Venezuela The heat. The dense, humid, heat.

Its the first thing that hits you when you walk out of the airport. I brace myself, but as my body hits the wall of hot moisture it takes me by surprise and I laugh. Next comes the smell. As you inhale your first breath of hot, wet, tropical air, the scent of decay fills your nostrils. It is not the refreshing smell of rot one experiences while camping. This decay is putrefaction. It is an earthy decomposition with notes of fecal matter and body odor. As I exhale that first breath I smile and I whisper to myself Im home. Caracas, Venezuela has always and will always be my home away from home.

Every summer for the past 6 years my family and I would fly down to Caracas to visit our families and friends who live there.

When people ask me what its like there I say different. I laugh, now, because different doesnt even begin to scratch the surface. Different is living in Santa Monica and going to New York City for winter break. I should have said alien. Caracas is alien. I feel liable for the contorted looks on their faces when I go into further detail about the differences, like I didnt fully prepare them for the horrific scenes I had painted in their minds. In reality its the small things, the things we take for granted, that are the most shocking. The things that they believe are luxuries, we require as necessity. We come home day after day and have the luxury of jumping into the bath and taking a hot shower, and if we felt like it, we could even drink that water coming out of the shower head. There was a time where I wondered how the people of Venezuela survived in such harsh living conditions and the answer comes from to root of Darwinism, It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Adaptation is the root of their survival. If their electricity and water gets shut off for one reason or another, then they eat dinner by candle light and collect rain water. This mentality has become part of my system of logical thinking. Last summer there was a small storm and a large branch broke from the top of a 50 foot eucalyptus tree and it came to rest on another smaller tree directly over our water tank. My father and I where certain that the next storm would cause it to fall and destroy the water tank so we spent an hour coming up with ideas of how to solve the problem. After passing the ideas of a potato gun or a swarm of termites we chose the more logical and attached a saw to a mango picker and spent three hours with our arms above our heads sawing the branch.