MERIDA, Venezuela – This hasn’t been the easiest trip for Diane Lewis Chaney. Then again, Chaney doesn’t do easy.
Neither do I. Which is probably why I took to her so quickly.
The retired California anthropologist injured her wrist after falling from a horse -- one of a few that was to transport a group of us up to a trout farm cooperative in the mountains of Mucuchies -- an Andean town where Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s plans to help struggling farmers finally enjoy some of that country’s riches are taking root.
Before that, Chaney told off the manager of an Internet cafe -- in Spanish -- who overlooked us as she was trying to get his attention and instead motioned to another customer to sit down at the only available computer.
But as Chaney told me, she likes confrontation. And challenges. Which is why she still tried to climb on that horse in spite of the fragilities that come with age.
The same goes for Ernestine Sells Roye, whose travels with her husband, a former official with the U.S. Information Service, stoked a curiosity in her about struggling people around the world.
Like me, Chaney and Roye and six others joined this tour organized by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based organization that, among things, tries to enlighten U.S. citizens about the lives of people in other countries through building people-to-people ties.
We came to Venezuela to learn Spanish in a city where English speakers are as rare as apple trees in the tropics, and to learn about Venezuelan politics and culture without the filters of mainstream media, which too often confuses the United States’ best interests with the best interests of every other country.
But I wound up learning from Chaney and Roye as well.
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What these two elderly black women showed me -- Chaney’s hair is as white as the Andean snow -- is that being old doesn’t mean that you stop indulging your sense of adventure about the world, nor accept that you don’t have enough time or energy left in your life to make a difference.
“I’ve been given so much, now is the time to give back,” said Chaney, who is also a member of Hands Off Venezuela, an organization that opposes U.S. political intervention in that country. “I try to give at least 10 percent of my money to good causes and to help others.”
“I think that I was looking for something to do to continue my interest in finding out how others live, and what governments like Venezuela are doing to improve the lives of people, and seeing it all for myself,” said Roye, a New Yorker who has also traveled to Cuba and has lived in several African countries. “I really strongly believe that people can find ways to live together.”
But Roye and Chaney reinforced my beliefs about something else: That life is about being guided by your passions, not being corralled by your fears or, worse, the limits that society expects for women to live within.
It’s a credo that many black women -- both young and not-so-young -- should try and get behind.
Too many times, we women get caught up in believing that we have to acquiesce to the roles that society has crafted for us. To want to travel somewhere with a group of strangers to find out about a foreign land -- especially one that has been portrayed as being unstable -- and to live with Venezuelan strangers once you arrive probably seems whacked to those who would never even step a toe outside their comfort zone. And it probably seems even stranger for women like Chaney and Roye -- women who tend to be stereotyped more as matriarchs than as adventurers -- as women whose curiosities are expected to extend only to marveling at the cuteness of grandchildren instead of at the beauty of languages and the complexities of cultures.
But they came to Venezuela in spite of bad knees and the other traps that age and expectations often lay to trip people up. They came to a place full of congested streets and crowded, craggy sidewalks that test both their patience and their agility.
Chaney and Roye came to see what this country was like. But they wound up showing me what my own old age could be like if I, like them, allow my curiosities and my passions, and not anyone else’s limitations, to rule me.
And that doing easy doesn’t have to be a prerequisite for getting the most out of it.
