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I came back from vacation with various souveniers, including:
-Relaxed mind
-Crystals from a coal bed
-Insect photos
-Insect bites
-A massive infection on my knee

I have gotten over the bad stuff and am ready to write again. Anyone who wants to see a photo of my knee from this morning can click here. On my screen that's a bit less than life-sized. It no longer hurts and the infection is going the way of the harlequin frog (that is, it will appear to be extinct even as it hides in nooks and crannies) thanks to my friend Dr. Pfizer. The insect pictures will be up soon.

I guess the most remarkable lesson from a week in the oilfields and steamy jungles is the same lesson I keep learning here and it's one that may get a bit dull for all three regular readers of this blerg: quit fearing.

In our first day on the road, my gringo (as in speaks very little Spanish tall curly-haired big-nosed frisbee geek) friend and I:
-Drove in Venezuela
-Talked to drunken Chavista oilworkers
-Used several ATMs at night
-Entered an oilfield with two drilling rigs in use
-Slept there without asking anyone


Drilling rig in San Joaquin oilfield, early morning Sept. 14

On their own, any one of these make many of my Venezuelan friends freak out with nervousness. And that's before I tell them about
-Meeting the poor homesteaders in the oilfields, and accepting their offered cup of ill-boiled coffee
-Hiking with one (Rafael) over a barbed-wire fence, where he argued with the shotgun-toting oil company guard
-Looking for giant snakes in a pond
-Climbing a ladder to the top of an oil well's "Christmas tree" to pose for a photo
-Examining the oil residue atop a wastewater pond

This is all the first 24 hours, and these are all things that are against the rules. Some are against the law, but most just violate the kind of keep-your-head-down good sense that permeates life in Caracas. Of course, nothing happened. This day of adventuring opened neither the door to perdition nor to salvation. But it did open doors of experience, and for that I'm glad to be free. For a country with such a power-mad bureaucracy in Caracas, it's amazing how little the police state intrudes on everyday life. It also helps, even today, to be a pale-skinned gringo in a nice rental car. The "down with the man" mentality that perfuses the States is almost completely absent here except in rhetoric. There is a nearly complete willingness to accept white privilege and wealth privilege.

The End of All Cans

There is recycling in Venezuela, though you wouldn't know it to look at a typical city street corner piled high with trash bags seeping mango juice and stinking of rotten chicken bones. A quick look at the bags shows all the usual recycling suspects: newspaper, office paper; glass bottles in clear, green, brown and blue; cans of aluminum and steel; and plastics of every sort. Not to mention the organic matter than in some cities is now sent to a municipal compost heap.

The recycling happens at the dump. Every dump has its residents, and the biggest -- which I haven't visited yet -- is La Bonanza (yes, the name means what it sounds like), the destination of Caracas's garbage. There, according to a TV report I saw recently, there are more than 1,000 people living in ranchos, homes made of waste material, and going through the trash for valuables.

This is mostly an old story all over the world. It's an important task and it's a job that gives people a living. The problem is that nowadays the existence of that job is evidence of a failed system. They are a scab over a persistent sore as materials leak out of the physical economy -- it's great to have a scab, but it would be better to cure the sore in the first place.

As is now, their job involves tearing open household trash bags and sorting through food scraps cooked in the tropical sun, the dirty toilet paper from the majority of buildings where the stuff can't be flushed and the crumbled styrofoam trays that accompany every block of cheese or pair of apples in most supermarkets, in order to find unwashed steel tuna cans, ant-laden aluminum soft-drink cans, and other valuables. I visited one small dump recently and found 15-year-olds standing around a bonfire of electric cables, burning off the plastic insulation and getting their daily doses of dioxin.

The government has been working on dumps -- on getting more garbage sent there. The first priority has been to cut down on the use of roadside ditches and canyons as informal landfills.