Hello everyone in the Hive Blog community, I am new to this and it is a pleasure for me to introduce myself to you.
I was born in Venezuela, in Mariguitar, located in the Bolivar municipality of the state of Sucre, on August 31, 1951, located between a mountain and part of the eastern coast, separated by a national road, so called because it serves as access to other municipalities. It has a river that crosses it, channeled by a reinforced concrete bridge, avoiding that when the river rises it does not overflow towards the national road, allowing passersby, cars and trucks to transit without any problem. It has three streets: Calle Comercio, Marina and Sucre, you can enter and exit through them to the town. It currently has two squares: Mejías and Simón Bolívar, a church, a public and a private high school, a university village, a club, an ambulatory, a football field, two bars, and a cemetery.
In the past, when you entered the town through the commercial street, there was a large coconut palm plantation, which produced a visual and auditory effect when the leaves of these palms shook by the wind danced among them and a relaxing sound was heard that made you lie down to sleep under these coconut trees. A part of this hacienda was deforested to build a housing complex of apartments and houses. The same happened in the cocalito hacienda (coconut plantation located on the shore of the beach) where the "Cocalito" housing development was built, which still maintains little vegetation, since these are part of the economic activity, together with the Alimentos Margarita factory.
I am the daughter of Leonides Salmerón and Víctor Eduviges Maicán. My mother married twice. The first time with Sixto Rodriguez with whom she had her first son Hernan Rodriguez; when he was 8 years old she divorced due to incompatibility of characters, she had a relationship with my father, already mentioned before, from that union 4 children were born: Maria Teresa Salmeron, Cruz Miguel Salmeron, Aurora Josefina Salmeron and myself, in total we are five siblings. I was born by chance, because my parents had problems caused by my older brother, he was very rebellious and spoiled because he grew up with his grandmother and grandfather. My father wanted to correct him by applying a very archaic psychological methodology.
That older brother told me that my father sent him to take a wheelbarrow (hand cart), full of large stones, to a mountain that for a child of that age is very high; this was next to the cemetery, he took it, then my father ordered him to fill it again with those stones and bring it down again; then Hernán got angry and disrespected him. This caused my brother a trauma. When my father passed away at 79 years of age, Hernan told me "I wish he would boil in the pots of hell, that wretch, I hate him and I will die hating him", I asked him why this attitude, he answered me that the reason for this hatred was the situation mentioned above. As a result of these problems my mother said "I can get a man around the corner, but not a son".
She made the decision to leave my father, but never looked for a partner and added "I will raise my 5 children alone". My sister Maria Teresa, the eldest of the second marriage, begged my mother not to make that decision, "my father gave us a little house made of mud, with a coconut palm roof and a dirt floor, my sister cleaned it and poured water on the floor to settle the soil, it was so clean that it looked like a golden cup. My father had a vegetable garden, vegetables, corn, which was for the self-support of our family group, which consisted of 8 people: my mother, my father, 5 siblings and the grandmother who also lived with us.
My father also worked as a watchman at the Alimentos Margarita factory, which produced canned sardines, tuna and mayonnaise, made from coconuts, packed in jars, the coconuts were bought from the owners of the haciendas". The pleas of my older sister, who was crying inconsolably, were worthless, then my mother told her "I swear by you that I will never fall in love with any other man, I want you to get ahead, study and be professionals, if we stay here you will not get ahead, there is no high school here.
Besides, I have an art, I am a seamstress, I have two hands to work with and my sewing machine that I bought with Bs 100.00 that my son Hernan found that money in the street, I kept it for six months in case its owner appeared, as no one appeared during that time, I bought it. I used to sew with a borrowed machine, so there is no turning back, tomorrow I am emigrating to Cumana" at that time my mother was 28 years old, I was the youngest and the youngest was 5 months old, on December 30, 1951, the luggage consisted of: clothes, kitchen utensils, the kerosene stove and the sewing machine. When we arrived in Cumana my mother also got a little rented ranch in Caigüiré, in worse conditions than the one we lived in Mariguitar, there we lasted 2 months, then we went to Barrio "Rio Viejo".
The Manzanares river that crosses the city with vegetation of apamates, araguaney, tamarind, coconut, among others, we were near there, we bathed, washed clothes, because in that community there was no aqueduct of white water, there was only a tap (pila) was common to the whole community, We took 2 empty cans of lard and 3 little pigs that were used to carry the water from the sink to my mother's house. My sister Teresa used to put a cloth roll on her head to cushion the weight of the cans full of water, that water was only for drinking and cooking.
