A week after having left Venezuela, some thoughts have resurfaced. Thoughts that briefly might have fluttered up in my conscience those many late evenings I spent sitting in the white living room Pampatar, with a glistening glass of aged Gran Kazike-rhum in my hand, watching a DVD on the computer before slowly and blissfully passing out on the couch. Thoughts on things that cripples Venezuela , and whether they can be traced to peoples minds, culture, politics or what. I really don´t know. But the question bears importance for many underdeveleped countries.
Take for instance the maintanence of supermarkets. The chinese owns Venezuelas small local supermarkets, and they are well kept, with the goods carefully stapled, prices pen-marked on every single item and goods regularly cleaned with a cloth. Things are different in the venezuelan-owned outlets. Take Rattan, who has three giant and supposedly high class supermarkets on Margarita Island. They are relatively expensive, and target a wealthy customer market. But around one third of the goods in the shops dont have any prices marked. This has several effects. For every single unmarked item, customers have to look for one of the few scattered computer code-readers in the shops, which requires a lot of walking and prolongs the shopping tour a lot. But some clients don´t do that. They stack up the goods they want to buy, plus alternative goods on their cart and when they get to the cashier they watch the prices register, and every item that is to costly (some imported items are very expensive) they tell the cashier to leave it on the side (normally after a brief discussion). Each cashier often have 3-4 people serving the customer. As you can understand, the numerous staff also leads to complex chains of contacts and discussion during the handling of every customer. And yes, queues do get very long and slow. If you are used to normal rational handling, it is painful to watch.
When Abukar came to Margarita, we went to Rattan and happened to be standing in the aisle of chocolates (surprise), where one of the staff folded some boxes. It was an aisle where none of the maybe hundred items on the shelves had any prices, and Abukar suggested we ask her why.
- Well, this is christmas season and we have been moving around things in the shops have not had time to mark up all the goods, she answered.
Her answer was an apparent lie (I came in early October and it things looked exactly the same then), but it did actually reveal an ambition that the shop items should be marked. But it just doesn´t happen. Employees do their work, bosses boss, everybody live their life and dont get hung up on things that some people claim must be done. Its all good, take it easy, the world wont crumble. Personally, I get annoyed to look at the multiplicatory bad effects of such negligence, especially since I realize that this way of thinking, or rather, not doing, perpetrates the whole society, deteriorating everyday life for everyone. It applies to all parts of infrastructure, from pavements, walls, electricity, water, plumbing etc. And I am not fussy about order. My philosophy: You DON´T have to do things properly from the start. But you have to do them properly ENOUGH from the start, not to get to do much more work later.
There is a sign in our bathroom here in Trinidad, that says in Spanish: "Throw toilet paper in the toilet, not the paper basket."
Why? Because Venezuelas plumbing is made with such an inferior quality and dimensions, that if you throw toilet paper in the toilet, it clogs and flood the floor. Hence, in Venezuela, you learn to throw toilet paper in a adjacent paper basket. (Yes - smelly.) Of course, when going abroad, many venezuelans continue with this habit from a dysfunctional plumbing system.
