For a Kilo of Milk

I wrote this article in 2014, when the food shortage in Venezuela was terrible. God grant that we never go through this again. Although now the problem is not the shortage of products but their high prices.

I remember the years when you went out to buy a wallet, a tie or a set of dominoes as a Father’s Day gift. This year was a little different for me.

My father spends several hours a week standing in lines trying to get basic food items, not to mention what he has to do to get his medicines.

A week ago I saw a very sad news story. A man went out to buy milk for his daughter, and after standing in line for several hours he had a heart attack and died. The most incredible thing is that the photo showed an enormous line all around the dead man, and nobody moved from it, because the milk came before anything else. How painful!

Thinking of my father, who is past seventy, and the last thing I want is for him to have a heart attack in a line, I prepared the following Father’s Day gift: in a bag I put some “treasures” I had been hiding for more than three months: two tins of powdered milk, two kilos of sugar, two packages of genuine Harina P.A.N. corn flour, and the trophy: a bottle of Mazeite cooking oil.

I felt as if part of my heart went into that gift. And I felt it, not for myself, because we Venezuelan mothers have reached the point where, if we have to eat grass to survive, we will eat grass. I had hidden that food for my six children, but since it was Father’s Day, I decided to give my father that pleasant surprise. He is, besides, an exemplary grandfather to his grandchildren.

His joy when he saw the gift was as great as if I had given him the finest set of dominoes. I also brought him another gift that is now a real luxury in Venezuela: a quesillo. Do you remember the days when you could find quesillo for dessert anywhere? Well, that’s over. Que- sillo has gone from an ordinary everyday dessert to a luxury, for the simple reason that you need condensed milk (which has nearly disappeared from the map of Venezuela), sugar (plenty of it, to make a good caramel), milk and eggs. I didn’t even look for condensed milk, because I’ve gotten used to making the homemade version I learned thanks to this crisis, and it comes out just as delicious.

While I was preparing those gifts, my mother’s mind wouldn’t leave me in peace, thinking I would be left without sugar, milk or oil. But it was Father’s Day, and I had to spoil my father. It seems incredible that at seventy he is learning what it means to struggle to find food (something his Lebanese parents had already lived through from a very young age).

I don’t know what to say about what we are living through. And the food is a trifle compared with the corruption and injustice being committed in Venezuela. Now I understand why my father so often tells me: “Onward,” “You have to be strong”… I never imagined life would become so hard for us.

Several times I have told him to go live with my mother in a “firstworld” country, but he says: “Not a chance. So I can die of boredom?” The family gatherings, his domino games with his friends, his arepa made on a griddle “and not in an arepa toaster,” as he says… are priceless. Besides, he is sure that someday we will come out of this.

Today I thank God for giving me a strong father, a father who taught me to be strong. Who from the time I was little gave me the example of earning things through work, honestly. Who got me up every day (even Saturdays and Sundays) at six in the morning. Who told me you never miss class, and motivated me to be an excellent student. Who allowed me only one party dress from the time I was fifteen until I was eighteen… He knows what all that has meant in my life. It has been his great inheritance, above all at this time, when we must be very strong and live detached from material things, without letting that take away our joy.

That is why, on Father’s Day, I parted with the things that are hardest for me to part with right now: a kilo of sugar, a package of milk, a bottle of oil… It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?

I know this will pass. But we have to be very strong. A friend told me that many countries have gone through things similar to, and even worse than, what we are living through. And that there, generations of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren stayed, going through hard times, but in the end they managed to pull their homeland out of the hole it was in.

Today I thank my father, and all the fathers of Venezuela, who are supporting their children and grandchildren in staying here, praying and fighting without rest and without losing hope that someday we will have the best country in the world, where we can not only find the food we need and afford it, but a country where Truth shines, where Justice is done and where there is Peace for all our fellow Venezuelans.