30/10/2011 - Sunday, Drunken Sunday

(This is a post I wrote but forgot to put up last time. It was a really fun day.)

we even tracked down a pumpkin in santa elena

Having opted out of going out last night for halloween (and being thankful I did so, the others told me it wasn't worth it) I went for an early morning bike ride with Manuel, the indigenous indian who works at the foundation, to a nearby river. Before setting off I asked him if I should take some water with us. “You can if you want, I'm going to buy rum.” He wasn't joking.

manuel cycling, beer in hand :)

Before we arrived at the river he'd already polished off 3 beers and when we came to an idyllic little waterfall and pool he cracked out the rum. We messed around near the river for a while and he told me about previous volunteers at the foundation, most of whom he seems to have had an infatuation with. For a bit of context, Manuel is 30, doesn't have a wife or kids and has been working on the foundation on and off for about 7 years. He's a very friendly and happy guy although I'm not sure what to make of the drinking. I'm wary of generalising, but talking with Richard and Martina seemed to confirm that drinking is omnipresent within the indigenous community.

On our way back to the foundation we stopped off at a posada (guest-house) run by some Germans that Manuel knew. They were very friendly and seemed to love the British accent. The 17 year old daughter of the German woman Angela, who runs the posada with her Venezuelan husband, was cajoled into coming to talk to me. I guess this could have been awkward if I hadn't already had a few swigs of Manuel's rum and Angela hadn't given us beer. Manuel drunkenly teased me about this encounter in incomprehensible Spanish all the way back to the foundation. I sobered up in the afternoon, while Manuel kept drinking. In the evening when the 4 of us sat down to have dinner he was completely drunk which was slightly bizarre but I guess it was a sunday after all...

7/11/2011 - 10/11/2011 - Spanish lessons

On monday, I became acquainted with Mavis, a 29 year old Venezuelan lady who was staying and working at one of the tourist camps 5 minutes walk from our farm. She's pretty bored staying on her own, especially when there are no tourists at the camp, so once every couple of nights she has become the recipient of my broken conversational spanish. Her english is very limited which is ideal since it forces me to either make sense of what she's saying or reach for the dictionary. I'm sure its very annoying for her when I ask what a certain word means every other sentence but its great for me.

Mavis used to be a lawyer in a city in western Venezuela but said she got fed up with it, not least since the political situation in Venezuela makes it somewhat difficult to work in law and retain any form of morals or ethics (I couldn't possibly comment on whether this is restricted to Venezuela, especially since I know you'll be reading this mum). Corruption and law go hand in hand here. Richard has a female friend who is a lawyer and when I asked him if she was a good lawyer, he said “Of course”. When I asked him if she was corrupt I received the same reply.

working hard at the foundation

the kids love me, honest

Mavis also told me that last year, while she was on holiday in Italy and had planned to travel and also try and find work, Chavez devalued the Venezuelan currency, which forced her to cut short all her plans and return to Venezuela. A simple story like that made me appreciate how many extra difficulties the Venezuelan people must face in almost daily life, most of which seem to be linked to a lack of security. What can you do in a country where the police are corrupt, the courts are corrupt and the leader makes changes at the drop of a hat?  

31/10/2011 - 6/11/2011 - Into the routine

The week flew by in a blur of playing, teaching, learning spanish, cooking and cleaning. Having gotten bored of running around the farm for exercise, I've started venturing into the woods and found some great paths which definitely beat the treadmill at the gym.

fancy a jog?

 On friday night we went for pizza at a deserted restaurant in town. Having taken our order, the owner then proceeded to have an unrequested 20 minute rant about the state of Venezuela under Chavez. On reflection, it isn't surprising that he hates Chavez's socialist agenda since he, as someone who has quite a bit of money, is exactly the kind of person Chavez is directing his anti-bourgeois rhetoric against. He mentioned that even his assets weren't safe since the government reclaimed and redistributed land and property at will. I tried to ask him why he still stayed in Venezuela if he hated it so much but he brushed this off with  “its where my roots are” etc. It's difficult to debate with people who complain about things they have no control over. Although occasionally interesting, this man's tirade about corruption, Venezuelan mafia, badly trained Cuban doctors in Santa Elena and the things this man wished to do to the president fell into that category. Fortunately the pizzas were delicious.

On saturday, we went for a drive into the Gran Sabana, stopping en route to take in some great views and ending up at a nice little waterfall and diving pool. There was a group of indigenous folk swigging whisky there who, after I'd managed to produce a few competent phrases in Spanish, even offered me some. Finally the Spanish is paying off. Richard used to run one of the tour agencies in Santa Elena so he knows the surrounding area really well and seems to have friends in every small village we stop at. The scenery is an interesting mixture of sprawling grasslands punctuated by clumps of palm trees with the imposing Roraima table-mountain always looming in the background.

In the evening, having discovered a guitar at the foundation, I tried to help love-sick Richard through the medium of song. Despite my tuneful and insightful advice I feel little progress was made.

