.  Within 30 minutes after leaving Maracaibo we were stopped by a National Guard soldier.  He spent 25 minutes asking me questions about my passport, and I had no real idea what he was saying.  After a while, he got tired of messing with me and told us to get the hell outa here.  A thought came to me approximately 10 minutes later.  I looked up the word for “bribe” in my dictionary and asked the taxi driver if the soldier had wanted a bribe.  He nodded an emphatic yes.  I was beginning to see that things were very different from the U.S.  I spent the rest of the trip taking photos of the countryside while the taxi driver played some kind of Latin music.  It was a 2 and a half hour drive.

[Top: Cathedral in Machiques 2009, Bottom: Sunset over the Sierra Mountains – Machiques 07/2013]

After arriving at a hotel and reserving a room that had pretty sparse accommodations, I got hungry and decided to venture out for a bite to eat.  It was night time and outside of my hotel I could smell a delicious aroma from the street venders.  I walked up to one vender and saw him making some kind of sandwich full of cheese and pulled beef.  He asked me in Spanish if he could take my order(of course I had no real idea what he was saying, just a hunch), I had looked up how to say, “give me one please,” in my dictionary, so I told him, “dame uno por favor,” and pointed at the sandwich, which I now know is called an arepa.  He says, “con todo?”(with everything?).  I just stood there looking stupid and pointed again and said, “dame uno”.  He looks at me kind of strangely and says, “pero con todo?”(but with everything?).  I didn’t know what he was saying and so I just shrugged and told him again to, “give me one please”.”  At this point, he is still looking at me very strangely but can tell that I obviously don’t speak Spanish, so he just makes me an arepa.  It was very tasty to say the least.  I asked him how much it was, and paid then went back to the hotel.

I spent the rest of the week talking to people in restaurants and in the street looking for a job and an apartment to rent… without any luck.

2nd Week:

I ran into a guy who helped me try to find some work, but after everything was dead ends he tells me I should go to a town named El Cruce(The Cross), and that I could probably find some work on a farm.  So with my hopes high I went to the bus terminal the next morning and took a buseta(little bus, in this case more like a modified van without air conditioning) to El Cruce.  The van belonged to a guy named Benjamin and had another guy named Jesus Torres working in it.  I rode in the front seat and talked with them the whole trip and they were very nice people.  They dropped me off in El Cruce and wished me luck and told me to be careful.

[Top Left: Jungle outside of El Cruce, Top Right: Sunset in El Cruce,     Bottom Left: Church in El Cruce, Bottom Right: Jesus Torres]

El Cruce is definitely a one horse town.  The main road cuts through the town and there is a T-junction that branches off of it.  The T-junction road is a dirt road by the way.  I booked a motel room that the owner had to spray for ants before I went in and that had no TV.  El Cruce looks a little like something out of an old Clint Eastwood Western.   People walk around with Cowboy hats and sometimes boots.  And many of the people have that gunslinger look on their faces.  You know, squinty eyes, with sun-wrinkles and a hard drawn line for a smile.

I ate lunch and asked around some more about work, but no one was helpful, and people seemed kind of wary of me(I would later learn that a fair number of people in Venezuela have the ignorant assumption that I must be in the CIA, its funny at first, but eventually it gets old).  The next day passed with the same results.  I spent most of my time just sitting on the curb, watching the campesinos(country boys) walk by in their cowboy hats with their machetes strapped to their belts, and shooting the breeze with people in broken Spanish, but no hits on a job.  That night I was hanging out with a couple guys at an outside location that sold plantains(kind of like bananas), and drinking small cups of the sweet coffee that Venezuelans and Colombians love.  The topic eventually turned to politics.  They were asking me what Americans thought of their political system and how it worked, and I was asking them the same about the systems in Venezuela and Colombia.  Now a natural course of this discussion brought us to discussing the civil war in Colombia.  Both of the gentlemen were declared socialist, there was no one else around to hear our conversation, and so I felt kind of safe in the discourse we were sharing.  So I asked one of the guys if he was sympathetic to the guerrillas in Colombia.  He gave me a hard look and put his finger to his mouth in a silence gesture, and swiftly walked away.  Now I didn’t know at that time that the word that I thought to mean sympathetic, in Spanish(simpatico) means more like to help and support.  So I ask the other guy we were with if the guy who walked off was in the guerrilla army and he says that he thinks so.  Then he explains the word, “simpatico” and I felt like an idiot.  The man I was talking with went on to explain that there were a lot of people in the Colombian guerrilla army and the Colombian paramilitary groups as well as narcotics traffickers in that town.  At that point I knew that it would be a good idea to get out of El Cruce post haste.  The following morning I saw Benjamin and Jesus at the bus stop and before I could say anything to them, Jesus tells me that El Cruce is a bad town and that there is no work there, Only Guerrilla, Paramilitary soldiers and drug traffickers.  To which I said in English, “no shit.”  He says I should come with him and that I can stay at his grandmother’s house until he talks with his aunt about an apartment for rent, and tries to help me find a job.  I agreed.

