Since my last blog my little black cloud of self pity has passed! I decided that, instead of continuing to “immerse myself in the language” I would go and see some Brits! I have been on three weekend mini breaks in as many weekends and worked out that I have travelled almost 2000 miles! I spent a long weekend in Merida where another language assistant lives. It was exactly what I needed; the fresh Andean air really helped to clear my head. We spent a lovely relaxed evening cooking spag bol, drinking red wine and eating chocolate whilst watching trashy TV…an average Friday night in for many of you I’m sure but I hadn’t been able to do something like that in so long (due to lack of TV, wine and decent chocolate in Coro) so it was perfect. The next day we went to a beauty queen contest: The Feria del Sol takes place every year in the bull ring in Merida, there were thousands of young people and even three nuns supporting! Live music and great dancing made it a really enjoyable evening. Afterwards we went for some Mojitos in a cosy little bar which felt just like Bath! Feeling really refreshed I headed back to Coro.

The following week I only taught three classes due to a number of quite frankly ridiculous reasons but I didn’t have time to get frustrated because on Thursday night I got the six hour bus to Maracay where I was meeting some other English assistants to go to Puerto Colombia, a gorgeous Caribbean beach. We were quite an international crowd; English, French and Germans, twelve in total. We had a lovely weekend and it was good to catch up with some of the assistants from Caracas who I hadn’t seen since October. One day we paid a fishing boat to take us half an hour to another more secluded beach called Chuao. Sea food and cocktails for lunch on the beach with some really unusual music playing – a mixture of salsa, French rap and the Cure, and a hippy Italian who didn’t seem to know where he was born! As it was referendum weekend it was “Ley Seca” which means that it is illegal to sell alcohol from Friday until Monday…but we still managed to find a little corner shop behind a collapsed gate that was selling beers discreetly…although slightly less discreet when we all rumbled up! (Photo is Playa Grande in Puerto Colombia.)

The referendum, an amendment to the constitution allowing the President and other elected officials to be indefinitely re elected, was won by Chávez and the “Sí” vote with 54%. Hence in 2010 he can now stand for President again and as he has emphasised he hopes to stay until 2021! Although once again the voting itself on Sunday the 15th was free and democratic one can’t help but think that all of the political rallying and pressure from the Chavistas in the streets and the huge amount of state money poured into the “Sí” campaign, as well as denying new student voters to register had something to do with his success.

I only returned to Coro for a few days before I was back on the road with my bags. I travelled 12 hours all along the coast to a town in the East called Cumaná where two other assistants live. We then caught the ferry across to Margarita Island where we spent Carnaval weekend. We saw some of the parades and the costumes were fantastic, we drank cocktails on the beach and partied all night long in a bar called Senor Frog (!) in which a barman with a Spiderman mask jumped on us and poured Sangria down our throats…it all went downhill from there! Sometime in the early hours we had to make a quick exit because about 30 armed National Guard had arrived as apparently Chavez had decreed that no alcohol be sold after midnight all through Carnaval –party pooper! I then stayed a night in their house in Cumaná and we went out for some dinner and drinks in the Marina so I really felt like I was on holiday. (Photo is of me and another Kelly on Margarita Island.)
Back in Coro now. I have finally been paid for January, now that it is almost March. I taught my second French class which went really well and so many people came that there wasn’t enough room in the classroom. Unfortunately I have been informed that the new semester on the main campus will now not be starting until after Easter so I have a month of only teaching French and possibly one other class a week. Not really the fifteen hours of English teaching I signed up for. Nevertheless I am busying myself planning a few weeks travelling the Northeast coast of Colombia over Easter and probably some more weekend trips!

A Day in the Life...

I realise that despite all my blogging since my arrival here in Venezuela I haven’t really acquainted you with what life is like from day to day; the routine. I have told you about my travels, the teaching and the politics but I don’t think I have really explained what it is like to actually live here. In my previous blogs I have recounted all of the exciting adventures and humorous, anecdotal tales…after all we never share the “boring bits” do we? However I thought it might interest some to learn some of the more trivial mundane details; although it might seem that I am constantly adventuring, travelling and dancing it’s not always the perfect palm tree postcard you may have in your heads…

During the honeymoon period of the first few months I had to keep pinching myself to really believe that I was living here, in a little colonial town, ten minutes from the Caribbean coast with a constant temperature of over thirty degrees and not another European in sight. Hence with regards to my Spanish the experience has been invaluable. However, travelling over Christmas and then coming back to start work again, once it eventually did get started, was not easy. The realisation sets in that I’m not in fact on a long holiday but that this really is my life and if I’m brutally honest the past few weeks have been fairly difficult for me. I believe that all the homesickness that I expected to feel when I first arrived and was finding my feet hit me all at once after Matt left. On the other hand the whole reason I came out here was for the challenge and I always knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Stiff upper lip and all that, character building and all the rest of it! In many ways the experience so far has exceeded my expectations and it has been absolutely incredible, much of which I have shared with you all, however every rose has it’s thorns and there are parts of the experience that I never imagined and that I didn’t realise would be so hard.

Therefore I thought I would share with you a few of the day to day things one has to deal with out here. I’m sure most of you sitting at home with the wind and snow outside will have little sympathy for me, but I’m not intending to invoke any sympathy, I merely thought I should expel the myth of a sun drenched paradise!

Firstly, despite what you may think, it is a lot more expensive than the UK. Venezuela does little else except oil, oil and oil hence the majority of food items are imported, making prices rocket. Add this to steeply increasing inflation as well as decreasing oil prices and you find that a trip to the supermarket burns a large hole. For example last week a packet of ham (or rather “ham” as it tastes more like limp plastic), cost me over five pounds and fresh fruit and vegetables are even dearer. There is often no bread or milk. On the other hand chocolate custard mix was forty pence, bargain!

