Having a salary as the main income for the average Venezuelan is far from enough to bring a plate to the table everyday. As of now, the minimum wage + a food bonus equals almost 5$ A MONTH. That probably doesn't say anything about the purchasing power in Venezuela since you may say that things are really cheap there or you get a lot of freebies, but, to put things in perspective, with the whole salary + the bonus you could get 30 eggs a kilo of rice and a kilo of butter if they're cheap, FOR THE WHOLE MONTH. I'm not even including bus rides for commuting, commodities and the like, or other expenses that you have to do when you're under some medical treatment or you have kids.

I found myself in a bind and said: Is it worth it to have a regular job? Am I actually working for free after all the expenses that I have to do just for working? As I was asking myself these questions, I started to look for ways on the Internet to get an extra income. Getting an income in USD would be of great help, even if it were just less than 10$ a month.

I found something that paid in VEF but was using the black market rate of the USD as a reference for payments. It was really low (like 5$ a month), but I took the gig while looking for other alternatives. A few weeks later, I quit my regular job in order to focus on this gig. The gig was about translating books and took me more than a month just to finish one. My productivity (or their generosity) wasn't enough to guarantee an income that made ends meet so my wife was carrying most of the weight for a while.

The other reason why I left my job was to tune all the details for me to leave the country and for my family to get a fund to turn to buy the groceries for the time I'm away.

By December 2017 while checking /r/vzla on Reddit something out of the ordinary happened. There was this thread with a few Redditors from /r/btc giving away tips in Bitcoin Cash. Some users got between 1 and 5$. I received a tip for 20$! I was shocked! This meant that I could at least buy food and baby products for a couple of weeks.

As any new user, I had to familiarize with BCH and how to use the tippping bots, especially tippr. Little by little, I was getting involved with the BCH community, contributing and also being rewarded. Most of the time, people at /r/btc gave us Venezuelans tips in BCH to help us with our situation and those tips have been of great help to many.

Some people found out about the tippenings, as /r/btc calls them, and found ways to take advantage of those tippings through scams. Almost inmediately, users from /r/vzla expressed their outrage agaisnt the scammers and also offered their apologies in behalf of the Venezuelan community for this shameful actions.

After that, I decided to offer my abilities to the BCH community to get an income instead of just getting tipped. By checking /r/btc threads and some redditors' recommendations I turned to Yours to see if I could get an opportunity here. It's been just a couple of days since I uploaded my first piece, but it seems promising so far.

The challenge for many Venezuelans is to find an income that avoids the inflation problem we have and garantees the plate on the table. There are many young users who are already employed by companies as freelancers providing their knowledge in web design and programming. Others have found opportunities in graphic design and transcriptions. I am at the very beginning of my journey publishing pieces here with hopes of advancing even more in the on line carreer.