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I don't know how is it to live in a my other country or city, I don't know if there is truly no place as unsafe as my beautiful San Pedro but I would like to think we are not the only ones that are being dominated by violence.
I want to give you an introduction to what it's like to live in Honduras. This is such a beautiful place and has so many beautiful people; we are warm, nice, loving and very charismatic people, and you will always find people smiling when you walk in the streets.
I've lived here for 21 years- that's all my life. I remember growing up in a city where I could play on the street, where I could sit outside and enjoy nature and enjoy life. I remember growing up surrounded by beautiful people, where even strangers would stretch out a hand to help you out, where you could sit and talk to someone you just met on a mall, on the street or anywhere and you could just enjoy a nice conversation. But as I grew older it has become harder and harder to do those things and be spontaneous and go out and become friends with total strangers on the street. In some way I feel like Dora the Explorer (haha) because I had much more freedom as a kid than I do now as an adult. Not because my parents don't let me have that freedom but it's more due to the fact that violence doesn't allow me to live freely.
Do you know what's like to wake up everyday and find in the newspapers that there were at least 3 heartless murders while you were sleeping? That's what we live daily. I can't remember the last time I saw a newspaper and there wasn't at least three news talking about some murder or some kidnapping. When I was younger we had to live some violent days, we had a hard period where gangsters would take over parts of the city and make a hell out of it, or they started kidnapping people and ask for outrageous amounts of money in order to return the victim and they would just end up killing that person if you paid or not. It wasn't a nice season for us, but we were able to overcome those days and didn't let gangsters keep us from living life and enjoying, we didn't let them rule over us. But it's been quite a few years since a new issue has been affecting us- that's drug cartels. I can only compare these last years to the era of Pablo Escobar in the 80's and early 90's in Colombia. If you are a Colombian, you will understand exactly what I mean. It's amazing how powerful and how indestructible this "business" is. It has taken over out country and unlike Colombia we have no honest authorities, we don't have people who will stand up for our country and say "it's been ENOUGH". All the powerful people who can actually do something about it are being bribed and rather think for the moment receiving money from this people instead of thinking long term and realize that if they keep letting this drug "lords" do what they please in a future there would be no way of actually living in here. And it would be such a waste- such a beautiful place will just become uninhabitable. It's already hard to survive, it's already sad how we live I just can't imagine how it will be 5 years from now.
Where I live the pizza is delivered faster than the police would ever react to an emergency. Why? Is it become they are THAT useless? No, it's mostly because they are being paid by the same guys who go around destroying, murdering and doing all sort of illegal things you could think of. You can't ever trust the police, because most likely they will end up doing the job the bad guys started. Instead of feeling safe you feel scared around them.
It's no secret that we have a pretty bad economy, and salaries are so low. There are places in my country where people are so poor that a family of four people has to survive with only $1 or $2 a day; yes, with only $2 top. Have you ever have to feed your family with only two dollars? Me neither. And of course people get tired of being miserable, they don't want to forever live like that. There's no way the government supports them, we have no shelters or places where we can get free food at least for a day. There's no scholarships to help this people who don't have a chance of receiving higher education. There's not enough employments, there's not enough opportunities to help you be successful. If you were born poor, it takes more than just hard, painful work to change that. So with all that being said, it's easy to understand how many people out there choose the easier way and start working for this drug dealers who offer them so much more money than they would get if they had a regular job. But at what cost? Risking their lives? Having to be a heartless person who would be able to kill an entire family, who would not think twice and kill a man in front of his sons, leaving lots of empty homes, making it impossible for decent people to go outside. I've obviously never been in their shoes, I've never lived a life as hard as them so I don't know if being extremely poor is reason enough to work as a hitman. I am not even sure anymore if they really do it because of their extreme poverty or there's some sick reason behind it but there are men who are hired to murder someone and in exchange they receive $25. Yes, that's the prize they put on life in my country.
We have such a bad cycle of issues- corruption, poverty, drug dealing. It's an endless cycle. People won't ever have a clean chance to improve, to succeed in life, to be someone better because our country is being lead by selfish people who have no interest in our people, but only care to make their own fortunes grow bigger, and then this same insane need of our political leaders to become richer and on the other hand the extreme poverty and ignorance of others pushes them to ally to the drug dealers and form this partnership to work for the wrong reasons and goals.
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