Barrio La Lima de Los Maitines

Justin and I met Chris, a youngish guy from Colorado who is a teacher at my language school, at ¨seven thirty this morning in Plaza Bolivar. Chris came to Merida two years ago to get his masters in Latin American Studies at the University here in Merida. He found that the program he wanted to take was dysfunctional because non career oriented departments, purely academic, are not very popular here, and therefore the departments hardly function. Chris took us on the bus, to Barrio La Lima de los Maitines, where he has been working for at least a year now. At one point he was helping to organize community meetings as part of one of the Missions, which are the social programs initiated and funded by the government since Chavez. However, the funding for that mission disappeared, nobody knows why. Lately, Chris has been teaching a computer class to middle school aged kids in a school funded by a Catholic organization.
When we arrived at the foot of the hill, where this barrio begins, there was a crowd of school kids waiting for a jeep to take them up the hill, where the schools are. We took the stairs instead of the jeep, and it was a steep climb. The steps zigzagged up the very steep hill, and around the houses made of red clay cinder blocks and concrete, and tin. Most of the houses in this barrio are only accessible and divided by these steps and concrete walkways as wide as sidewalks. Some of these walkways are partly crumbled away, because the clay beneath them washed away. The instability of the soil beneath these houses is one of the main challenges for many Venezuelan barrios, because they are commonly created on very steep hills on the outskirts of cities, where no one else wants to build.
Although the mission Chris worked with disappeared, this barrio has a few other government missions. The first is the Barrio Adentro, a basic care health clinic with one Cuban doctor who lives and works in a building in the Barrio. The Bario Adentro health program is a copy of part of the Cuban health program. In the beginning the program did not come with its own building provided by the government. Instead the doctor lived in one of the houses with a family in the community, and worked out of the house as well. It appears that this program is working very well now for the community. Becasue most barrios have their own clinic now, the one public hospital in Meridais not the only place where everyone goes for every type of health problem.
We also stoped in to visit the Bolivarian School, which is a public school for grades 1 through 6. The gov. education system also includes other levels, including adult literacy programs and Universities, but I am not sure on the details yet.
Another popular and successful program are the Marcals, which are grocery stores that are independently run, and provide gov. subsidized food within the poor communities. An extra positive to the inexpensive food is that the food is supposed to be grown and produced as much as possible within the country.
The missions are working well for the people. Accessible health care, inexpensive food, and education opportunities have improved people´s lives. There are more problems that need to be addressed, and it will take time. Chris explained that the community has been organized by outsiders, and organized itself many times, and many times the gov. has not come through with with the funding. Recently the gov. has been encouraging the barrio communities to organize themselves and present the gov. with requests for funding. The idea seems to be that the people living in each barrio know what their most important problems and needs are, so encouraging inter community organizing could be effective. Chris explained that an interesting issue in this barrio is that so far, the requests of the community have been very small. So far they have asked for trash receptacles with roves where trash can be picked up, and their other request was for a bridge across the large stream that separates a far edge of their barrio with a main road. The trash receptacles look very good, and the bridge is not quite finished. I need to find out if the gov. pays for the labor of making these things, or just the supplies.
More on this subject later.

Progress

It has felt a little strange to be in such a touristy city, and not having to opportunity to do the research that I really want to get into, but have to improve my language skills before i can make it work. Because I have been in language classes studying grammar, I have to remind myself that soon I will have a lot of time to do my other study. The grammar is a little overwhelming, because we are covering a lot in a short period of time, but I think that once I have time to really memorize the tenses I will be in better shape.

Ham

Ham and cheese everywhere, I think I will become a ham. Ham is the most common filling here, and for me it is sort of serves as an example of the lack of healthy and familiar food options that I have found so far. Venezuelans have a few national foods that they eat frequently for breakfast and dinner, the smaller and simpler meals in the day. Lunches include soup, meat and rice and either a noodle salad or cabbage type salad, but the breakfast and dinner foods that are most common all commonly come with ham, except one. The Empanada, which is a fried pocket filled with beef, chicken or cheese are the solo hamless breakfast and dinner food. Arepas, English muffin like biscuits made out of refined cornmeal similar to the cornmeal in grits, are served split like an English muffin with different filling options, including ham. Sandwiches are common for breakfast, almost always with ham in my experience. In the bakeries, there are sandwiches and pastries of different types, and always with ham and cheese, just ham, or just cheese. Yesterday I had lasagna for lunch, which had all of the fillings you would find in the US, and also deli slicked ham. For a few days I have been ham free, because I have been making my own breakfast and dinner in my posada. It has been really nice to eat simple food that I have made, after many days of going out and eating greasy food so often.
Lunches always come with soup, and the other day when I started eating my soup, I discovered that what I thought was chicken was very strange looking. It had strange texture and on one side of the chuncks sort of long cells. I figured it was octopus for some reason, but I later learned that it was mondongo, cow stomach. I didn´t eat very much of it. Perhaps I should look for something with ham next time and pass on the mystery menu items.

