The Boob Incident

This past Tuesday morning (about 10am), I was walking to my mini project office in Danlì from our training center when, unexpectedly, a man grabbed my boob. He had apparently eyed me walking in the distance, and stood sideways on the sidewalk where I was walking. Since the sidewalks here are very narrow, I had to walk close to him, so it was easy for him to grab it. The grab wasn’t only a grab… it was more of a caress.

My initial reaction was to get scared and scream. With my loud scream, you would think one of the passers by would have stopped to find out what was going on. Nothing. As soon as I realized what the son of a bitch had done, I got really mad (the guy was still standing there) and started hitting him with the notebook I was carrying. At this point he started walking away, and I was so pissed that I yelled a string of insults in Spanish: CABRON, ME CAGO EN TU MADRE HIJO DE PUTA!!! And I left. No one ever came to help.

As I walked the rest of the way, I was enraged. I was pissed at myself for not kicking or punching him like they taught us in self-defense class… I am sure the notebook didn’t hurt much, I was pissed at every Honduran man I walked by… for being the machistas assholes most of them are, and I was pissed at every woman I saw… for putting up with all the crap they do and not doing anything about it. I was so enraged I felt like crying, but I didn’t let myself drop a single tear for the individual that did that to me.

The sad part is that this is not an isolated incident in this country. In fact it is not even uncommon. A volunteer that works in this town told me that two times she has had her butt grabbed by guys in bicycles. Once she tried running after the bastard but couldn’t catch up. In Morocelì, the town we went to for volunteer visit, the volunteer told us an older guy had grabbed both her breasts and tried kissing her.

It even gets worst. We’ve been told in training that some volunteers have had hormones to induce cows into heat put in their drinks with other drugs when they are out in bars or clubs. The hormones have been mixed with other drugs to make them black-out and then they are raped, sometimes multiple times. In almost every case the individual doing it gets away unpunished, because the girl must have done something to cause him to behave in such a way. One volunteer that had this happen to her was sent to a Honduran psychologist in Tegucigalpa, who said that they needed to work on changing her behavior so she wouldn’t bring this upon herself again.

As far as I am concerned, I plan on walking with Max or someone else as much as possible. No job is more important to me than my personal safety. As far as trusting men here, I will have a hard time doing it… maybe with time.