First experiences in Venezuela

I made it to Carorita without any problems. It´s definitely in the mountains. I´m about a mile down a dirt road that apparently goes on for a long way. The nearest real town is La Puerta, about 40 minutes South of Valera in the state of Trujillo. That´s where I am now in an absurdly slow Internet cafe.

Rev. Mendoza has building where he hosts various groups and works in the community. I´ve got one of the bunk rooms with an adjacent bathroom. It´s nice, but I´ll probably have to give it up if a big group comes. The current project is finishing three houses that were started by a UMVIM group about a month ago. The closest one is just about done, as soon as I finish the plumbing. We got it wired yesterday. It´s a different sort of work, but I´m getting used to it, and I´ll probably be quite a good mason by the time I come home. The clinic has been closed because a neighbor bought a load of chicken manure and it was for some reason dumped right outside the clinic. The neighbor is moving it to his field, but only one burro load at a time. When I arrived Francisco had some family in, and I was happy to work on the house. Being in a building full of people I barely understand was a little challenging.

This weekend should be interesting. We are hosting a women´s group from the Methodist churchs in the Maracaibo area. It´s probably fairly revolutionary considering the general mentality of people around here. It´s definitely a male dominated culture. Some guys from another MEthodist project on the coast in San Carlos came in to help. Toby is a gringo but has been here a while, so he can help with some of my cultural questions. I´m looking forward to Monday though when the place will be quiet and I can relax a little bit.

Things are going well. I´m struggling some with the language and isolation, but as one improves, the other should as well. The people are amazingly welcoming. In the evenings, everyone just walks from house to house visiting. Most houses have a driveway, but there is always a dirt footpath linking them directly. I can say what I need to, read the newspaper etc, but I´m still having a hard time parsing conversations.

There is a youth group that Francisco leads. They recently returned from a mission trip to San Carlos. It was surprising to hear them talk about how poor the people in San Carlos were. I guess that from my perspective, it´s hard to distinguish levels of poverty when looking so far from what I´m used to. The people I´m with though aren´t particularly destitute for Venezuela, although they have very little.

This afternoon has been fun though. I took a taxi, ironically a Lincoln Conquistador, to La Puerta to get a few things from the hardware store and use the internet. I had a funny experience in a little store. I stopped for a coke, and she apologized that for some reason, she didn´t have a bottle opener. I didn´t see this as too much of a problem and opened the bottle on a retaining wall outside. I guess this trip will draw on the entirety of my education. I was surprised they weren´t familiar with this technique. Well, I´m off to the hardware store where I´m going to try to figure out how to say "I need a galvanized one inch to half inch female adapter." Hopefully they will be sufficiently fascinated with the fact that a gringo in shopping there that they will forget how annoying trying to talk to one can be.

Home to Venezuela

I´m currently in Venezuela, but a lot has happened to get me here. I thought I´d fill in some of the gaps before arriving. I flew out of Knoxville very early Friday morning and arrived in Madison, WI before lunch. This gave me a chance to spend some time with Aaron and meet some of Liz´s half the aisle. We went to dinner that night, but I had to abandon the bachelor party and get to be early.

I arose at six Saturday morning to the concerted noise of three alarms, each of which I checked almost hourly between 1 and 5. I then got ready and headed downtown to the UW campus to take the MCAT. I probably left at seven, wanting plenty of time to get lost and still make it by eight. I arrived at about 7:12. There were already people there studying flash cards. I walked around the block a couple times, then just sat and try to relax. The test went well. I think. I´m going to think it did anyway -- I won´t actually know until the middle of October. I left at 5:30 and went to the bride´s mother´s house for supper, then to bed at a reasonable hour.

I have to say I enjoyed not having a vehicle. Having me where I needed to be was someone else´s responsibility. A lot of people from college met at a neat restaurant, then we started getting ready for the wedding. Everything went well. The service was in Frank Lloyd Wright´s famouse Unitarian Meeting House, and everything was very well done. Afterwards we celebrated and had a great time. I got to spend some time Monday with Aaron and Liz since most people had already left. They took me to the airport and I was off to Venezuela, or at least St. Louis.

I´ve been on the giving end of the ASP hospitality network many times, and this was my chance to make use of it. I met and stayed with Aileen, friend of Abe, past and future ASP staffer, and wonderful hostess. Then, another bleary eyed start to Miami. I arrived there around ten and didn´t leave till 5. It was a long, boring day. But, by the end, I was in Maracaibo.

Throughout all this, I don´t know that I had any particular feelings about the trip as a whole. It was just a lot of stuff to do in a few days, and I was going to get through it. I think my first moment of excitement and panic was walking through the Maracaibo airport and seeing NOTHING in English.

Trappist Bars

This is, I guess, a glimpse into how my mind works and how I end up being a font of trivia. The beginning is a little odd, but it ends up very apropos of my last entry.

While listening to the Doors' song, LA Woman, I noticed the line that I always heard as "trappist bars." This has always seemed unlikely as trappists are members of an order (sect?) "wholly ordered to contemplation," in the tradition of St. Benedict.

Rather than continue studying, I felt it necessary to determine the true lyric, which turned out to be "Cops in cars, the topless bars / Never saw a woman... / So alone, so alone." So, I was right, there are no trappist bars, either in reality or in the fertile imagination of Jim Morrison. My curiosity was not quite sated, and I was shortly looking at www.trappist.net, which had a link to the daily reading from St. Benedict's Rule which, for August 15, is:

Chapter 61: How Pilgrim Monks Are To Be Received

If a pilgrim monastic coming from a distant region
wants to live as a guest of the monastery,
let her be received for as long a time as she desires,
provided she is content
with the customs of the place as she finds them
and does not disturb the monastery by superfluous demands,
but is simply content with what she finds.
[more deleted]

While I'm neither a "pilgrim monastic" or a "her," I was amused to stumble on this, especially in light of my current situation. I will try to remember this and "be content with the customs ... as [I find] them" etc. Hopefully next time I write to this travel journal, I'll actually be traveling.

Humility

I'm very thankful that a couple groups have thought this endeavour to be of enough value to contribute to it. My airfare and room and board in Venezuela have been taken care of by contributions by the members of Cherokee United Methodist Church, its missions committee, and by the UMW group at Fairview UMC.

I had hoped to avoid asking for help, and am not entirely comfortable accepting it. I was wondering what to do if I collected more than the sum of airfare, room and board, and asked Rev. Woody at Cherokee. His answer has give me a lot to think about, and I'll try to explain why.

He said simply that if it was given in the spirit of helping me get to Venezuela (and back of course), then I should use it as such, for extra living expenses or whatever. I think it's good advice and something the American Red Cross learned the hard way after 9/11. The idea this led to for me is that turning down a gift freely given is in some way an act of arrogance -- I'm second guessing the giver's intentions and demeaning their act of generosity. I'm also running away from the responsibility of being a good steward of their money.

So, I'm going to take it and not say anything (excluding, of course, this entry). In fact, I don't budget for anything but the bare minimum, and I trust to austerity and sheer stubbornness to stick to it. For example, the little bit extra will allow me to eat more than granola bars during the 14 hours of total lay-over I have on the way down.

In that spirit I, vegetarian of 7 or so years, ate a ham sandwich someone gave me yesterday. I anticipated that not eating meat would be a problem as it's very likely that I'll be offered meals (likely including meat) by numerous people while I'm there. To turn it down is to choose my own somewhat arbitrary value over their generosity, and, as implied above, it's a statement I want to avoid.