If It Belongs To All….

In my research for the second to last post, I saw some comments online which, unfortunately, I failed to source. Nevertheless, I believe the reader will appreciate them and if anyone knows the source, please advise and I’ll give due credit. 

They are not my words, but they encapsule my memories as well as my gratitude. I’ve linked to prior posts which expand on the subject or comment, as necessary. I’ve made no changes or edits to the comments, other than grammatical corrections for ease of reading.

Comments Online

El Pao has a very cool tropical jungle climate with rainy periods from April to November each year. Minimum temperatures reach 19º C [66° F] and maximum temperatures reach 31º C [88° F], with an average of 24º C [75° F].

The Betlehem Steel corporation carried out explorations on the El Florero hills, discovering large iron deposits in this area. Eduardo Boccardo transferred the mining rights to Bethlehem Steel, which began to develop the project for exploitation, creating the subsidiary company Iron Mines Of Venezuela. In 1940, the project to build a road and a railway to the port of Palúa on the right bank of the Orinoco River began, but these were delayed by the events of the Second World War, and exploitation actually began in 1950.

The El Pao camp, as it was known, was divided into three urban groups: “Rankin High” where most of the teachers and nurses lived [my Madrina lived there with her mother], and the Catholic Church was also located there; “San José Obrero” where the workers lived [known to us as “el Otro Campo“], there was a primary school, a commissary, a hospital, an evangelical church, police, a national guard, a hotel, and a workers’ social club; and “El Florero” where the administrative staff, doctors and engineers lived, mostly North Americans in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They had an American primary school and a social club (with a swimming pool, tennis court and bowling alley).

El Pao, a magical place in permanent contact with nature, where every day at 3 in the afternoon we were shaken by the explosives that exploded in search of iron, and the train with its slow and heavy step was the sound of progress, work, and hope. 

Thus, a modest but comfortable [mining and] urban center was built, where the first inhabitants, apart from the peasants from the region, were the immigrant employees who were in charge of carrying out the work of the mine, one of the most significant in all of Venezuela, from which, until 1996, at least 111 million tons of mineral were extracted.

In 1974, the management of the mine passed into the hands of the Venezuelan state, and in 1975 the company, Ferro-minera Orinoco, belonging to the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana, joined the exploitation works.

Reply from a reader of the above comments:

Greetings from Caracas. Reading this whole story takes me back many years because I was born and raised in El Pao, exactly on Bolivar Street. 

My mother worked at the hospital when the [Americans] left. She had 30 years of service. 

Those were unforgettable times. If God asked me what I would like to repeat in my life, I would tell him to return to El Pao as I lived it, its streets, its green grass, the streets full of mangoes, me going to the commissary, the school — by the way, the best in the state of Bolivar — the best hospital, ufff, everything first class, the pool…. 

Well, friend, I congratulate you for all that I have read, without being able to contain my eyes from clouding with tears when I read or see something from my dear and beloved El Pao, remembered forever. 

I am a Paoense in soul and heart. Greetings.

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Paoense. I don’t remember having heard or read that word before. But I fully relate.

View from the administrative camp towards the warehouse and mine, circa 1965