All Out!

By Adriaan van Ginkel

First of all,  my apologies to you all for being late with my weekly news brief. Yesterday was just one of “those days”, a day in which the daily chaos of Venezuela comes trampling down the door of your life and throws everything in a chaos. What started as a day of picking up course books for my in-company English course and then go to my in-laws’ house to care for three small puppies we rescued from a dumpster, turned into a mad day of looking for soap, detergent and toilet paper. No books were picked up yesterday, no mail was read nor answered, my blog couldn’t be updated, no soap, detergent or toilet paper were found, but we came home with even scarcer sugar and white rice, hooray. And we didn’t even have to stand in one of those kilometrical queues in front of shops that we saw all around the city. On an even higher note, the puppies were attended to – doing fine, the scabies is already receding, they are happy and playful and we already found a temporary home for them. Two advices at this point: the more negative your surroundings are, the more positive your own way of acting should be. Saving three puppies three days ago is a sound way of punching a damning hole into the wall of death and negativity that is engulfing Venezuela. One point for you! And the second advice: if you plan to use an agenda while living in a third world country, forget it. Your planned day will be tossed around without notice, and you will end up either as a candidate for a nervous breakdown or a master in juggling and improvising. Drum roll. Apparently, I am not on the list for the Happy Gardens Mental Home. Yet. So I must be doing something right till now. 

Yes, Venezuela is all out. Out of products, out of money, out of hope, out of mental sanity (particularly among politicians from all sides), out of any order that should be part of a country with a government. My own opinion is that the country is also “out” of a government, that we are watching warped reruns
of the Muppet Show instead (see left). The only things that abounds here, is talking nonsense. All around us, people seem like having lost their marbles. Yesterday, my wife and I were watching an enormous queue in front of a supermarket in a part of the old west of Caracas called La Concordia. We couldn’t see where it started or where it ended. I already warned my wife that I wouldn’t think of standing baking in the tropical sun for hours for a miserable quantity of detergent. Soldiers were omnipresent, the people in the queue, some of whom already seemed to have grown roots because of the hours and hours waiting, were deadly silent. Everybody knew: anyone who starts complaining in public will be arrested. I asked a housewife in the queue how things were going. “Oh, we are doing fine. The queue is going really fast, señor. Look how people are moving.” I blinked twice, thrice, but I saw no movement. In fact, for the 20 minutes or so that we were watching the scene, no one had moved an inch.

I asked the wretched lady if she thought that this was “movement”. She didn’t get the irony of my words. It’s clear to me that people are trying to adapt themselves to the situation reminiscent of the Soviet Union, Cuba and other socialist countries, accepting the shortages, the lies and the deceit as a part of everyday life as well as the abuse from the part of the authorities who were standing there, uniformed with Kalashnikovs at the ready (for what?), and keen on anyone who would dare to speak the unheard remark “I won’t tolerate this abuse”. Seeing and not seeing the abuse, hearing and not hearing the lies and the nonsense, and keeping your mouth shut. 

The poor and middle-class Venezuelans are surviving, like I described it in an earlier news brief about the fictional single mother Yonarkys - nothing else. They will tell and believe any nonsense that will make their daily life bearable. So, if that lady I talked to did find some consolation in imagining that the queue is moving fast, then so be it. To any outsider who is not infected by certain ideologies, the whole scenery is surrealistic, absurd. But when you go to Cuba, you will see the same scenes. And remember, that island is already experiencing all this for the past 56 years. Venezuela is just beginning, from the Cubans’ point of view. 

But now comes a lifeboat. This morning I saw a Venezuelan motivational coach called Carlos Saúl Rodríguez on a TV talk show. His clients are the national football team and a score of big companies, so nationally speaking he is somebody. His keyword in his books and conferences is attitude. It all depends on the attitude you adopt in a certain situation. In situations full with fears, uncertainty and despair, like we all experience in Venezuela, a positive, constructive attitude is the best way to avoid being swallowed by that black hole of negativity. And it doesn’t mean closing your eyes on the mess and pretend it’s not there. The German population held a saying about the same situation during the last war. Translated, it goes like this: if misfortune grins in your face, just return the grin.

In my first news brief, I touched this theme already. When you don’t have the means to fight the storm, bend to it like a bamboo. When the storm has passed, get upright again, shake the dust from you, and keep smiling. Go on with your life. Attitude is maybe not a water-tight guarantee you will survive physically (the number of deaths through violence keep shooting through the roof here), but it is the key to mental and emotional survival. It was the salvation for countless survivors of the Holocaust and the war. One day this nightmare will be over, because nothing lasts forever, except maybe an optimistic attitude towards life. If you have lost your job because of the crisis in the Eurozone, keep smiling. The end of something always means something new is starting. It could be positive, right?

I’m surrounded by our cats on the table while I’m writing to you in my living room. Our apartment is cute, our car is working again. I don’t have a single bolivar in my account right now, but there is enough food at home and our pets are happy and well-fed. And with a smile, hoping this day will turn out the way I planned, I close this news brief with the remark “All out? No way. La vita é bella!”

Have a great week and till next Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015