Carlos Hernández Blanco is an economist and a contributor for Caracas Chronicles. We had gone six days without running water. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, sweltering hot, and my skin was sticky. I desperately needed a bath; we all did. We walked from our third-floor apartment to the parking lot in front of our building — a sprawling, utilitarian, turquoise, three-story concrete block built 40 years ago — to refill our buckets from the only place with access to water, the faucet on the sidewalk they use to wash the cars. My whole family (dad, mom, brother and I) went together. We ran into another family filling buckets, too, so we had to wait in line to fill ours. There’s a line for everything these days. We are almost used to this by now. We have learned to keep buckets of yellowish tap water around the house at all times: that’s just common sense. By day six of the shortage, though, no one in the building had water, and we were getting desperate: the whole apartment was starting to smell like a public restroom. We needed to flush that toilet!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. My dad works in an office, the head of his department. My brother and I are both college graduates. We are technically middle-class. We thought we’d have our own apartments by now: office jobs, suits. Instead, we spend all our time scrambling for the very basics. Just as I was finishing a second trip lugging a heavy bucket up three flights of stairs, water service returned. Ugh. Just another day in Venezuela. Where I live, water is the most unreliable service, but the Internet and the electricity are not far behind. Water, power, Internet: our impossible triangle. You’ll rarely get all three at once. Hospitals scrap surgeries and residents forgo showers amid water cuts in Venezuela, the latest addition to a long list of woes in the fifth year of an economic crisis.
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