Taking the blow

Something awkward occured to me today. When I was browsing TankSpot it suddenly struck me that this was somewhat tank-correlated.

I'm going to give you some background here. I used to be an offtank, and I left the game about right before the 3.0.2 madness hit the game. I've since then continued to follow WoW monitoring my guild's progress, reading sites like TankSpot and WoWInsider etc.

The reason I left the game is that I'm participating in an exchange problem, which allowed me to travel to Peru for 6 months. I'm working as a volunteer in a child service program. This means I'm present in a home for street children that have been abandoned or picked up by the police. Several of them have behaviour and/or mental problems, making this a tough job sometimes, especially since Spanish is obviously not my mother tongue.

This morning I was sitting down, watching some kids playing football and talking to some of the elder children, as I usually work with the little ones. One of the boys, Elvis, was standing there calling me "maricón", which means gay, but is just a tad more insulting. So I told him that I didn't care about what he said, but that I wasn't gay. He ran over to me and hit me violently on the back. One of the other boys dragged him away and I didn't feel to bad about it, after all the boy clearly had some mental disorder.

After a while, the boy returned to talk to some of the children in my vecinity, but he seemed to be calmed down. He did, however, start to talk about me again, mentioning the word "maricón" various times. I do have some experience working with children, so I decided to just draw the line for him, stating: "I'm going to tell you two things: a) I'm not gay b) I don't like it that you insulted me and punched me." This rather innocent remark caused to boy to enrage and he started to hit me, punching me various times on my back and, eventually, on my nose.

Now that was an impressive blood fountain. I've been examined by a doctor and he says I'm fine, it's just the hit that caused the bleeding and there's nothing wrong. The staff has been finding out what exactly was going on (they suspect some boys had been severely bullying Elvis), and they fully support me, so all in all things aren't that bad.

But I took the blow. Does that make me more of a tank?