In March of 2021, following a year of confinement due to the pandemic, dentist and university professor Francys Viaña traveled to Panama in the company of her teenage twins and her sister. Once there, she began to feel under the weather. She tested positive for COVID-19. From that moment on, what she had planned as a short vacation turned into a vertiginous and harrowing experience.

A kid who feels singled out because he is different. A kid who prefers to hang out with adults and who loves to read books and listen to the radio. A kid who is hypersensitive to many things around him. A kid who is labeled as a smarty-pants and whose behavior is considered as imprudent. Following a late diagnosis, surgeon Björn Martíinez delves into his memories to piece together the puzzle that is his own world.

Adriana García is an obstetrician-gynecologist. When her cousin, whom she loved like a sister, told her she was expecting, Adriana was overjoyed. The pregnancy seemed to be progressing well, but when she entered her fifth month, the doctors found out that the baby was carrying several congenital anomalies. Adriana, aware of what that diagnosis meant, wished she did not know the things she knew, for they began to feel like a burden on her shoulders.

When she learned that she was pregnant with her second child, María Gabriela Chalbaud knew that she had to do something to make more money because what she earned as a university professor was no longer enough. So, she and her friend Yanet Calderón decided to act upon an idea she had for a very singular undertaking: they would become the substitute daughters of many Venezuelans who had left their parents and grandparents behind when they migrated.

Mytha Cordido wanted to become a lawyer, but her mother had her enrolled in a career in Education at the University of Carabobo. At first, she felt frustrated, but she would eventually discover in her classroom practices a vocation for teaching, one that she has clung to, as she has to her faith, every time the world around her seems to fall apart.

For forty-seven years, Luis Antonio Molina ran a blacksmith workshop in Valle del Mocotíes, 50 miles from the city of Mérida. Welding fences, lanterns and doors, he found the means to provide for his family. It was also a way of life. Now, at 63, having been diagnosed with cancer, he feels that life is hanging by a thread.

I thought I continued to tremble for what I still wanted to know: themitochondrial secret in my nerves, my shoulders, my arms, my hands.

After Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état against Salvador Allende, many families migrated from Chile. It was the case of the Ponsots, the Balaguers and the Escobars, who lived in Finland for some time and then settled in Venezuela. Decades later, some of them went back to the point of departure. 

Minguito has the responsibility of keeping afloat Kiosko El Caney, a small business that his father started in Playa Parguito, Margarita, in the early ‘80s. The multifaceted economic crisis has compromised its operation, but nothing compares to the impact of the pandemic confinement. Images: Álbum Familiar   On Monday, March 16, 2020, during a mandatory […]

On June 28, 2017, Valjova Saavedra decided to jump from a viaduct in Mérida. She was 18 years old. At that time, specialists and researchers had already warned about a surge in the suicide rate in Venezuela, particularly in that Andean region.