María Boscán, Surgeon, 30 years old.
The healthcare sector in Venezuela is extremely affected by the great crisis that surrounds the country. The morgues in most public hospitals of Venezuela are overcrowded with the corpses of people whose families do not have enough money to move and bury them, not even in a mass grave. If there is an excessive outbreak of the epidemic in the country, I do not know how we could handle it because our health system is not prepared to face a crisis of such magnitude. I work in a dermatological and cosmetic office, and since the quarantine began I had to completely stop working since very few cases of health emergencies are related to this branch of medicine.
I have a 9-year-old daughter and it has been very frustrating for me to be in charge of her education from home; I’ve been able to spend a lot of time on this, so I think now I have more patience to handle the moments when she is distracted. It has also been difficult for her because she wants to go to school, play with her friends, visit her grandmothers, you know, regular things for children.
In other words, I would also like to tell you that my dad was always a very active man, who unfortunately had to stop working also due to the quarantine; he owned an auto repair shop, and one day, some burglars broke into his shop and stole most of his tools. As a result of this, he developed a depression disorder that led him to stay in bed, and which ultimately ended up in his death less than a month ago. My paternal family is very large, my father has many cousins who were like his brothers, and none of them could say goodbye to him. Only six people were able to enter the graveyard to say the last goodbye; I think that if the quarantine situation had not existed, added to the gasoline shortage, that moment would have been very different, and perhaps we would have felt more accompanied.
Before quarantine, I felt very stressed because of the precarious situation the country faces, but now that everyone is in this same situation, I realize that everything happens for a reason, that life is a cycle. Although I am a doctor, I also sell cakes and bread that I bake myself, and even my daughter, who is a student, started making handmade bracelets to sell. I have taken refuge in God to arm myself with patience; many people in Venezuela are in a much worse situation than mine, and who cannot give food to their children, I know how difficult that can be, but I tell them that in any situation, we must be able to redesign ourselves.
Photo credit: Ivanna Mia Márquez.
