The seek for understading: 4 things you must know about this blog

The following paragraphs could be useful in order to answer some of the questions or concerns the reader might have about this blog, her author and the process of writing it.



1. A NON-NEWS BLOG

Venezuelans and foreigners make blogs about what’s happening in Venezuela by commenting news and speeches, by talking about things that the people already know. But in a more "subjective" way, Do the people really know how the Venezuelans live this process? Beyond the news, beyond Chavez speeches on TV? Do the people know how it’s our daily life, how we feel about the events and how those events affects us directly? I don’t think many people know that. And that’s why I took the courage and started writing. That’s why many things that happen on the news don’t even touch my blog.

My blog is very personal indeed, as personal as I can make it without putting my identity into risk.

So my blog is not about news, there are many, many blogs about news and they are awesome blogs indeed. My blog is a testimony of someone who witnessed this crisis, who's living inside this crisis. And when you live here, you cannot be commenting the news all the time, or you will die of desperation. That’s one of the things I wanted to make people understand by writing this blog.



2. A NON OFTEN UPDATED BLOG

For several reasons, I don’t have time and inspiration to update this blog daily as I would want it in ideal terms. I write when for some reason, the stories came back to my head, or see something, live something, have a discussion and then feel the need of writing (another reason of why this blog is not about news). This blog can’t be written under the commands of a certain schedule. So I ask in advance, excuses to the readers who might wait too long before seeing the next entry.



3. THE LANGUAGE(AND THE PEOPLE WHO I'M WRITING FOR)

I want to provide to the people who is interested in any way about the current Venezuelan situation something different, something that makes them easier to put themselves in one shoes. And those people are foreigners, Venezuelan people even if they are abroad know about the things I write, for them my stories are like the bread they put on the table every day, quite obvious. But foreigners read about my country and no matter how concern they are, some of them are living in a free world, in a comfortable world, with no fear, where they take many things for granted, and because of that (and this is completely natural) they see our situation as something very distant.

That’s why I write in English, even counting that its very, very hard for me to write in English, and I could express so many things, and say so many things better if I could write in my language: Spanish. But I know that if I write in English I can reach to the people I want to reach to.



4. A BLOG WITH A NEITHER "LEFT" NOR "RIGHT" IDEOLOGY (THE AUTHOR'S STANCE)

I don’t know if I’m on the right side of this battle. And in this world, where the left consider as suspicious anyone who is not with them and the right closes their eyes to the fair demands of the ones who don’t have as much luck as they have, and they just don’t even sit for a minute to wonder why; its hard to even think about taking sides. I don’t know if the history will be fair to me and the ones who are going through this situation in the same way I’m living it. I even wonder who is going to write this story: the story of the Bolivarian Revolution, and based on what and in the name of who is going to tell the story of this events that will pass as history as far as the world concerns.

Because on those pages I could easily pass as a heroin or as a sheep of the imperialism, depends on the hand who writes it. And the funny part is, that I’m not neither or at least, I don’t feel like neither of them. I don’t think that Venezuelans can easily adjust their feelings to the labels that who ever writes or speak about this, journalist or politicians, put to us if we support one side or another side of the fight.

We are not sheep of the imperialism, or real committed and passionate fighters for democratic ideals. We are just people, people like anyone else. I’m just a Venezuelan, by birth, not by choice. From the middle class, again by birth, not by choice, who happens to be in the middle of this events and who for several reasons, that might be good or not (I’ll let the reader judge that) happens to not like the track that my beloved country is taking. Again a track that I’m living not because I choose to live it, but because I couldn’t choose. The reader must know that when Chávez won the first elections in 1998, I wasn’t old enough to vote, still missed 4 years to do that; and I don’t think I ever had the chance to vote in the same conditions that my parents did before 1998.

And since then, I have put all my energy on changing the course that the vote of others dictated when I was too young for being quite aware of the consequences. And I have not only, not succeed, but in fact; I failed enormously. And that’s because despite of my birth, and the conditions I have to live with, I have chosen now to at least, write about it. Because I have to give it a shot so that the history someone will read in some years about my country; tells not only the version of the winners.

