Welcome to Caracas

Our first day in Caracas: Ale and I arrive from the airport by taxi through 2 hours of traffic. We are given lunch and shown our room at PROUT, the hospitality house where we'll be staying for the next several days. Outside it is sunny and damp. Green vines and explosive red flowers ornament iron gates. Birds chirp, guard dogs lose their minds whenever anyone passes on the sidewalk. The traffic horns are incessant and motorcycles dart between the cars like schools of fish.

Inside, Ale and I sit with several dozen Evergreen students, professors, and Dada, the proprietor of this place, a Northamerican Buddist monk in orange robes. We are listening to a presentation by Roland Denis, a longtime member of the revolution here in Venezuela. We are terribly tired after 24 hours of travel, but he is both fascinating and well spoken. When someone asks how life has changed for the poor now that Chavez has come to power, Denis responds that it is far more important what the poor have created for themselves. He highlights several successes of the revolution so far: the availability of higher education, the near eradication of illiteracy, the beginnings of land reform, better housing in the barrios. He talks about what needs further change: the health system, which he hopes will move in the direction of natural and traditional medicines and the ongoing displacement and assassinations of campesinos on behalf of multinational land interests. In the struggle for greater justice, he says, the government has been both a help and a hindrance. Denis has been organizing in Venezuela's poorest communities for decades, and it is clear his enthusiasm for the work hasn't waned. At the end of his talk, one of the Evergreen students asks what inspires Roland to work for revolution. And this is what he says:

As a young man, Denis was in Nicaragua when the Sandanistas took the capital. After the the basic necessities had been dealt with and food and water had returned to Managua, neighborhood meetings began. One form these meetings took was poetry circles, and Denis went to one, with the goal of relaxing and meeting some of his neighbors. He read something he'd written. Others read what they'd brought. And then an elderly woman stood up. She didn't know how to read, so instead she picked up a mirror, and began to undress. Part by part she told the story of her body, the poem of her skin. Roland was in awe. He decided that if this was what revolution looked like, he was ready to make the commitment. Thirty-some years later, he's still at it. And even if we are bone tired, we know how lucky we are to be here, fighting sleep, learning about some of the ways a revolution can look.