The sweet hope!

Will days like those we had at the beginning return? When my family and I arrived at this house, everything was gray, little by little it was fixed and expanded. Basic services were placed eventually, there was electricity, water and the garbage truck passed. Then came the telecommunications service and cable television.

I'm talking about 45 years ago, when everything was evolving towards modern life. Little by little the amenities were installed until in less than 15 years we had all of the comforts, including internet with Wi-Fi and computers provided by public telephony.

…But now the opposite happens. Since a relatively short period, of approximately 20 years, everything has been declining. Water reaches the aqueducts for less than 24 hours, after five days without it. The light goes out during the morning, then in the afternoon, then at night, it continues at dawn and so it goes. The garbage truck passes when it suits them, with the garbage accumulating on garbage disposal shelves, on avenue sidewalks, in front of houses, and in any corner where garbage can be thrown away.

The public telephone service is disappearing abruptly from Venezuelan homes. Wi-Fi comes and goes when the server is okay with it. Sometimes there is no signal in the morning or afternoon and sometimes it goes away all day. Some people have it leave forever without pain or glory, no warnings and no claims.

With cable TV you could choose the most convenient, or you could simply, choose none at all. In my house we had DirecTV. But some things happened that did not please the company and the government and so they decided to leave one day, leaving everyone who had DirecTV without signal. Of course, only the regional signal was visible, which is the same as saying that we had no signal; either because the signal doesn’t reach every home, or sometimes doesn’t have sufficient clarity or because the programming simply doesn’t have any quality at all.

Now that another cable television company has arrived the prices are for minorities, the vast majority who live on a basic salary, from small merchants, from people with few resources, those many, as well as myself, will be left from the 15th of this month without TV, simply because they don’t have enough financial power to pay what they ask for.

But what can be done about it? It's not even worth giving an opinion, nobody pays attention. The few who speak are silenced. Those who can say something must do so from outside the country because from within it’s unpatriotic.

This is what I saw while growing throughout my life, I saw how a country developed, in that same way I now have to see that modernism collapse in less time, to the point that it feels like everything is disappearing.

How much do we have left? Weeks? Months? Years? I don’t know. I just know that none of this is pleasant. That I don’t agree on any of this. But I have to live with it until I have the opportunity to not live it anymore, to leave- Will days like those we had at the beginning return?