facebook Fr Michael visits Venezuela: On the road - Missionaries of the Sacred Heart
04 Apr 2019

In January 2019, MSC Missions Office Director Fr Michael O’Connell spent three weeks in Venezuela, visiting MSC parishes in the cities of Maracaibo and Caracas. Here, he shares his experiences and his thoughts on a country in crisis.

“When I arrived in Caracas Airport, I travelled into the city by car – and this is a very fitting introduction to Venezuelan life. The airport is located on the coast, with the city of Caracas situated about 1,000 metres above it. The drive from the airport to the city takes around 45 minutes, and it’s a continuous uphill drive, going through two tunnels. One of the tunnels is short, and the other is long, longer than the Dublin Port Tunnel.

In that short 45-minute drive, we must have passed at least 15 cars and trucks that were broken down or overheated – and there were not all stopped at the side of the road, either! Three of them were in the long tunnel, and we just had to slow down and keep our fingers crossed that the traffic would keep moving.

Why are there so many breakdowns? Well, people are stretching out the time between cars services for as long as they can, because of the cost. There’s a severe shortage of parts to repair cars, and people can’t afford the cost of parts and repairs. If you can’t bend a wire to make it fit, you’re in trouble!

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“At a meeting of 40 teachers, there was only one car in the car park.”

The mother of one of our students had to pay 400,000 bolívars to have her car serviced. She earns a relatively good wage of 240,000 bolívars per year, or 20,000 bolívars per month. One of our MSCs, Fr John Jennings, had work done to his car at a cost of 240,000 bolívars for the parts. That covered, oil, ball bearings, and getting the wheels fixed. Labour was an additional 40,000 bolívars. More work needs to be done, but if you converted the total of 280,000 bolívars to USD on the day the work was done, you would get $112 – $96 for parts and just $16 for labour.

Petrol is cheap here. Actually, the price of petrol is almost non-existent. Before devaluation came in last year, USD $1 would have filled 31,300 Ford Fiestas. Today, people get the petrol for free, and the only cost is tipping the petrol attendant. Engine oil, on the other hand, can be expensive, at a cost of almost USD $5 per litre.

There are fewer cars, taxis, and buses on the road now – it’s just too expensive to run a car. I attended a meeting of around 40 teachers in Maracaibo, and there was only one car in the car park. It was a 1957 Volkswagen, which was very impractical and far too low for the roads, but must have belonged to a real enthusiast! Can you imagine a teachers’ meeting in Ireland with one car in the car park? We would think that there was nobody there.

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Trucks are used as buses, or big taxis, so people can get around. After the teachers’ meeting, we were driving home in Fr Vincent’s car, and a big truck passed. We realised that the people in the truck were waving at Fr Vincent’s car – and then we saw it was the teachers, all going home from the meeting together. They were travelling together in the truck, as they didn’t have their own cars.

Even the head teacher doesn’t have a car – she walks to school every day. Another one of the teachers has to pay 400 bolívars a day on transport, just to get to and from work. In a country where every cent counts, the cost of – and lack of – available transport is just another challenge for local people to struggle with on a daily basis.”

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Read Fr Michael’s thoughts on the Venezuelan economy crisis

Find out more about the importance of food availability to Venezuelan families

Read more about Fr Michael’s visit to Caracas

Find out more about our missionary outreach in Venezuela