Your Questions

A few months ago, I asked my blog readers to send me their questions about Venezuela. The questions that I received touched on topics like politics, religion, artisan crafts, higher education, to name a few. Zoom forward. A few ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and colleague Zenaida Cabello. Born and raised in Cumaná, Zenaida has been an English professor at the Universidad de Oriente since 1987. I presented the questions to Zenaida during this interview, and we had plenty to discuss during our forty-minute talk. I hope that you enjoy listening to it.

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Photos: Travels Near and Far

Hola amigos y familia,

Over the last month, I have tried to make the most of my remaining time in Venezuela, traveling more and more to areas near and far from Cumaná. Here are some photos from my recent travels:

Mérida: a mid-size city nestled in the andean region of Venezuela.

San Antonio del Golfo: a small picturesque fishing town about an hour outside of Cumana.

Mochima: a national park that consists of various islands in the state of Anzoátegui. Specifically, my friends and I went to a beach called Playa Manare.

Margarita: I made a visit to the famous Venezuelan island, known for its tax-free-zone status and beaches. While there, I swam a 5 km open water swimming competition with my swimming buddies.

Enjoy!

Two Vans

It was Friday afternoon, during peak traffic hours, and I had a three hour car ride from the airport in Barcelona, Venezuela, to Cumana. Faced by sweltering heat, I was to make the trip in a staple of Venezuelan public transportation: the buseta. This name belongs to a class of oversized vans that –crammed with passengers– travel local routes among cities and towns. Preceding the schlep, I had arrived in Barcelona by plane from Caracas, where I had attended a meeting on Thursday at the U.S. Embassy with other Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) and the embassy staff. Following our meeting, an embassy contracted van took us to an evening jazz recital at the ambassador’s house. The meeting was successful, and it was a pleasure to enjoy the recital with the other ETAs. However, the subject that calls my attention most is neither the meeting nor the recital. Rather, I am fascinated by the contrast between the embassy van and the buseta, for their dichotomy reveals the extremes that I have encountered in my experience in a provincial region of Venezuela yet under the auspices of the U.S. government.

It would be a grave understatement to call the buseta “secondhand” given its many defects. The windshield was cracked, the speedometer was broken, and the air conditioning did not work. Fortunately, the absence of the buseta´s rear door aided air circulation in the car; the gaping hole in the vehicle´s side abated the merciless heat. My favorite feature would be the splintered ply wood panel that covered the left side, contrasting the dull, unfinished paint job of the van´s shell. Though U.S. made and built during the mid-1980s, the vehicle had shed its North American identity as salsa music blasted from oversized speakers. My buseta was loaded with its own sabor.

Despite these critical observations, I am not picky when it comes to public transportation, even if it means braving a three hour ride to my destination in a buseta. And I was simply on my way back to my clean yet nondescript home in Cumaná, a small city that has more attributes of a large town than a metropolitan city. It is unassuming and low-key, for the most part.

The aesthetic qualities and destination of the embassy van was a 180° flip. The vehicle’s immaculate, white exterior reflected the neon lights of Caracas as Cesar, the driver, picked the ETAs up at the hotel. It was about 6:30 in the evening when we moved from the air-conditioned hotel lobby to the air conditioned van; there was not a bead of sweat on my brow as I opened the door and hopped into my well-upholstered seat. The door closed, and Cesar drove us through Caracas traffic. However, the fully enclosed vehicle muffled the din of the city as Cesar refrained from playing salsa music at a blaring volume. Our artificial sanctuary-on-wheels headed to the jazz recital.

The destination of the embassy van was the opposite of nondescript: we were to enjoy an evening of jazz in the home of the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela*. The large house lies in an exclusive neighborhood on the slope of a mountain that overlooks Caracas. The fine backdrop complemented the even finer hors d'oeuvres, whiskey, rum and wine served to the embassy employees in attendance. No one constituted royalty, yet this event was aristocratic relative to most social affairs that I had attended in Venezuela. The jazz saxophonist Pablo Gil played his set, and by 9:30 we were heading towards the white embassy van to go back to our hotel. I enjoyed the whole ordeal yet felt surprised that the event was sponsored by the U.S. government.

I ask myself: figuratively speaking, do I prefer the buseta or the embassy van? The most gratifying choice is not obvious to me. The buseta was cramped and not aesthetically pleasing, yet it felt dynamic and exciting; the soundtrack conjured up a desire to dance to the rhythms in my seat. The embassy van was clean, comfortable and free of inconveniences. On the downside, the ride raised neither my heartbeat nor my adrenaline. The buseta took me to Cumaná, the low-key Venezuelan city where I strictly rub elbows with Venezuelans. The embassy van took me to the crème de la crème of the capital where I rubbed elbows with my compatriots. The dichotomy distilled: down-to-earth, corybantic, 100% Venezuela versus U.S. privilege, transplanted to the Caribbean and doused in the finest of Venezuelan rum. Who am I kidding? I want both.

