Super Bolo Sundays

In Honduras, drunks have a name: Bolo. In Honduras there is no such thing as drinking socially or drinking in moderation. No, there is only not drinking and getting wasted. If you are drinking at all, you are drinking to get completely plastered. Although some Hondurans may get drunk at parties or at bars, bolos are a special breed of drinkers as they are completely plastered all the time. They walk the street in a drunken daze at all hours of the night and day. Every once in a while, they pass out on the sidewalk in some distorted position and wet themselves. Some of them carry machetes, although the majority of them are probably harmless. However, you don’t want to meet a bolo in the street, if you can avoid it. Whenever I see one in the street I get the same feeling as when I meet a vicious dog in the street. Bolos sort of remind me of zombies. They are not your happy drunks. If you look at their eyes they are both empty and piercing at the same time. They stumble down the street, but no one’s home.

In Honduras, kids have no need for a boogeyman. They already have real boogeymen-- bolos. So, when my family wants my 2-year-old cousins to come inside and she refuses to do it, they say, “Here comes a bolo!” and after a terrified look around the street, she sprints inside.

In Cantarranas there is a relatively large bolo population. In Santa Lucia there were a few bolos, but they fit the happy drunk character more than the boogeyman zombie character. I never saw one passed out in the street and the 3 bolos that I did see would just sit there and yell out bits of nonsense. One day these 2 bolos were sitting on a wall on my street and one yelled out in a slurred sing song voice in Spanglish, “Hello! In your country they call you gringo!” It was a pretty hilarious sight, as the bolos were laughing so hard afterwards that they nearly fell off the wall.

However, I would say that I have seen probably 15 bolos in Cantarranas. Fortunately, they don’t live in my neighborhood. Every once in a while we’ll get a stray bolo who has inadvertently wandered away from bolo territory. My family lives in the Parte Abajo (the part of the town down the hill) and the bolos generally hang out in the Parte Arriba (the part of town up the hill). The unofficial border that sets off bolo territory is the central park. Below the park, the town is mostly residential with dirt roads. This is where I live. There are just a few stray bolos here. Above the park, the town is more commercialized and there is a pool hall, which hosts some bolos until they wander out of the pool hall or get kicked out. There is one street which I call Bolo Alley, as there are always at least 3 bolos passed out in the street and a host of other bolos who are somehow still standing, but probably on the verge of passing out.

One day, I was walking down Bolo Alley with my host mom, aunt and 2-year-old cousin, Dulce Maria. As we passed bolos, she made comments in a very frank voice. “He fell down,” she said as we passed a bolo passed out on the sidewalk face down. “He is sleeping,” she said as we passed another sprawled out in a distorted position. “He peed his pants,” she said as we passed the third bolo in a one block distance, this one with a puddle of urine beneath him.

I am very fortunate to live in non-bolo territory. I live in pot-smoker territory, but they generally just sit on the steps to the cemetery and keep to themselves. One of my friends lives in bolo territory and one morning he opened the front door and there was a passed out bolo on his doorstep.

Lately, we have had some stray bolos. Yesterday morning at 5 am I heard a knock on my window. I woke up and looked outside. There was a bolo with a cowboy hat on our porch staring at me. At first, I didn’t realize it was a bolo and thought that there might be some type of emergency. The bolo asked if Mechey, my host mom, was home. I thought it was an emergency, so I woke her up. She didn’t know the guy and chewed him out with some choice words for knocking on my window at 5 am. It was pretty funny. Don’t worry. My windows are covered by iron bars and our doors double lock.

On a completely unrelated, or perhaps related note, the neighbors down the street told us that they had seen some bolos on our porch and the porch of one of our other neighbors in the middle of the night. This freaked out my host mom and aunt. Our bathroom is not connected to our house and you have to go outside in our backyard to reach it. My host mom said that she didn’t want anyone to leave the house unaccompanied at night, so she said that everyone had to use a bedpan. So I have a bedpan. Thankfully, I didn’t have to use it last night. She also posted the police number on the wall in case any of us saw something suspicious.

There are bolos everywhere in Honduras, but some cities just happen to have more than others. For example, La Esperanza, a city in the mountains in the province of Intibuca, is full of bolos, especially on weekends and especially on Sundays. The Peace Corps Volunteers there call Sundays “Super Bolo Sundays” because there is such a large bolo population.

(Note: I wrote this last week. The stray bolo situation is now under control. No more bedpans.)