Una vaina loca

I'm sitting on a terrace overlooking a city of multi-colored apartments tucked into a valley surrounded by tall, green mountains.  I see the mountains to my left, closest to the airport, blanketed with ranchos, small, vibrantly colored shacks, stacked one upon the next.  How do the people living there even find their own houses with so much chaos and stacking?  The sky in front of me is clear and things look clean and beautiful from this height and then I see the fences surround the house, and the next house, and the one after that.  I see the circles of barbed wire and electric fences lining the beautiful houses of this mountain that is so close, but obviously so far from the mountain of poverty.  Welcome to Caracas.

With me on the terrace are two people, Jose and Mrs. Oviedo (the dona of the house).  We begin talking about Mrs. O's son's trip to the US embassy tomorrow in order to get his visa to study in California this upcoming fall.  The paperwork, she says, is two inches thick, and in order to get money out of the country of Venezuela, Venezuelan citizens need to go through an office called Cadivi.  Cadivi restrics the amount of money leaving Venezuela by setting requirments depending on destination.  On a trip to the US, a Venezuelan can take around $1,500.  To Colombia, $3,000.  To Iran, maybe up to $5,000.  In this way, Venezuelan's are forced to keep their money in Venezuela.  Even credit card charges are restricted by Venezuelan banks according to the mandates of Cadivi.  In addition to these Venezuelan rules, in order to gain entrance into the university, the family must show evidence of available funds, meaning income statements, bank statements, titles to houses, businesses, and property.  Tomorrow, her son will leave the house at 8:30am to make sure traffic doesn't make him late to his 11:00am appointment at the US embassy where he will wait in line and then go over the paperwork with an official.  He is hoping to leave the embassy by 3pm.

I am stuck by the difficulty of things that I have never thought twice about in Minnesota.  I have never questioned whether or not my credit card would work in Europe, China, or South America.  I have never been so struck by poverty nor so overwhelmed by beauty and garbage at the same time.  I have never thought about paying hundreds of dollars to compile papers, make dates with an embassy, translate documents, in order to get an education.  And at the same time, while I feel so  lucky that those things are easy in my country, so straightforward and transparent, I feel like there is something in the spirit of the people here that I haven't seen before.  The knowledge and the acceptance and the experience of poverty and inequality and frustration and shadow and perserverence is something not many of my American counterparts have ever experienced outside a National Geographic commercial or news report.  It's difficult to step back and realize that my sheltered existence in the US, China, Europe, Mexico, Dominican Republic, the world, my life in a bubble, has never given me the wariness, distrust, determination, or fire that many people here have.  And this is the real world.  Or part of it.  Because Rochester is the real world too.  Now the question is how do I exist in both?