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Posted: March 18
I was looking at Caracas in the rear view mirror this morning as the taxista Dionysio drove me down the long descent from Caracas to the airport on the coast. As the crow flies the distance is not far, but you lose almost 3,000 feet in a half-hour drive. On Tuesday I came back to Caracas from Maracaibo. What struck me then was the surreal quality of going through the one long tunnel on the trip. Gas fumes from the cars created a thick haze that made me feel like we were passing into another world. Actually that is true. Caracas and Maracaibo are the two largest cities in Venezuela, but they are so different. Caracas is as vertical as Maracaibo is horizontal since Caracas is shoe-horned into narrow valleys with houses of the poor climbing the steep hillsides above rivers. Maracaibo by contrast stretches out along the shore of its eponymous lake. There aren’t any hills and the wide avenues with tree-filled central dividers give an expansive feeling that is very welcome after the intense compactness of Caracas. Maracaibo is as colorful as Caracas is grey. In the capital, the tall apartment buildings are mostly unpainted concrete, whereas the lake-side city is Caribbean in its abundant use of blues, yellows, pinks and greens on its single-story houses.
What is common in both cities is the friendliness of the people I met. In Maracaibo I was met at the airport by Father Miguel Matus, who had just recently moved there after serving as the province’s novice master; he knew how to get close to the offices of Fe y Alegria and the radio station we wanted to visit, but once we got in the neighborhood he got lost. We stopped to ask directions, and the man who helped us started explaining it, and then just said, “Let me take you there.” He got in the car and guided us around several turns to the front door. That was certainly a clue that I was not in New York City. The people I met at the radio stations were equally friendly and welcoming. On Tuesday we went to the small town of Paraguaipoa; it probably took me longer to learn how to pronounce it than to reach it by car. The station there is bilingual, Spanish and Wuayuanaiki (an indigenous language). I could not understand what the radio announcers said, but their welcome was absolutely clear. Señor Isidro Uriana F. interviewed me in Spanish. I must have done OK because we met a woman a few hours later who had heard the interview and liked what I had said.
One of my more interesting conversations was with Dionisio, the driver who took me to the airport. He wanted to know what my business was and I explained as best I could in Spanish the importance of visiting a place and spending time talking with people to understand what they do at a more profound level than you could reach just by reading a letter about their work. As he said goodbye this morning, Father Jesús María Aguirre told me he felt very much encouraged by my visit and our conversations about what they are doing and can do in communication in Venezuela.A friend of mine in New Orleans used to talk about the importance of getting people “on the excitement plan.” That is my job, and the perks are not bad. Now it is on to Quito, Ecuador with more people to meet and more things to
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