Living as If at War

When I was studying journalism at my beloved Central University of Venezuela, my dream was to be a war reporter like the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. I loved photography and doing interviews, and I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a book as much as “Interview with History,” in which the main world leaders of the 1970s and 1980s answered her questions about war and peace.

The fact is that once I happened to say, in front of a Spanish woman who had lived through the civil war, that I wanted to be a war reporter. She looked at me in surprise and, with an expression of great sadness, said: “Young lady, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

Today, through these lines, I want to apologize for having thought and said such a foolish thing, because now I understand, in a certain way, what it means to live in a war. Wars simply should not exist. I have in my mind the image of John Paul II crying out with all his strength, “War never again, war never again!” He lived through it in his own flesh and knew how much suffering those caught in it endure.

And as the saying goes, “the tongue is the body’s punishment”: today I am living firsthand, like many other Venezuelans, something very much like living in a war, with my husband and my six children, with most of my family by blood and by marriage, and with many dear friends.

As a journalist I have this column, which El Universal generously gives me every week and which is a window onto the world!, to report on what we are living, what we are experiencing, what we are suffering…

Today I understand, in my own flesh, all the people in wartime who have lost a loved one to violence. Now I understand those mothers you see in war films who say goodbye to their children as if it were the last time they will see them. That is how I say goodbye to my children every morning and every time they go out in the afternoon or evening. As soon as they leave I start praying to God with all my strength that He! will protect them for me. Those of us who have no bodyguards or armored cars live like this. That is the reality! I have lived and wept! with mothers who have had more than one child killed, with mothers whose beloved son has been left bedridden for life by a criminal. And this is not some virtual movie. No! It is something very real, flesh and blood.

Today I understand the pain of parents in wartime who came home with no food to give their children. When I see lines of people with numbers marked on their arms, as in a concentration camp, so they can be given a package of corn flour, I understand what people suffer in war. When I read that some people are buying spoonfuls! of milk to take to their children, I understand what one must suffer in a war.

Every time my husband comes home bent over, tells me about the problems at work and adds, crestfallen, “I couldn’t find the milk or the medicine you asked for,” I understand what a father suffers in a war. That is when you act like the father in Life Is Beautiful and start joking with your husband to “cheer up” his evening, even while you are swallowing hard inside.

These months I have also thought a lot about the Spanish women who lived through the civil war. It happens every time I sit down to mend my children’s clothes, because with inflation the way it is (I suppose that happens in wartime too), what we have stretches to cover food, school supplies (the few we can’t reuse) and medicines, whatever we can find. So we have to get every last bit of use out of clothes and everything else in the house. I, who used to sew very little, have become over the past several years an expert at mending everything that tears, patching trousers and letting down hems. Sewing was hard for me, but I had to learn it, and I’ve even come to enjoy it. I wonder: did those wonderful Spanish and Portuguese seamstresses who came to our country, with their “golden” hands, learn to sew during the war, mending what little clothing their families had?

Well, I always try to look on the bright side of things.

I ask God every day, every hour, every minute, that the script of this movie we are living changes very soon, and that the next one is written on the basis of development, competence, honesty, truth, freedom, justice and peace. I know for a fact that many people are praying, studying and working for things to improve (even if they go around in mended clothes).

We Venezuelans deserve times of Justice and Peace. I don’t want to keep reporting injustice and pain… I want to report the joy and Peace of the whole Venezuelan people. I am firmly convinced that day will come. May God and the Most Holy Virgin of Coromoto help us and protect us from all harm!