Charles Kong Soo

Teach­ing is much more than a pro­fes­sion for Cruz Delis Ri­vas Zor­ril­la—it is her pas­sion.

How­ev­er, she will­ing­ly ad­mits that while teach­ing can be tremen­dous­ly ful­fill­ing, it al­so has its chal­lenges.

Zor­ril­la, who teach­es Eng­lish and Span­ish, has been liv­ing in T&T for six years and since mi­grat­ing here from Venezuela she has been teach­ing chil­dren in her mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty who don’t have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to at­tend lo­cal schools.

How­ev­er, the moth­er of three has put her vo­ca­tion and pas­sion on hold as her con­tract with an or­gan­i­sa­tion she worked with for sev­er­al years re­cent­ly ex­pired and she doesn’t know if it will be re­newed.

“I’m a per­son who prefers to serve than to be served. I love help­ing oth­ers, es­pe­cial­ly mi­grants since I know what it feels like to be ob­lig­at­ed to leave your coun­try and to try to sur­vive in a for­eign coun­try,” she said in an in­ter­view at her St James home.

“Life is not like be­fore here in Trinidad. Things are get­ting a lit­tle dif­fi­cult but I al­ways think pos­i­tive, give my best and try to be a good per­son in so­ci­ety.”

Zor­ril­la, who is orig­i­nal­ly from Guiria in Su­cre State, Venezuela, stud­ied Eng­lish for five years at the Lib­er­ta­dor Ex­per­i­men­tal Ped­a­gog­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty in Maturín, Mon­a­gas State. Af­ter com­plet­ing her de­gree, she moved to San Juan de Unare where she taught Eng­lish and Span­ish at a pub­lic high school.

It was a job that she loved and she was re­luc­tant to give it up but even­tu­al­ly had to leave when the so­cial and po­lit­i­cal tur­moil in her coun­try re­sult­ed in her salary not be­ing enough to sur­vive on.

She said her da­ta and years of work ex­pe­ri­ence have been elim­i­nat­ed from Venezuela’s ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and she could face le­gal prob­lems if she re­turns to her home­land for what the cur­rent gov­ern­ment of Venezuela calls “be­tray­al of the coun­try and aban­don­ment of work.”

In Trinidad, Zor­ril­la has been ac­tive in the mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty, as­sist­ing with trans­la­tions and oth­er ser­vices, in ad­di­tion to her teach­ing stint.

Along with her three daugh­ters, Gen­e­sis, Wales­ka and Sch­enelle, she has al­so been in­volved in El Puente, a project di­rect­ed by Raquel La Roche that pro­motes the shar­ing of T&T and Venezue­lan cul­ture.

Through the project, her daugh­ter Gen­e­sis had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in the Bur­rokids cat­e­go­ry of Kid­dies’ Car­ni­val last year. She placed sec­ond and had the ex­pe­ri­ence of danc­ing on stage with artistes such as Machel Mon­tano, De­stra Gar­cia and Patrice Robert at the 2023 Di­manche Gras.

How­ev­er, she ad­mit­ted that ad­just­ing to life in T&T has been dif­fi­cult at times, par­tic­u­lar­ly be­cause of the xeno­pho­bia and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion she and her fam­i­ly have ex­pe­ri­enced.

Zor­ril­la said she has faced ver­bal, phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal abuse, and has ex­pe­ri­enced ex­ploita­tion which she be­lieves is be­cause of her sta­tus as a Venezue­lan mi­grant.

One of her worst ex­pe­ri­ences was when one of her daugh­ters, just two years old at the time, was beat­en at a day­care fa­cil­i­ty. Al­though Zor­ril­la and her hus­band filed a com­plaint with the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties, none of them paid at­ten­tion to the mat­ter and it went un­pun­ished.

“This thing about xeno­pho­bia in this coun­try is some­thing that I have nev­er un­der­stood since we are all hu­man be­ings and we are all chil­dren of God,” she said.

“And just as I am a mi­grant here at this mo­ment, any­one in this coun­try can be a mi­grant some­where else and they can face all the sit­u­a­tions that we have been through too.”

De­spite all these bad ex­pe­ri­ences, Zor­ril­la and her fam­i­ly have met good peo­ple in this coun­try who have helped make their lives bet­ter. She said they in­spire her to al­so do her part to help make oth­er lives bet­ter when­ev­er she gets the op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Zor­ril­la is al­so hop­ing she will be able to con­tin­ue to pur­sue her pas­sion, teach­ing.