Interview by Dylan Baddour published on March 25, 2019 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-philanthropist-hopes-to-make-headway-in-13712468.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result#photo-17118120

1. LOCAL // HOUSTON
Houston philanthropist hopes to make headway in crisis-
stricken homeland of Venezuela
Dylan Baddour March 25, 2019 Updated: March 25, 2019 8:18 a.m.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-
philanthropist-hopes-to-make-headway-in-13712468.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result#photo-
17118120
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1of 12 Cristal Montañéz hands out her signature teddy bears to Venezuelan children outside a
migrant shelter on a Colombian highway. Photo: Dylan Baddour, Houston Chronicle /
Contributer

2. 2of12 Cristal Montañéz applies a numbing bandage to a years-old leg wound on Junior Ríos
Olivares, a Venezuelan who plans to hike 1,000 miles to Ecuador.Photo: Dylan Baddour,
Houston Chronicle / Contributer
3of12Cristal Montañéz visits a kitchen a where people are lined up to eat.
Photo: Dylan Baddour, Houston Chronicle / Contributer
CÚCUTA, Colombia — Cristal Montañéz carried a box of her signature teddy bears from
Houston as she led a small convoy down a Colombian highway to explore the humanitarian
crisis spilling out from her homeland, Venezuela.
She spotted a crowd of young adults and children on the roadside, and she ordered the
three cars in her group to pull over. A contingent of international aid workers stepped out
to inspect.
Montañéz had been there before and knew the scene well. The people gathered were some
of the thousands who every day flee Venezuela’s collapse into hunger and chaos, setting out
to cross more than 1,000 mountainous miles on foot with nothing but their bags of clothes.
Children lit up and giggled as Montañéz handed them stuffed animals.

3. “The bears are just magic,” she said in Spanish, forcing a weak smile, though her eyes still
bore the grief that weighed on her. “They can bring out happiness even at times of such
tragedy.”
The convoy continued on. They were there to evaluate a project launched by a Houston
Rotary club, designed to feed thousands of people in this crisis zone. Montañéz, a former
Venezuelan supermodel and lifelong philanthropist who moved to Houston in the 1980s,
led the delegation to demonstrate that the crisis was real, and that the project was working
and ready to grow.
Two women of Houston’s large Venezuelan community led a local Rotary Club to partner
with North Carolina-based Rise Against Hunger to deliver about $56,000 worth of food — a
20-ton shipping container full of nutrient-enhanced rice plus locally bought groceries — to
this Colombian border region, which for years has borne the brunt of a massive migration.
“We do see a need to scale up our involvement,” said Silvia Roscot, a technical adviser for
Rise Against Hunger who traveled with Montañéz to tour the project. “This is a population
that’s on the move.”
It’s been years of spiraling decline for Venezuela, once the wealthiest South American
nation. Conditions of hunger and health have worsened dramatically in the last year and
plummeted toward catastrophe in early March, when most of the country’s power grid
went indefinitely down, leaving millions without running water or communication with the
outside world.
The region surrounding Cúcuta, Colombia, on the Venezuelan border, receives about 5,000
migrants every day, about twice the daily average of migrants apprehended at the entire
U.S.-Mexico border in recent months.
Some here have money to travel by bus, but many go on foot, bound for far away countries
like Ecuador or Peru. All have left behind loved ones in search of whatever livelihoods they
can find to support their families.
“It makes me so angry what I have seen,” Montañéz said, wiping tears away in the
restaurant of an upscale Cúcuta hotel, decrying the self-proclaimed revolutionary
government that has presided over Venezuela’s collapse. “They’ve destroyed the people,
the families, the values, the hopes and dreams of an entire country.”
‘This one is perfect’
The idea for this project came from Isis Mejias, a Venezuelan who moved to the Bayou City
in 2001 and earned a chemical engineering degree from the University of Houston.
Early last year, she chaired the Rotary Club’s international services committee, and she
yearned to find a way to help her crisis-stricken homeland.

