As I mentioned in the post where I introduced myself, from time to time I will tell personal experiences. I hope you can also learn from them. As a first experience, I will tell you something that happened to me a couple of months ago.
The first point I want to make clear is that I live in Venezuela. What does this mean? Well, you will see, as many have to know, Venezuela is going through a great crisis. Due to this the number of crimes has increased tremendously, reaching alarming figures.
Despite this, many of us are trying to live our lives as normal as possible. However, there are days when reality really hits you. This was what happened to me one afternoon when I went to my boyfriend's house, trying to keep the relationship stable, to see each other, despiting the economic situations that surround us.
We both left his house, since he usually doesn't let me go alone to the bus stop in an attempt to protect me from the long walk I would have to do alone. Just before leaving the front of the house, two boys passed by, looking dissimulately at all the houses, one of them about fourteen years old, perhaps, while the other didn't seem older than nine.
Alarmed, I looked at them, as they both stared at me for a long time, which of course didn't give me confidence. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't my intention to think badly of them or to judge them the first time, only that in my country they look at you in that way is usually a bad sign, usually.
I stopped, I didn't want to finish going out. Worried, I told my boyfriend, that they had looked at us strangely and that it would be better to wait until they left. He joked with me as usual and told me I was such a beautiful girl, besides telling me that he believed they lived there. However, he decided to accept my decision.
We watched them walk away, walking very slowly until they got lost in the corner. After considering that the reasonable time had passed and thinking that perhaps I was only some paranoid, since after all a nine-year-old kid was with the teenager, and considering that it was getting late and then night very soon, which would be even worse, we decided finish going out
Once walking, my boyfriend took my hand gently and we began to talk casually until we reached our destination. But just before we got to the corner where we had lost the two boys in sight, I realized they were standing there, calling a house where there was a business of transcripts, they turned around and they watched us. I really wanted to think that they were sending some work, but I couldn't ignore the fact that nobody was taking care of them. Again they began to walk slowly towards us, but at the other side of the street.
I thought: 'they will continue on their way, they are returning, it is just that, you mustn't be paranoid, they are just children'. Even so I couldn't help but feel harassed. I imagine that this is how the gazelles feel before being attacked by the lions.
Until I understood it. When they crossed the street directly to us, I told my boyfriend: "They're going to steal from us"; He looked at me strangely, I knew what he was thinking: 'but if a child comes', but I was already sure. I watched the teenager waiting for to take out the weapon, and two meters from us he passed, it was so fast that I could hardly believe it. Quickly the kid not older than eight or nine years, removed a weapon from his tiny waist and gave it to the teenager. I felt at that moment how my heart broke.
They came closer, the kid was the one who spoke the most, the other aimed to my boyfriend, with a weapon that frankly didn't fit in his hands. The child told me: "Give me the phone"; I looked for it in my purse, he could see several bills, it didn't interest them, and I understand, our currency is devaluated. I gave the phone to him, the simplest phone I had, far from being a 'smartphone'. He lifted my sweater a little in search of something hidden in my waist. He found nothing. The other was in charge of checking my partner. The same child, told us: "Turn around and walk without looking back", which we did, and without further walking away.
We returned to my boyfriend's house to tell what happened to their parents. But all I could think about was that not only had I lost a phone, but the fact of having seen in the eyes of that child, a stolen innocence.
And this is my story. I hope that my experience will serve as an example and, as human beings, teach us to have more empathy. And to have demonstrated, in some way, the critical situation that my beautiful country is currently experiencing.