Against All Odds

by R. A. Lang

  Carolina joined me after three months, but that was another mistake. She had a terrible time while waiting in the hotel all day. She received several phone calls to our room every day from a man who was pimping. He asked whether she wanted to have many boyfriends.

  He kept saying that he knew many men who needed a lady, and that he would arrange men to visit her! We had to have the telephone put through the hotel operator to vet each person calling.

  If that weren’t enough, the minibar stocker visited our room every hour to check the drink status. Of course, that was just an excuse to look at Carolina. We had five hotel employees fired due to this behaviour. There were other incidents, too, such as finding needles in our toilet paper rolls and discovering drawing pins in our room service meals.

  While in Karachi, I needed a local man to work for me in the office at site, and take care of the database I’d created. The Japanese firm I was working for set me up with three guys that I could interview. The first two seemed terrified. They only answered yes or no to all I asked them, but the third and final candidate was quite different. His name was Izhar Ali.

  Izhar not only answered all my questions, but he also had many of his own to put to me! All Izhar’s questions gave me an excellent impression of his professional integrity, and I asked him how soon he could start.

  Izhar started the following Monday, and he immediately began dismantling the computer I was having trouble with. With bits all over my desk, he found a loose chip that was causing the problem. He put it all back together again in a few minutes.

  That was probably the best first impression anyone has ever left on me. Izhar and I became the best of friends, and we still are today. Fortunately, Pakistan wasn’t the last place I had the pleasure to see Izhar.

  My wife’s problems continued at the hotel. The most shocking one was when we were in the elevator together with a local man who moved behind me, bent down, and tried to sniff my wife’s backside! I spun around and cracked him hard on the side of his jaw, knocking him out cold! I was rather proud of myself.

  When I told Izhar about the episode the next day, he recommended that I buy Pakistani clothes for Carolina. He said no one would dare look at her the same way again, and they’d leave her alone.

  Luckily, there was a clothes bazaar in the hotel the very same week, so Izhar came over to do the negotiations and help us choose two outfits. Carolina looked just like a local lady in her new disguise, plus she already had the skin tone.

  Once, she was fed up with staying inside all day, so she tried to lie down by the hotel swimming pool. But that innocent action generated a lot of interest from some locals and they all moved in close to her. She didn’t do that again.

  Many taxi drivers hovered around the entrance of our hotel. One in particular was a horse drawn carriage. The horse was a big boy called Jack. I’d take an apple back with me every night from the office to give to Jack. Its owner would hold the apple with his hands cupped so Jack could nibble his way around it. Jack would eat the whole apple except its core, which I found very unusual for such a big horse.

  I would choose to go with the carriage to look around Karachi on the weekend. It was a hot and dusty way to get around, but still better than inside some of the taxis. I always sprayed a handkerchief with cologne and carried it with me when I went out for use each time we passed over a canal, for natural reasons.

  I regularly visited a furniture and ornament factory. All the furniture was made from solid rosewood and sometimes decorated with skilfully inlaid brass. The Pakistani craftsmanship was amazing and I bought many items from the factory shop including onyx carvings. The onyx was a mixture of dark green and brown and of exceptionally high quality, not to mention the brassware. I bought a rosewood captain’s trunk, which had my name inlaid in its lid together with the date 1999. It was ideal to store all the other items I’d bought which included a handmade silk carpet.

  I continued to visit the place and Carolina also enjoyed going with me as there wasn’t anywhere back in Venezuela which sold such beautiful handmade ornaments. Once the captain’s trunk was full, the shop arranged for my box to be crated and sent back to the United Kingdom, which arrived in the while I was home on holiday. A friend was with me and was able to help me carry the box into the house from the delivery van. All the items were certainly intact, but the onyx was a different colour to what I had bought. Instead, they had swapped it for the cheapest quality, which I dealt with as soon as I returned back to Karachi two weeks later.

  At one of the weekly parties, which the German hotel manager held for expats, Carolina and I were introduced to another Venezuelan man who fully understood and sympathised with Carolina’s situation. He gave us the phone number of the wife of one of his Pakistani friends who was also Venezuelan and living in Karachi.

  Carolina couldn’t wait to make the call the next day. The Venezuelan man called ahead and told the lady to expect another Venezuelan lady to call. The married lady was very excited to hear from Carolina, and she immediately drove to the hotel with her private driver to pick up Carolina.

  It turned out that the lady’s husband was a very successful company director of a textile company. Carolina had a great day out and came back to the hotel refreshed and excited that she had a new friend to visit. She was also thrilled that she could finally escape the confines of the hotel.

  On the weekend, I was invited to the director’s house. Because he’d visited Venezuela many times on business trips, we had plenty to talk about. He also owned a farm, which we all visited for a barbecue the following weekend. There weren’t any animals or fields of crops, though. He had bought the farm just to have somewhere to relax outside the city, a place with some much-needed fresh air.

