By Sarah Kinosian
SAN JOAQUIN, Venezuela (Reuters) – When Juan Meza can no longer bear to hear his daughter cry with hunger, the SDA pastor sold his family’s few belongings, presented his valuable fantasy novels and history books to a neighbor, and left Venezuela in 2017 for a task at a shoe factory in Colombia.
For years, Meza was relieved to be able to feed her daughters and send them to school, until the coronavirus pandemic erupted and she was fired.
Back in Venezuela, instead of training theology as he once did, the 42-year-old wanders the streets of the small town of San Joaquin in northwestern Venezuela, to sell birds to others willing to pay in dollars or in the flour and rice industry. . Training
Like 100,000 other migrants who returned home amid the pandemic, Meza returned to the tumult from which she fled to escape the hyperinflation, scarcity and unemployment created through the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
At 3:45 a.m. on a recent morning, Meza left her tin and concrete space looking for a cell phone signal on a 2010 shell phone to locate her bird supplier. The purpose of the benefit for the day is $5, but if I couldn’t pick up the birds, I wouldn’t get anything.
“It’s apocalyptic, however, it’s just to help us until we can go to Brazil,” Meza said, on her black street and acclaimed in a worn blue football shirt. As maximum days, the force comes out.
While difficult situations for migrants returning to military-run quarantine centres have generated criticism, their post-departure joy is equally digraa: a struggle for food in the midst of breakdowns, water scarcity, and the constant threat of coronavirus exposure.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Maduro said that returning Venezuelans would be welcome “with love and with open arms.” He denounced the xenophobia many have suffered abroad.
But as the virus threatened to overwhelm Venezuela’s crumbling fitness care system, Maduro began to blame returnees for a number of cases that the government says has reached nearly 42,000.
Some officials have called on returning migrants “biological weapons” sent through Colombian neighbors to infect the population.
This suspicion received Alejandra, a nurse from the city of Barquisimeto, on his return from Colombia in March before Maduro’s government closed the border.
When she returned home, her neighbors said she was “infected” and called the police. Although the government only told her to stay home for two weeks, she felt treated like a criminal.
Alejandra, who asked not to use her genuine name, was unable to locate paintings for 4 months and, with her savings spent, began feeding her elderly son and mom with rice and beans once a day.
He now fears that he will get the disease in his new task in a deteriorating and ill-equipped hospital to manage the coronavirus.
“We don’t have enough masks, protective equipment, nothing,” he said. “But that’s what I have to do until we leave.”
Colombia, which estimates that there are about 1.8 million Venezuelans there, expects a new wave of migration once the border reopens and the economy restarts.
Venezuela’s Ministry of Information responded to a request for comment.
CHICKEN FOR RICE
Meza, his wife Norelis and their two teenage daughters spent seven days camping on a bridge on the Border with Colombia in June as they waited to pass.
They slept in the street, bathed in the river and saw other people promoting tickets online. They even sold their daughter’s hair for cash so they could eat.
“My mom told me that Maduro had told state television that she would take care of us,” said Norelis, 45, with her lips open in a sarcastic smile and open teeth. “That’s not what happened.”
Upon arrival, the local network council told the circle of relatives who were not eligible for the government-subsidized food box that month, which supplies products such as rice, flour and spaghetti.
“I don’t need to rely on them for food,” said Norelis, a seamstress who was about to open a small shop when she emigrated. “I’m angry and tired of having to reinvent myself to survive.”
Meza sold bananas on the street or traded them for bags of rice, but the fruit was too expensive due to the shortage of gas caused by years of government mismanagement, aggravated by U.S. sanctions.
He and a nephew began exchanging small chickens for government-subsidized food, a business that has become more complicated due to delays and stops in the arrival of the boxes.
Meza is on the street at four in the morning looking to get on one of the few buses crammed into service, with little time to worry about getting COVID-19.
By 10:35 a.m., her sweat-soaked blouse, however, had emptied her bucket. He won $4 and was given two bags of flour and six bags of rice. When they hit him home, the force was still out.
(Editing through Brian Ellsworth, Daniel Flynn and Alistair Bell)