Suppose that you are part of the 20% in Venezuela … the 20% that live in a what they themselves often call “the middle class.” You may own a “quinta” (a large home usually surrounded by a high wall with barbed wire or broken glass) in Prados del Este (a mid-to-upper class urban area in eastern Caracas). You could also own an apartment in San Antonio de los Altos (in western Caracas), a large family home in Merida (a beautiful Andean town), a small ranch in Los Llanos (the plains), a beach home in Higuerote or Los Caracas (both on the Caribbean), and a sail boat and several cars, including a Jeep Cherokee (or equivalent).

You may be a lawyer, a university professor, a professional accountant, a high-ranking bureaucrat, an engineer, a small factory owner, an importer, a judge, a former military general, a local municipal council member or a former PDVSA middle-manager.

You could presently be working or you could be a young (40-ish) retiree with a full (or almost full) lifetime pension. Your children will probably all go study university in the USA, Canada or Europe and you will probably visit them twice a year. Your children would also possibly spend spring-break and Christmas vacations with you and your extended family at a Margarita resort or at another top-notch paradise in Los Roques or Aruba.

You are probably also “culto” (cultivated/educated). You have read (for endless hours) the works of great international writers and poets from the past and the present. You “understand” the way the world works. Although you may not have studied in philosophy, you can probably pursue an interesting intellectually challenging discussion with friends while sipping the best whisky and smoking a Cuban cigar made by the leather-skinned hands of poor Cubans forced into cheap labor by a Communist and greedy dictator.

You can also name the title of some of the best known works of Chagal, Dali, Picasso, Miro, and others.

At home, you probably have an almost-full-time maid that cooks for you, washes clothes, cleans the bathrooms (4-5 of them) and sweeps floors. She also does small errands for you; dry-cleaning, pharmacy, gifts for friends, etc., but she takes the bus to do these errands … or walks. You may also have a respectable gardener who takes care of your plants and your lawn, but he also does some carpentry, some electrical work and some plumbing. He also does errands for you; hardware store mostly. You have known your maid and your gardener for years, perhaps 4-5 years or more. You might consider them almost part of your family. Even so, you can certainly feel that you are “helping them” by “taking care of them.”

Without your “help” they may not be able to get a better paying job, such as one that pays at least minimum wage. But you compensate by giving a Christmas bonus and paying for their medication when needed. They also eat free when in your service. You even provide a small room for them in case they cannot travel back and forth daily from their home to yours or if they stay late to serve invited guests. (Your guests could include family and friends, the local priest, a work colleague or a local government official).

On weekends, you may go to your beach home to rest from the long week of work. You leave on Friday around noon to avoid as much of the traffic as you can. You take your wife and children and perhaps your cousin and his/her family. You trust your maid enough to keep watch over your house alone for a day (until your brother can come to take care of it on Saturday afternoon).

At the beach, you discuss with friends and family the increases in the cost of food and services. You discuss how the value of the money you had has decreased by thousands of percentage points. Luckily, you (as most of your friends) changed your bolivares into US dollars years ago. Your bank manager suggested it to you. You are grateful and sometimes invite him to your beach house or to your ranch in Los Llanos (in the dry season) for an adventure weekend.

At the beach, you also tell stories … of how one of your nephews was stung by a Portuguese-man-of-war (a large jellyfish) and was rushed to the nearby clinic after suffering an allergic reaction that almost killed him. Luckily, the doctor on duty was a good friend of yours, and although you did not have the cash to pre-pay for services, he did you the favor, later collecting from your private (and very expensive) health care insurance.

On Sunday afternoon, while at your beach home, you spot your maid walking around kicking sand and holding the hand of a little girl. You notice her and decide to go greet her. As you approach, she also notices you. She seems a little nervous and the little girl frowns. You ask who the little girl is. Your maid says that it is one of her nieces. Where is the rest of the family you ask. She answers that they were all busy this weekend, so she came alone with her niece. You smile brushing your large hand over the girl’s long black kinky knotted hair and bid a good day.

