Mission to Venezuela

At DSC Technical High School, we read King Solomon's Mines. Maps stained with danger! Men propelled by courage! Distant lands waiting to be discovered! Only decades later did the question arrive: what exactly were we being taught? Morality? Or conquest with better PR? 

Long before press briefings and legal memoranda, there was a story we told ourselves: men who crossed borders with courage as their visa, who stepped over rules as though rules were shrubs, who returned with treasure because the story said they must. The land was silent. The gold was waiting. The law had no speaking role. 

That story grew legs. Strong ones. It jogged through centuries, picked up speed during the colonial era, briefly went to the gym during the Cold War, and today it's running marathons in business casual attire.

The mine is gone now, but the instinct thrives. The treasure has learned new names: democracy, stability, freedom, strategic interests, and—my personal favorite—the necessity of correction. The jungle has hardened into highways and oil fields. Expeditions now wear suits and carry briefcases that might accidentally spill weapons contracts.

Yet the rhythm remains unchanged: arrive quickly, act boldly, hold a press conference, tidy the meaning afterward. It's a three-act play that's been running for centuries, somehow always marketed as 'breaking news.' 

The UN: World's Most Expensive Debate Club

Somewhere in this unfolding drama, a nation pauses mid-breath. A leader becomes a symbol—much easier than dealing with complicated history involving decades of political maneuvering and petroleum futures. Symbols don't require nuance. They come with interchangeable backstories depending on your media outlet.

At the edge of the stage stands the United Nations—old, earnest, clutching its charter like a grandfather holding a family photo album at a rave. It was born to slow us down, to insist that force bow to process, that sovereignty matter even when phenomenally inconvenient.

But the UN now negotiates with impatience itself. If it speaks, it's called weak, bureaucratic, possibly socialist. If it waits, it's called irrelevant, outdated, definitely socialist. If it insists on international law—the very thing it was created to uphold—it's accused of living in yesterday and almost certainly socialist.

The UN is the village elder in a marketplace that has actively monetized not listening. It stands with its gavel while nations speed past in armored vehicles, occasionally shouting, 'We'll file the paperwork later!'

The Security Council convenes. Vetoes deploy with the regularity of a cuckoo clock. The General Assembly condemns things. The International Court reminds everyone that law exists. And somewhere, a superpower representative checks their phone, wondering if they can expense the minibar.

The Diaspora Sings (But Keeps One Eye on the Door)

Then, almost as a whisper, the diaspora begins to sing. In kitchens across Miami, Madrid, Bogotá, Toronto, phones light up. Laughter edged with disbelief. Tears that don't ask permission. Flags held by hands that remember hunger and hope in equal measure.

Their rejoicing is not careless. Joy walks beside grief. Relief leans on fear. Exile doesn't erase memory; it sharpens it. They celebrate, yes—but it's the kind of celebration that keeps one eye on the door, because they've seen this act before. They know that regime change is easy; nation-building is the expensive part, the part where suddenly everyone remembers they have other commitments.

Isaiah's Inconvenient Prophecy

Hovering over all of this is an ancient voice. Isaiah 24 doesn't shout. It reveals, like a letter from your accountant that you keep meaning to open.

The earth mourns. The world withers. Not because laws were unknown, but because they were handled lightly, transgressed casually, changed when inconvenient, broken when profitable. Covenants treated as inconveniences. Order revised to suit urgency.

When law becomes optional—when it applies to some nations but not others—even the ground loses its balance. The earth keeps better records than we do. It remembers every shortcut, every exception, every time we said 'Just this once' and meant 'Until next time.'

This is the thread that binds the old tale, the modern seizure, the anxious council chamber, and the diaspora's cautious songs. We keep forgetting that the earth is not loot. It is trust. Borrowed ground does not belong to the fastest runner or the loudest voice.

My Venezuelan Professor's Warning

Years ago, a professor of mine—herself Venezuelan—discouraged me from going there. She spoke not with drama, but with fatigue. She told me it wasn't safe. She said she hadn't been back in years. Bad government, she said quietly, had made even home feel foreign.

This is what bad governance does: it turns citizens into exiles without their ever leaving. And now, the question: will regime change fix this? Or will we discover, three years from now, that we've simply rearranged the furniture in a burning building?

Between the books we read as students and the lives people live as citizens lies a tension that cannot be ignored. Stories can romanticize movement. Reality demands discernment. Some journeys aren't about discovery at all—they're about responsibility, specifically the question of who takes responsibility when the adventure story ends and the actual governing begins.

A Modest Proposal (Finally)

Perhaps we might consider a revolutionary approach: What if we stopped treating sovereignty like a privilege that has to be earned, and started treating it like a right that has to be respected?

What if we admitted that the gap between our intentions and our outcomes isn't a PR problem, but a fundamental misunderstanding of how change actually works? That you cannot bomb a country into democracy any more than you can insult someone into loving you?

What if we let the UN be boring? Let it be slow. Let it be bureaucratic. Because boring, slow, and bureaucratic is what keeps nations from solving their differences with F-16s.

What if we listened to the diaspora, not just when they're celebrating, but when they're warning us that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, and they've heard this rhyme scheme before?

What if we took Isaiah seriously? Not as poetry, not as metaphor, but as a warning label that we keep ignoring because we're so certain that this time, with these leaders, with this technology, with these noble intentions, it will be different?

History will take its notes. The UN will keep calling the meeting to order. The diaspora will keep hoping, wisely now, tenderly. And the earth, patient and bruised, will keep echoing Isaiah's warning:

This world is not our own. We are only passing through it. And how we pass matters.

The earth has a longer memory than we do. And it's keeping score.

Dr Uvoh Onoriobe

Editor, Real Relationships Magazine
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Medical Missionary @ www.hhands.org
editor@realrelationshipsmag.com
Author of Emptied Cup. The book is a collection of inspiring stories of God’s faithfulness in the mission field.

Uvoh is a member of Christian Union Uniben alumni in the United States . He serves as Director of Healing Hands Health Society a faith-based organization with the commission of spreading Christ’s love through medical care to all people around the world.

He has worked as a General Dentist/ Missionary for over twenty years offering dental services across various communities around the African continent and around the world. 

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