In late November, when U.S. President Donald Trump had announced that he was closing Venezuela’s airspace—tantamount to an act of war, given that Venezuela is a sovereign nation—many of us had worried about Christmas. The country has a diaspora of nearly eight million; more than a quarter of the population has left in the past ten years alone, primarily owing to economic hardship. Inflation is so severe that, in the past two decades, the nation’s currency has been declared void and substituted with a new tender three times. The streets of Caracas glitter with discarded, obsolete money, not worth the time it would take to bend over and pick it up.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter