A Senior Citizen in Caracas

Last week I received an email from an elderly man who lives in Caracas. It truly moved me, above all because I expected it to end differently. Here, in my own words, is the substance of what he told me.

He is almost 72 and wanted to speak not about the past but about the present and the future he sees coming, which, with luck, won’t be very long. For some years, he wrote, he has been seeing and living something he never imagined would happen to him at the end of his life. He is healthy and energetic enough to run all his own errands on foot. But when he crosses the street, motorcyclists and some truck and bus drivers swerve at him and often hurl insults he would rather not repeat. He remembers how, more than 60 years ago, his teachers and his parents (who were immigrants) used to tell him that a country that does not respect the elderly and children is not a country you should live in.

He has no pension, because according to Social Security he never paid in; he wonders what became of his contributions from 1964 to 1970, the 1980s and so on, and supposes they got lost somewhere. Still, he says with irony, everything has its good side: on pension days he sees the elderly lining up on the sidewalks outside banks, standing or sitting wherever they can, under a merciless sun or in the rain, even though years ago the banks announced with great fanfare that pensioners would be able to collect directly from ATMs.

Once a week he goes to the open-air markets, where your age, strength or balance doesn’t matter: what matters is getting the products and standing in line to have them weighed and to pay, with another 30 to 45 minutes in line if you want cheese or cold cuts. He visits five supermarkets looking for basic foods, and only one has a checkout for seniors. On days when a price-controlled product arrives, the lines become endless; he has sometimes spent more than two hours in one.

When he tried to buy a plane ticket directly from an airline, he waited three hours to be served. After buying a ticket in January to visit his daughter abroad in March, he spent an hour and 45 minutes in line in February just to have copies of the ticket stamped. Depositing or cashing a check takes him an hour or more, depending on whether it’s payday. Wherever he asks what is going on, they tell him, “Sir, everything is collapsed.” People with problems in their Social Security papers tell him it takes months, sometimes years, to sort them out. And he has seen the lines at the government food stores, which he calls a humiliation for our people.

The network some housewives have for spreading the word that a price-controlled product has arrived at a supermarket is so efficient, he says, that if they used it to protect themselves from crime we would take a big step toward reducing robberies and kidnappings. As for insecurity itself, he says he won’t go into it, because he could write a book.

He has a small car and tries to stay in his lane on the expressways, yet many motorcyclists insult his mother and behave very aggressively for no reason; he wonders whether the law gives them priority over every road, crossing, shoulder and anywhere else they please. He also sits in Caracas traffic, but, as a friend told him back in the 1970s, you just have to get used to it.

In short, he says, he spends a quarter of his life or more standing in lines. He hardly ever receives a statement in the mail anymore; everything has to be looked up online, but his internet connection fails 70 percent of the time. He doesn’t know whom to blame: the government, the opposition, bankers, business owners, himself? Everyone he asks says it’s someone else’s fault.

But of one thing he is sure: he is not leaving. This is where he grew up from the age of reason, in 1945, where he raised his children, and from where he keeps an eye, from afar, on some of his grandchildren.

He ended his email with the story of a Catholic who was sent with his whole family to a concentration camp in the Second World War, where his parents, his wife and his children were killed. Every time one of those terrible trials came, that man would say to God: the worse the things that happen to me and mine, the more I love you.

May God bless this gentleman and his whole family. I can only tell him: have faith that one day this will be put right, and we will be able to live in a country where children, young people, adults, senior citizens and the elderly are all respected. All we have to do is pray hard and work very hard so that better times may come.