I start my daily routine at 5 am. My wife, my daughter and I have to get ready to go to our respective work places (she teaches at a private elementary school). They get a ride every morning by a good Samaritan who drops his grandson at my wife’s school (so he does not mind to take her too) and take our daughter to her HS, which is a few blocks ahead. I have to walk and take either a bus (some ten blocks away) or an occasional ride some 4 blocks in the opposite direction.

In either case, . At a local bank downtown you can see dozens of people crowded hoping to get a number to be able to get the maximum amount of cash banks can dispense now. This particular bank, gives people 40,000 VEF, just enough to pay for 8 rides on buses. No food item cost 40 thousand; the tiniest snack may cost 150 thousand. And people must wait from 6 to 12 hours to get that pittance. All banks show the same scenes.

From 6:15 am, the average time I walk these streets, These people, for example, overnighted to buy some products (1 or 2) at a slightly lower price at a supermarket in that mall.

. Imagine to transfer someone $3 to get a $1 bill because banks do not give you but 1 penny max a day. I’d rather pay three times the value of 2lb of rice than sleep in the streets exposed to all kinds of dangers to try to get a number that will make me wait under scorching sun for hours to get one or two products and then do the same the day after that for another product, and so on and so forth.

I did not go to campus today. There is a call for a 48-hour strike to try to put some pressure on the government to raise our salaries to a decent level. As of right now, an average university professor makes $2 to $5 a month (you read well). . It had rained two days before and there was a fallen branch from a tree in the middle of the sidewalk. Let’s see how long it will take for the local authorities to clean up that mess.

This mess, for instance, is still here. I took a similar picture two months ago. They might have picked up that mountain of trash, but a new one just popped up. It’s like that for almost everything. . So, we wander around thinking not only about the errand we may be running, but also about pending business that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t get done. And everything in the streets is a reminder of a dysfunctional society that threatens to swallow you whole. You´re buried in inefficiency, filth, rudeness, chaos, ugliness and despair.

This is part of the public market. This area is the “new place” the local authorities moved the fish sellers to. If you can see in the background, those are the ruins of some small buildings that were erected for these people to sell their products several years ago. They never felt comfortable there, abandoned the buildings to sell by the sidewalk, along the avenue, dirtying the whole place. Now they are back, only there are no buildings and there is more pollution. You have no idea how horribly this place stinks. It’s nightmarish. I could not buy any fish, of course. I almost threw up. And

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