Barrio Carapita

There are so many good things to say about the people of Venezuela that I hesitate to mention something negative. Although the people of Venezuela are very attentive to personal hygiene, and they are very clean in personal appearance, litter fills the streets of the big cities. You can walk out of a clean spotless subway system in Caracas to face a bunch of litter on the street. To their credit they are trying to do something about it but it is a very difficult task to change the ways of a people. The litter problem is especially true in Barrios, former shantytowns built on the side of a mountain. As people improved their life they built better housing, concrete instead of tin and straw, expanded their houses and made many improvements. However, the houses rest on top of each other on the side of the mountain, leaving little room for anything green. There are just spots where people drop garbage down the mountain. On a Sunday when we were at the Barrio Carapita outside of Caracas, a mechanical machine was on the road down the mountain shoveling up garbage into a truck. Growing up in a Barrio without seeing green and nature may have left some to not notice the order of nature.

My office and sunroom currently are full of clutter. These days when I am working on cleaning and preparing the yard for the garden, the clutter inside is really getting to me. There is something about the natural beauty of land that calls out against clutter. My personal life cries out for the clutter-free life of nature, but finds itself in the clutter-full environment of my office. Now that I think of it, the rural villages we visited in Venezuela did not suffer from the litter problems of the cities. There seems to be a no clutter rule in Nature.

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