On June 29, 2017, a group of students from the Simón Bolívar University was detained in El Rosal by police officers who were repressing a protest march that had been called for in Caracas. The images of their arrest and subsequent transfer inside the closed cargo section of a truck were circulated on social media. The students would be released a few days later without charges. One year after the events, Patricia Rodríguez, one of the students in question, gives La vida de nos her account of her experience.

La vida de nos Itinerante aims to train storytellers through a process of intensive several-day workshops held in the regions themselves and equip them with  journalistic and narrative skills to discover and write meaningful stories that tell the country’s current state of affairs and how this crisis is endured in their respective regions.

At age six, Dioselyn was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in her right foot. The doctors prescribed her some chemotherapy drugs which her parents, Carlos Villegas and Ediana Marchán, could not find in any of the hospitals of the states of Bolívar or Anzoátegui. The solution they came up with was to take their daughter to Brazil in the hope that she could begin treatment there.

One day in June of 2015, María Beatriz Lara, a reporter with 20 years of experience in her field, attended a press conference at the office of the scientific police in the state of Aragua. She was assaulted and handcuffed for no reason by several police members there, who were later indicted and ordered to be arrested by a court. But four years later, the trial is still pending…

Three months ago, on April 23, 2019, Yubreilis left Güiria, a town on the west coast of the state of Sucre, for Trinidad and Tobago. Her idea was to find a job there so that she could be able to provide for her three daughters. The boat in which she and 37 others were sailing capsized. She is one of the eight survivors.

On Monday, February 18, 2019, three weeks before March 7, when a power cut left the entire country in the dark, Caimancito, a village located in the northeast of the state of Sucre, had already been experiencing an extended blackout that had only been interrupted by a few and occasional periods of electricity supply. That is where Mérida, aged 50, lives, and this is her story…

Upon returning from the United States, where he specialized in various scientific areas, Dr. Alberto Paniz Mondolfi founded the Zika Network in 2015. The idea was that the network would engage in the study of a virus that was then unknown in the continent, but it ended up becoming the Venezuelan Incubator of Science. They conduct research and train students…

The inhabitants of Guanta, a city in the state of Anzoátegui bordering Puerto La Cruz, Barcelona and Lechería, live in fear. A refinery has been operating there for 69 years now and they are well aware that an accident could put them at risk. And that is exactly what happened on the Saturday evening of June 8 of 2019: heavy rainfall was followed by three explosions…

Sofia, 8 years old, lives in Maracaibo. Due to the constant energy blackout in this city in the northwest of Venezuela, she had to receive Christmas presents in the darkness. One blackout ruined her school end of the year party in July. Fed up, she voluntarily decided to record a video to tell-and show to the world what it means living without electricity in a city that boils. 

Marina lived in a remote community, deep in the jungle of Delta Amacuro. A three-month trip to Tucupita, the capital city, made her grow into an adult at the early age of 14. When she came back to her community, she started seeing a man she didn’t know, got pregnant and, four months later, went on a trip to the neighboring island of Trinidad.