We lived there for a year, we moved to another house on a blind street that was between Bolivar and Sucre streets near the "República Argentina" School, there Hernán, Teresa and Miguel studied elementary school until 6th grade, Aurora was in 3rd grade and I had not yet entered elementary school. Hernán took an accounting course at a night academy because at the age of 15 he had to work in a business owned by the Tobías family on Bermúdez Avenue to help with the household expenses. My mother taught us to see in that brother the figure of the father and to respect him, so we did, from there we moved to the house of a relative of my mother, who lent us to live there, all those houses where we lived until that one had no sewage system, only latrines.
Since we emigrated we did not have a refrigerator, a clay pot, we filled it with water and that cooled the water, the fish were bought 5 kilos, my grandmother fried them, placed them in a pot and we stored it for 6 days and with some towels that my mother sewed we protected that food, so that the flies did not enter, because they produce a keresa that decomposes the fish, with that we ate for 6 days, alternating one day fried with pavilion and another day in soup. In that house my brother bought a 4 burner kerosene table stove, since the one we had was a single burner stove and smoked all the pots, he also bought the first canvas furniture since we did not have any.
That same year was the first gift of Baby Jesus that we had: some dolls that my older brother gave us on December 24 by placing them in our shoes, they were our first dolls to play with, because Aurora and I played with some pebbles that in our imagination were our dolls, we laid them in some empty boxes, which pretended to be the dolls' beds, the shoes of my brothers were our parents and when we misbehaved we grabbed the shoe and hit each other with one of them, we played as a little food with plant leaves, we cooked them pretend and pretended to eat by the beard. At that time I began to study first grade at the school "Santa Teresita de Jesus" and Aurora 4th grade at the "Republica de Argentina".
My sister Teresa studied 3rd grade at the Sucre high school in front of the Cathedral church. My sister was very intelligent, she had grades of 20 points, she wanted to be a Petroleum Engineer, but since we were very poor she studied to be a teacher and graduated at the age of 18. My sister Aurora and I were the ones who did the housework: we washed and ironed the clothes, cleaned, scrubbed and went to the market that was near the house to buy food and ingredients to make food, since my mother lived working attached to the sewing machine, which was her means of production.
Grandmother Aurora Salmerón de Mariña helped in the preparation of the food, the older siblings worked, mother never let them do the housework because they could get sidetracked and identify with the opposite sex. As soon as my sister Teresa graduated as a teacher she started working in a school in Playa Colorada, she traveled every day by car. When my three older brothers began to work, our economic conditions changed and we moved to the "Bolivariano" neighborhood, a house of social interest with right to buy with services: white water network (pipes), sewage network (sewers) and electricity. My mother cancelled her house and it is her legitimate property. It is a very spacious house with all appliances, telephone and utilities.
When we moved to Bolivariano I had not finished the school year, I was left at Santa Teresita school to board a bus to go to and from school, I had, with other classmates, to go through the telegraph office. One day we entered those offices and discovered that there were bathrooms with 7 urinals, where we used to relieve ourselves for 5 days. A cousin of my mother's who worked there told my mother, and on Monday when I returned home in the afternoon, my mother hit me very hard with a strap with a tremendous beating so that I would not return to that office. A few days later I saw a recreation park on that same road that was free, so I went there for a little recreation, we had already been going there for 4 days.
My mother worked as a seamstress at the hospital, one Friday she left earlier than usual, she was going to the bus stop to take the bus to come home, but while she was waiting she managed to visualize me in the park, she got there, took me off the swing and brought me by the ear to the bus stop and told me "as soon as the school year ends, I will change you to the Bolivariano school" and so she did. There I finished my 6th grade and immediately entered the "Jose Silverio Gonzalez" High School, I graduated from high school in 1971, and entered the University to study Sociology.
In February 1972 I went to the historic center of Cumaná, where the carnival festivities were held, there I met a young man named Efraín Cipriano Rodríguez Velázquez. He was a boy of 23 years of age, his height was 1.75m, slim and with honey-colored eyes, profiled nose, abundant black hair and dark complexion. I felt a crush of love in my heart, but then I didn't see him again until March when I met him at the U.D.O. He was also a student at the same school where I was studying, but he was studying for a degree in Social Work. It was love at first sight, a few days after meeting him we started a love relationship; he wrote me beautiful love poems that made me fall more and more in love with him every day.
And so began our love story...
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