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A little perspective on life from a Venezuelan point of view - How hard can it be to live here?

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@therealflaws
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What is psychology? Differences between scientific psychology and common-sense psychology

Before I start, I thank @autocrat for the idea. Although I have talked about this topic before, I must say that in a country with hyper-inflation life changes drastically in very small lapses of time.

Social, cultural, educational and psychological decrease.

I have no idea, maybe there are many more things I could mention to describe the shitty situation that most of my Venezuelan brothers live, but, I will not make a cliché post where I emphasize how bad the situation is here, rather, I will gather a little of my experience in my personal life here and also give some interesting facts (and their respective sources) about this "beautiful" country.

Let's start

Leaving a country is something really hard, I have many relatives who have decided to leave this country to get a better future, but I think that what is really painful in all this is simply that no family member has wanted to leave the country, but they must do it because of the obligation to pursue a better future and not just stay in these lands where they would most likely die of hunger due to the situation that continues to worsen day by day.

Thousands of Venezuelans leave this country every year, to date already 4 million Venezuelans have left the country, leaving incomplete/unstructured families and this is something that is seen in the day to day life of all the people here.

A Venezuelan mother and child cross the Simon Bolivar Bridge to Cúcuta, Colombia, January 2019. © UNHCR/Siegfried Modola

This pic captures a good image of what the borders between our country and neighboring Colombia look like, just look at the gigantic amount of people grouped together.

Leaving your family must be incredibly hard, I read a lot about the emigration of Venezuelans and it is quite discouraging to read about it, for example, look at the following text:

After crossing the gate of the house, Aura Fernandez, 38, a single mother of ten children, held back tears. Her bus arrived. Fernandez kissed her children, boarded and disappeared.

"I love you," she said before leaving. "Study hard."

You can read this full article on this page: Venezuelan migrants leave behind almost a million children, it is an article in Spanish, so I advise you to translate it into English using https://www.deepl.com/.

I am not a father nor do I plan to be one in a long time, but, abandoning my children to have to work in a foreign country to support them and try to give them a better life is something that would simply break my heart, it is something that I do not wish to anyone and that, unfortunately, many Venezuelans have to do.

Thanks Wikipedia for the chart

Why?

It is incredible the amount of disaster that a bad economy can cause in a country, I mean, the amount of side effects resulting from an abysmal inflation are considerable and also have a terrible repercussion in the country, just look at our educational system: Do you have any idea of the amount of university students that cannot pay for their studies? The quality of the public universities in this country? I will use my university as an example: every quarter I pay $110, which, although it sounds incredible, very many Venezuelans must make unimaginable sacrifices to be able to pay this, I mean, the salary of a Venezuelan in 2019 was $2 per month, my uncle receives 2,800,000 BSS of pension every month, although it is a figure that at first glance looks really big, they are equivalent to $1.1 American dollars.

This chart shows the insanity of Venezuela's hyperinflation from: businessinsider

In my high school days I had to see children fainting while we sang the national anthem, children with serious malnutrition problems and even a girl who studied in the same high school as me committed suicide, the serious psychological damage resulting from such a precarious situation can be seen in any aspect. Out of respect for the girl who committed suicide (I understand that the relatives did not want the news to be public), I will not publish a link, but a couple of months ago also happened an even more shocking fact and that is that a small child of 10 years old was found dead, there are several versions, but the most "accepted" was that it was a suicide.

I am not saying that a 10-year-old can already see the world realistically and have psychological problems due to the situation in the country, but this is a sign of the very bad education that even the children of this country themselves are receiving, how would a child think of something so disastrous? Is it the parents' fault? I would say he learned it on the internet, but if so, how many cases of suicide by 10-year-olds can you see in the rest of the world? I highly doubt it's technology's problem as well.

Although this image is for public domain, anyway many thanks to Nicolas Perrault III for his amazing work.

How am I doing in spite of everything?

Basically, this post talks about a country that looks like hell itself, although I know there are people in more desperate situations (like countries at war), I find starving to death just as fucking disturbing. So, how the fuck can I live in such a shitty country?

Well, most Venezuelans have found ways to overexploit themselves to be able to stay afloat in the middle of all this crisis, in the case of my mother (person I don't live with), she has 3 different jobs to be able to have a living for herself, she lives alone and despite only making expenses for herself, she has usually asked me for money because what she earns in 3 DIFFERENT JOBS doesn't give her enough. I was raised by my uncles, so I have always lived with them and in my house, we are 8 people currently, my uncles pension is useless as a carton of eggs is 3$, lol, basically my uncles would have to use 3 pensions (1.5 months if split between the two of them) to be able to buy a carton of eggs, a fucking shame. Basically we managed to sustain ourselves largely thanks to all the unimaginable effort I've put into researching internet businesses, I used to be a guy with nutrition issues and it showed in my appearance, but, cryptocurrencies in general gave me an opportunity to contribute financially to my family and to be able to get ahead personally (Something I talk more about in this post).

Before coming back to Hive I was working in a platform called Appen, I was making about 10$ a week and all the money I was making was going to my family, I think I was about 11 months working in Appen, trying something completely different to what I did for years in Steem-Hive and I noticed a little late that I was being exploited by labor. 10$ a week? Really? I don't think anyone should have to go through this kind of thing regardless of their job, but it took me a while to notice how this platform takes advantage of the "cheap labor" of so many Venezuelans and I honestly couldn't take it anymore.

Thumbnail from hive.io assets ^^

What is the relationship between cryptocurrencies and Venezuelans?

In a country dominated by hyper-inflation and, therefore, with a national currency in constant decline, international currencies are the best alternative to have a refuge where our money does not devalue (or at least not as fast as the Venezuelan currency does), this is why cryptocurrencies became the best option for Venezuelans to safeguard their money, the flexibility and the market that exists almost since the birth of Bitcoin make it very easy to buy them (or at least the most known) and thus safeguard the money or simply invest in something where you have the hope of earning money.

An example of a cryptocurrency that has wanted to establish itself in the Venezuelan market has been Dash, I remember that a couple of years ago Dash made many partnerships with Venezuelan businesses to start using their cryptocurrency and adapting it to the market, I honestly do not remember or do not know exactly if the Dash team is still working to implement their cryptocurrency in my country, but, I know there was a time where there was a great focus to realize this mission, here you can read a little about it: Dash sees 562% increase in active wallet users in Venezuela.

I'm pretty sure I've written before about trying to push a Hive campaign on the Venezuelan market, despite being such a poor country economically compared to others, I think its large amount of people would simply make Hive's user base grow en masse and the more people -> the more potential users will enter here, it's common sense (and most people know about basic marketing stuff).

Thanks hive.io again

I believe in the potential of Hive as a social media and also in the incredible community here, I would say that I have been here in the worst moments of our whole existence as a community and if we could overcome all the problems we had in front of us, without any doubt we can increase a lot more the number of people that make life in our incredible community. I will quote my own comment I made in a post that talks in a rather philosophical way about Hive made by @autocrat as well:

Hive just need more people, more minds, more eyes looking for content answering their questions and more hands writing the answer to those questions.

Thank you so much for reading this.

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