Freedom
Published February, 2013 in "The Bozeman Magpie"; names of people in Caracas changed to protect privacy
Walking in the barrio of Caracas, my curiosity feels cheap and invasive. Here everyone knows each other’s business, the good and the bad, the gangs and drug dealers. Drunken men, barefooted, dirty, with bottle in hand slump on the ground and sit out the day. They yell at us. I feel protected in the company of the six-year-old and the nun. Both are regulars here.
Toby and I and our two children live, for now at least, in the 1980’s, in a home nestled against a mountain in Las Mercedes, a suburb of Caracas. Here Venezuelan kids attend a bilingual school. From a black-and-white marbled balcony, we overlook the city, the museums and skyscrapers. People visiting us never notice the barrios next to skyscrapers, as if they do not exist. To me these barrios share a reality I like to touch.
The steep dirt trail has a narrow ditch along it. Sewage and murky water from leaky pipes gushes down the collection from thousands of dilapidated houses hustled on top of each other. A sour stench of spoiled waste mingles with the stagnant air of seventy degrees.
“Aqui, aqui, this camino,” the six-year-old Gabriella yells. Sister Lucia, dressed in white follows us. “Don’t wear any jewelry,” she had cautioned me. “You don’t want to be killed over it.”
I’d wanted to see where the barrio children who attended her private school lived. I volunteered there.
Gabriella, with her short black hair, pulls me by the hand up the mountain. Her blue skirt and white blouse sets her apart and identify her as a student at the school in El Paraiso run by nuns, where kids have short hair as a safeguard against lice. We have come to pick up the statue of the Virgin Mary from Doña Clara, and bring it to the next home. The ritual of moving it from house to house happens in May.
The girl points at a metal shack up a tight snaking path. From a distance a sweet singing can be heard … “Dios te salve María. Llena eres de Gracia.” The voices come from Doña Clara’s house. “Clara teaches children here to read and write,” Sr. Lucia explains.
Out of breath we enter the dark room made out of paredes de metal – metal sheets. Ten women cramped inside smile out a welcome. One apologizes: “No water or electricity: We only get it an hour or two.” An opening in the wall looks down a mingling of rooftops to the old town center.
“Sientese, sientese.” Sit down. With tea and cookies in front of us, I notice the timeless force manifested in the altar. Flickering candles adorn the Virgin, a one foot porcelain statue of a gentle-faced woman... Salve, salve Maria, we sing. I celebrate this female presence, a statue of a Virgin. She will connect hearts and strengthen the community.
Doña Clara takes the Virgin Mary from the altar, wraps her in cloth and puts her in a box. In quiet procession, we shuffle behind her out the door. Out of respect, the women cover their hair with a white handkerchief. Gabriella, in her plastic shoes, skips ahead. In the distance an overweight woman is dressed in a black skirt waits in a shanty doorway. Her swollen feet are too big for the flip-flops she wears. It’s Gabriella’s grandmother who offered to house the Virgin next.
Her house has two rooms. The altar—a pink wooden table—in the corner on the dirt floor has red plastic roses on top. Gabriella gestures to come. Señora Lucia and I bend our heads as we step through the doorway into the second room. In the dark, a small bed stands against the wall. This room, like a balcony, is suspended over the mountainside. The stagnant air smells musty. Light enters through the floor panels.
“Grandma is too heavy for this room. I sleep here and she with the Virgin. This room can fall off with mud slides. I don’t want her to die. I’d rather it be me.” Señora Lucia and I stare at the child’s face as her eyes sparkle.
At six years-old, I too slept in a dark place, an attic storage area adapted to a bedroom. A room without windows began to form my yearning for freedom. Unlike Gabriella’s birth in the barrio of Caracas, my city of birth, Rotterdam, connected with the open sea. My confinement was the adverse shame of being a child of a German “Mof,” a degrading term used after WWII.
