Dear Neil Mason,
This is Natasha Pentin and you awarded my a scholarship some months ago. I am so sorry I have not been in contact sooner. I am currently in Venezuela and have not had wifi until now. I just wanted to thank you. This is the most incredible trip and it would have not been possible without your generosity. There are many things I want to address in the report that I will write. Here are some things I thought you’d find interesting.
The country is suffering from an extremely high inflation rate so you have to take a sack around if you want to take more than 20 pounds with you. There are queues that are endless where people are waiting for food or gas. You can actually fill up an entire bus for only 10 bz which is around 10p. The police are also extremely corrupt,you even see them drinking beers while working! I will go into more detail about that at another time.
I would have loved to have send you postcards but it is not a possibility. Their post service takes forever and it can often cost up to 200 dollars just to send a postcard. In regards to the projects we have already helped the community in many ways. We built a baseball arena for the local children.
This was an amazing accomplishment as the captain of the baseball team, who was 15,was incredibly emotional when he saw the final product and we played a baseball game against them. We refurbished a disabled school where we repainted the playground and hosted a party for them. We have given several speeches to school children in Caripe about conservation. All the children wanted to know about our country and asked intellectual questions about our opinions of the EU etc. That same week we also made a nursery of 100 baby trees and planted many trees during our reforestation project. Our latest project was redecorating the local community centre which I will send pictures of again at a later time. The last two weeks we were in Gran Sabana where we climbed Roraima in 5 days, hiking almost 60 km and absolutely killing our knees!
There have been some incredibly funny moments. The whole time we were working at the disabled school they all thought I was deaf because I could speak Spanish but not really understand it , they just couldn’t grasp that I was English! Experiencing Caracas airport was another. We’d been warned over and over by our parents about all the dangers of the airport as there are many kidnappings each week.While we waited for our Jakera club leader to pick us up we were like sitting ducks with every taxi driver possible swarming around us and people asking us questions in Spanish.We got so paranoid to the point where everyone seemed suspicious and we ended up embarrassing ourselves .
After taking the wrong exit into the wrong arrivals and feeling all disorientated a man started calling out to us and grabbing Megan’s trolley. Thinking he wanted money , our luggage or to give us a taxi ride, we ignored him and carried on. When he did not give up we eventually realised he was actually just in charge of taking the trolleys back …
We have Spanish lessons every week and our first day was funny. Megan, the person I am travelling with and Kaylan, one of our closest friends at the camp, didn’t know any Spanish . When Kaylan saw the question ” what did you used to do when you were younger ” she thought it meant ” how many boyfriends do you have”. Megan when asked how old she was replied with ” tengo diecinueve anos” ,pronouncing the anos wrong . Flaco, the Spanish teacher was so confused because Megan was saying ” I have 19 bums” . He replied with ” I think you need to go to hospital ” . 2 weeks in we were awoken at 5.15 by Kaylan saying ” girls grab your stuff and your shoes an evacuation alarm is going off” . We quickly got out of bed and sure enough this loud fire alarm / air raid alarm was sounding. We were thinking of the worse case scenarios , tsunami’s , raids , anything!
However , turns out it was just the village celebrating their victory in the baseball match. They started playing loud music too which went on and on at 4 in the morning. A massive group of supporters rang on our doorbell and they had a black fake coffin with the oppositions name on it. They were running down the streets shouting , singing and drinking. It was definitely a culture shock!
Many thanks,
Natasha Pentin
