Volunteers and contributions from businesses and individuals are helping sustain efforts to recover bodies and even protect properties affected by the June 24 earthquakes.
Vanessa Davies
Norbelis Martínez’s hands were slicing peppers with infinite patience this Wednesday, September 2. With a smile, she endured the sweltering 11:00 a.m. heat in Maiquetía. For Norbelis, the end—filling stomachs with freshly cooked food—justifies the means. Like so many volunteers who continue to lend a hand in La Guaira after the June 24 earthquakes, she knows that solidarity is a word that begins to wear thin precisely when it is needed most.
That same commitment keeps Sofía De Pasquale and Carlos Teixeira busy collecting vegetables from Finca Dos Aguas, in the mountains near El Junquito, and transporting them to the San Sebastián parish in Maiquetía to supply traveling community kitchens and deliver food packages to other communities. These zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, and peppers, among other vegetables, bring flavor and color to hundreds of meals bound for Caraballeda or wherever they are needed in the so-called ground zero left by the earthquakes.
An arepa feast for the heart
A glance reveals workers from public institutions, volunteers, and relatives amid the collapsed structures of the Presidential Office for Special Plans and Projects (Opppe) at Los Cocos beach. At the Caribe building in Tanaguarena, a massive structure that went down on June 24, rescue workers and relatives of those who died continue searching for their bodies because they refuse to leave them in that tomb of rebar and concrete. In nearly every building across Caraballeda’s ground zero, a mother, a son, a brother-in-law, or an aunt refuses to give up and keeps fighting to bring their loved ones out. Families in Playa Grande and Catia La Mar remain in the area to protect their properties. In other words, there are still many people in La Guaira, even though little is said about them.
With a sack of corn flour and several chickens donated by one man, proteins contributed by other helping hands, and vegetables from Finca Dos Aguas, volunteers prepared the fillings for more than 500 arepas that brought some joy to the afternoon in Playa Grande on September 2. The arepa feast, organized by Equipo Vanessa—led by activists Vanessa Rodríguez, Lisseth Manamá and Jesús Narea—provided a hot dinner in a place where evening meals are becoming increasingly scarce.
The arepas took shape and were cooked on griddles surrounded by structures damaged by the earthquakes, beneath a canopy and beside tents sheltering other volunteers. Rodríguez wanted not only to provide something hot to eat, but to prepare it right there, in the very place where people “guapea”—where they struggle on and keep going—every day.
La Guaira is a reality with many faces. Yet in every one of them, the commitment of volunteers—both public and private—keeps everyday life standing.
