Pain and Abandonment in Venezuela
“I could not sleep last night. There is no medicine for the pain,” he told me. Then his eyes filled with tears and he began to sob, the saddest cry I had ever heard from a grown man. “We are always hungry. There is no food here. The government and everyone else has abandoned us. We are all alone,” he cried. I was angry. This was the place where elderly men were supposed to live out their golden years in dignity. Instead, they were starving, crippled and allowed to go blind, in the same country that only a few years earlier had flown in tens of thousands of people from all over Latin America to undergo free cataract surgery. Deceased President Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro had nicknamed the programme “Operation Miracle.” The cook made dinner - a soup made of corn flour, salt and boiled in water, nothing more. “Before the crisis we had to throw away food, because there was so much,” said Maria Gomez. “This home is run on donations, but the donors have left the country.”
By law the government is supposed to provide medical care and sustenance to all those who cannot support themselves. But Ms. Gomez said that it had been months since they had received anything at all. When the soup was served, Antonio Garcia - who was also confined to a wheelchair - led Freddy Benitez - who was totally blind - to the dining area. They all helped each other as best they could. It was 4pm and they sipped their food eagerly, in total silence.
The cook and the cleaner prepared to go home, leaving the men to put themselves to bed by 6pm, before dark. There were no light bulbs left in the entire residence. But the cleaner explained that it was not the dark that prompted them to go to sleep early. It was to make it easier for them to forget their hunger. In countries undergoing an acute economic crisis, like Venezuela, the very young and the very old are the most vulnerable. At least children are given priority by international aid organisations; no one seemed to remember that these older citizens existed.
A lot of Al Jazeera viewers were as heartbroken as we were when they saw our story, and wrote to ask how they could help. But it was impossible by then to wire money into Venezuela because of the financial sanctions imposed by the US government on the Maduro government. Venezuela has become a country where only the fittest survive – and the residents of Hill of Hope are not among them.
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