A different kind of sewage coursed along my life. Staring outside on days of rain in the Netherlands, my fingers trace the drops against the window. I dreamed of an escape out of my circumstance and going to the U.S., my icon of freedom.
I feel a unity with Gabriella. What does she dream about? With a few years of education on account of the nuns, luck could lift her out of life in the barrio. Maybe she wants to become a teacher, find a safe place to live with electricity, a toilet maybe, like in school.
Since education and my basic needs were cared for, my dreams began higher up the ladder. It included, as in the barrios here, the recognition of a feminine strength that exists in this world. In Catholic belief, the religion of my childhood, it translates in the adoration of the Virgin Mary. Buddhists have a female awareness in the statue of Quan Yin, and some Native American traditions revere Buffalo Calf Woman.
Toby and I and our two children live, for now at least, in the 1980’s, in a home nestled against a mountain in Las Mercedes, a suburb of Caracas. Here Venezuelan kids attend a bilingual school. From a black-and-white marbled balcony, we overlook the city, the museums and skyscrapers. People visiting us never notice the barrios next to skyscrapers, as if they do not exist. To me these barrios share a reality I like to touch.
The steep dirt trail has a narrow ditch along it. Sewage and murky water from leaky pipes gushes down the collection from thousands of dilapidated houses hustled on top of each other. A sour stench of spoiled waste mingles with the stagnant air of seventy degrees.
“Aqui, aqui, this camino,” the six-year-old Gabriella yells. Sister Lucia, dressed in white follows us. “Don’t wear any jewelry,” she had cautioned me. “You don’t want to be killed over it.”
I’d wanted to see where the barrio children who attended her private school lived. I volunteered there.
Gabriella, with her short black hair, pulls me by the hand up the mountain. Her blue skirt and white blouse sets her apart and identify her as a student at the school in El Paraiso run by nuns, where kids have short hair as a safeguard against lice. We have come to pick up the statue of the Virgin Mary from Doña Clara, and bring it to the next home. The ritual of moving it from house to house happens in May.
The girl points at a metal shack up a tight snaking path. From a distance a sweet singing can be heard … “Dios te salve María. Llena eres de Gracia.” The voices come from Doña Clara’s house. “Clara teaches children here to read and write,” Sr. Lucia explains.
Out of breath we enter the dark room made out of paredes de metal – metal sheets. Ten women cramped inside smile out a welcome. One apologizes: “No water or electricity: We only get it an hour or two.” An opening in the wall looks down a mingling of rooftops to the old town center.
“Sientese, sientese.” Sit down. With tea and cookies in front of us, I notice the timeless force manifested in the altar. Flickering candles adorn the Virgin, a one foot porcelain statue of a gentle-faced woman... Salve, salve Maria, we sing. I celebrate this female presence, a statue of a Virgin. She will connect hearts and strengthen the community.
Doña Clara takes the Virgin Mary from the altar, wraps her in cloth and puts her in a box. In quiet procession, we shuffle behind her out the door. Out of respect, the women cover their hair with a white handkerchief. Gabriella, in her plastic shoes, skips ahead. In the distance an overweight woman is dressed in a black skirt waits in a shanty doorway. Her swollen feet are too big for the flip-flops she wears. It’s Gabriella’s grandmother who offered to house the Virgin next.
Her house has two rooms. The altar—a pink wooden table—in the corner on the dirt floor has red plastic roses on top. Gabriella gestures to come. Señora Lucia and I bend our heads as we step through the doorway into the second room. In the dark, a small bed stands against the wall. This room, like a balcony, is suspended over the mountainside. The stagnant air smells musty. Light enters through the floor panels.
“Grandma is too heavy for this room. I sleep here and she with the Virgin. This room can fall off with mud slides. I don’t want her to die. I’d rather it be me.” Señora Lucia and I stare at the child’s face as her eyes sparkle.
