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Petare

During my recent (heavily prolonged) stay in Venezuela I was due to my injury and tedious rehab bored out of my mind and wanted to do something meaningful. As I had years ago really enjoyed some charity work in Cali in Colombia, I started searching for information. I found a children’s hospital but the communication wasn’t all that great and out of nowhere, one of the founders of Furia messaged me and asked if I’d be interested in visiting Petare with one of his friends who run an organization called Unos Venezolanos.

Petare is one of the world’s largest barrios, which translates to favela in Portuguese and in English I guess “slum” is the closest we’ll get to the proper translation. It sounds so negative though. It’s basically a very poor neighbourhood and Petare is almost 10km long. Just think of that for a second. Me, personally, I grew up in a village of less than 1000 people and I had 7km to school where roughly 50,000 people lived.  In Petare, almost 400,000 people live on top of each other and needless to say, life is tough around there.

Curios as always, I asked all how this organisation came to life, and one of the co-founders (and probably the head of the organisation) Gianpiero told me the story. I don’t remember now if it was 1 or 2 years ago, but somewhere in that timeframe, he and some friends basically decided to get together and do something good for those with the fewest ressources. Each brought some ingredients and from what was brought together, they cooked up some meals and went into some poor areas and gave them away. This inspired more actions and people quickly learned about the project which was then named “Unos Venezolanos” meaning “Some Venezuelans”. 

I made this video from some basic video recordings. Nothing fancy but it shows what happened this day.

There’s a mexican guy called Alex Tienda who travels the world and makes Youtube videos. He visited Petare and his production shows in greater detail what it’s all about. Alex has millions of followers and was able to fundraise enough capital to build a basket ball court.

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