Well kids – I’ve been pretty lax on the ole blog here – not out of laziness but out of busyness – there’s been a lot goin’ on here down South America way. Let me try to catch ya’ll up…
Since my last post we had 3 days at sea before arriving in Venezuela. During that time I started to learn Final Cut Pro and cut my first webumentary for GNG – a piece on the students arriving at the ship, saying goodbye to their parents, and then departing from Nassau. Final Cut seems real easy to learn and use for the most part, and sure beats cutting on a moviola, which is what I used the last time I edited picture 12 years ago at USC. For not having edited in so long, I think the piece turned out fairly well – hopefully we’ll be able to figure out how to post it soon so that people can actually watch it.
I’ve been going to some music classes – choir, gamelon choir, and African music. What’s gamelon choir you ask ?? Well, it’s something that originated in Bali that has gongs and xylophone-like instruments. They’re based on a different scale than the western one we’re used too, so it sounds a bit dissonant to the ear. Anyways, it’s pretty fun to beat on stuff with mallets and make some music – very weird sounding music ta boot.
In regular choir we’ve been singing traditional songs from the countries we’re visiting – last week we sang songs from Venezuela, this week we’re working on songs from Brazil. Pronounciation is a bit tricky – Venezuelan Spanish is a bit different than normal Spanish – they tend to leave off the s’s at the end of words – gracias would be pronounced gracia, por exemplo. Brazilians speak Portuguese, and that’s really weird – it looks a lot like Spanish, but m’s sound like n’s , x’s sound like sh’s, etc… Luckily we have some native speakers in the class to help us with the pronunciation. We’ve also been working on a native hand-clapping song from Kenya – you sing in the native Kenyan tongue, and do a syncopated hand clapping with a partner at the same time. That takes some real coordination, which some people in the class just don’t have – but it’s pretty funny watching them spaz out trying.
We arrived in Venezuela at the port city of Guaira in the early morning hours of Saturday, September 3. A mountain covered with sketchy but colorful houses loomed over the main drag through town.
Apparently there had been a large mudslide here a few years ago causing enormous loss of life, and some scars of this catastrophe were still visible.
We took a very cramped cab ride to Caracas through more mountains and long tunnels – and stopped at Acción Solidaria, an HIV/AIDS clinic. Here is their web site, which is in Spanish:
http://www.acsol.org/spa/acsol10.html
Here is a biography of the clinic’s founder and president, Feliciano Reyna, and what he is doing in English:
http://www.ashoka.org/fellows/viewprofile3.cfm?reid=97611
We were all most impressed with Feliciano’s kindness, compassion, vision, and humility. Truly an inspiring person, Feliciano spent the afternoon with us discussing the AIDS crisis in Venezuela, and showing us around his clinic. The clinic is a full-service facility, with psychological counseling, blood testing, and even surgery rooms for various medical procedures. They also operate a summer camp for children with HIV, which is attended by non-HIV-infected children as well.
That's us with Feliciano. According to him, the problem of HIV/AIDS is mostly buried and ignored by both the press and the government in Venezuela. In fact, the leftist government of Hugo Chavez (whom some call a dictator) views Acción Solidaria as an enemy, at odds with their cultural revolution. Nor will the media run any of the 10-second public service announcements Acción Solidaria created to raise awareness about HIV. That said, it doesn’t seem like it’s all bad; condoms are well distributed, and sex workers are regularly tested for STD’s. Also, it was surprising to hear that the Catholic Church is actually a proponent of condom distribution in Venezuela, splitting from the Vatican’s official line regarding birth control.
After a late lunch, we got on an “executive” (that means really nice) bus to Maracay, with the hopes of traveling on to Choroni to hear some indigenous drum playing. Venezuela has many novel drums, developed over the years out of the confluence of its indigenous peoples and slaves brought over from Africa.
Unfortunately, we didn’t arrive in Maracay until 9pm, and we could find no car to take us on that night to our final destination, so we stayed the night in Maracay, and feasted on fried chicken, steak, blood sausage & fried yucca, which tasted a lot like french fries. Yummm.
The next day we woke up early and took a cab ride over the mountain pass to Choroni. It quickly became clear why no car would take us the night before – this road was the definition of gnarly. Very narrow, it was often one lane wide yet somehow accommodated two directions of traffic. There were switchbacks and crazy drop-offs, not to mention several near misses with busses coming from the other direction. We made good time though and arrived in Choroni in time for a delicious breakfast of eggs and arepas, a local pastry that you can stuff like an empanada, but it’s more like a biscuit in texture.