*Note: Technically the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela was designated persona non grata by President Hugo Chávez. In place of the ambassador, the chargé d'affaires carries out the ambassador’s duties.

La Travesía

“Do you see it? It looks like café marrón (“brown coffee”), like mud,” Señor Jesus said to me as we starred into the water of the Orinoco River. Our bus had arrived at the river’s shore minutes ago from Cumaná, where I swim at the local pool with Señor Jesus and a handful of other university professors and students. But now we were waiting for the ferry to take us across to the other side of Venezuela’s longest river. It was a Friday afternoon, and we came to compete in a 3.1 km swim across the river scheduled for Sunday. Studying the characteristics of the water, as well as the town of San Felix on the opposing shore, I began to comprehend our group’s concrete purpose after having planned this trip for months. Yet my thoughts that weekend were to encompass not only the race and the Orinoco River’s innate qualities, for the competition spurred me to also reflect on my experience during the last seven months swimming in Cumaná at the local pool.

Swimmers –over 900 in all– converge upon the small city of San Felix annually to compete in this race, and all of them can easily tell you the river’s qualities. Señor Jesus´s comment only begins to convey its essence. For instance, the competition’s route really goes through two rivers: the Orinoco and Caroní. These two rivers join upstream, yet they run parallel and do not mix despite “joining”. During the competition, the swimmers first cross the Orinoco, turbid and loaded with sediments from upstream. The water is warm, and the current is the weaker of the two. After crossing the unmistakable Orinoco side, swimmers find themselves in the path of the Caroní two-thirds into the race. They quickly feel the difference. The water is cooler, and its hue is black (not brown like the Orinoco). Appearance aside, the Caroní’s stronger current proves a greater challenge; swimmers must swim faster and face upstream to make it to the finish line. The two rivers even taste different.

Considering the conditions of the water, I could not help but think about my training at the pool in Cumaná, which I can relate to my experience in Venezuela as well as a few salient reflections.

Since November, I have been swimming four or five days a week at the polideportivo, Cumaná’s public pool that provides an invaluable respite from the stresses that occasionally irk me. First and foremost, my daily workout at 6:30 am allows me to escape the intense tropical heat of eastern Venezuela. The unceasing 90º-plus climate has afflicted me since I arrived in Cumaná, yet an hour in the pool refreshes me and alleviates the incessant strength of the equatorial sun. But the heat is not the only challenge that I have encountered. Unlike any previous job, my work at the local university is highly irregular: teachers often cancel class, students occasionally hold strike, and administrators have closed the university due to happenings in national politics. Though pleasant, my work does not provide as much stability as I would like. Regardless of the university schedule, the pool at the polideportivo stays open, adding some regularity to my schedule. Gracias a dios.

My experience at the pool highlights a few of the difficulties and virtues of life in Venezuela as well. For example, the pool closes occasionally for one sole reason: a shortage of chlorine. Then again, supply shortages occur not only at the polideportivo but in many spheres of daily life (i.e. a paucity of rice and eggs at the supermarket, limited teaching supplies at the university, power outages in residential areas). An empty stock of chlorine at the pool typifies this reality. But the pool represents one undeniable virtue: the warmth and humor of the people. Each day I swim with the most delightful and motley group of swimmers, usually Señor Jesus (a slightly crotchety, retired chemistry professor) and Charli (a twenty-five year old computer science student). A slightly machista yet caring man, Señor Jesus has taught me most of the Venezuelan obscenities that I know, while Charli happens to be an avid evangelical churchgoer. We are a ragtag band. Señor Jesus often cracks perverse jokes as we rest between swimming sets, causing Charli to cringe and the other swimmers to burst into laughter. The temperaments of my two closest swimming buddies often clash, yet that does not preclude our usual post-swim cup of coffee. Nor does it keep us from traveling together to swim across the Orinoco River; Señor Jesus, Charli, and I became de facto partners-in-crime from the start.

