A Walk Through the Barrios

   Oscar walks with a limp.  He has a voice that has witnessed decades of darkness.  I only understand about 3 out of 5 words.  Sometimes I feel as if he could punch me in the middle of one his speeches because of the hard gaze he throws with his one straight eye.  He never gets much above a whisper but the growl underlying his voice gives inflections. 

  He spent 15 years in prison and he is now a christian.  He has been out for less then a year.

   I've walked with him twice on his candy runs.  He runs a small business out of wooden box strapped around his neck.  The box weighs about 20 pounds and he sells loose cigarettes, matches, suckers, cookies and other misc sweets.  People know him by name. 

   We were searching out the trash dumps where people make their living sifting for recyclables.  We checked out a few small scale operations.  I ran into one his old prison buddies.  He had the same serious growl.

   The places we sought were dangerous and I asked him how dangerous he thought they were.  In his many words I halfway understood that he had faith that we were not in danger.  I sensed he was basing this on his belief that we were doing Gods work.  It was a nice thought but I had my reservations. 

   I had spent the morning going through the Honduran newspaper and in the past 24 hours a victim was thrown out of a car with nails in his eyes.  Another was hacked up into little pieces and bagged up.  The previous day I was appreciating the rustic nature of one of the barrios in Molina.  My friend told me that a body was shot and thrown from the cliff above us and landed on the tin roof that we were looking upon.

    My nerves were on edge but I was willing to risk the equipment I had brought that day which amounted to about $350.  As long as whatever crime committed against me was logical and without passion I would be safe, I might lose a camera but what is it worth if I don't take the risk of using it? 

   I was filming the vultures eating trash near the river and I realized there was a 9 year old girl rummaging through the garbage.  Three more younger kids popped up and then there was a whole family peering out of a shack.  Filthy and one with the trash.  I am envious of the immune system they must have developed to thrive in such grime and grit. 

    From there we walked around a corner.  I asked to photograph an old toothless woman and asked her to step into the shade but she stepped into a watery mud pit and I felt bad so I just dealt with the shitty light.  She kept talking to me the whole time and the I only understood the words, "Here, famous, pistol, dead, dangerous." 

   And with those words we continued.  The looks from people passing were becoming graver and graver with each step.  There was a bar with a man laid out in a wheelbarrow with a swollen blue face.

    Usually in these situations I have a way of walking that keeps me in control of my exit route if need be.  Oscar still had a job to do and anyone who wanted a smoke or light got his and my full attention.  I was confined to the sidewalk blocked off by cars and surrounded front and end with people.  Usually I think the more people the better for safety but when it is a tight spot with the same type of people it is bad news. 

   I saw more and more glue huffers.  Most use a blue bottle cut off halfway and they huff away laid out on the sidewalk. 

    We took a bus through Carraval into Colonia Lomas where Oscar lives.  We hiked up about a mile through winding steps and we met up with his brother who shared his one room shack with him.  His brother talked to me for awhile about how my mission was from God and blessed.  I told him that my mission was journalism and whatever I put out into the world from my experience here will be a reflection of what I see, not for God.  But if God is the truth then yes. 

    I interviewed Oscar for an hour and his neighbor blasted Mariachi the whole time.  Oscar was talking about some heavy deep seeded issues with a voice I would not want to hear in an alley after dark and the whole time this cheesy background of accordions, hollers and tubas is killing the atmosphere. 

   It began thundering and as we walked up the tire steps from his shack I realized his barrio was covered with masked police carrying AK47s.  I immediately counted roughly 20 on the street and as we turned the corner I counted 10 more.  Down the stairs to the bus I counted another 5.  They seemed to be searching random houses. 

    On the bus ride back Oscar and I had attempted more failed conversations.  I noticed something protruding out of his shirt.  I realized the entire day while he was selling candy and smokes he had a huge machete shoved down his pants.  I had a new found respect for him.  I thought he was foolishly putting his and my security into his religious ideology and the entire time he was on guard to hack some people up and at any given moment. 

   He is not the perfect fixer, his English is none, I begin to wonder about his Spanish as he is by far the hardest to transcribe.  But he looks half crazy, he's independent and he's armed.