Lately there are not many news from Venezuela in western papers. Does it mean that the situation is better now? On the contrary, when I read the posts of my Venezuelan friends, it seems that there is no silver lining at the horizon. The inflation is terrible and people suffer from lack of food, lack of medicine, insecurity or electricity cuts...

A good illustration of life in Venezuela at the moment is given by @hlezama in his post about how retired people have to cue for hours to get their pension, which is not even enough to buy 1 Kg of apples...

What are the hopes for Venezuela in 2020

Some may say that things can only get better but it seems difficult to imagine what could bring about such a development. The corrupt government doesn't seem to care about its people. The opposition is quiet and the economy is still completely broken. The local currency is almost unusable and everything is sold for dollars. Knowing that it is almost impossible for Venezuelans to get these dollars. We can only wonder how they survive.

How steem and crypto can be helpful

Steem and other cryptocurrencies are a real way for Venezuelans to have money that can purchase stuff. Thanks to the exchange orinoco. Venezuelans can exchange Steem or BTC into a local currency with which they can purchase food and other merchandise. Thanks to this external income, some authors on steem manage to help also the people around them. Like @fucho80 who built a project that distributes food to the people most in need in the neighbourhood.

For others like @hendersonp, steem helped him to finance his flight from the country. He lives now in Brasil where he tries to build a new life with his wife.

By helping the people from Venezuela on steem, we can contribute to make their lives and also the lives of the people around them a little bit better.

What is the program @help.venezuela

At christmas 2018, I (@achim03) have created the program @help.venezuela. The idea was to provide to some selected authors from Venezuela a little additional revenue when they post on the steem blockchain. I wanted to be able to help them on a daily basis and that is why I created this program. For these few authors, all their posts would be upvoted by a powerful vote from the account @help.venezuela. The authors were selected according to three factors:
they must be Venezuelans
they must be on steem for several months
they must write quality posts

Unfortunately because of the price of steem, the upvotes lost a bit of their power over time but I believe still that it could make a little difference in their lives.

Here the number of upvotes that have been given throughout the year:

Author	Number of votes
@lanzjoseg	437
@jenina619	418
@sacra97	426
@hendersonp	219
@darthgexe	209
@yomismosoy	203
@hlezama	183
@equipodelta	183
@topfivefamily	149
@manuelgil64	133
@fucho80	126
@juanmolina	115
@reinaldoverdu	124
@por500bolos	128
@nachomolina	121
@peraza82	121
@pedrobrito2004	95
@jadams2k18	91
@jennimorillo	79
@spirajn	32
@jorgebgt	26
@yonnathang	24
@roronoa07	17
@bntcamelo	17
@necho41	15
@chiminguito	17
@jjqf	10
@garybilbao	7
@tramelibre	3
@maria1989	1
@flaws	1

source: https://steemyy.com/outgoing/

There are currently 31 authors from Venezuela in this program. The number of upvotes that they received depends on the time they were taken into the program and also on the amount of posts that they have written.

A big thanks to the delegators of the program

The program has evolved also thanks to the precious aid of some people that have delegated to @help.venezuela:

Delegators	Steem Power
@akdx	50
@crypto.piotr	100
@equipodelta	20
@garybilbao	5
@hlezama	30
@lanzjoseg	10
@majes.tytyty	25
@mariusfebruary	2000
@preparedwombat	125
@realself	1000
@topfivefamily	10
@yasu.pal	40
@yasu24	1
@yonnathang	5
@achim03	750

How powerful was the upvote by @help.venezuela during this year?

At the beginning, the program has started with 750 SP but soon some people delegated additional SP to the program. Thanks to the help of the community, @help.venezuela won a price and a 1 year delegation of 1000 SP. This contest also allowed the program to be better known and we got additional delegations. At the peak the Steem Power at the disposal of the program was around 8000 SP. This gave quite meaningful upvotes. After the hard fork and with lower prices, the program not only saw its voting power diminished, we also lost some important delegations because people powered down. At the end of the year the SP at the disposition of @help.venezuela was 5300. At 100% voting power, this gives an upvote value of around 0.04 Usd.

How will the program evolve?

After the hard fork, the curation rewards became more significant and 100% of these rewards were powered up so that the Steem Power of the account itself has grown constantly to reach 1930 Steem Power by the end of 2019. To face the loss in delegations, I delegated 750 SP to @help.venezuela. We start the year now with 6'126 Steem Power to upvote the posts of the Venezuelan authors.

Do you also want to support the people in Venezuela?

If yes then you can simply follow the curation trail of @help.venezuela on steemauto.

Happy new year to all of you !

by @achim03

P.S: 20% of the payout of this post goes to the account @ph-fund. Ph-fund is part of project.hope. Among many other things, project.hope employs several people from Venezuela and pays them monthly in steem!