By Adriaan van Ginkel
Only two rolls left. As
most of you will agree with me, finding out that only two rolls of toilet paper
are smiling at you on an early Tuesday morning is a sure sign that some
shopping needs to be done. But what if you
find out that there IS no toilet paper in any shop or supermarket? Believe me.
In Venezuela, the only way to get four or eight of these precious rolls is to
stand for half a day in an endless queue in front of some supermarket where
they happen to sell those darn things. If you happen to have a large family,
plan ahead and mark a “toilet roll day” in your weekly schedule. Because that’s
the way things are going here, if you don’t have some 80-year-old granny who is
willing to spend days and hours under the burning sun, sacrificing herself for
the family’s toilet relief. There are elderly people who HAVE died these past
weeks here in queues of a heart attack or heat stroke, I’m not kidding. So, on
second thought, let’s not send Granny to the death queue, but some useless
spotty teenage second cousin who has nothing to do but stalk the neighbor’s
daughter. At least he will be doing something useful for the family.
So,
what to do? What can you really do if you are
stuck in a country that has no toilet paper freely available? The disappearance
of the roll of toilet paper, true symbol of post-war modernism, has forced me
to reprogram my thinking. DO we need toilet paper at all? Is the total absence
of toilet paper, aside from bringing really awkward moments and panicky
walk-abouts with sagging pants in that little room, a real disaster, if there
are other alternatives available? My dad as a little boy “did it” with
newspaper, which did the trick of course but stained his bum black with ink.
Some way not to be in the news, but the news being on you.
Then there are
true millenary paper-free methods like the French bidet, which would do the
trick nicely if Venezuela hadn’t such tiny toilets in her apartments. The spout
of water in Persian toilets (I lived in Iran a long time ago) is yet another traditional
yet modernized way of cleaning your nether parts after the job (left), with a
highly decorative handle bar attached to the wall to prevent any disaster of
yourself falling to the side and getting stuck in that gaping hole to hell. It
seems that in Iran, you have to have true Cirque Du Soleil acrobatic skills if
you have to relieve yourself. How would our 80-year-old granny in Venezuela get
that thing done? “Look family, no toilet paper!” could have been her last happy
words before she fell forward and into that hole. There are advantages of having
that unobtainable roll of toilet paper. So, back to the death queue she goes.
But seriously, folks.
The sanitary problem in Venezuela (a country slowly crashing through the 21st
century floor and reaching that of the 19th ) is such that moms are
at a loss – we are again talking about the excrement problem – at how to
control the babies’ uncontrollable urge to crap at any time in any place, with
no disposable diapers on. As many grown-ups must have a problem of how not to
walk around with smelly pants after a disastrous visit to the paperless toilet,
toddlers are making their moms’ lives a true brown-stained misery. Now, you
might laugh. But it’s the plain shitty truth, uncensored. There are NO diapers
freely available in Venezuela, and this is a problem that has been going on for
months. Diaper queues are monstrous at times. Now, Caracas is not really a city
smelling of flowers, but imagine the situation in crampy homes full of children
having no toilet paper and no disposable diapers. Imagine the smell in the
tropical heat, if above all these disasters your tap water gets cut off without
warning for hours on end because of some rationing plan drawn up by the city
authorities. I had the thrilling pleasure of having to live for almost a week
in my apartment without running water, at 30 degrees centigrade temperatures,
but that was because the water pump in our condo had broken down and there were
difficulties in getting spare parts to fix that contraption. So we had time to
put the buckets of water in place, fill all bottles with drinking water and
make sure our home stayed fresh and free of nasty smells. It is a day-filling
job, I assure you. And to finish our good news, we have NO toddlers or smelly
teenagers at home, only some very clean kitties who do know their way about
with the litter box.
Returning
to
crapping babies. You might ask: why
do Venezuelan moms not apply alternatives like the cotton diapers of the golden
olden days? It is done in highly developed countries nowadays with an eye towards
ecology, since disposable diapers are slowly but surely increasing the mass of
our planet with fermented baby poop and plastic wrappings. Why torture yourself
looking for disposable, highly expensive ones and fighting with other
poop-stained moms over that single left-over pack in the shops? Now, that is a
question I ask myself too. The suggestion has been made in public, and a howl
of disapproval greeted it nationwide. Modern Venezuelan moms will NOT be caught
washing crapped-up cotton diapers. End of story.
I
have discovered three main reasons for this “no” to
cotton diapers. First, cotton is very hard to come by, as it has to be imported
and there is no currency available for that. Using synthetic fabrics would be
true sadism to a baby’s skin. Second, Venezuelan moms haven’t got a choice:
they cannot spend their entire day changing soiled cotton diapers on their
babies, as many have explained to me, because they have to go to work.
80-year-old granny is standing in the toilet roll queues and having trouble not
to grow roots, spotty teenage second cousin is no choice for changing pooped
baby diapers all day long, and mom’s mom has to go to work too, as is the
toddler’s dad. So who is left? No one. And third, there is some kind of
psychological angle to the problem. Letting go of disposable diapers is maybe
losing the last element linking a tortured mother in impoverished Venezuela to
the 21st century. Officially, we are living in a modern age, and for
so many third-world countries, being able to at least enjoy some aspects of it
(like disposable diapers wrapped in a colorful bag identical to those being
sold in richer countries) is more than a commodity. It is an essential part of
participating in that modern age, if only on a psychological level. You see
people living in barrios in
crudely-built huts, and you assume they live in misery, but you’d be surprised
if you step into such a home. Newest flat-screen TV in the living room
connected to a satellite dish, and every member of the house has an intelligent
phone in their pocket. Even if the roof is leaking, but spending your last dime
on symbols of modernism is absolute priority to the lower classes in this and
other similar countries in the Third World. One of these modernist symbols is
the disposable diaper. And women here will sacrifice their time, their health
and their feet to make sure their little princes and princesses are clad with a
modern crap-control device around their hips. It’s a mental thing as well as a
practical one.
