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Outlook: My love letter ticket out of Venezuela

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José Gregorio Márquez

19/03/2020 GMT

My love letter ticket out of Venezuela

BBC World Service - Outlook, My love letter ticket out of Venezuela

José Gregorio Márquez won a love letter contest - with a letter to his neighbourhood

José Gregorio Márquez entered a love letter contest with a letter to his neighbourhood in Caracas. He won the contest - but it pushed him further away from his childhood home.

José Gregorio Márquez grew up in the neighbourhood of Niño Jesús, a poor area on the outskirts of the Venezuelan capital Caracas. He began writing stories from a young age, as a way of staying off the streets of Niño Jesús, where crime was commonplace. After finishing university in 2012, he left the neighbourhood, and moved to central Caracas to live his dream of becoming a journalist.

Working as a journalist at the time in Venezuela was no easy task. President Hugo Chávez had been in power since 1998, but the hope that had greeted his election had been replaced by despair at his growing authoritarianism. But among the difficulties, Jose began to appreciate his old neighbourhood, and the role it played in the person he had become. Then, in 2013, he saw an advertisement for a famous Venezuelan love letter contest - and decided to enter with a love letter to Niño Jesús. He tells Outlook’s Emily Webb about the contest that changed his life - and pushed him further away from the neighbourhood.

Stuart Wood, who lives in the English city of Oxford, is no ordinary delivery driver. The packages he delivers are human hearts, kidneys, and other organs - for people in desperate need of a transplant. Stuart had been living with polycystic kidney disease since 2003, but then received a transplant himself. He knows that his donor, and the support of his wife Jodie, saved his life.

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is a huge inland river delta in the north of the country which floods seasonally. It's full of hippos, elephants, giraffes - and baobab trees. They can live for up to 3,000 years and grow to 100 feet tall and 40 feet wide. Motswasele Tshosa is a local tour guide who looks after them.

Picture: José Gregorio Márquez
Credit: courtesy José Gregorio Márquez

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