I want to work with the Venezuelans in New York City. Here’s why.
Imagine this: is winter time and you’re kind of alone, in a new city, with none or few friends, away from your family, living through a pandemic, maybe you don’t have documents in that country and it’s very likely that your national ID is not valid anymore. You may be unemployed or with some luck, you may have a job that, in most cases, have nothing to do with what you studied for in college. And, on top of that, your country is a dictatorship, your family spends hours without electrical power every day and some of the little money you’re making has to be for them, because otherwise, they may not be able to eat.
Sounds exhausting? Yes, a lot. Exaggerated? Not a little bit.
That’s the reality of many of the almost five and a half million of Venezuela that had to flee the country. I am one of them. I lived through everything I described there. Well, almost everything. There wasn’t a pandemic the year I left Venezuela, but all the other stuff it’s pretty accurate.
Being a Venezuelan immigrant myself I know it’s pretty hard to keep well informed when you’re living through those circumstances. That getting to know what happens in your new city is hard. And I’m not talking just about politics or that kind of hard information — you need leisure time too! And there’s plenty of free or almost free options that you never know about.
…and, of course, you need to learn how to navigate a new system, how to get your first doctor’s appointment if something hurts, how to get a driver’s license and how to a lot of stuff.
I want to make access to that information easy. My name is Mariel Lozada and I’m currently enrolled in the Social Journalism program at the City University of New York. My community of choice to work with is the Venezuela diaspora. You can say that my decision has some of public service to my country, and you may be right, but I’d rather say that comes from personal experience. I know how hard it’s to live all that.
I dream of doing at a platform where the Venezuelan community can find step by step guides on how to do all the things mentioned above but also can find some useful data on things like free yoga, Latino meetings and Venezuelans restaurants. That some 20 something years old who decided to leave his life behind and try her luck in a big way can go and learn about the new ICE policies but also had the contact of a psychologist he can talk about what she’s feeling. That a parent that works many hours a week can check where he can find Harina Pan close to his home.
It’s a hard, ambitious dream. I know that. But it will help so many people (around 15.000 Venezuelans live in New York, according to no official records). What’s journalism if no something to serve the people? Vamos!
