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.

19/10/2011 - Last day in Ciudad Bolivar

Having spent the morning sorting out finances and bank transfers, I spent the rest of the day exploring Ciudad Bolivar. As in Caracas, shabby exteriors of buildings give way to the much nicer interiors, even if those interiors are mostly comprised of row upon row of shoe and mobile phone shops. I managed to find a great little cheap eatery which served a 2-course meal for 25 Bs ~ £2.50 and got chatting to a university professor sitting next to me who helped me order my meal. He'd worked in the mines in his youth and was now lecturing on the geology of mines at the local university. We chatted about Venezuelan beauty queens (apparently potential beauties go to a preparatory school in Caracas where any blemishes they might have are “ironed out” – gutted I missed that), the perils of working in a mine (of which there are numerous) and the benefits of getting a south American girlfriend to accelerate my acquisition of the Spanish language (honestly his idea but not a bad one).

Here is a quick detour into the stupidity of the Venezuelan currency. The official exchange rate set by the Venezuelan government is roughly 4 Bolivars to $1, while the black market exchange rate is at least double that: 8 Bs to $1. This means that when getting money out of an ATM you effectively pay twice as much for everything. Good ol' Chavez. I've managed to avoid having to do this so far but it just makes everything that little bit more difficult. Ok rant over.

The coach to Santa Elena and 2 months of volunteering awaits.

18/10/2011 - Waterfall trekking (day 3): Back to Ciudad Bolivar

We spent most of the day returning to Ciudad Bolivar where I said goodbye to the other people I'd been travelling with as they headed onwards to other destinations while I opted to spend one more night in Ciudad Bolivar before travelling onto Santa Elena tomorrow. It had been great travelling with some fellow English speakers and most of them seemed to have been travelling for a long time already so it was good to get some recommendations. A couple of people had come into Venezuela from Columbia which they were raving about so any reservations I might have had about going there have gone and its quite likely to be my next destination.

In the evening I went to a local eatery and ate what I can only describe as a massive plate of meat while Starship Troopers dubbed into Spanish droned on in the background. Seemed like a bit of an inappropriate film to be on at 7pm and not exactly what you'd want with your dinner, but maybe I should stop being so prudish.

17/10/2011 - Waterfall trekking (day 2): Angel Falls

After a couple of boat rides along the river and several mini hikes we arrived at Angel Falls. Getting to the waterfall and taking photos felt like a bit of a box-ticker but the journey to the falls, especially racing along the river with the dramatic tepuis (flat topped mountains) on either side of us, was great. I also realised that the film “Up” was based on this landscape and it turns out the animation team actually came to Angel Falls while working on the film. We spent the night in hammocks under a constructed shelter which is just as well because it was absolutely pouring it down. I also got my first taste of the side effects of my anti-malarial medication as my stomach churned away under the weight of my dinner of chicken and rice.