IT WAS A SATURDAY NIGHT IN MEDELLIN I was smoking in front of my motel, the drunks going in and out of the bar next door, when a boy aged about 12 approached me.

‘Gift me some money for a candy sweet.’ He said. 

 ‘Where are your parents?’ I asked.

‘My mother is sick; I am selling sweets to bring money.’ 

The street lights had been on for hours and the bars were filling. He was the only child, accompanied or not: a Venezuelan boy who had travelled to Medellin from Caracas and lived five metro stops away from where he was working. We were speaking about football when the men on the stoop next door caught his attention and called to him. They looked over at me midway through questioning him and then he wandered off with his bag of sweets. The men resumed their talking without another glance. The boy is no exception to the Venezuelan workforce here, the majority of which carry their tools with them: a bag of sweets, a windshield squeegee, or juggling balls for instance. They are called informal, but their days are taken up stood at traffic lights, street performing or vending their wares to pedestrians. The boy’s age is no rarity and neither are the dangers inherent in street work which he is especially prone to becoming victim of. 

On one side of Medellin’s valley there is a church, resembling a gated compound, where children in these circumstances can find refuge. The nuns working there were sweeping when I arrived, and I spoke to the head sister on a table beside the pews. In the background a doorway led to a dormitory that housed 120 girls rescued from abusive situations, though was empty for Christmas vacation. This along with nine other homes across the city houses and educates 1130 boys and girls who would otherwise be working like the boy, or those who work with their parents as recyclers, venders or in the domestic service.

In Valledupar I saw four of these such children not in formal education who were helping their wheelchair bound and massively overweight I assume to be mother in begging each table at a restaurant, thereafter returning to her at the roadside with only unconcealable resentment. The watershed is theirs to give the generation before them, for the majority of Venezuelan men of my age walk thousands of kilometres with bubbled feet and emaciation to become car window washers, sleep under bridges and find no camaraderie, so too hindered without specialized skillsets applicable to the streets, themselves then being incapable of changing the situation. The old are draped with loose skin over bone and often have distended stomachs, trembling their hands into rubbish bags in slow fraught searches for plastic. The pregnant and degree educated are not exempt from these so called ‘informal’ fates, and how doomed the situation in Venezuela must be for whereafter five years of hearing about these agonies then continue in their direction. The generosity of locals like Dairo Cantillo who each Christmas uses his family business´s savings to feed Santa Marta’s in-crisis affords one more meal to these enduring. 

‘Our country is ruined. We have nothing more to do, just to leave because if we stay there we will starve or die of something else.’ Said two young Venezuelan men twelve days into their walk to Cali, while on the moorlands near Berlin in North Santander, an area named after its likeness to the Germans city’s colder climate.

‘The salary at the moment is 1200 Bolos (Bolivares) and you cannot do anything with that, if the flour and rice costs that, it is useless.

‘We left there (Pamplona) yesterday, the cold weather did not let us sleep. Now we are going to see what they give us in the shelter, supposedly they give aid, support, some food, a bag with things to help oneself but we cannot stay there, for example the police do not let Venezuelan’s stay.’ 

The difficulties of living in a country without being formally acknowledged were eased with the provision of temporary legal status to the 1.7 million migrants here, for instance in humanitarian organizations being able to offer bus services. Over half of those migrants were before undocumented in this system, but among them many still cannot afford to prove they are Venezuelan. According to one Venezuelan walker it can cost more than 200 USD and take ten years to get a passport. 

“Here you can only have a formal job if you have your papers in order, for example I do not have papers so I have lost many opportunities.” Said Ecuaris, 26, from Maica, working ‘informally’ outside of Medellin´s bus terminus.

“In Venezuela, I could work without problems… (But) It is difficult there, for example, I have my daughters there and one of them is suffering from malnutrition because although there is food, it is very expensive, so the salary is not enough to buy a lot of things, just the things that are necessary.”

The absurdity of comparing Venezuela´s migration crisis to Syria and warzones in the middle-east and Africa discounts the country’s fertility for growing crops, those migrated Venezuelans I interviewed saying its lack of affordability is tantamount to famine. To have one´s hunger forbidden in surely Eden is the mentality that in concrete cities one may feed themselves and their family, or be as thieves, where barring natural disasters it will continue as Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, ‘There’s movement now. People are moving. We know why, and we know how. Moving’ because they’ve got to. That’s why folks always move. Moving cause they want something better than what they’ve got. And that’s the only way they’ll ever get it. Wanting’ it and needing it, they’ll go out an get it. Its being hurt that makes folks mad to fighting’ (updated for coherence). As then applied to the promises of work in Californian orange fields, here also to the synthetic orange flavoured sticks as pickings for the those Venezuelans in Colombia.

The responses I received to my question, ‘What message would you give to Venezuelans who are thinking of leaving their country?’ are here below, some expressed by the people in this article.

“My message to the people in Venezuela is that if they decide to emigrate, they should echarle ganas a la vida (do it bravely, with perseverance) because we go out looking for opportunities and we need to try to achieve them.” Eucaris from Maica.

“My advice to Venezuelans is to continue fighting for what is ours, for our family because everything that we do, it is done mainly for family. To have something better you need to sacrifice yourself, for example, now we are sacrificing ourselves by coming here to be able to give our children a good future. Aids from other countries need to continue so that we can move forward.” Jose 43 years old from Caracas, while in Pamplona.

“The most important thing is to have a goal and know what you want to do. When I started dancing it was very difficult for me, I didn’t know how to dance and I just thought it was something I really liked and wanted to learn. I spent a lot of time on this and I succeeded. I think this has changed the life of many people who lived on the streets, consumed drugs and now have better lives. Things don’t come alone if you don’t have dedication.” Jesús, 21 years old from Maracaibo, in Santa Marta.

Written by Jacob Hamilton in May 2021