  Because Carolina now had a friend, the shopping trips started. Her friend and her driver took Carolina all around Karachi. She bought more and more clothing for herself and her family back home. Naturally, I went crazy some days. She kept coming back with more clothing, and I was concerned about the baggage restrictions for our flight out.

  Amazingly, she had already thought about that: a friend working for KLM had access to the system and made a notation that the excess baggage had already been paid! We were told to say the following when we got to the KLM check-in: “You need to look at the notes. Our baggage has already been paid.” It worked!

  In September of 1999, we parted company at the airport in Amsterdam. I needed to work in Habshan, Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi was a wonderful place, except I was a two-hour drive out in the desert surrounded by sand dunes. My time in Abu Dhabi was short-lived because I received a phone call from an agent in December enquiring whether I’d be interested in working in Venezuela again. At the time of the call I was high up on a pipe rack. As I carefully walked along the top of a large diameter pipe I wasn’t afraid of falling as there was scaffold planking underneath the pipe. I wasn’t aware until the phone call that the planking had run out long before and as I reached to get my phone out, I noticed there wasn’t anything below me except air, which gave me a little vertigo.

  Shortly after getting back to the United Kingdom while I was preparing to return to Venezuela, I turned on the TV to see some horrifying news. Continuous, heavy rains had caused mudslides in La Guaira, on December 17, 1999, where their international airport was situated. The torrential rains, flash floods, and mudslides isolated coastal towns and forced 120,000 Venezuelans from their homes. The storm had claimed many lives.

  Security forces patrolled the mud-filled streets of Caracas to halt scattered looting and rescue thousands of people from flooded buildings.

  At least 15,000 people lost their homes, authorities claimed, and dozens of towns and villages had been cut off. Venezuela’s rainy season normally finished in early November, but not this year. Venezuelan authorities claimed the rains were the heaviest in sixty years.

  The disaster shut down Caracas’s Simón Bolívar International Airport and closed schools and businesses in the capital. Also, parts of th
e subway system were closed, which normally transports one million people every day.

  Mudslides raged down El Avila Mountain overlooking Caracas, and they carried homes and parked cars with them. Mangled bits of furniture and tree trunks littered many city intersections. The country’s National Guard ordered the evacuation of shanty-towns clinging to the hillsides and bordering gullies.

  I began to wonder whether I should have stayed in Abu Dhabi. I didn’t know how long it would take for Venezuela’s international airport to reopen, and I was somewhat hesitant to return due to the previous problems I’d encountered there. Still, I decided to go so I could be back with Carolina.

  Chapter 10

  Second Time in Venezuela

  Arriving in Venezuela made me wonder whether my problems were going to return. It started off badly as KLM had mislaid my luggage, which didn’t arrive for several days. I even recognised the immigration officer who I’d dealt with in the past, so I let someone else go before me so I’d have a different guy. That immigration officer previously refused me exit unless I gave him one hundred dollars. He figured that I was working without a permit, and he threatened to have me arrested and taken to the main station in Caracas. Considering my options, I paid the bribe and flew out.

  I spent the first night in Caracas because the vice president of the company who selected me wanted to meet me in person before I began work. The reason he wanted me was because I had helped his company out so much on my first project in 1997 in Puerto Ordaz, when I first met Carolina. I’d actually visited the site eighteen months before, looking for work, and they had a Romanian quality manager at the time. I was offered the position to support him, but I had declined their offer at the time.

  I was booked into the Intercontinental Hotel and scheduled to meet inside the rooftop bar. A very tall, blond-haired man approached me and introduced himself. He was originally from Russia, and he had a very highly-strung personality. He looked like he was heading for a nervous breakdown.

  The manager of his head office in Caracas accompanied him. He was a short, weedy-looking man who resembled a ferret.

  We moved away from the bar so we could speak more freely and face each other. The Vice President didn’t waste any time cutting to the chase, and he started telling me that the project was in real trouble. I put my hand up to stop him from rambling on, and asked if a certain Italian contractor was on the project. The look on his face was that of shock and horror.

  He said that they were his main contractor. I replied, “I fully understand why your project is in such trouble.” Without allowing him to explain any of the problems, I explained what the contractor had done in Puerto Ordaz. He was all ears, listening to every word I had to say. He knew that I understood the style of his contractor and that they were up to their old tricks again, milking his company for everything they could.

  He asked what could be done to put things right. I replied, “You’ve already made the first move to start putting things right because, when they see me, they will recognise me from before and know what they’re in for. They won’t be able to screw you anymore.”

  Previously, I had uncovered many of the scams the contractor had pulled over the Japanese in Puerto Ordaz, and I mentioned what they liked to do. With the aid of our corrupt procurement people in Puerto Ordaz, the Japanese had been charged two or three times the normal prices for materials and services.

  His face changed in such a way that I thought he would either laugh or cry. Instead, he bought another round of drinks before retiring for the night as we had an early start the in morning.