Maria and the little girl continue their walk along the beach, kicking water and sand … and you return behind the metal grills of your seaside haven. You lie in you China-built USA-imported lawn chair thinking how beautiful the day is and how lucky you are as you watch your children play around with their axial-flow-pump propelled jet-skis. You think … perhaps you will return from the beach on Monday morning to avoid traffic.

Maria, your maid (she has a name) gathers her bags and walks to the bus stop in town to go back home with the little girl before it gets dark. It is 4:00 p.m. She must leave now to get home before 6 7:00 p.m. where she lives in Catia. She must prepare supper for her husband. The bus is hot and sweaty. The air is heavy and damp along the coast. The windows on the bus are all opened but it brings little comfort until the bus rises upwards towards Caracas at higher altitudes. She and her daughter must change buses two more times to get home. (Yes, her daughter. Maria does not want her employer to know that she has children for fear of being accused of stealing food from their house). As her child sleeps, drooped over her thighs, she wonders if she will have enough money to pay the bus fare for the last bus. She feels inside her bag and finds the balance of the money she took that morning. Yes, she has enough.

Arriving in Catia (one of Caracas’ largest slum areas), Maria and her daughter, exhausted from a day-off at the beach, muster up the energy to walk upwards on the main street and then climb three long flights of cement-staircase-alleys to the middle part of “el cerro” (the hill) where she lives. (She thinks of how it was when she was a child; cardboard and sheet-metal shacks, open sewage waters and mud alleys). Her husband waits for her, beer in hand. He is hungry and sad about not having been able to go to the beach with them. (His boss needed an urgent job finished at his home before the guests arrive from the USA. Maria’s husband is a gardener but works in Club Hipico -- another mid-to-upper class urbanization in eastern Caracas). The little girl runs to him and jumps on his lap.

They spend the next half hour discussing the events of the day. Maria prepares arepas for supper (Venezuelan staple cornmeal hotcakes) using the little water which is left in the few pots and pans used to collect water from the water-pipes as a provision for the several days-per-week that the water-pipes provide no water. Maria asks her husband if he has seen the other children. (She had left them with her aunt nearby because she could not afford to take them all to the beach). He answers that he has not seen them, but that he will go get them after he and the little one eat.

It is now 9:00 p.m. Maria’s husband has eaten and is having a few more Polar beers (small ones). Tonight he will only drink 6-7 because the prices went up again. Anyways, he whispers to himself, we have to get up early again, at 5:00 a.m., to catch the bus. We cannot afford to get to work late because our bosses will deduct our salary under threat of being fired.

The rest of the kids are home now and they all eat some more arepas and watch satellite-dish TV before going to bed. (It is a lot cheaper to pay for satellite TV than to go to the movies).

In the morning, Maria and her husband go to the “parada” (the local bus stop). At least they have this time together. She looks at him and wonders if they will ever get a whole weekend off … and if they do … will they be able to afford a small vacation. The thought however, gets put aside by other concerns. What if she gets pregnant again? What if one of her children gets sick or breaks a bone? What if she gets sick? What if her husband gets completely fed up one day (of working 6-7 days per week at minimum wage about US$150 monthly) and leaves the family? How about the children’s education? Maria’s thoughts fade into a depressive haze … the same haze that has clouded her mind since she began to work as a maid.

Four hours per day of traveling, 10 hours per day of work, sometimes 6 days per week … and so little money. Yesterday she read that the food-basket costs about Bs.450,000 monthly. She only makes about 200,000 and her husband slightly more. The rent is Bs.120,000 monthly. What to do? She looks out the window as the sun begins to peak through the morning clouds. She smiles and tells her husband, “Aren’t we lucky, we are in good health.” Her husband wakes from his snooze, smiles and doses off again.

Maria arrives at her employer’s home. Nobody is home. She left the house keys with her employer’s brother on Saturday. She waits on the sidewalk till 2:00 p.m. … it is very hot outside. The family arrives and excuse themselves and lets her in. She thinks quietly (very quietly) to herself … well, another half-day pay … another week of work.