Pain and Abandonment in Venezuela
Pain and Abandonment in Venezuela Lucia Newman | Senior Correspondent, Al Jazeera English - Latin America
I have been a foreign correspondent for more than 30 years, the majority of them spent covering wars, political upheavals, drug trafficking, social uprisings and natural disasters all over Latin America and the Caribbean. I am not ashamed to say that in those years, I have cried a great deal. Witnessing so much human tragedy is heartbreaking. After drying your own tears, you hope that somehow your reporting will help change things, or at least contribute to lessening the suffering of some of the desperate people you meet. I encountered one such group of men near a village some three hours from San Cristobal, the capital of Tachira State, in Venezuela. The country was, and still is, in ruins. I remember that it was a Sunday when we made our way to the top of an isolated hill in Colmar de Cope. That is where we found the Colina de Esperaza (Hill of Hope) Retirement Home for men. There were no guards, but one of the senior citizens, 79-year-old Feliciano Rocha, got up from a dilapidated plastic chair to open the gate for us, because he was the only one there who could still walk. The sight of the rest of the residents was shocking. All of them were elderly men in deplorable condition. Most had lost many if not all of their teeth. They were sitting in wheel chairs that were
disintegrating. There was no one to help them go to the toilet, so it was impossible not to notice the stench of urine in the stifling heat. Most of them were still quite lucid, but they were all suffering from moderate to severe physical ailments. From 9am to 4pm there was a cleaner and a cook, no one else, to take care of the 19 residents. Three others had died recently. No one could remember the last time that a doctor had come to visit, or when they had received medication for hyper-tension, diabetes and a long list of other conditions. Venezuela was in a shambles. Food, fuel and medicine was almost impossible to obtain. Hyperinflation, the highest in the world, made people’s money worthless. The large central hall served as a kind of lounge area, with one tiny television hanging close to the ceiling and no furniture. That is where 76-year- old Antonio Rosales began tugging at my jacket, desperate to speak to someone. No one had changed his soiled pants for quite some time. He cried a lot, and pleaded for help. Rosales had been brought to the Hill of Hope by a family member three years earlier. At the time he could see and walk. Now, untreated cataracts had left him blind, and he was confined to a wheelchair because of a painful hernia.
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