Bridging the Gap
Every day at dawn, Valentina Betaba, a 16-year-old Venezuelan student, crosses the Simón Bolívar International Bridge to reach the Megacolegio La Frontera, a school in Villa del Rosario, a border town in the Colombian province of Norte de Santander. According to Gladys Myriam Carbajal Ortegon, the school’s coordinator, eighty percent of the school’s students are Venezuelans who make the crossing daily.
“In Venezuela, we went to class only twice a week,” Betaba, who lives about a half hour’s walk from the Colombian border, told me when we met in June. “There were power cuts, and many professors no longer came because they did not receive their wages.”