Thus it was no surprise that the three of us were running late before the competition on Sunday. All swimmers needed to check-in by 5:30 am inside the San Felix City Hall. We arrived at 6:00 am. The city hall was a mob scene upon our entrance, complemented with men and women of all ages and sizes in their swimsuits. Speedos under our clothes, we quickly stripped down and checked-in as one of the event volunteers marked our respective assigned numbers on our arms and back. Soon after, a priest held a short service on the town hall’s outdoor balcony. Without a single rabbi in sight, I chose to stretch inconspicuously until the priest’s spiel came to a close. With his final words, nine hundred swimmers loaded up into the fleet of municipal buses that waited for us, and we headed off to the town’s nearby port.

At the port, we boarded a navy transport ship. The atmosphere was saturated with frenetic energy on the vessel as we waited for everyone to get aboard. I felt jittery yet said almost nothing. Charli and Señor Jesus conversed. Around 8:00, the last swimmers got onto the ship, and the captain blew the horn. The passengers –especially the rambunctious, younger ones– jumped up and down, cheering uncontrollably. All the while, Señor Jesus laid sprawled out on the ship’s deck, looking into the sunlight with his eyes closed, cool as a cucumber. He told me softly, “Stay down, Jeremy. We still have a while.” Legs crossed, I sat and concentrated on my breath. The ship brought us downstream to the course of the race, and we headed towards a beach across the river from San Felix. Nearing our destination, Señor Jesus told me to take a look. The river was filled with kayaks, private motorboats, jet skis, and navy patrol boats – all present as part of the event’s security set-up. A helicopter passed overhead, prompting the swimmers´ roar to double in volume. We approached the starting point, a beach cluttered with spectators and event volunteers. The ship’s landing ramp lowered, and we rushed onto the beach. After a short warm-up period, the volunteers told us to get back onto the beach. The men were to leave first, five minutes before the women. We crowded behind a rope that represented the starting line. A judge stood on a tall post before us, his flag raised. The masses watched intrepidly.

When the flag lowered, all hell broke loose as a flurry of swimmers departed. There were no lanes. Order did not exist. It was every man for himself. Swimmers moved left, right, and straight forward. Most flailed their arms wildly and kicked like mad; not paying attention meant a smack or kick in the face. Having lost track of Señor Jesus and Charli, I decided to stick with another swimmer in our group, Ramón, and we headed slightly up-stream in order to avoid the masses that veered with the river’s current. Soon, Ramón and I were swimming nearly alone; most of the other swimmers had scattered.

The wild frenzy mellowed down into a brisk yet meditative journey. Participating in my first open-water competition ever, I accustomed to this earthen, unrefined arena. My hands ran through the chocolate brown water, and my brain reviewed one thought at a time: follow Ramón, watch the opposing shore, swim slightly up-stream. Two thousand yards later, the water changed from chocolate to ebony, and the pressure of the current intensified. I was in the waters of the Caroní, the race’s most taxing section. Ramón had gone farther and farther ahead by this point. As he moved out of my sight, it was time to follow my own instincts. I was clearly above stream from the finishing point, but the current was rapidly pushing me down. I picked up the pace and directed myself farther up-stream. The finishing line in San Felix came into sight. Nearing the end, other swimmers entered into my peripheral vision. No one familiar. I crossed the finish line, and my exhaustion caught up with me at that very moment.

My brain simply stopped working. As I stood, dumbfounded, an event volunteer handed me a plastic card that indicated my standing in the competition. Someone else pushed me along to the table representing my category (men, ages 19-24). I breathed heavily and expressed a few of Señor Jesus´s regular obscenities, trying to overcome my lightheadedness. The sun shone brightly, and I sauntered around the beach even though the sand burned my feet. I received my free energy drink and packet of fruit from a table and recovered my breath. The crowd of elated yet ready-to-drop participants grew and grew. I dawdled back towards the finish line and congratulated others from our group. Now meandering with Charli, I caught sight of Señor Jesus´s back. He was at the water’s edge watching the final swimmers glide through the Caroní. “Señor Jesus!” I called. He turned around and stood up. Munching on an apple, he had stuck a banana into his Speedo as if he were a gunslinger with a pistol stuck into his pants. Charli shook his head at the undeniable double meaning of the banana. Señor Jesus grabbed us to shake our hands and commenced the congratulations. We basked in the late morning sun, elated and exhausted

Kosher For Passover in Venezuela

Passover (aka Pesach) began last week, and Jews worldwide celebrated their ancestors´ freedom from slavery in Egypt.  As part of the holiday’s tradition, they abstained from eating leavened bread for an eight day period. To many readers of this blog, this is not groundbreaking news. Far less obvious, however, is that my Passover in Venezuela has been one of gastronomic plenty; I have not gone hungry despite abstention from leavened bread. This is my third Passover in a Latin American country–the previous two being Chile and Mexico–and my waistline surprisingly has not diminished by any means. Access to my own kitchen during the past week has played a huge role, granting me the liberty to prepare my meals at home. But regarding meals outside, I can thank a few other key factors that make this holiday’s eating less complicated: the presence of Jewish food stores in Caracas and a few traditional Venezuelan foods like arepa, pabellón criollo and yuca.* 