There is no postal service. I have not seen a single post box and people do not have letter boxes on their doors. I don’t even have an address. Which sadly means I can’t get my Mummy to send me Vogue and Cadbury’s every now and again. How a girl suffers!

Every Wednesday Coro is without water from 6 in the morning until 5 in the evening. Which means very early showers…but at least an excuse not to do the washing up!

Banking…if there’s a financial crisis in the UK at the moment, just thank your lucky stars that it isn’t structured the way the system is here. Obviously there is no Internet banking. I have a small book that looks a bit like a World War II ration book, that they stamp and put through a machine every time I make a deposit or withdrawal, of course under my new name Kelly L British Citizen. To make a bank transfer you have to first withdraw all the cash and then go to the desk to deposit it in the payee’s account, which isn’t ideal as Venezuela isn’t the sort of place where you want to be carrying around a lot of cash. This is further made difficult as my card will not allow me to withdraw very much per day, so paying for anything substantial is a no no. At the beginning of December I sold dollars on the black market and the man paid the bolivars into my account via a cheque, which bounced. The bank called me last week to inform me of this, about two months too late, after I’d resolved the problem myself. At the end of the month when everyone eventually gets paid the queues stretch all the way down the streets and people spend the entire day waiting to withdraw all their money as they don’t trust the banks. The cash machines rarely have any cash.

My staff room, or rather the staff postage stamp, is used by all members of the education department, numbering well over fifty people. It consists of one computer, one broken computer, three desks, and a cupboard full of useful grammar books to which no one ever seems to have the key. It’s about the size of the kitchen in my student house in Bath.

The mosquitoes are evil. I had three bites on my right foot that became really infected and have only just healed. Furthermore I think I had an allergic reaction to the cream the pharmacist gave me. My foot was very swollen, and I could no longer see my ankle. Decided to brave Venezuela’s healthcare system and went to the clinic. I had a lot of accumulated liquid on the joint, doctor tried to drain it, most excruciating pain ever, couldn’t really walk hence I had an attractive hobble-hop gait going on…no salsa for me for a while. I had to go back to the clinic everyday to change the dressing and was taking three different medicines which cost me nearly seventy quid! It ain’t the NHS…The cleaning lady in the lobby had a rusty mop, only one nurse on duty who was also doubling up as receptionist, waited over an hour even though there were only four other people waiting, the bottles of iodine and other substances used to clean my wounds were labelled with stuck on written stickers that were peeling off, the nurse didn’t wash her hands or put on gloves to treat my foot …I made a quick hobble exit…five minutes down the road the whole bandage fell off. Back I hobbled, swearing.

On a grander scale there is a shocking lack of education, or rather of being correctly informed of the facts. It is common knowledge here that some people pay for their degrees instead of studying for them. I was told by a grown man who works in journalism that there are only four continents. I suppose this is not surprising when you consider that text books do not exist and lined paper costs you ten pounds a pad. A large number of seemingly educated people really do believe that the United States has imperialistic intentions to invade Venezuela and that the US government is constantly undermining Chavez…needless to say the President more or less does that for himself and furthermore the US is in fact the only country in the world that pays Venezuela the full price for its oil! I understand how and why Chavez came to power and I certainly agree in theory with many of his proposals to increase education and literacy and reduce poverty, however ten years since his ascendance to power there is arguably little to show for his progress and corruption remains rife.

On February 15th there is to be another referendum to amend the Constitution and allow Chavez to run for re election indefinitely, to which the opposition are crying “dictator for life.” At the moment he will have to leave in 2010. The population already voted on this matter and a number of other constitutional amendments in December 2007 and Chavez was defeated. The student body was key in supporting this defeat and it is clear that Chavez fears their influence so this time he has attempted to prohibit student protests, which has all sorts of implications on human rights and freedoms, echoing Castro’s regime in Cuba. Furthermore he has closed the electoral register meaning that all those who have now turned 18 since the last elections are unable to sign up to vote this time because he knows most of them will vote against him. Last week tanks entered university campuses in Caracas, Mérida and Tachira and the peaceful student protests were quelled with tear gas. So far all has been peaceful here in Coro, although some friends asked if I wanted to participate in betting for when the civil war is going to break out?! I declined…

This morning the newspapers are plastered with the awful photos of the main synagogue in Caracas that was vandalised on Saturday night; religious artefacts were destroyed and anti-Semitic graffiti sprayed on the walls, the place was ransacked. It bears a sinister resemblance to Kristallnacht in 1938 Nazi Germany. Since Chavez launched his tirade of criticism against Israel’s position in the current conflict it appears his supporters have taken it upon themselves to grotesquely manifest this view here in Venezuela…although of course Chavez has immediately blamed the “oligarchy” saying they are trying to smear his image ahead of the elections.

I realise this may have been a rather cynical post, but despite these difficulties I really enjoy being in the classroom teaching, (when classes aren’t cancelled,) which is why I’m here after all! I’ve even been asked to teach an eight week beginners French course! Most of the time I take things with a pinch of salt and a smile, even though I often feel terribly sad at the prospect that, if things continue the way they are here even fewer tourists will come to visit Venezuela and it will remain a hidden jewel beneath an impenetrable, murky exterior.

NB. In the process of writing this post I have just been informed that work and classes have been suspended again across the country due to a Presidential Decree: Chavez wants to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his presidency, so once again I won’t be working…I probably taught less than twenty classes in January; it’s an extremely frustrating situation, especially after working full time in la belle Paris!