[A goat walking in the road in front of my apartment in Machiques 2009]

I got the apartment a couple days later.  It was just a cement room with a bathroom that had a pipe sticking out of the wall for a shower.  But I was running out of money, so it worked.  Benjamin game me a hammock and a chair, and I bought a fan.  That was where I spent the next 9 months.  The fan didn’t do much for the heat, but it kept the mosquitos off of me at night.  The neighborhood is called Barrio Singapur(like the place in China) and is a poor neighborhood that at that time was considered kind of dangerous.  The roads in that neighborhood are all dirt and sometimes uneven with potholes and dips from the water runoff when it rains.  The roof of my apartment was that green plastic type of material that we use for the roofs on sheds sometimes in the U.S.  I do have to say though that the people in that neighborhood were mostly very nice and even the rude ones would help you if you needed help with something.  Sometimes you would see cows or goats walking down the road, and chickens wandering around.  The people there who have grass in their yards cut the grass with a machete.

3rd Week:

Eventually I picked up work at a restaurant where I used to have breakfast everyday.  The owner and I had been on fairly friendly terms and one day I said to him, “I need a job badly.  If you let me work in your restaurant for 3 days for free and think that I can learn the Spanish and how to do everything fast enough, start paying me.  If not, you made 3 days of work for free.  He agreed.  Of course I learned very fast.  When your survival depends on it you can learn to do a lot of things and to adapt quickly.  So he gave me a job.

I spent a few months working for them then I got dengue fever(similar to malaria), and almost died.  I was dehydrated and hallucinating near the end of it.  I don’t even remember how I got to the hospital.  The doctor who treated me said that if I had waited one more day I would be dead.  Dengue can be contagious so she said I had to wait a week and a half to go back to work.  After a few days I explained to my boss what had happened and they acted like everything was ok.  On the day I was supposed to return to work they fired me, and without the worker’s comp that they were legally obligated to pay, on top of it.  I was so mad that if I had owned a gun I can say with a certainty that I would have shot them.  This was my survival they were screwing with after all.  But I didn’t so all I could do was fantasize about it and try to find another job.

4th month:

[Nixon in a clothing outlet in Maracaibo]

After tightening my belt considerably, I picked up some work with a Colombian named Nixon, who is now a business partner in my clothing business.  He plays the accordion and sings, and owns a business setting up stages and audio equipment for concerts.  My experience as a mixing technician for a church in the U.S. paid off here.  The work wasn’t steady, but the pay was alright.  Nixon would get some of his contracts from the government, which I started to see would rather pay for a good party than for a good water filtration system for the town.

In between concerts I worked for one of Nixon’s brothers named Riccardo.  Nixon is a hefty black Colombian guy and Riccardo is his opposite.  A short wiry white guy.  Riccardo does mechanic and body work on cars in his back yard and could make a car if you gave him the measurements and the raw metal, he’s that good.  The pay from Riccardo was very little, sometimes just lunch and a pack of smokes.  But this was because sometimes Riccardo’s customers didn’t like to pay on time.  In fact that is a rampant problem in Venezuela, one which is common enough to have convinced me never to sell anything to anybody without getting the money in my hand first.  Working on cars here is difficult.  The mechanic stuff is alright, even kind of fun, but the body work will kill you.  Because the labor cost here is so little, many times to get good tools(like special sanding equipment) is more expensive than what you would make in profit.  I worked a long time for Riccardo, sometimes when I think about it, it feels like I worked for him for an eternity.  Sanding the paint off of bumpers with a piece of sandpaper and my bare hands under the burning sun until at the end of my 15 hour day, when my hands were raw and bleeding, I was too wore out to do anything but pass out after a cold shower.  And after spending all day under that evil taskmaster of a sun your skin is so hot that a lukewarm shower feels like you’re jumping into a river in Alaska.