  The following morning, we all left the hotel together and drove straight to the construction site from hell. We made one stop halfway to the site to have something for breakfast because it was going to be a long day. When we pulled up, the Russian got to hear me switch into Spanish for the first time as I ordered a chicken arepa and a coffee.

  Before it was time to pull off the main road, we drove right through the middle of a shoot-out between Venezuelan police officers and someone on the other side of the road. There must have been four or five police cars along our side of the road with officers crouching behind them, firing across the road into the trees. We couldn’t see anyone in the trees as we passed, but we were lucky the police paused as we raced by.

  The last twenty minutes was spent driving through the Andes Mountains. In the distance, I could see the plant, which was not looking great even from a distance, and as we neared the plant, it was clear that it wasn’t a good project to be associated with.

  The highly stressed vice president wasted no time showing me around. There wasn’t an opportunity to grab a coffee, or any time for formal introductions. I was a stranger to all the onlookers, and I’m sure they were wondering who was getting a personal, escorted tour of the mess they were trying to construct.

  The job was an engineering disaster due to the two previous Eastern European quality managers. They had both been fired, and quality records were non-existent to justify their two-year stay.

  I could see signs that the contractor’s style was well and truly impregnated throughout the construction. One of their tricks was to erect steel beams the wrong way around and later charge for additional work to drill new holes where the original holes should have been. I could see unused holes everywhere.

  The project was the worst I’d ever seen; all the structural steel-work was crooked or out of alignment. After a little investigation, I learnt that the former Eastern European quality managers had no control over their Eastern European construction supervisors. Foolishly, the supervisors were being paid a bonus for progress. Consequently, everything was basically thrown up with no regard for accuracy. Faulty bolts had been bought cheap, and they were shearing off when torqued up. They had to replace over fifty thousand such bolts, so additional work claims were totally out of control; they were re-erecting scaffolding everywhere.

  The only (but expensive) solution was to bring a team of professional steel erectors to do whatever they could to try to repair what the idiots had built. We had a team of New Zealand steel erectors come over, but I thought it would have been quicker to take it all down and re-erect the entire building properly.

  When the new team came in, I met an amazing man from New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Dave was a huge man whose body had been completely tattooed in the old-fashioned way, except for his face. We became good friends, and the Venezuelans nicknamed us the twins, just like the movie. When Dave and I walked around the site side by side, I measured up only to his chest.

  This giant played the guitar and sang with the softest voice. It was like a Hawaiian lullaby.

  We lodged in a small town called La Victoria. It was certainly not a place to walk around in the daytime, let alone at night. The nickel plant we were working on was deep in the Andes Mountains, which had been declared a nature reserve.

  The mountains were impossibly steep, but cows managed to live where even goats would have to watch their footing. One slight slip, and that would be the end: there was nothing to stop the fall except the bottom of the mountain, over a thousand feet below.

  It was a true engineering accomplishment to dig into the hillside to lay the new road to the site, but the constant risk of landslides was a permanent reminder to drive as fast as possible. Our tires screeched almost the whole way to and from the site.

  It wasn’t long before Carolina joined me in La Victoria, and she eventually began working in one of the site offices. We were only a one-hour drive from Caracas International Airport, so we took advantage of that fact and went for a five-day trip to a little Caribbean island. That was my first visit to the Caribbean, but unfortunately, it wasn’t my last. An Australian and Dave also went at that time, so it was a fun trip. Inevitably, we always ended up at the bar on a beach pier.

  After several months of working on site and living in the hotel, life became more boring.

  We passed a bottle store every night on the way back to the hotel. One night, wh
en I was driving back alone, I pulled over for a quick beer at a bottle store we hadn’t visited. I spent some time talking to the owner, who originally came from mainland Spain and had just had his eighty-eighth birthday.

  The next day, I invited my New Zealand colleagues to join me at the same place after work. As it worked out, everyone had a great time. The little bottle store became the new place to go every day after work. The eighty-eight year old owner could not believe his luck.

  Word got around until the local bad guys heard about the nightly event, due to all the new targets. One night, I was too tired and needed to walk back to the hotel alone because my colleagues had the truck and didn’t look like they were going anywhere for a while. As I was about to start the three minute walk, a local woman called Mary-Eva stopped me. She said that there were two local guys waiting for a straggler at the corner.

  Apparently, they had been waiting there every night. In the past, we had always driven back together so they couldn’t do anything to us.

  That particular night was different. I was getting fed up with the restrictions of living amongst the same dangers from one day to the next, so I walked towards the two Venezuelans, and keeping a safe distance I invited them to join us. In Venezuela, if you offer anyone a drink, you are automatically expected to pay the bill, even for anyone else they bring along.

  The two shady looking characters looked at each other and walked towards me. I invited them into the bottle store, much to the owner’s surprise and bought them both a beer.

  They didn’t speak any English, so I explained to my colleagues what I was doing. They understood and played along with my plan. In short, we got the two guys very drunk.