Samuel Andres Mendoza carefully chooses from dozens of colored pencils spread out on his kitchen table, humming a reggaeton song as he deftly applies contrast to the Dragon Ball anime character taking shape on his sketch pad.
It is not just a pastime anymore for the 14-year-old. Without his mother’s knowledge, he began selling his drawings on his Twitter page to help the family get by and to pay for a special diet doctors say he needs in Venezuela’s troubled economy.
“Hi. I’m Samuel, I’m selling my drawings for US$1 to help my mom with my diet, buy her a house and a shop, so she won’t work on the street and get sick with COVID-19, and buy peanut butter for me. Thank you, sir and madam,” he wrote on Twitter, along with photographs of four drawings.
Photo: AP
It caught the eye of many and he now has more than 15,000 followers, selling dozens of drawings he has worked up at a table between a worn-out couch and a rusting refrigerator in the small family home in Barquisimeto, about five hours west of the Venezuelan capital of Caracas.
“The truth is I did not know that I was going to draw like that, but time has passed, and I have managed to paint for real,” Samuel said this month, showing his finished drawing of Dragon Ball’s Goku. “And here it is.”
In a crisis-wracked country where workers earn an average of US$2 per month, his sales can make a big difference for a family budget strained by his need for high-protein foods to deal with a form of malnutrition.
Like millions of other Venezuelans, Samuel and his mother, Magdalena Rodriguez, emigrated in search of better conditions. They went to Colombia in 2019, when widespread power outages hit her homeland just as she learned of her son’s diagnosis.
However, they came home in December last year after she lost her job and found increasing prejudice against the growing number of Venezuelan migrants.
The mother of three now sells snacks from a table in Barquisimeto’s main plaza. She also found work as a cleaner. Still, it has been difficult to afford the relatively expensive high-protein foods needed by her son, who has also been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a broad branch of the autism spectrum.
“It’s not easy,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez, 38, discovered Samuel’s effort when he asked for her bank account information so that people could pay for his work.
Samuel, who said he began drawing at age five, has an inclination for anime characters, but has also portrayed soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and the animated SpongeBob SquarePants.
Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares, who runs an art academy, saw Samuel’s Twitter messages and gave him a scholarship to study drawing.
Social media followers have also gifted him a laptop, a set of artists’ pencils — and peanut butter, a good source of protein.
Samuel, who said he may raise his prices as his skills advance, would like to make YouTube-style videos about videogames when he grows up.
“I’m proud of him, really. I don’t have words,” Rodriguez said. “But I do feel angry sometimes, I feel helpless, because I think that at his age, he should be studying, learning and not wanting to work to help me, when I’m the one who has to do everything possible to give them comfort and nourishment.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS