Robbing Yourself Blind

Alcoholism is a plague on many Honduran families. Extreme poverty and cheap alcohol have never been a good mix anywhere. In Honduras there are a variety of cheap liquors that sell for as little as $1 for an entire liter. It is of such poor quality that people joke that it will make you go blind, and there is probably some truth to it. Few women in Honduras are alcoholics, due in part to a stigma against women drinking. Only recently have women started to actively go to bars to drink, however those women are most likely to have a steady job (many of them in the Honduran textiles industry) and they rarely drink excessively. The real drinking problem is mainly for Honduran men.

Honduran men drink are said to drink socially, medicinally and religiously. Wealthy men often like to show of their wealth by going to expensive bars and buying round after round after round of beers or ordering an expensive table service. Poorer Honduran men often see the richer Hondurans spending massive amounts of money, they in turn feel that it is there right and duty to spend half of their biweekly pay check on beer and liquor.


Daniel was a construction worker. Every weekend he and his fellow workers got paid and would celebrate. Two nights of drinking later and Daniel would return home to hand over the remainder of their paycheck to supply food his family. After years of working and drinking, they call of alcoholism got Daniel's number.  Soon he went from drinking two nights a week to three or four. Then he started getting so drunk that he would not show up to work on Monday. After loosing several jobs for his drunkenness, Daniel became depressed and started drinking even more.

One might think that when one runs out of money that the drinking would stop. Unfortunately, alcoholism is a plague on the poor for a reason.  As Daniel's drinking habits became more desperate, he started selling off pieces of furniture, kitchen utensils and even Christmas gifts that people had given to his wife. What is worse,  a neighborhood bar would take items of much greater value that Daniel would take from his home in exchange for another bottle of booze. There were even so many alcoholics doing the same thing that they bar set up a side business to then resell everything that they brought to sell.

Soon Daniel's wife had little to nothing left in her home. Her husband was slowly robbing themselves of everything. She was too old to be able to go out and find work, but every once in a while some one would pay her to wash clothes or clean up a yard so that she could afford food. Even then she had to hide the food from her husband. On various occasions she would come back with $5 or $10 worth of food, only to have her husband steal it and trade it for a $1 bottle of booze. Many women throughout Honduras must deal with alcoholic husbands who often steal their belongings and then beat them in range when there is nothing left to sell. The women stay though, because they do not know where else they could go.