Unaware of my good fortune to come, I prepared for the worst during the preceding weeks. The past offered reason to worry: I had struggled to find kosher-for-Passover meals in Chile and Mexico previously. In the case of the former, Chilean breakfasts overwhelming depended on leavened white bread. In the case of the latter, I had overdosed on corn tortillas –my one viable alternative to bread– by the time that the Pesach rolled around during my stay in Mexico. My complicated experiences in Chile and Mexico encouraged me to better stock up on matzah, the infamously bland cracker permitted during Passover.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity store up my matzah cache. A few weeks ago, I was in Caracas – the nucleus of the Venezuelan Jewish community and a city where Jewish food stores abound. Relatively speaking. It was not exactly easy to get my hands on the necessary Passover food items such as matzah, gefilte fish, horseradish, matzah meal, etc. To obtain these items, I spent two hours schlepping through Caracas and passed through three different specialty food stores.  The final Jewish food store (a whole-in-the-wall gem called “Galipan”) was fully stocked with everything I needed. They even sold six-pound packages of matzah from 2008–at a discounted price! What more could one want? I left Caracas with enough kosher-for-Passover carbohydrates to make it through the imminent eight-day period of no bread.

Yet the holiday leaves me surprised, for this week I have fully realized the wealth of Venezuelan alternatives to leavened bread. First, one must consider the most common of unleavened starches in this country: arepa. This staple food looks like an English muffin, but Venezuelans make it with cornflower and without yeast. One can find arepa on almost any street corner in the morning, so it serves as an omnipresent last resort in case matzah ever runs out.

Second, Venezuelans often serve pabellón criollo, one of the country’s favorite dishes. It includes black beans, rice, seasoned minced-beef and fried plantains (seen in the picture above). This bread-free meal is not a traditional seder plate, but it will sate a person’s most desperate hunger any day.

Finally, the Venezuelan kosher-for-Passover diet would not be complete without the nation’s most popular root vegetable: yuca. Peeled, chopped and boiled, this vegetable has the waxy texture reminiscent of a russet potato, but it exudes many subtle differences in taste. Boiled and well-salted yucca often accompanies braised beef or finds its way into chicken or fish soup. Or, Venezuelans can mash it up, turn it into a flat round, and bake it into a thick cracker known as casave. To my comfort, all yucca-made delicacies are 100% unleavened and, therefore, kosher-for-passover.

In the end, the bounty of kosher alternatives made the bread-free holiday easier, but they did not alter my regular Passover meditations. I still thought of every year’s traditions on the first evening of Pesach: the stories, songs, and traditional foods.  I still considered the symbolic significance of the holiday too. And I thought of my family. There was only one difference: I pondered this year’s Passover meditations as I chewed on a piece of boiled yucca. It was most definitely a Venezuelan Passover.

*Note: Ashkenazi Jews of eastern European descent –such as me– traditionally refrain from foods containing corn and rice during Passover. Given my consumption of these ingredients, the strictest of Ashkenazi Rabbis would chide me; my shtetl born grandmother would probably raise an eyebrow. For those critics, I respond: tranquilo, poco a poco (“relax, little by little”). In other words, new countries require flexibility.

Other updates from the month of April

Recent Photos

Diving for Pepitonas on the Araya Peninsula

East Break Travels

Passover Meal Cooking Lesson

ALBA in Cumaná

This week in Cumaná, President Hugo Chavez hosts a summit meeting for ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de nuestra America). Ten heads of state from various Latin American countries will convene in Cumaná for the affair. To the surprise of many, state education authorities suspended academic and administrative activities at the primary, secondary, and university levels. On the bright side, this gives me time to update the blog a little bit.

Crossing the Orinoco River

On April 26^th, I will participate in a 3.1km swim across the Orinoco River near the City of Guayana. Don’t worry: I will not be alone. Approximately 900 swimmers from the entire republic and abroad convene to partake in the swim. Suffice it to say, I am quite excited. Be ready at the end of the month for an entry about my experience.