I do not any longer seek for changes. I have lost the hope and throughout my writings, the reader will notice why I lose it. Now, I seek for nothing less and nothing more than understanding. And that’s the challenge I give to the reader.

(Part III) Passing by Altamira

The center of the square brings me back to a much more developed political memory. A few months after April 11, a very weird phenomenon began. It was called the “civic military resistance” or something like that. Basically consisted of a huge group of very important military people gathered on Altamira square and saying that they were against the president; and in a civic way they would make Altamira square a “free territory”.I never quite understood the movement that surprised me in my first years of the university, but after that and for a few months in a row, some days more than others people went to that square to show support to those soldiers. They even installed a clock that kept track of the days the “resistance” was there.
I decided to go one day after class, like three days after everything started. Took the subway, reached the square, and stood a few meters away from the platform hearing the speeches. In one pocket of my bag pack, along with some books and stuff, I had my cell phone and my wallet. Since I was so distracted hearing the speeches, I did not notice that someone opened my bag and took stole my cell phone and my wallet under my nose.
After I got tired of hearing the speeches, I randomly walked throughout the square, lost in my thoughts.
Then, in one side of the square I found my mom and my sister crashed into tears next to a police patrol. They looked at me as they would look a death person coming back to life. Some strange woman also approached and asked me if I was ok. I didn’t got what was going on until my mom told me that she called to my cell phone and a man picked it up and he said he kidnapped me and he was going to kill me, since he hated “oligarchs” (mainly a word used by Chavez to call the people against him since the very early years of the regime). My mom ran to the police and gave them her cell phone, the police called again and the guy told them the same story.
Then, the police sent a message to the ex- military standing on the platform and they started to call me from there. But between the noise and the fact that I was very distracted, I didn’t hear anything.
When the man who had my cell phone realized of the gravity of his joke, he said he didn’t steal my cell phone; he only found it and that he started joking because he was a “chavista” (Chávez supporter) and he had a girlfriend who lived just near by the square; so he was tired of the traffic and the noise caused by the protest of a bunch of “oligarchs”. After that he gave us his address. My mom, after arguing with me obviously, for being so naïve and distracted, threw away the address.
I felt very angry afterwards: my cell phone was very cheap and old, I couldn’t even write text messages with that cell phone. And I didn’t have much money in my wallet. Not more than what you could use for buying a bottle of water or something. But I had other things: a picture of my grandmother and what was even more important: my old Venezuelan ID, with my 10 year old face and signature and the inscriptions above “República de Venezuela”. Sigh… when my country was only República de Venezuela and not República Bolivariana de Venezuela. When my country was truly mine. And I don’t even have the ID that proves it and I still don’t know if I was a victim of common delinquency or of an incipient political resentment.
I wouldn’t be paranoid if I choose the second hypothesis. Two months after that, the meetings at Altamira square stopped being peaceful and the square became a very dangerous place as we never pictured it before. We saw on TV, how a man entered the square and just started shooting against the people, leaving three people dead and many more wounded as a result. So the woman I called “the woman of the shape”(read the first part of this story), wasn’t the first, nor the only one who spent their last hours there; but she’s the only who has “a shape”. Those victims were the light that kept turning on the fire of three long months of the recent political history of my country, what it has been called The General Strike.
As the bus arrived, the man with the deep look and rough face because of the people passing by over the shape and myself, forgot a little bit about it and paid the bus ticket, going back to our routines. The square looked calm and beautiful from my window: always clean (something unusual in Caracas), with a huge obelisk in the center, and the Avila (a big mountain, national park and very meaningful place for the “caraqueños”) above. The elegant stairs that leaves you to the subway couldn’t tell me about the people who hide there many times from the shootings. And the many events in my presence (cause I only told three stories so far from much more) during my political socialization, that is has been developed in that square. I couldn’t tell if it was really a place for freedom, or has lost a lot of the old political magic but it is certainly a place for trying to be free while a devoted husband spends two years so far, carefully marking the place where he lost his wife; that could be my mom, or even me. And even knowing that: People just pass over the shape and keep moving on with their lives as they normally do.
Ps: Sidenote made on October, 2008: the sidewalks of the square were repaired, so the trash can it’s in the same spot but not the shape of the woman that made me write this three part story in the first time.