BARQUISIMETO, Venezuela (AP) – Samuel Andrés Mendoza carefully selects dozens of colored pencils spread out on his kitchen table, humming a reggaeton song while deftly contrasting the Dragon Ball anime character taking shape on his sketchbook.
It’s not just a pastime for the 14-year-old. Without his mother’s knowledge, he started selling his drawings on his Twitter page to help the family get by and to pay for a special diet that doctors say he needs in Venezuela’s difficult economy.
“Hi. I’m Samuel, I’m selling my drawings for $ 1 to help my mom with my diet, buy her a house and a store so she’s not working on the street and get sick with COVID-19 and “Peanut butter will buy for me. Thank you, sir and madam,” he tweeted with photos of four drawings.
It has attracted a lot of people’s attention and he now has more than 15,000 followers and sells dozens of drawings he has on a table between a worn sofa and a rusty fridge in the small family home in Barquisimeto, about five hours west of Venezuela’s capital , Caracas.
“The truth is, I did not know I would draw like that, but time passed, and I managed to really paint,” Samuel said this month, showing his completed drawing of Dragon Ball’s Goku. “And here it is.”
In a crisis-stricken country where workers earn an average of $ 2 a month, its sales can make a big difference to a family budget through its need for protein-rich foods to deal with some form of malnutrition.
Like millions of other Venezuelans, Samuel and his mother, Magdalena Rodríguez, emigrated in search of better conditions. They went to Colombia in 2019, when widespread power outages hit her homeland just as she inquired about her son’s diagnosis.
But they returned home in December after she lost her job and found increasing prejudice against the growing number of Venezuelan migrants.
The mother of three is now selling snacks from a table in the main square of Barquisimeto. She also got a job as a cleaner. It was still difficult to afford the relatively expensive protein-rich foods her son needed, which also has a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, a broad branch of the autism spectrum.
“It’s not easy,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez, 38, discovered Samuel’s attempt when he asked for her bank account information so people could pay for his work.
Samuel, who said he started drawing at the age of five, likes anime characters, but also portrayed football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and the animated SpongeBob SquarePants.
Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares, who runs an art academy, saw Samuel’s tweets and gave him a scholarship to study drawing. Social media fans also donated him a laptop, a set of artist pencils – and peanut butter, a good source of protein.
Samuel, who said he can increase his prices as his skills increase, would like to make YouTube-style videos when he grows up.
“I’m really proud of him. I have no words, “said Rodríguez. ‘But sometimes I feel angry, I feel helpless, because I think he should study, learn and not want to work to help me at his age, that’s all I have to do to give them comfort and nourishment. ”
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Garcia Cano reports from Mexico City.
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This story has been corrected to show that the teenager’s is from Mendoza.