Under the Mango Tree

Travels in Venezuela, and lessons in what we take for granted

Dear Memory of Soil Readers: Thanks for your support as I embark on this new project to deconstruct my identity as a woman within white U.S. culture, experiences living and traveling in Latin America, and the human stories of those I’ve met along the way.

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We lay in twin cots, attempting to rest, but fervent fever dreams eclipsed our sleep. Sweat dripped from every pore. The air was heavy and fragrant with the odor of hot human bodies and diesel fumes, the ever-present aromas of Venezuela.

I wasn’t sure where we were. They’d brought us here in a large SUV. Their air-conditioned vehicle was a matter of great pride. We’d driven hundreds of miles, crossing regions, our tour guides narrating the journey along the way in animated Spanish, unable to contain their mounting excitement.

We were going to attend a great regional gathering, we were told. It was a summit of faithful believers from throughout Venezuela, convening in one place to worship together. Church services would be held twice per day at a minimum and would last at least three hours. The room would fill with singing, dancing, and chanting, until our voices grew hoarse. After an hour or two, we wouldn’t feel our dancing feet any longer; they’d have merged as one with the earth beneath us.

As an offering to us “norteamericanos”, they’d rolled out the red carpet. They offered us unending bottled water. They cut open an entire watermelon, so we could have something fresh to eat, while they all sweated and ate their usual processed foods.

An interesting fact about Venezuela, even back in those days (the start of the Chavez era, in 2000): it’s a population both overweight and undernourished. Most people are too poor to afford fruits and vegetables. They cost an obscene amount in the local currency, and are exported to richer countries where people can afford them. Multinational food corporations have dumped an unlimited supply of cheap, ultra-processed foods on the populace. I was shocked to learn that locals couldn’t even eat the foods they’d grown themselves – they were sent away to wealthy nations.

At this point, we’d been in Venezuela for close to a week. We were four youth on an exchange from our church in the U.S. We’d been invited to visit a sister church in this foreign land. A sister church that spent half their waking hours humbly worshipping God in ways we affluent norteamericanos had never before witnessed. We had come under the auspices of helping build infrastructure for a native tribal group. As it turned out, that wasn’t really the case.

We spent one afternoon visiting this native tribe earlier in this week. This was a group who’d been relocated by the government to a cramped, dusty plot of land adjacent to the regional dump, a giant mountain of human waste through which people roamed and rummaged in large numbers.

While we thought we were coming to help build shelter, no one would allow us to lift a finger. The one task they permitted us was placing a ceremonial brick on the wall. Then they commanded us to play a game of volleyball with the other native youth. Kids and teens reveled in our presence as if we were celebrities. They flocked around, cheering at our every move, even as we served the ball right into the net and and bumped pathetically.

They’d sacrificed a goat for the occasion of our visit, offering us first dibs at sampling its raw intestines, a great honor. My insides churned as I took a small bit, pretending to eat it while tossing it subtly to the dirt beside me, burying it beneath the dust with my foot.

Though my stomach growled continuously, I couldn’t bring myself to partake much of the sustenance we’d been offered: gut-rot instant coffee, ham on white bread, tripe soup, boiled yucca root, and cachitos (white breakfast pastries stuffed with ham. A lot of ham for someone who doesn’t eat pork, but I digress). In retrospect, I’m thankful for having refused the goat intestines. Turns out they gave my cohort Amy parasites from which it took decades for her to fully heal. I suppose being an entitled, picky eater isn’t without its advantages.

En route to wherever we now were, we’d traveled high in the mountains, passing through Mérida where the locals informed us the climate was an eternal spring, and snow often fell among the surrounding peaks. Compared to the devastated, humid landscapes we’d seen, Mérida seemed indeed a paradise of sorts. But as soon as we’d traversed through, we were making our way to a far-flung, swampy locale just as relentlessly suffocating as Maracaibo, where we’d been for most of our journey, apart from an initial night in Caracas.

More on these two largest of Venezuelan cities in another post. Bottom line was that both places struck me as terribly shady. As much as I didn’t want to cast my judgment as a privileged white woman from the U.S., my friend David and I were nearly kidnapped/robbed/taken somewhere that wasn’t our hotel from the Caracas airport. We were saved only by our fluent Spanish and detailed questions.

Maracaibo was a creepy skeleton crew of hulking high-rises, many abandoned, looming over a stagnant, dead-smelling lake. Its glory days had apparently passed, as oil capitol of the western hemisphere, and what remained was an economic and environmental wasteland so dangerous to norteamericanos like ourselves that our hosts refused to let us walk half a block on our own. We were chauffeured everywhere in that air-conditioned SUV.

Back to the backcountry church gathering to which we’d been transported. Not only were we melting from the unbearable heat, we were hungry beyond belief. Ravenous in a way I’d never experienced before, I longed for protein, fruits, and vegetables. Outside our quarters was an enormous mango tree, and the fruit was perfectly ripe. My eyes probably bugged out of my head, cartoon-like, when I spotted it. We turned to our Venezuelan hosts, asking if we might partake of a mango or two.

They came to us with armloads of mangoes, inviting us to all of them. I recall staring, dumbfounded, in disbelief they would relinquish so many of these delicacies to us. Back home, a single mango cost a few dollars and could not compare to the exquisite, juicy flesh of these homegrown treasures.

As we gathered our mangoes, we were also made aware of a man down the way selling roasted chicken. We bought one for next to nothing, and sat beneath the mango tree, feasting like savages, gnawing on drumsticks and slurping up the mango juices that dripped from our fingers. After I’d frantically devoured five or six mangoes, I paused and noticed our hosts staring curiously at us.

“Why do you like mangoes so much?” they asked.

“We don’t have these at home,” I explained. They laughed about how appalled we were that they would ever let these fruits rot on the ground, especially given the lack of readily available produce.

Thinking about it more deeply, I considered the apple tree that grew at the apartment building where I had lived the year prior. I told them about how in the fall, the tree grew heavy with fruit. Most of it fell to the ground and rotted, never gathered or eaten. Hearing of the uneaten apples, their mouths fell open. Many of them had never tasted a real apple before. They told us what they would give to try just one.

We laughed with each other, incredulous of the waste we each experienced – and the amount we took for granted.

And our connection grew, as we discovered what we shared in common.

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