How many days would you survive with only ten dollars?

Hello, everyone. First of all, I'd like to talk a little bit about my country and its humanitarian crisis.

I live in Venezuela.

Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world, we have gold, diamonds, aluminum, coltain, among other priced minerals; the greatest landscapes and most beautiful beaches you could imagine, an awesome weather, great music... But even though we have all that, the majority of the population is very poor, to an extreme measure, and I'm not talking just about people who are not professionals: my mom and dad are teachers, they don't earn more than 10$ a month. The average Venezuelan earns no more than 20$ a month. Does that seem unlikely to you? Well, it is true, I'll get to that a little bit later.

Unfortunately, we've had more than 20 years of terrible politics. We had a president called Hugo Chavez, a former military man. He was a retrograde man filled with resentment and hatred towards wealthy people, but with a great propaganda got himself elected and re-elected as president twice. He was lucky enough to rule Venezuela as the oil prices were at its peak. This allowed him and his acolytes to rob all the money they could to the point that they became among the richest people in the world.

How were they able to do that, and why we the rest of us are so poor? The answer is easy: corruption.
My country has a thing called Currency Exchange Control, a platform for companies and normal people get access to dollars. The thing is all this platform is controlled by the estate. They get to decide who has access to dollars and who doesn't. They set the rate at which amount you can get each dollar.
At the start of this year, there were two official rates: DIPRO, a 10 bolivares per dollar rate for importation of food and medicine; and DICOM, another rate set by auction, which could vary from 11,000 bolivares to 20,000 or 25,000 bolivares per dollar, depending on whom do you know. This rate is for other goods and services.
This is where things get tricky. The food and medicine rate is inaccessible for the normal Venezuelan. The military men and corrupted "businessmen" create fictional companies and steal that money. Imagine that you have one million bolivares, using the DIPRO food and medicine exchange rate you could buy 100,000 dollars. Using the DICOM rate you would buy like 40 bucks -- a minimum wage in Venezuela is around 70 0,000 bolivares a month, keep this number in mind.

You would ask yourself why do we need a food and medicine rate and why don't we produce all of that ourselves. Well, president Chavez liked to expropriate ... A LOT. He expropriated thousands of productive companies, leading them then to ruin. So, basically, they ended up having all the production in their hands, but they didn't produce anything. They still don't. Venezuela has to import around 90% of the food and 100% of the medicine -- the latter also because of a huge debt with the farmaceutical sector by the government.

So, imagine that you want to buy a chicken. Let's say that a chicken costs 3 bucks. If you're the government, the only entity allowed to have access to DIPRO dollar, you could import each chicken for 30 bolivares ... They do it, but not enough for the whole population, because they prefer to steal that money and they use that small amount of food to control the population that still supports them.
Because you don't have access to the DIPRO dollar, you'd have to go to the DICOM dollar auctions. So, if you're lucky enough to "win" an auction at DICOM and get the dollars, you'd buy each chicken for around 75,000 bolivares. The corrupted government makes almost impossible to get access to these rates. Only 1.4% of the Venezuelans get access to them.

All of this has led to the creation of an unofficial rate. The black market rate. Today, the black market rate is the rate that most of the Venezuelan people use: a 234,000 bolivares rate, or even more, I'm not sure. We are a country with hyperinflation, that rate varies everyday. So, today you would need 702,000 bolivares to buy one single 3-dollar chicken. Remember the 700,000 bolivares minimum wage?

President Chavez died of cancer in 2013 and left Nicolas Maduro, his former chancellor, vice president, minister, and who knows what else as president; a man who has only aggravated the situation. Hundreds of people have died in public manifestations against his government.

I know this seems really difficult to believe and I don't know if I explained it correctly, but what I'm saying is true. I am crying as I'm writing this. There are kids dying of famine in my country, people dying from diseases that were extinct for decades, such as Malaria and Diphtheria.
One of the richest countries in the world, destroyed by a few bad men and women.

I'm trying to gather enough money to leave Venezuela some day and move to another country that could give me the opportunities to have a normal life and help my family leave too. Almost 5 million people of my 30-million-people country have left Venezuela, and people flee every day, massively.

I feel very tempted to ask for your help, but I know there is a lot of people who are really struggling to survive. You could go to GoFundMe and find Venezuelan campaigns asking for help to buy medicines for sick people or foundations like this one https://www.cuatroporvenezuela.org that help our people in struggle.

Please, help them and help me by spreading this information and even investigate further more about our situation. I hope it doesn't, but it could may well happen to you and your country some day.

Thank you for reading.