English and Biology Collide

With gusto, the group of ten Venezuelan marine biology researchers broke into the warm up song at the start of class. It happened to be the Beatles´ “Octopuses Garden”. As they learned the lyrics to Ringo Starr´s cephalopod-staring ditty, the researchers practiced their pronunciation, worked their listening comprehension, and simply had fun. These researchers participate in a weekly English workshop that I run at the Oceanographic Institute of Venezuela, located at the Universidad de Oriente (UDO) in Cumaná, Venezuela. The workshop is secondary to my main job at the university: I spend most of my time working with students in the Department of Modern Languages as an English Teaching Assistant (ETA). Much to my surprise, however, one of the most meaningful components of my job at the UDO has been my secondary project.

I could not have predicted this opportunity to work in the Oceanographic Institute during the days preceding my arrival in Venezuela, much less when I was finishing my university studies two years ago. As an undergraduate student, I studied ecology and environmental education. My college studies and English teaching did not have a strong relationship at face value, yet I applied for the ETA program to gain teaching experience in a university, experience the many facets of Venezuelan life, and improve my Spanish. I applied, won the grant, and serendipitously ended up at the UDO. Upon arrival, I immediately began to search for a secondary project related to ecology. This quest provided me with an early opportunity to see Venezuelans –savvy at social-networking– in action: an English teacher in the Modern Languages Department was about to get married; her fiancé had studied marine biology; the fiancé’s thesis advisor knew an ecotoxicology professor, Dr. Mairin Lemus, who was in search of an English teacher trained in the biological sciences. As this example illustrates, fortuitous social networks rule in Venezuela.

At our first meeting, Dr. Lemus described the research station that she directs, explained its pitfalls related to English, and voiced a proposition. The research station, titled El Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas de Guayacán (CIEG), lies nestled in the small coastal town of Guayacán, a boat ride plus a one-hour car ride away. The workshop participants usually work from the CIEG and, logically, aim to publish the results of their research in academic journals. Even journals in Spanish require an English translation of the title and the abstract of each submitted article from researchers. All of the UDO biology researchers had received some level of English study. Currently, the biology department requires all students to study basic English, training them to read scientific works and arming them with fundamental biology vocabulary. Yet students are not prepared to write clear, grammatically correct scientific abstracts in English by the end of this rudimentary class. With this level of English training, the researchers translate the abstracts of their scientific papers before sending them off to academic journals. For a scientist who wants her work published, this is like a matzo ball that has fallen right into the lap; it is a mess. Dr. Lemus admitted that the grammatical errors of a poorly translated abstract are oft-cited grounds for rejecting a research paper. This is a serious problem for any researcher with a less than stellar command of written English, and thus a problem for the CIEG researchers, some of whom last studied English when they were in high school. Dr. Lemus wanted a remedy for the problem and asked me to lead a weekly English workshop for the ten researchers.

I would have been meshuga* had I said no; it has greatly enriched my experience in Cumaná.

Unexpectedly, the workshop participants exhibit an incredibly cogent desire to learn English, making my teaching experience enjoyable. The researchers´ reasons to learn English are urgent, concrete, and related to their respective areas of expertise that they each adore. I noted this quickly when we held the first workshop in a university classroom back in January, but it is most evident when I travel with them to hold the occasional class in Guayacán. The town faces the Caribbean ocean and is backed by arid mountains. The wind constantly sweeps through this place, where the town’s artisanal fishing-based economy lends itself to a rustic way of life. As I accompany the researchers outside, they exhibit the least of inhibitions and ask question after question: ¿Cómo se dice laboratorio de ambientes acuáticos? (How do you say aquatic environments laboratory?); ¿Comó se dice area de preparación de taxidermia? (How do you say taxidermy prep area?); ¿Cómo se dice campana? (How do you say fume hood?). Truth be told, my heart lies in the natural sciences, so I feel ecstatic at each of their questions.

Yet the “teacher” learns as much as the students – or even more. In college, my studies almost exclusively focused on terrestrial ecology. Marine biology was out of the picture. Now I find myself working with researchers whose professional lives focus on marine organisms, ranging from bivalves to sea birds to sea snails. Never having studied these topics, I learn a great deal talking to workshop participants and reading their papers. For example, one researcher’s work shows that the bivalve Emerita portoricensis is capable of accumulating heavy metals (such as mercury) from its surrounding environment without dying. Scientists can take samples of this mollusk to the laboratory and analyze the levels of contaminants in its somatic and reproductive tissues. In this case, E. portoricensis becomes an invaluable bio-indicator of industrial pollution in the marine environment. Forgive my digression, but it never hurts to learn new things, albeit in unanticipated ways. And on a personal level, my unexpected project with the Guayacán researchers elucidates this.


*meshugah: mad or idiotic (Yiddish)