Amanda and I have been hanging out a lot lately. We go dancing at different fiestas, go to Santa Rosa to hang out in a bigger city - we have been having a good time. Sometimes, it is almost like we are not even living in a third-world country. Yes, our sites are small and you can see the poverty and we are working with counterparts to try and educate the population about HIV/AIDS and nutrition for kids/babies, but they way technology is readily available and how people dress in Hollister and Abercrombie, we realized it is very easy to forget where we are. We are not forgetting our goals, and why we are here - it is just a matter of keeping our guard up. It is sad that the two years that we are going to be living here, we will need to have our guards up, but the fact of the matter is that we will. And, we had that realization on Saturday!
Yet another fiesta was going on in my site, and so of course Amanda and I went. Any reason to go dancing, and we are there. The fiesta went until about 1:30 a.m. and as everyone was leaving the community center that it was held in, a fight broke out. This is normal - any time there is a fiesta, people are drinking, and any time people are drinking, people are going to end up fighting. That is the same anywhere, whether you are in Honduras, Alaska, Florida… it is all the same. The difference, however, is that in Honduras, pretty much everyone walks around with a gun, and if not a gun, than a knife. This particular Saturday, it was a gun. The crazy part is that the people at the door of the community center were “patting people down” to make sure know weapons ended up inside, but apparently they were not doing a very good job because people still had their guns on them.
As this fight broke out in the street out front of the community center, a couple of our friends grabbed Amanda and I and pulled us farther down the street. Then as the fighters moved around yelling at each other, we sort of kept moving back. At this point, Amanda and I were fine - two guys yelling at each other with a hand full of other people trying to keep them from landing punches - we could handle that. The guys fighting kept getting a little closer, so the guys we were with pulled us behind a truck that was parked on the side of the road. Up until this point, everything was ok. The guys we were with were being protective and it didn’t seem like there was any real danger, but that was when reality set in. It was right then that one of the men fighting pulled out a gun and starting shooting it into the air - he was drunk, he didn’t want to actually hurt anyone, he just wanted to freak the other guy out. But, after his arm got tired and he lowered it a little, the shots were not going into the air anymore - at that moment, the tire that we were standing next to started losing air. I noticed, but Amanda didn’t. When the guys we were with noticed, they all started talking about it and I told Amanda to listen, when she heard the air leaking out of the tire, she got freaked out - we were both really freaked out, and one of our friends grabbed our hands and pulled us farther down the street away from all the commotion! However, one of our other friends just walked off in front of us - that was irritating. Then he came back to where we were and asked what was wrong. We tried to explain why we were so shaken and how him just walking off was not ok, but he didn’t get it. He didn’t understand he just said “oh that is just my crazy cousin - he is drunk - it was an accident.” We tried to explain how that didn’t make it ok - ya it was an accident, but we still had a bullet hit a tire that was literally less than two feet away from us!!!
People here in Honduras are just so used to it - people have guns and shoot them off when they are drunk. If someone were to be hit, that would just be an unfortunate accident. But, in the U.S., yes, people have guns and sometimes people get shot on accident, but whoever did the shooting would most likely end up in jail for the rest of their life, and the family of the person who was shot would grieve forever. Not here. If someone would have been shot that night, there is a good chance the body would still have been their in the morning, nobody would go after the person that did the shooting, and the family of the person who died would of course be sad, but it would just be another normal thing that happened that they would eventually forget about. People being killed is not a cause for alarm here - it is just a natural part of life that everyone seems to have come to terms with. This is what Amanda and I and the rest of the volunteers here have to come to terms with. We have to realize that we are not in “Kansas” anymore. It may seem safe most of the time, and we may feel like nothing will ever happen to us - but unless we keep our guards up, one day something will happen and who knows when, where, or what - but we have to be as prepared as possible.
During training last week the Country Director, Emily, told us that this is part of service where people start letting their guards down - we have been in Honduras for more than six months and we have been in site for more than four. We feel settled into our communities; it feels like home; we have friends and neighbors and a somewhat normal work schedule; we want to think that nothing could ever happen to us. But, like I just said - we need to keep our guards up, because something can always happen when you least expect it.
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