Hope from La Guaira

Last week I slipped away from Caracas to La Guaira with some of my children. We left very early and stopped facing the sea so we could watch a few rays of sunrise while we waited for the bakery to open, so we could eat a cachito and drink a café con leche.

We had El Ávila on one side, and we could see mountain, beach and sunrays. All I did was sigh and breathe deeply, very deeply! I was gathering strength, because I know the coming months will be anything but easy.

The beaches of La Guaira have marked many of our lives. One of the few photos I still have from when I was a little girl was taken by my father in the Pigeon Plaza in Macuto. That was a “can’t-miss” spot for those of us who went down to the coast on weekends with our parents or grandparents. For people from Caracas, La Guaira was like a second home.

I remember that during the August vacation, my mother would load the whole gang of kids into her station wagon every day (down the mountain and back up) and drop us off at the public beach of the much-missed Macuto Sheraton so we could burn off our energy there. At one o’clock sharp we came out of the sea to ask for lunch (I will never forget the hard-boiled eggs and deviled-ham sandwiches) and then went back into the water. My brothers and sisters and I were on our own all day, and absolutely nothing ever happened to us. It was definitely another era.

As I watched the sunrise, I remembered the old Macuto boulevard, the Tomaselli ice-cream parlor with its lime snow cones (unique on planet Earth!), and the avenue with the King of Fried Fish, where we ate well and cheaply. Many of us started courtships on those beaches and ended up married with children. Those landscapes, with their colors, scents and flavors, unique in the world, follow us wherever we go.

I remember that before the mudslides, people went down to the beach every weekend because it was part of our lives. That fateful day put an end to many things. When I went down after the tragedy and saw how everything had been left, all I could do was cry. I take my hat off to the people of Vargas for everything they have suffered. We can never know what it was like if we weren’t there.

The day my grandmother died, I was in La Guaira, and I took a taxi back to Caracas. The driver, a man from Vargas of about seventy-five, told me his terrible story: “Ma’am, I had my house and two trucks I worked with, and I lost everything. I left my house in a T-shirt and shorts, with my wife and my four children. My family and I watched the sharks eat the bodies. We were left on the street. We were devastated. One day my wife said to me: ‘My love, I know how we’re going to solve this. I’m going to make some meatballs and put rat poison in them; we’ll all have lunch together, and that’s it, problem solved.’ I told her, ma’am, that I needed to go to the bathroom, and I locked myself in and cried, inconsolable. I called my brother, and he found a psychiatrist. My wife was treated and, thank God, she recovered. I’ve had it hard, ma’am. After having my life almost settled, I had to start from zero, and the government didn’t help me at all. Here you see me, working at my age, but happy, because I’ve been able to give my children a future. They all have their degrees now, and I only have one girl left in high school.”

I was truly astonished, and all I could do was congratulate that man for the great example of fortitude he has given. I also told him that Saint Teresa of Ávila used to say that this life is “a bad night in a bad inn.” That phrase struck him deeply, and he asked me to repeat it.

Examples like that man’s (and there are so many others!) are great rays of fortitude and hope that encourage us to keep going.

The beach was lovelier than ever; you can’t imagine how much I enjoyed it. Looking at the horizon, I thought a great deal about all my fellow Venezuelans and everything we have suffered. And this phrase flashed through my mind like lightning: “There must be a reason, there must be a reason.” Only God knows what He has in store for this country. Meanwhile, we will keep gathering strength, praying hard and working as never before to move our families forward, each of us contributing our grain of sand (or truckload, as one reader wrote to me), whatever is ours to give.