At six years-old, I too slept in a dark place, an attic storage area adapted to a bedroom. A room without windows began to form my yearning for freedom. Unlike Gabriella’s birth in the barrio of Caracas, my city of birth, Rotterdam, connected with the open sea. My confinement was the adverse shame of being a child of a German “Mof,” a degrading term used after WWII.
A different kind of sewage coursed along my life. Staring outside on days of rain in the Netherlands, my fingers trace the drops against the window. I dreamed of an escape out of my circumstance and going to the U.S., my icon of freedom.
I feel a unity with Gabriella. What does she dream about? With a few years of education on account of the nuns, luck could lift her out of life in the barrio. Maybe she wants to become a teacher, find a safe place to live with electricity, a toilet maybe, like in school.
Since education and my basic needs were cared for, my dreams began higher up the ladder. It included, as in the barrios here, the recognition of a feminine strength that exists in this world. In Catholic belief, the religion of my childhood, it translates in the adoration of the Virgin Mary. Buddhists have a female awareness in the statue of Quan Yin, and some Native American traditions revere Buffalo Calf Woman.
So I did escape. At 26 years-old, I made it to the U.S. and standing on a boat warmed by Toby’s arms, my American husband-to-be, I visited the Statue of Liberty. Leaning forward over the rail of the boat, a deep “Yes” quavered through my body. This icon stretched my grasp for freedom, my sense of destiny and choice as a woman.
I do not visit long in that barrio of Caracas. Dark clouds had gathered, rain could make the trail down slippery. Señora Lucia and I hugged the women and Gabriella, said Adios, and left.
I thought about Gabriella. Would she survive the frequent mudslides? Would she, like some in Latin America, our neighbors, dream about a better life in the U.S.?
A few months later in Caracas, Toby and I decided to return to the U.S. Our conscience no longer could justify working for multinationals. “It feels to me like being a prostitute,” Toby stated. After living in remote areas of the world we had become intimately aware of community destruction that multi-nationals induced; not to mention the environmental devastation. We left Venezuela to make a difference in the U.S.
But freedom continued to summon me, especially after Toby unexpectedly died. A need for reflection and discipline, an integral part of freedom came to my awareness. I now differentiate an inner and outer perspective of freedom. I’m closer to who I’d like to be and learn what makes me grow in authenticity. As a single mother the icons of freedom move me forward. What roles do I play now? And how can I provide for the children and model a deeper meaning. Discernment helps me to carve this out. I lived in various cultures with different value systems and understandings of freedom; countries like Iraq, Borneo in Indonesia, Guatemala amongst many others. This helps me professionally. I’m able to share my experience and my inner compass of freedom. I’ve observed the strength of women around the globe.
In my fifties, I visited the East Coast of the U.S. and found the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. My step hastened with the prospect of seeing a powerful symbol of freedom again. Focused I walk toward the large object, but a sunken feeling startled me, much like when I realized the dangers of Gabriella’s room in the barrio: “A crack, the liberty bell has a crack,” repeated in my mind. “It actually has a crack.”
Frustrated, I brooded about freedom and how our aspirations could be higher from the get-go if that crack—the essentials of healthcare, education, and retirement—was mended and the understanding of what immigrants bring to this country was restored. I wanted a solid sounding bell that rings in true freedom, building global relationships with hearts and minds that radiate liberty for all.
Compared to Gabriella’s, my Dutch heritage allows me many choices. Folks before me have set it up that way, absorbed that responsibility. The wealthy in Venezuela and across the world have the freedom to live a full life. It’s almost guaranteed in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Canada and Great Britain where all people are fortunate not to get bankrupted by cancer or loss of their job.
Now in my sixties, a foreigner who lives in the U.S., freedom narrows the distance between my head and heart. I visualize the creation of building blocks for the next generation, a task to last until I’m in my nineties. I want to contribute to society, share my own connection with that creative feminine force, facilitating arts and ways to reflect. To the extent that I have the security of decent healthcare and the outlook of a basic income like social security, I can pursue my dream of freedom. I envision a human race coming together, a world that chooses to become bigger in mind and heart, sharing in each other’s wisdom. My continued participation in the evolution and creativity of freedom is life-changing.
