Jaime Ruiz crouched low in the bow of the pirogue as the twenty foot vessel violently skipped across the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The pre-dawn ash gray clouds threatened rain, a development which, Jaime thought, would only have made the conditions of escape marginally more painful than they already were. To remind him of how miserable things remained, the boat leapt into the air and dropped back into the waves with a jarring ‘crack’, dousing him and the twenty nine other refugees again with sea spray. He wondered whether it or he would survive the eleven kilometer crossing from Venezuela to Trinidad.