To try for a country in trouble

The phrase my mother consistently used to persuade me to clean my plate at dinner gradually became more personal as I got older and as our country started entering hysteria. That phrase was, “There are starving children out there.” These children are not those we are appropriated to believe come from charity commercials. These children take the form of my family and other oppressed people in Venezuela.

When I moved from my birthplace of Valencia, Venezuela, to Houston and later to Chicago, I had just celebrated my first birthday in 1998. Photographs tell me my party was full of family I had yet to know in an apartment my parents were ready to leave. My mom tells me America was not the first scam she experienced, but it was responsible for the first time her cholesterol went up. The media tells of an election between two men in new political parties, one of whom promised anti-corruption and anti-poverty. His name was Hugo Chavez.

Four-year-old me came to know a teacher named Pam and learned English by watching television. Upon visiting my grandmother’s apartment in Valencia, I met the people to whom I had likely babbled the phrase “Los quiero” whenever the phone was pushed up against my ear. Meeting my tias (aunts in Spanish) Marlene, Lilia, Graciela and Grecia felt like I had four strange mothers. They locked their doors a lot after we came inside, and they didn’t carry purses on the streets. My grandfather owned a grocery store smaller than the ones in Illinois but with fresher mangos.

Ages 6 through 10 showed me more of what was going on in Venezuela, and I finally learned all of my cousins’ names over the phone. I turned into a white suburban outcast because I had black hair, tan skin and the only people with whom I spoke Spanish were my parents and my sister. Chavez apparently wasn’t letting people talk about his manipulation, or they could be silenced. I heard my parents throw around the Spanish words “matando” and “peligroso” after many phone calls. The fact that my aunt’s washing machine was stolen from the top floor of her apartment was terrifyingly amusing.

Ten years after I left Valencia, I came back to warnings on how we should avoid yellow taxis, seeing that my uncle was killed while on the job. I finally spent all of two weeks with my family who I couldn’t afford to see any earlier, and I learned that I loved them all along. People could distinguish my Spanish from others because I didn’t have an accent or properly use slang. I was told I shouldn’t speak too much in public. By the time I left real family, I knew I probably wouldn’t be back any time soon.

While I receive the comfortable education that my family risks their lives to give me, I think of the people whose lives I could have lived had my parents not had one opportunity.

“I feel ignorant,” I told my mom as we reviewed the latest in protests, feeling slightly helpless. She reassured me that my knowledge does more than I think.

Our responsibility as citizens of a privileged (and currently threatened) country is to pay attention and talk. The way we are influenced will hopefully motivate us in the future to join forces in righting wrongs. Venezuelan freedom of press currently faces extinction as publications and journalists are consistently shut down by the government for lack of funds to complete basic operational standards; the private media is controlled. Our real fears in current events embody the reality just across the Caribbean. Assault and robbery are commonplace as inflation has risen an exorbitant amount, which has eventually led to desperate murders and officials continuing to claim there is no humanitarian crisis. Last week, global news outlets documented violent protests erupting in Venezuela — they are speaking, and we see them being silenced.

Karla Arboleda is a UF journalism and international studies senior. Her column appears on Thursdays.