The dates start getting a little mixed up now, but everything before was pretty much chronological.

I started hanging out with a guy I met back when I worked at the restaurant.  We will call him “Charlie” for the sake of anonymity.  He doesn’t want his name mentioned on my blog because he worries that the government will read it and give him a hard time, to say the least.  He’s not being paranoid.  He lived in the U.S. for a while and speaks pretty good English.  When I first met him he asked me why I came to Venezuela.  I told him that it was because I wanted to see the world and because I wanted to see what a socialist government was like.  He looked at me kind of strangely but just said, “oh, ok.”

Anyway, a few months later we go over to one of his friend’s houses.  These are both semi-rich people by Venezuelan standards, middle class by American standards.  His friend breaks out a bottle of expensive whiskey and we are all drinking it on the rocks.  Then Charlie asks me, what I think of the government now that I’ve been there for a while.  I tell him its alright I guess.  That the biggest problem is the corruption, but all-in-all its pretty much the bee’s knees.  He asks for me to give him specifics.  So I tell him ok, there isn’t really any taxes.  Just import tax and business taxes.  He and his friend look at each other and almost spit whiskey out of their noses.  (In my defense, up to this point I’d been getting most of my information about the government from poor people.  I didn’t take into account that many of the poor people don’t have a very good education here and some of them just believe whatever the government tells them.  Also, my Spanish up to this point is still pretty bad, but of course much better than when I came, so there was a lot of things people talked about that I just didn’t understand)  Charlie tells his friend to tell me about the sales tax.  And his friend explains that there is a 12% sales tax on everything.  I told him that I’ve never heard of that.  He asks if I’ve ever looked at a receipt, and I admit that no I haven’t.  In fact, I’ve never been given a receipt for anything here.  He tells me to go into a café and ask for a receipt and on the bottom it will say, “impuesto: 12%.”  The next morning I did that very thing.  And sure enough that was what it said on the receipt.

After that night I began questioning a lot of what I had been told was how things worked in Venezuela.  And little by little I started to find out that Venezuela’s government wasn’t socialist at all.  It was a hardcore communist government in the process of being made.

After a little while Charlie found me a job at a cheese factory.  He was friends with one of the owners.  That was another hard job.  It was on a farm outside of  a town called La Villa de Rosario 45 minutes north of Machiques.

There were air conditioned employee quarters, which was a step up.  They provided 3 meals a day, but unfortunately the meals consisted mostly of rice and a piece of bread, or maybe a couple tiny pieces of chicken if you were lucky.  The company was a cooperative that had 14 owners, some of which were crooked and were stealing money from the other owners.  The majority of the employees who worked there were Colombians.

Now the actual factory was under a roof and had 4 walls but there were large openings on either side of the walls so when you were making the cheese you would have to skim dead flies off of the milk and salt mixture.  It was really gross.  At first I would get a fair amount of cuts on my hands and wrists from the plastic buckets that they put the cheese in until I learned how to throw them right.  That was okay, I’m no sissy, but then many times, with open cuts, I would have to mix the cheese in a water/salt vat or have to spread salt on the finished cheese.  To say the least this was an extremely unsanitary practice, but in addition, with the cuts on my hands it was like torture.  I learned firsthand the meaning of the saying, “rub salt in your wounds.”

[Left Pic: Yanitza is the girl in the middle, Right Pic: Yanitza’s Daughter Hannah]

Before the Cheese factory I acquired a girlfriend named Yanitza.  She is a Guajira Indian who speaks Spanish, English and French.  And she is a jack of all trades.  She sells clothing and other merchandise, works in a medical laboratory, sometimes teaches language, and is the full time mother of a beautiful little girl.

After about a year in Venezuela I decided to return to the U.S.  I spent three years of ups and downs in New Orleans.  I eventually saved up enough money and met a suitable business partner to start an import business in Venezuela selling clothing.

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