I
keep asking myself where those “poor people” get the
money from. If I can’t even afford an intelligent phone or a flat-screen TV
nowadays, with such absurd inflated prices, how can they?
Some
days ago, my wife and I were shopping in a supermarket or frigorifico just outside Caracas.
Outside, we saw the tell-tale long queues standing outside the shop. They were
selling coffee. We went in and saw a depleted shop, with empty shelves here and
there. The meat freezer was totally empty. The people – really humble persons -
coming in in groups were told to take no more than four packs of coffee of one
kilogram each. We saw whole families, each member – mom, dad, granny, spotty
second cousin, children – carrying 4 packs of ground coffee each, in some cases
coming to 16 (!) packs or more of coffee purchased by one single family. I
thought for a moment, tonight there will be some deaths by caffeine
intoxication here and there; what are those people planning to do with so much
coffee? My wife told me that the shop employees were just putting a quantity of
canned tuna on the shelves. So we went there, and we saw a whole bunch of
people grabbing ten, twelve cans of tuna in one go. I walked towards that shelf
and shouted in Spanish something like “come on!” The people, some who had their
four big packs of coffee clutched under one arm and maybe six or seven tuna
cans under the other, looked at me, said nothing and just walked away. And we
stared at a totally empty shelf on which just moments ago I had seen maybe
twenty or thirty cans of tuna. If the supermarket hadn’t put those people in
queues outside, maybe they would have emptied the shop completely.
My
question once more: where do these people get the money
from to buy so much stuff at once? Bachaqueros,
my wife told me with a wink. Resellers. On the street, they sell the products
they get in the shop, at twice or thrice the price, taking advantage that you
cannot find them – like the tuna cans of the coffee or the meat packs – and
with the money badly earned, they get in queue to yet again clean out another
shop and sell everything on the street with sometimes 200% profits. These
people are an universal by-product of any economic crisis in the world, where
the misery of some means opportunity for others.
And
without wanting to stigmatize, maybe there lies the
answer as to why so many “poor” people here can afford to buy luxurious goods
like the latest intelligent phones and the like. Many make a real business out
of standing in queues, cleaning out stores and selling everything on the
streets at double the price, generating enough income (without paying taxes of
course) to lead a comfortable life in the barrio.
They are not the main cause of the economic crisis in Venezuela, but their
activities surely worsen it.
A
crisis does heighten criminality as well as
inventiveness. Here you can see how far people can go to protect their way of
living in difficult times, even if it means to let others suffer for it.
Diapers and toilet paper, here you go! Long live modernism, even if the country
is sinking away.
But things might get a
bit awry for the bachaqueros.
Just two days after I saw the shopping frenzy at the supermarket I talked
about, the government of Nicolás Maduro decided to introduce, starting yesterday,
biometric controls at the supermarkets (it was world-wide news, in fact) in a
desperate attempt to stop people from shop-hopping from one spot to the other. But
apart from the
fact that we are now
confronted with digital rationing by putting your thumb on a reader every time
you buy a coke, to name an example, the measure will deal a blow to informal
commerce in Venezuela and of course increase corruption and cronyism which are
already the highest in Latin America, if we belief Transparency International. We
are talking about at least 30% (and growing) of the national workforce who can
be called self-employed, because new jobs are NOT created, despite all the
hullaballoo statistics and propaganda published by the Chavist government. We
are talking about millions of people depending on street commerce, no matter
what statistics you look at. Putting all those people out of business will have
a political cost, and I don’t think Maduro will be able to take that risk now.
Parliamentary elections are due this year, the danger of rioting hasn’t receded
at all because the queues in front of shops are really getting bigger and
bigger, SIMADI has turned out to be a fraud, the black-market dollar is
sky-high thanks to that, and really, Maduro and his team have done everything
these two years except running the country. It seems that all they care for is
staying in power, no matter the cost.
So,
as things go in this country, many people in the
coming months will not be able to buy more than let’s say four cans of tuna a
week nationwide, to name a typical example, because their recorded thumbprints will
stop them from doing so. But other people, with the right connections, will be
getting all they want at the proverbial backdoor. With popular unrest lurking
around the corner these days, rampant corruption will again be the escape valve
for a government doing everything to stay in power. And in the end, nothing
will be solved; acute shortages will stay indefinitely and street sellers will
go on offering disappeared articles at double the price. Except that some
government bloke in a red shirt now might know exactly how many tuna cans I
bought last week. If that isn’t Big Brother talking, then I don’t know what
else it might be.
Whether with the
biometrical controls shop shelves might stay a
bit fuller the coming weeks, will depend on the government measures to increase
domestic production or spend more on imports. If that doesn’t happen, the scene
will look much alike that in front of that chain of supermarkets expropriated
weeks ago. The shortages have increased as well as the rows of desperate
housewives looking for their rolls of toilet paper, among other disappeared articles…
Meanwhile,
I’m stuck with the problem of how to get toilet paper
without having to lose a day standing in a queue. Those two rolls will be gone
before the week has ended. Maybe it’s time for that water spout…
Till tomorrow! There
is more news coming, so stay tuned!
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten