Aury Bailon

October 27, 2021

 

Decisions

              Good or bad decisions will always have consequences that can affect our lives, generations, and even worse our country. I was born and grew up in a country with many opportunities, a free country at that moment. In those years, Venezuela was a stable country economically and politically. However, from the year 2000, everything changed. People decided to vote for a man whose background was scary because his ideology was communist. Hugo Chavez won the elections and took the power in 2000. People always knew his bad intentions because in 1992 he made an attempted coup.  Despite that, after eight years, he ran as a presidential candidate and won the election. When his government started, there were changes in the laws of the constitution including to give him the opportunity of taking the power unlimited. After ten years, Venezuela started to show the symptoms of a dictator. This is an example of how people’s bad decisions have the power to change and affect a nation. 

At the beginning of Hugo Chavez’s government, everything was economically prosperous, but in 2010 people’s quality of life began to be affected. Venezuela began an economic recession. Salaries were not large enough to supply the normal need. For that moment, the government expropriated the most important food-producing companies and imposed measures to bankrupt them. For that reason, basic products began to be scarce. The government took control of the sale of food, and due to that, people had to change their lifestyle and the wages were concentrated on buying food. In addition, some irony is living in a country which in the past was the richest in South America for having oil and now having a car more than a comfort became a nightmare. For instance, I remember I used to waste a whole day waiting to fill the gas tank. Spending hours and days to access the oil supply is now something normal in Venezuela

    Second, many people started to leave the country. Venezuela has had never in all its history has had an exodus of people. Even in its better years, it was a country that received many foreigners from different parts of the world and they invested in the country. Now the history has changed for many families. In fact, some friends and colleagues started to leave for other countries like Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile among others. In the beginning, I tried to be a successful businesswoman for several years, but it was impossible. I believed that things in my country might change soon, but each day got worse. For that reason, I had to make a plan to leave my country like many people try to support my family. I think the dream of each student is to graduate and start their business or to get a good job and finally to reach stability. On the contrary, that dream did not happen for many young people in Venezuela. Some had to withdraw from their university to leave the country and have had to work to send money to their families. Nowadays, whole families are even putting their lives in danger to escape from Venezuela and give a better future to their children.

Finally, this story has allowed me to become a pathfinder for my relatives and also for my future generations. I am the only one in my family who decided to leave the country and change my future and my generation too. I am grateful for being Venezuelan because I had the opportunity to study at the university. By the time when I started to study at University, my parents were able to support me economically before the dictatorship began in Venezuela. I had the opportunity to study in my country and work for fourteen years. On the other hand, leaving Venezuela has been a blessing for me because I have the opportunity to learn another language. When I moved to the United States, I just knew a bit of English, and I had to work in different fields with low pay. Due to that, I enrolled in school to learn English, and nowadays I am learning more. Maybe living in Venezuela, I would have not made it.

Currently, Venezuela continues to have a dictatorship government and is one of the poorest countries in South America. It is a country in which human rights are not respected, and sincerely I do not know when it will end. However, people keep running away, families keep dividing and children are dying from hunger. We are living in a world in which some people are making decisions to do something and some decisions to do nothing. I dare to say that if we want to change our future, we should be more aware that our decisions have the power to make a great difference in our life and also in our society.