Ranchitos

Life has been very busy lately.  Lilly celebrated her 8th birthday this week.  My music classes began this morning.  I've volunteered to organize Sunday School at the church.  And then there are the power outages and the groceries missing from the stores and the extra work load Dave took on this month.  Life is busy in our house!

When life is busy, I compose posts and then lose them to the other things going on around me.  So here, rather than another rambling post doing nothing more than journaling my day, here are some photos I took on the way to the beach last weekend.

The poor in Caracas live in ranchitos.  We are absolutely not allowed in this neighborhood, by a rather nanny-ish decree of the US government.  You see, the security forces within the U.S. Embassy have mapped out the more and less dangerous parts of this city.  They do this in any foreign post - you'll hear about it on the news sometimes in war zones.  The green zone is the safe part of the city.  Caracas has no green zone.  The yellow zone is somewhere one ought to be wary.  We live in the yellow zone.  It is very small, but does encompass the school and our grocery stores and favorite restaurants.  Much like our community, it is like living in a small town.  We are supposed to be out of the orange zone by 8:00 at night, after which crime rates jump dramatically.  And we are actively encouraged (in fact, I believe we are forbidden) from entering the red zone.  At a guess, I'd say that 80% of this city falls in the red zone.

So, back to the ranchitos.  Having not explored them myself, I can't give honest details.  But they ramble up the hills all around town, looking as if the lower houses may be structurally sound and then people began adding walls and ceiling and light fixtures all the way up the hill in a very ramshackle way.  They generally have electricity and running water, all illegally.  And it appears that many of them do not face a road, but rather a sidewalk or a set of stairs.

I'm so curious what they look like inside, these ranchitos.  And as I'm looking, I realize that although these photos capture the drama of layer upon layer of houses climbing up the hill or over an area, they don't show how precariously some of these houses will perch one upon another.  The ranchitos are where what quick destruction this country could see in the face of an earthquake.