Download cheroni_beach_time_lapse_movie.mp4
We took a walk down to the beach, which was incredibly crowded on this Sunday morning. In fact, I’ve never seen so many people on a beach in my life – and I’ve been on a lot of different beaches. Thousands of humans dotted this half-mile stretch like ants. Many camped there in tents, and more came in cars from neighboring areas for the day.
We then took a boat ride up the coast a ways, just to check out the coastline. None of us spoke Spanish very well though, so we couldn’t communicate to the driver to slow down so we could take some decent video footage. It was frustrating not being able to speak Spanish. Made me wish I’d stayed awake in class during those 5 years of Spanish classes I took. It surprised me though how certain necessary words would bubble up from my unconscious.
We climbed a hill around sunset to get a good view of Choroni and the neighboring Puerto Columbia.
That evening we spent in the town’s gathering area, which overlooked the ocean. Here we hoped to hear some indigenous drumming, but that never panned out. Instead, we heard some locals singing revolutionary songs, ranting about Hugo Chavez, and “viva la revolution.” It was incredible to see the mass of people that surrounded us the moment we started filming. People love their Chavez in this town - he seems to be an iconic figure that people follow with an almost religious fervor.
We interviewed a few people about the music and their feelings about Chavez, then capped the night off with a hamburguesa, or Venezuelan hamburger. Best hamburger ever, in a pita-like pocket with ham, grated cheese, and these crunchy little potato crisps – they’ve got hamburgers dialed in Venezuela, let me tell you - it was truly a sublime culinary experience.
We returned to Caracas on Monday. The first leg of this trip, back to Maracay, was by public bus. This kinda sucked. The public busses are school buses with custom paint jobs and high-end sound systems.
Unfortunately they don’t upgrade the seats, which they cram to overflow capacity. Somehow I lucked out and got the seat with the wheel-well, so my knees were totally crammed against the next seat, and with 2 other children sharing my seat, I was pretty much unable to move for 2 hours of gnarly mountain road. It was the salsa and reggaetone pounding into my skull at ear-damaging levels that really made the trip for me though.
When we finally got back to Caracas, we returned to Acción Solidaria to interview one of the children involved with the summer camp. A very enlightened 11-year-old girl, she seemed intent on helping others in any way she could.
That evening then we met up with a friend of a friend of David’s, a native Venezuelan named Carlos, who took us out for some native cuisine and on to a bar for a taste of the local rum. We got into a great discussion about Hugo Chavez over dinner. People in Venezuela either seem to love Chavez or hate him… The more impoverished people, such as those we met in Puerto Columbia, regard him as a hero and icon, while the more well to do capitalists such as Carlos tend to see him as a destroyer of the country. They’ll tell you that crime has gone up, not down as he promised, and the vast fortune that the government is making selling oil is not trickling down to the poor, as it should. Further, communist indoctrinators from Cuba are staffing the education system, and dissent in the media is handled with armed soldiers pulling the plug on television stations.
Crime has increased massively since Chavez came into power. The streets of Caracas are no longer safe, except in certain exclusive areas. We were warned repeatedly before leaving the ship to use great discretion in pulling out cameras, as stealing them is the number one crime in Caracas. Caracas also happens to be the murder capital of the world, or so we were told. All of this crime might have something to do with Chavez’s ideas of property – which are anti-capitalist. Everything belongs to everybody.
Although everyone we met in Venezuela was incredibly nice and I personally did not feel in any danger 99.9% of the time, on Tuesday there was one incident when we were out shooting footage of the city – a car with impenetrable tinted windows followed us for a while and kinda freaked us out until our driver was able to lose it. They must have been after our cameras, and the fact that they had the cajones to approach us when we were 4 people strong made us think they were probably packin’ some heat. Thankfully, Chris was very aware and spotted whoever this was and got us all in the car before any unfortunate incident could transpire.
That said though, Venezuela was great, and I would love to return here. Gas is incredibly cheap – it costs 70 bolivars per liter, which is about 12 cents per gallon. It’s crazy - I mean that’s practically giving the stuff away. Did I mention it’s incredibly hot & humid here though? Being just a few degrees from the equator, that sun beats down on you somethin’ fierce, and it’s all tropical rainforest so it’s sticky and buggy as well.
Now we’re back at sea & heading for Brazil. Tomorrow, 9/9/05, we cross the equator. Apparently it’s tradition to shave one’s head when crossing the equator, so I’ll have to do that, and take out Jason’s mop too. I also intend to find out if water really goes down the drain in the opposite direction south of the equator. We shall see – stay tuned…
Love u Byron. B safe :) ~Jess
Posted by: Jesso | September 12, 2005 at 08:26 PM