On sunday morning we went along to the inauguration of the new chief of Mana-Kru (the indigenous community) who had been elected last week. After speeches from people of importance and the ceremony itself, certificates were handed out to many people in recognition of their work within the community. At the end, the youth orchestra from the local music school played some lively pieces and there was a real sense of unity about the whole thing.

Considering that the foundation has been going for around 8 years, it is surprising that the work we do currently doesn't have much recognition in Mana-Kru. Richard mentioned that some members of the indigenous community are somewhat negative towards the foundation, partly because some of them don't agree with the rationale, or see the point, of teaching the children English. Also, some children, especially girls, get drafted early on into helping with household chores and staying at home to look after younger siblings and so can't take part in the activities we organise. However, after we talked to him, the new chief seemed relatively enthusiastic about trying to change the attitude of the community towards the work we do, which will hopefully be a good thing. That said, I am fairly realistic in my expectation of what we can and can't achieve here as European outsiders, but that's not a reason not to try and do as much as we can.

Sunday afternoon also saw the arrival of Barry, an architect in his forties from London, who's going to be volunteering at the foundation for 10 weeks. He's a really nice guy and has done a lot of travelling, some of it in south america, so I'm looking forward to picking his brain for recommendations of where I should explore in my travelling months.

23-29/10/2011 - Ups and Downs

As my first week in Santa Elena draws to a close, to say I have mixed feelings about this place would be an understatement. I've also realised that for the next 9 weeks or so this isn't going to be a travel blog (unless you count emotional journeys – I don't) so I'm probably going to post slightly less frequently, especially as my life here takes on a bit more of a routine.   

my lodgings

A gloomy sunday view from the farm

The foundation gym! (including dumbells made from concrete)

Sunday the 23rd was a hungover write-off, during which I mulled over the drunken heart to heart I'd had with Richard. He had told me in no uncertain terms that he's hating this job at the moment and he has the power to sell the farm, close the foundation and leave. I know I should have tried to motivate him but I was just speechless. I managed to keep a relatively straight face and drunkenly told him to follow his heart.

On Monday the 2 female volunteers returned and the first thing Gatrey said to Richard was “I'm leaving”. She was due to leave next week anyway but she decided to cut her losses and leave earlier. It was obvious she hadn't been enjoying herself. It also transpired that a meeting had taken place where she'd criticised Richard and the Foundation for over an hour (prompting Richard to write an email to the owner of the Foundation telling him he wanted to quit) 2 days before I arrived, which probably accounts for the slightly tense mood I found myself in during the first couple of days. All the motivation had been sucked out of the place and it was going to be an uphill struggle to bring it back.

While tuesday was an unremarkable day of lessons and play, wednesday was more memorable. Last week, during our arduous meeting, we discussed the mobile school. This is essentially a massive box on wheels with lots of pull-out blackboards and has lots of activities which you can hang up for the kids to do. It turns out that for as long as anyone could remember, the mobile school had just been sitting in the classroom where the volunteers used to teach and was being used in situ. Upon my insistence that a mobile school should indeed be mobile, on wednesday we took the school into the area where the indian community live and spent a couple of hours teaching kids from the neighbourhood. Just as I'd hoped, the combination of the kids' enthusiasm and a new experience for us as volunteers was very galvanizing. I taught some maths and geography as well as tactfully dodging the advances of the 14 year old girls who'd taken my sunglasses. A knackering but satisfying day.  

"Look mom, I´m a volunteer!"

On friday morning I went food shopping in the market with Richard. As we bought indian bread, mangoes, papayas and various other essentials, it was great to see several people sitting around already on the booze at 8am. We then had to drive to the Brazilian border town of Pacaraima to buy powdered milk. I thought this was ridiculous until we went to fill up the car with petrol which cost around 40p for a full tank. Venezuela never ceases to amaze me. In the afternoon we threw a halloween party for the kids which, i assume like most kids halloween parties, involved face-painting, too many pancakes, too many sweets, too much cake, kids vomiting, hide and seek and a sack race. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves though so it felt like we'd done a good job.

22/10/2011 - Border Hopping and the Commercial Disco

I was running out of cash so in the morning I tagged along to the Brazilian border town of Paracaima with Gatrey and Martina who were going to Boa Vista (the nearest city in Brazil) for the weekend. Paracaima is literally one street but it had a bank which allowed me to withdraw Brazilian money which I could then change into Bolivars without getting stung by the official exchange rate. I also got excited and purchased shaving foam, several packs of wafers and some trainers for running (nearly 2 weeks of fatty Venezuelan food and little exercise means my fitness levels are plummeting). Frustratingly, I had to make the 500m walk between the Venezuelan and Brazilian border controls several times in order to get a visa back into Venezuela (apparently, I could have gone into Paracaima, which is technically in Brazil, without bothering to tell the Venezuelan or Brazilian authorities). However, it did mean I got several chances to admire the massive queues of Brazilian motorists who hop over the border to get cheap Venezuelan petrol at the gas station just the other side of the border.