4. “There’s a huge Venezuelan community in Houston, and I can tell you that every single
person is doing something to send aid,” she said recently by phone from Kalisizo, Uganda,
where she was checking on another Rotary Club project.
She already knew about Montañéz, the 1977 Miss Venezuela whose personal charity
project, Bear Hugs, had given teddy bears and more in the aftermath of Tropical Storm
Allison. Mejias pulled the strings to bring together Rotary, Montañéz and Rise Against
Hunger, and their project began to take shape.
They partnered with the Cúcuta Rotary Club, and Montañéz came in August to find a
network of kitchens that could put their donations to use. Mejias came in January when
their shipping container of rice with nutrients and dried vegetables arrived in Colombia by
boat and began to be served.
“This is our first such international partnership,” said Diana Gamboa, president of the
Cúcuta Rotary Club. “It’s allows us to at least do something small to help our region, which
is totally drowning in this crisis.”
Now, Montañéz took three observers from Rise Against Hunger around the kitchens and
shelters where their food was being served, demonstrating that resources were put to good
use in acceptable conditions.
“This is your rice,” said Father Francesco Bortignon, an Italian-born priest who helps the
poor in this border region, lifting the lid off a massive pot in one of the charity kitchens he
supervises. “The previous supplies we got here had a weird taste, but this one is perfect.”
Several hundred people filed into the kitchen at lunchtime. Many brought young children.
Many said they’d walked two hours for their only meal of the day.
“The first months here were hard, but now with all the help that is arriving, at least we can
get food,” said Diana Alfonso, a 30-year-old Venezuelan who used to pick plastic recycling
from trash piles for food money but now shares plates of rice, beans, salad and potatoes
with her four children at the kitchen.
‘So much’ to be done
Later, Montañéz led the group out of town and up the highway into Colombia to visit
shelters that fed the hundreds of people who every day set out on their cross-continental
hikes.
The convoy stopped at a group of 12 young men loaded with luggage, who eagerly took the
water and snacks then pointed out that one of them hobbled with a cane and hurt to walk
up the mountains. So Montañéz offered him, 33-year-old Junior Rios Olivero, a seat in a car
in her convoy.

5. The car would take him 20 minutes up the road, a four-hour walk, to the next town, where
he would wait for his group at a shelter.
Beyond him lay about a thousand miles until Ecuador. There, he said, he planned to get a
job — he guessed as an informal salesman or a laborer —and save money until December
so he could buy a bus ticket home to spend next Christmas with his wife, two children and
parents. Then with the money he hoped to save by then, he would buy them all bus
transport back to Ecuador, where he planned to have a stable place to live.
He wasn’t scared of such a long path that crossed the cold Andean highlands then a large
swath of the continent, he said. The journey was easier with his group — a dozen friends
from his neighborhood in Valencia. Furthermore, he didn’t feel like he had a choice.
“There’s a saying that goes, ‘If you don’t risk, you don’t win,’” he said in the back seat of the
former Rotary president’s car. “If we don’t risk, our families will die of hunger in
Venezuela.”
Almost three years ago, he lost his job loading trucks at a state plastic factory after it shut
down for lack of raw materials, Olivero said. He found several odd jobs since then but
couldn’t keep up with hyperinflation that drove prices higher as the economy crumbled
more each day.
Now a month’s minimum salary could buy one kilo of cheese, so his family and what few
neighbors remained ate yuca root and potato, rarely three times a day. He hadn’t eaten
meat in years, until Colombians fed him donated chicken rice and lentils the day before.
The car dropped him at a shelter where a few dozen other Venezuelans sat outside. The
family owners of two adjacent houses had opened their doors to the flow of migrants
walking into the mountain town of 57,000 people. So a new crowd of several hundred
sleeps there each night — women and children on the floors of the houses and men on the
ground outside.
Montañéz stepped out of her car and stood with her fists on her hips, looking at the
hundreds of people who’d left the country that had been so prosperous in her days there.
She sighed.
“There is so much work to be done,” she said.
Rise Against Hunger is now fundraising for phase two of the Houston-led project through
its Emergency Global Relief
fund: https://act.riseagainsthunger.org/give/95605/#!/donation/checkout

6. Dylan Baddour
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Dylan Baddour is a business reporter for the Houston Chronicle.