Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez remembers growing up in a house made of thatched palm with dirt floors, a huge backyard filled with fruit trees and a family that gave him love. Almost everyone was poor in the small rural town of Sabaneta de Barinas. TeleSUR Reports takes a look at the tremendous changes that have been made in his hometown and in Venezuela as a whole since he assumed the presidency. His childhood friends, neighbors, teachers, fellow soldiers and political comrades remember him as an avid reader, a man of ideas, a rebel soldier, an advocate of community councils and people’s power. He didn’t tell people what to do, he planted seeds, they say, and he was himself a seed of the revolution. teleSUR