In the evening Richard taught me how to make arepas, an activity punctuated with shots of whisky. We ended up in town and, this being Saturday night, Richard gave me a tour of the “commercial discos”. They're not dissimilar to UK clubs except that they're much smaller and at least some of the partygoers know how to dance. I found them quite tedious but Richard seems to love them. Communicating in a club is tricky at the best of times but when you don't have a strong command of the language it's even harder. I found this out the hard way when I tried to explain to a group of Brazilian guys, one of whom was trying to hit on me, that I wasn't gay. Another highlight was a guy inexplicably smoking in the stinking toilets when he could have easily gone outside to do so. The night ended with us getting a flat tire on the way back to the Foundation but we just about made it back. This would be a problem for tomorrow.

21/10/2011 - Kids, Horses and Mosquitos

After a long and awkward morning group volunteer meeting, during which I could have squeezed gallons of blood out of the surrounding sedimentary rocks in the time it took us to make a plan for next weeks activities (which ended up being more or less the same as this weeks), the kids came to the farm again and we took the horses out into the little sandy enclosure on the farm. Later Richard told me that the Foundation is the only free activity for children in Santa Elena; the government does little to provide for kids from poor backgrounds.

Richard is standing in as coordinator for Manfred Monnighoff, a German businessman, who set up the Foundation 7 years ago but is back in Germany at the moment to be with his dying mother. The current dynamic between Gatrey, Martina (volunteers) and Richard (coordinator) is interesting to say the least. However, this is not a blog about power struggles and group dynamics in small NGOs, so I won't go into details.

In the evening, after failed attempts to watch some kung-fu films Manuel had bought (the dvd would seamlessly skip massive chunks of the film leaving me wondering why I couldn't follow the story) I had a chat with Richard about his horse-riding days and the trials and tribulations of being a coordinator of the Foundation. I also noticed the large amounts of mosquito bites on my legs which I'd obtained from being near horses wearing only shorts. Live and learn.

20/10/2011 - Arrival in Santa Elena

Having joked in a previous entry about how the inter-city coaches really weren't that cold in Venezuela and that people on the internet were exaggerating, I was to get my comeuppance on the overnight bus to Santa Elena. This time it really was freezing. The air-conditioning is inexplicably set on full blast throughout an overnight journey which would have been pretty chilly at the best of times anyway. Earlier in the trip I thought it was stupid to be lugging 2 jumpers with me but now they were an absolute blessing.

We were also treated to 3 army checkpoints which involved everyone being woken up and having their passport checked and a few people having their stuff rummaged through.

Despite the broken sleep I actually felt relatively refreshed upon arriving into Santa Elena's unspectacular bus terminal in the early morning. I was picked up by Richard, the current coordinator of the volunteering organisation, and Gatrey, a volunteer in her late 20s from Finland, in a pick-up truck which had seen better days. We drove to the farm where the NGO is based and which will be my home for the next 2 months, stopping en route to pick up some coffee from, bizarrely, a Hong Kong supermarket in Santa Elena (there are actually several of them). Santa Elena itself is a pretty small (~20,000 according to Richard) but “happening” (according to my lonely planet guide) town, which is probably due to the number of tourists making excursions into the surrounding Gran Sabana and its proximity to the Brazilian border (about 20 minutes drive).

Arriving at the farm, I met the only other volunteer currently here, Slovakian Martina who is studying in London, and Manuel who is a Venezuelan native (“Indian”) and works on the farm full time. The farm is 3 hectares and is also home to 2 horses which the kids involved in the project get to ride as part of their activities. The volunteer house, which sits in the middle of the farm and has a massive kitchen and eating area, feels very homely already and even has some gym equipment round the back.

My first, unofficial, task was to help Martina with her English for some university work (she is doing the volunteering as a part of her course, in development or something) which was already overdue. She told me she'd stayed up till 3 am and then woke up at 5am to work on it which brought back countless memories of last year of uni for me.

In the afternoon Richard and Martina went and picked up the kids from the indigenous community in town and brought them back to the farm where me, Martina and Gatrey gave them a quick “English lesson” (we translated a few lines from that Dirty Dancing song, which the Black Eyed Peas have covered, from English into Spanish). Today there were only 4 children but I was told by the others that the numbers fluctuate quite a bit. After the lesson, the remainder of the 2 hours that the kids stay on the farm was spent going round the farm with a wheelbarrow and collecting horse poo. Richard assured me that “the kids love it”. And funnily enough they really did, zealously raking it onto the shovel I was using and excitedly running to the next pile. I love how refreshingly enthusiastic kids are when it comes to mundane chores. It was a bit of an uphill struggle for me to communicate and understand the kids but its definitely easier here where both Richard and Martina have pretty good English-Spanish skills and I think it'll force my Spanish to improve quickly. If not then my future Venezuelan girlfriend will.

After we'd dropped the kids off at their respective houses, Richard, Martina, Gatrey and I had a drink and arepas in town before proceeding to buy beer and ludicrously cheap rum (15Bs ~ £1.50 for 70cl) which we enjoyed back at the “Foundation” (the nickname for the farm). On first impression, Santa Elena has a nice atmosphere around it and feels a lot safer than anywhere else I've been in Venezuela. I went to my mosquito-netted bed knackered but content.