I realize that a moral collective consciousness narrows the gap between the rich and the poor in the world, including young people like Gabriela. Those that control the masses through unjust cheap labor will increasingly be held accountable. I believe that in time the rising of consciousness will do away with the dark stand of entitlement, which doesn’t come from those who have nothing. Yes, a strengthening of and fusion with a new feminine presence in this world by innovative women and men can unlock the degradation of the global human family. The infinite feminine icon of freedom carried by the United States is pivotal.
I do not visit long in that barrio of Caracas. Dark clouds had gathered, rain could make the trail down slippery. Señora Lucia and I hugged the women and Gabriella, said Adios, and left.
I thought about Gabriella. Would she survive the frequent mudslides? Would she, like some in Latin America, our neighbors, dream about a better life in the U.S.?
A few months later in Caracas, Toby and I decided to return to the U.S. Our conscience no longer could justify working for multinationals. “It feels to me like being a prostitute,” Toby stated. After living in remote areas of the world we had become intimately aware of community destruction that multi-nationals induced; not to mention the environmental devastation. We left Venezuela to make a difference in the U.S.
But freedom continued to summon me, especially after Toby unexpectedly died. A need for reflection and discipline, an integral part of freedom came to my awareness. I now differentiate an inner and outer perspective of freedom. I’m closer to who I’d like to be and learn what makes me grow in authenticity. As a single mother the icons of freedom move me forward. What roles do I play now? And how can I provide for the children and model a deeper meaning. Discernment helps me to carve this out. I lived in various cultures with different value systems and understandings of freedom; countries like Iraq, Borneo in Indonesia, Guatemala amongst many others. This helps me professionally. I’m able to share my experience and my inner compass of freedom. I’ve observed the strength of women around the globe.
In my fifties, I visited the East Coast of the U.S. and found the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. My step hastened with the prospect of seeing a powerful symbol of freedom again. Focused I walk toward the large object, but a sunken feeling startled me, much like when I realized the dangers of Gabriella’s room in the barrio: “A crack, the liberty bell has a crack,” repeated in my mind. “It actually has a crack.”
Frustrated, I brooded about freedom and how our aspirations could be higher from the get-go if that crack—the essentials of healthcare, education, and retirement—was mended and the understanding of what immigrants bring to this country was restored. I wanted a solid sounding bell that rings in true freedom, building global relationships with hearts and minds that radiate liberty for all.
Compared to Gabriella’s, my Dutch heritage allows me many choices. Folks before me have set it up that way, absorbed that responsibility. The wealthy in Venezuela and across the world have the freedom to live a full life. It’s almost guaranteed in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Canada and Great Britain where all people are fortunate not to get bankrupted by cancer or loss of their job.
Now in my sixties, a foreigner who lives in the U.S., freedom narrows the distance between my head and heart. I visualize the creation of building blocks for the next generation, a task to last until I’m in my nineties. I want to contribute to society, share my own connection with that creative feminine force, facilitating arts and ways to reflect. To the extent that I have the security of decent healthcare and the outlook of a basic income like social security, I can pursue my dream of freedom. I envision a human race coming together, a world that chooses to become bigger in mind and heart, sharing in each other’s wisdom. My continued participation in the evolution and creativity of freedom is life-changing.
I realize that a moral collective consciousness narrows the gap between the rich and the poor in the world, including young people like Gabriela. Those that control the masses through unjust cheap labor will increasingly be held accountable. I believe that in time the rising of consciousness will do away with the dark stand of entitlement, which doesn’t come from those who have nothing. Yes, a strengthening of and fusion with a new feminine presence in this world by innovative women and men can unlock the degradation of the global human family. The infinite feminine icon of freedom carried by the United States is pivotal.