Observations

Something the has interested me lately have been the abundance of very small scale business operations on the street. Two that stick out are are people selling coffee and people selling the use of cell phones. The cell phone booths are all over the city, and used it seems that people use them quite often. Some cell phone setups are simply a person on a plastic stool, a cell phone with a chain connecting it to the stool or the vendor. Sometimes there is no chain and sometimes there is a little canopy and a few phones and a clip board. There is a cell phone booth down the street from my posada, with a card table and a little canopy. sometimes there are maybe eight people crowded around it. Although it seems that everyone in Venezuela already owns a cell phone, the phone stores seem to always have people in them, these stands are all over. I will have to ask around to see how much less expensive they are, compared to the businesses owned by the phone companies that have up to 20 phone booths, located in commercial building spaces. The governments efforts to nationalize the communications corporations is especially interesting considering the obvious demand for communications by consumers and who owns the cellular companies now. I will have to do more research on who owns the companies now, and why the government wants to own them.

Merida

Merida is very ¨tranquillo¨, which is a work everyone here uses to describe it. The city is attractive, with narrow streets and narrow sidewalks, and little stores. It is a very popular tourist destination, but it seems that the majority of the tourists are from other parts of Venezuela. The city is full of little stores selling shoes, clothes, cell phones, ice cream, candy, underwear and other things. All of the fruit and vegetable stores look very much the same, and none of them are bigger than 12 feet deep or 8 feet wide. I finally found a small super market, in downtown area, but most of the bigger stores are outside down town, across the river.

First night in Merida

After arriving in Merida at midnight on a Saturday night, Meiler, a Venezuelan our age who had been on the bus with us with his girlfriend, asked Justin and I where we were going to stay. We didn´t have any reservations, so he invited us to go to a hotel with two Spaniards he met on the buss, where they had a reservation. WHen we all arrived in two taxis the reserved room had been given away, so all six of us crammed into one taxi and scoured the city for a place to stay. Still holiday season, Venezuelans take about a month off, there were no posadas or hotels with vacant rooms. Eventually, the taxi driver dropped us all off in front of a 24 hour cafe, where we sat outside all night and talked in Spanish and drank coffee. The nights in Venezuelan cities are never quiet, people party in clubs until four am, and then they go to after parties until dawn, so we were never completely alone in the night. About 8am we looked around for rooms again, wanting a shower and a nap really bad, we were informed that the rooms would be ready and clean after 11am or 1pm. We found a really nice posada eventually, which was located close to the language school I am now attending.

Caracas

I arrived in Merida city by buss at midnight on a Saturday night a little over a week ago. I am enjoying my stay in Merida, and the langueage school I am attending. The four days before arriving here I had been staying with Justin in an appartment he was renting in Caracas. Caracas was a very interesting experience, modern, big, and surrounded by hills with barrios climbing the slopes and spilling over the peaks on a few sides. The other slopes surrounding the city are steep green mountains. While in the city, I took the metro with Justin to the art museums, and ran arrands trying to get cell phones to work. My most valuable experiences in Caracas were two conversations with Caracaños about the city. Justin and I both had the number of a man named Charlie Hardie, from different sources. We met Charlie at a very fancy hotel for desert, where he was staying with a group of college students who were on a school trip, which he was leading while they were here. Charlie had come to Venezuela a little over twenty years ago, as a priest. He ended up living in a tin shack in a barrio with no suer or running water, for 8 years. He is currently very excited because his book is being published soon, which is about his experiences in Venezuela. The publishers have chosen to title it A Cowboy in Caracas.
The second valuable discussion was with the Arthur, who works for global exchange, is from Caracas and speaks english. While we were driving, he talked about the barrios on the hillsides, and the oil strike that occured a few years ago. He explained that the barrios are very similar to those shown in the film, City of God, with gangs fighting over territory for drug sales. As huge as these problems are, there are changes occuring slowly. Health facilities, food, community based media and new housing construction, I will talk about these later, but you can view photos of the housing pilot project on Justin´s blog - http://www.justinvela.com/
He also spoke about comming from a family that opposes Chavez, but his opinon changing when the elite people who opose CHavez shut down the entire oil operations for two months, shutting down the economy for months. I will write about this more late, when I have the correct dates and names, because it (the sut down of the oil know as The Oil Strike) seems to have been very important in influencing people´s opinions about the conservative political party.