Hammocks, E-Coli, and Liquados #3: Homemade Barbed Wire – Tegucigalpa, Honduras

3: Homemade Barbed Wire
My first week and my first Friday…we had a serious party and then the taxi dropped me off at the bottom of my street in a dark alley – alone. My house was guarded by a tall metal gate topped with broken glass bottles. You would think this would make me feel safe…until the 40 year old drunk man comes straight at me with a machete. Neighborhood watch my bloody…back. What do you do? I found myself clutching my keys as if I were readying a weapon in my defense. The door is jammed and Jefe (”chief”) and I are face to face. So I asked for his help, handed him my keys and to no avail…took them back and cursed the lock. I made it inside, Jefe stumbled away and I think machetes should require a permit.

Hurricane Mitch Aftermath
I’m accident prone. My freshman year I fell three stories out of my apartment window, broke my back – compress fractured T12…you don’t want to know. So my NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE in Los Pinos isn’t far from expected. We’re doing housing surveys for ACP. The requirement for getting the loans is a daily family income of less than 7 cents a day. So we’re on the dirt cliffs, jumping from one home built with chicken wire, car batteries and plastic tarps to the next. I thought I was on a walkway but instead found an eroded water trail, my feet slipped from under me and I had little to grab besides passing roots and rocks. I layed on my side falling, screaming, laughing even until Adid handed me a stick which only made for two of us in need of rescue. I don’t remember how it ends…except that hand sanitizer is not a good idea on bloody wounds.

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