Selling sweets and benefiting from gifts from good Samaritans assists Diana on her journey.
Diana expected to have a stable job lined up when she arrived in Medellín, Colombia in 2021. Her aunt, who worked as a maid and caretaker in the city, had arranged for Diana to replace her, as she planned to retire in Venezuela. But, when Diana arrived with her four-year-old son in tow, she was informed that the job had evaporated. Without a backup plan, Diana relied on the generosity of friends, family, and strangers to establish herself and her family in the new city. Now those sources of charity are starting to run dry, so Diana is searching for new strategies to make ends meet, especially as paying rent once again becomes a priority and a monthly uncertainty.
When Diana left Venezuela for Colombia with her four-year-old son in 2021, she had a plan. Calculated and risk-averse, Diana knew that a steady job and secure housing awaited her in Medellín. Diana’s aunt, who was retiring back to Venezuela, had lived in the city for nearly twenty years and had arranged for Diana to take over her job as a maid and caretaker for an elderly Colombian woman. After leaving her three older children under the care of her grandparents in the Venezuelan state of Zulia, Diana hitched a ride to the Colombian border at Maicao, where she used the last of her funds to purchase two bus tickets to Medellín for $29 USD each.
Upon arrival in Medellín, Diana and her son went directly to the house of her aunt’s former employer, where they planned to settle in before Diana started work the following day. When they arrived, however, the elderly woman’s daughter, who was visiting from out of town, informed them that her mother had passed away two days prior. Because Diana did not have a phone, the family had not been able to contact her to share the news. Immediately recognizing the implication, Diana asked if the daughter still needed someone to take care of the house, but it was too late. The daughter was leaving the city that evening and planned to sell the house that month. The woman gave Diana $5 USD for cab fare, wished them luck, and sent them into the night in a foreign city. Despite her best calculations, Diana’s plan crumbled before her eyes.
“The first night, we slept in a stairwell,” Diana recalled melancholically. “I saved the $5 USD in hopes that the next day we could find a room somewhere.” Wandering the streets the next morning, Diana was stopped by a middle-aged Colombian woman, who, after hearing Diana’s situation, offered her lodging for three days while she got back on her feet. The woman also gifted Diana $29 USD and instructed her to purchase lollipops, caramels, and cookies to sell on the street. “The three days ended up being one month,” Diana said with a grin, noting the astonishing generosity of the Colombian woman—her good Samaritan.
Every day that month, Diana and her son sold her products on the streets of Medellín. “Because it was December and people caught the holiday spirit,” Diana explained, “people would give us $1.20 USD, $5 USD, or even $12 USD for the candies.” Occasionally, someone would gift them food or groceries, allowing Diana to save all her earnings towards bringing over her other two children. Having her young son with her as she worked, however, created problems with Colombian welfare officials who approached her and warned that her son could be taken from her if she continued to use him to gain sympathy from strangers. In reality, there was no one else to look after him. With Diana’s aunt back in Venezuela, she was the only member of her family in Medellín.
After a month of selling sweets, Diana used her savings of $49 USD to pay a neighbor in Venezuela to bring two of her children to Medellín, while her oldest son stayed in Venezuela to finish studying at the police academy. She moved out of the Colombian woman’s house—thanking her profusely for her help—and into an apartment with her three children, where rent was $61 USD monthly, including utilities. To secure the apartment, Diana relied on her sister, who sent her husband from their house in Barranquilla to Medellín to support her. Her sister’s husband also paid the first month’s rent since Diana had used the entirety of her savings on the tickets for her other two children. “I was lucky to have my sister’s help,” Diana said, “and I used to call my aunt a lot too, since she had lived in Medellín for so long.”
Still only earning money by selling sweets, Diana worried about being able to cover the cost of the family’s new apartment and food, especially now that there were more mouths to feed. With the first month of rent paid, Diana was able to scrape by, but the second month, when the landlord informed her that rent would increase to $73 USD monthly, her worries were confirmed. “I called my aunt, and she told me to call the 123 hotline,” Diana recalled, referring to the emergency social services hotline set up by the Medellín Mayor’s Office. Through the hotline, she was connected to Mercy Corps, a local humanitarian organization that assists Venezuelans recently settled in Medellín. The organization enrolled Diana in its six-month cash assistance program, which gifted her $90 USD monthly via a rechargeable bank card.
With the new stream of income, Diana rented a larger house for her and the children, where the family still resides. Each month, she puts the cash assistance towards rent, which is $93 USD plus $17 USD in utilities. Now that she’s not facing the looming worry of saving enough to cover rent, Diana has also been able to expand the inventory that she sells on the street. “Cigarettes and coffee are my best sellers,” she said, particularly on weekends when she works late into the night outside of the local discotecas. On the weekends, she typically makes $20–24 USD nightly, whereas on a normal weekday, she tends to earn $10–15 USD.
On weekdays, she sets up her sales cart within eyesight of the family’s house, so she can keep watch over her two oldest children who aren’t currently studying due to a lack of legal documents. Without transcripts from the children’s school in Venezuela, which are prohibitively costly to obtain from the Venezuelan government, the children would be required to start a year behind their actual grade level—a particularly embarrassing prospect for her self-conscious fourteen-year-old daughter. “Our neighborhood is not the safest,” Diana explained, so she likes to make sure that her children do not stray too far from the house. Even conducting sales in the neighborhood, she said, requires her to pay extortion fees, or vacunas, to a local gang that insists the weekly payment of $2 USD is for “insurance”; if her cart were ever stolen, they would supposedly help her recover it, Diana scoffed incredulously.
Diana’s youngest son is enrolled in a local kindergarten, thanks to the generosity of the school’s director who waived the one-time matriculation fee of $21 USD and the monthly fee of $23 USD. The school only required that Diana purchase a uniform, which cost $29 COP. To ensure that her son could start school as soon as possible, Diana took out a $49 USD loan from a paga diario, or loan shark, to cover the cost. “The interest rate was 20 percent and [the loan shark] gave me one month to pay back the loan,” she explained. Before she could purchase the uniform, however, her son came down with the flu. Since the family is still waiting to receive their residency permits (PPT), which would allow them to enroll in the subsidized Colombian healthcare system, Diana was forced to use the loan to pay for a doctor’s visit and medicine.
Her youngest son still doesn’t have a uniform, but the school now allows him to attend in his regular clothes, although he is the only one. To pay back the loans she took out, Diana stopped reinvesting her earnings in inventory for the sales cart. This dealt a significant blow to her daily profits, as she ran out of her most popular products quickly every day. “It was a vicious cycle,” Diana lamented, although the monthly arrival of her cash assistance at least ensured that she would make rent. As of June 2022, Diana is waiting to receive her final stipend from the six-month cash assistance program. She worries that the end of the assistance will similarly undercut the success of her sales cart because she will need to prioritize saving for rent over reinvesting in inventory. Anticipating such a scenario, Diana plans on using a portion of her final stipend to purchase ingredients for arepas and empanadas, which she will sell daily alongside her current inventory in the hopes of increasing her profit margins.
Thinking about the future, Diana said that her dream is to own a small house in Venezuela. Although she has no immediate plans to return, her oldest son who is 22 years old still lives there, where he has nearly completed his studies at the police academy. In the short term, Diana hopes to finance his journey to join the family in Colombia, where his contribution to the family’s income may ease the stress of covering monthly costs. Finally obtaining the family’s PPT documents also promises to lend greater stability, as it will enable Diana to enroll the family in Colombia’s healthcare system and make her eligible for formal employment.