A bullet in my leg.

When I was about 27 years old I was at my University. From time to time riots would occur that started off peaceful and ended in fights between the police and the students.

So one afternoon I was walking home from university, I was going down a busy street with few people and I heard a loud buzz, like something going through the air, and then I felt like a thump on my leg. I stopped to see what happened to my leg only to see a hole in my pants. I touched it and could see blood. I couldn't imagine what happened to me.

I held my leg up with force, while looking up, trying to look in the windows of the buildings in front, where the thing that hit my leg came from, but I quickly thought and said to myself: “I can’t stay here. What if the next time there’s a hole in another part of my body!?“ I took the road to the hospital to have my wound checked.

The doctor on duty saw me. The policemen who were passing there caught my attention. So, before being evaluated by the doctor, I had to talk to the police. Fun.

I told them that I needed to have my wound checked and then the doctors would pass the information on to them. They asked me if I came from a riot. And I laughed without heart. "See this is why it has to be checked by the doctor. Why do you even ask that? Don't you have a radio to talk to other policemen? How are there riots here that no one knows about? Isn't this the place that you get the calls from when there are problems at the university?" The hospital is one street away from my university, so that’s a common thing.

I was upset. First I get shot… well, we realized that after the X-ray of my leg came and we saw that it was a plastic pellet that I had inside that hole in my leg. After receiving the shot I have to put up with these policemen who treat me as a criminal who just faced policemen or robbers.

I get through the bad stuff and then I have to go home, to later find out the next day that even the local newspaper had mentioned me. "Young student is shot in the leg, by a stranger."

The things one goes through, such madness!