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.