CINTHIA DELGADO

I am a graphic designer.

Cinthia Delgado’s husband was a refugee when they met in Venezuela in the 1990s. He had just fled Colombia and the carnage of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord.

In the city Juan Pablo Chalacra was leaving behind, Medellín, Escobar’s thugs were roaming the streets, pressuring men to take up arms and join their fight against the government.

But in Ms. Delgado’s Venezuelan border town, San Cristóbal, Mr. Chalacra found a haven. And he found Ms. Delgado.

He was among countless Colombians pouring into Venezuela back then, few of whom expected to return home. “I can tell you, we all had a Colombian family member back then,” Ms. Delgado said.

When she thinks back now, Ms. Delgado remembers working as a graphic designer, sketching out designs for logos and business cards at a firm, where business was booming. She remembers the Saturday barbecues, and her dogs Lulu and Dolly. But what she most remembers is the home she shared with her new husband.

It was a work in progress. As Ms. Delgado’s extended family grew larger, so did the house, with new floors built for cousins, aunts and grandparents. The apartments were modest, but they were built to taste.

“Mine had the big windows, because I like big windows,” she said.

As Venezuela’s economy plummeted, however, so did Ms. Delgado’s personal fortunes.

When Mr. Chalacra had a motorcycle accident, injuring his legs and back, the struggling hospital could not offer the CT scan he needed. When it came time to operate, doctors gave the family a shopping list: On it were sutures, antibiotics and gloves.

Mr. Chalacra recovered, but when it was clear that Venezuela would not, the couple realized they had no choice but to reverse the path he had taken decades earlier, and move to Colombia. Now, Ms. Delgado’s husband would be the one offering refuge — and in the very country he once fled.

Like Mr. Chalacra decades before, Ms. Delgado crossed the border in 2018 with her pockets almost empty. She and her 22-year-old son carried only clothes and enough money to buy tickets for the afternoon bus to Medellín, where Mr. Chalacra was preparing their home.

At first Medellín frightened Ms. Delgado. All she really knew about her new home in the Andes was the gruesome tales her husband had told of the Escobar era. “I spent almost a year like I felt I was going to cry,” she said.

But because her husband was Colombian, at least she had a home.

“We didn’t arrive like so many Venezuelans that have to sleep on the street,” she said. “We arrived at a house. We arrived to his family.”

Still, Ms. Delgado had much to learn.

She tried working in a restaurant. Then she tried caring for the children for a wealthier family — her first job as a domestic worker.

When her husband began selling food on the street, she said, she cried. How far they had fallen, she thought.

Her husband, the more seasoned refugee, set her straight. “He told me this work isn’t dishonorable,” she said.

Now, Ms. Delgado can be found right next to him.

“He told me: ‘My love, we must work. Food won’t wait for us. Hunger won’t wait either.’”

Image Andrea Calabrese and her mother. Credit... Andrea Calabrese

Andrea Calabrese

I am a classical musician.

Her violin was made in Italy, and as she was growing up in Caracas, she used to dream of performing Beethoven for concertgoers in evening wear — little surprise, considering her family.

Andrea Calabrese’s mother was a viola teacher, her father a well-known composer and conductor. “Some families go to the park on Sundays,” she said. “We went to the concert hall.”

She was 10 when she first picked up a violin, practicing scales after her homework. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was young, but their life project — to raise a musician — continued.

Her mother, Joyce, patiently taught her to play between lessons with her other students. In the evenings the child would watch her father composing orchestra works in his studio. He often paused to tell stories about the lives of composers.

Ms. Calabrese lived the life of a young upper-middle-class woman, and for a time her family felt shielded from the economic crisis overtaking the country, even as staples like corn meal and coffee began to disappear from store shelves.

But at her orchestra rehearsals, the fraying threads were impossible to miss. Musicians went unpaid for months, and many left the country.

The marches against the government began in 2017, and many musicians took part, some bringing their instruments to play amid the tear gas and rubber bullets. Ms. Calabrese remembers the day one, only 18, was shot dead by the police. He had played the viola — her mother’s instrument.

Ms. Calabrese’s course became clear some months later, when she got a call from a friend who said she was leaving for Buenos Aires: For her, too, the musician realized, life in Venezuela was over.She joined her friend at the airport.

Ms. Calabrese was abandoning her country, but not her dream. The violin from Italy was among the few belongings she grabbed before leaving.

In Argentina, a friend recommended her for a local orchestra, but the pay was too low to cover food and rent. So Ms. Calabrese quit, and sought an audience elsewhere, waking at 4 a.m. to play at Station 11 of the Buenos Aires metro, and living off spare change.

“I could earn in three days what I earned at the orchestra in a month,” she said.

But other musicians, some Venezuelan, got the same idea, and Ms. Calabrese’s earnings fell.

Recently, she put her violin away and took a job behind the counter at an Italian restaurant downtown.

Just going to a concert is a luxury, though she did see a performance by a soprano from Venezuela, Mariana Ortiz, who had come to sing at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires’s storied opera house.

“She sang so many times in my father’s orchestra,” Ms. Calabrese said. “But she has left the country too.”