Los Locos

Las Vegas, despite being a pretty small community, seems to have a proportionally high amount of crazy people that wander its streets. Not crazy in the sense of simply bizarre or eccentric, but more along its traditional definitions of people who have mental health issues which are untreated. Like many other conditions in the developing world that we would find atrocious, the lack of care and medical institutions to deal with these mental health issues isn’t a result of negligence, but rather is related to a lack of resources, knowledge and funding to properly treat these people properly.

Using our own armchair psychoanalysis techniques, we have noticed everything from mental retardation to severe schizophrenia. Far from being shunned in the community, these members are omnipresent in the interactions of Las Vegas, and we have had opportunity to meet all of them, with varying results. Here are some descriptions of our most regular encounters.

There is one woman who slaps me on the chest every time we cross paths, and reminds me what a ¨beautiful gringo¨ I am. Her reaction to C is less affectionate, as she lauds criticisms on her ranging from her choice of husband (directly contradicting her comments about me) to the devilish properties of our dog Stella.

Our next door neighbors harbor and care for two middle age men, whom we believe are their sons. One is extremely friendly and plays us songs on his toy harmonica; the other is equally affable, despite his vocabulary being limited to the words ¨heh¨ and now ¨estella¨. There are two other men who frequent our street, and who perform odds and ends for a little money, in the same manner people here send their children to carry firewood, or to retrieve an item from the store. In fact, the overall attitude towards our town’s people with mental health issues is similar to that of children; errand runners who require supervision. One of these two men yells an enthusiastic salutation at everyone he meets.

Other people around town are less friendly, and in fact give an air of volatility. One man never wears a shirt, is covered with what appears to be axle grease, and always has rags tied to his legs, like Steven Tyler’s microphone stand in the band Aerosmith. Although he has never uttered a word, his fiery eyes and taunt facial features seem to restrain a soon to occur violent event, he once sent an entire group of school children running while making an impromptu appearance at one of our schools. He is the personification of the character Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird, tragically misunderstood and feared by all.

By far the most interesting character in Las Vegas is a guy that we refer to simply as ¨crazy guy¨, and he is as complex and interesting a person as we have met in Honduras. He suffers from delusions, as one day he pulled a picture of famous soccer star Ronaldhino that he ripped out of the newspaper and insists that it was his son. He has a tendency to sometimes display a violent personality, which he warns people about by covering his mouth with his hand.

Sadly, he is almost constantly drunk, as the money he earns for small tasks around town goes straight to booze. One day he found C and some friends of our sitting in the park, and approached them with following, ¨Look, I’m drunk, but I just wanted to sing you this song, because you are beautiful.¨ before launching into a song he made up about Minnesota, and now asks all gringos if they are from Minnesota. Unfortunately, this drunkenness usually means that he is typically passed out on the sidewalk during the day, with fresh bruises from whatever fight he was in the night before. On his better days, he is friendly and inviting as anyone we have met in Las Vegas.

I think that one of the reasons that all these people approach us especially is that they share our outsider perspective in Las Vegas: they know that they will never blend in here, as we know that no matter what we do that there will always be a barrier that we won’t be able to breech. All you can do is wear your eccentrics and differences on your sleeve and hope people will understand.
Simon