It’s the rainy season. Days filled with hot sticky heat but
in the distance you can hear the booms of thunder gradually coming closer.
Eventually the sky opens up and the rain pours, filling buckets with clear
water and cooling off the air.
Tuesday was exactly one of these days, it cooled off and I
began looking forward to getting a good night sleep. By 8pm, I was showered and
in bed reading, Nunu went out to turn on the generator and as the fans kicked
on I was in my happy (cool) place. We asked our guard Bouanassa to shut the
generator off at midnight and fell to sleep.
The night was just as any other, a noise prompted me to ask
Nunu if he locked the door and when he said yes, I was right back to sleep.
Until I heard Bounassa talking outside, I don’t even know
what he said. I looked at my watch, it was only 10pm, I thought to myself, “He
isn’t supposed to shut the generator off till midnight.” That’s when Nunu
frantically said, “My motorcycle was stolen!”
What! Wait! How? It was sitting on our front porch. Where was
the guard? Where was the dog? How did I not hear anything?
Nunu rushed outside, cellphone in hand and he and Bounassa
were off. I felt helpless. Honestly I wanted to call 911, but that doesn’t
exist here. So I got dressed and put on shoes. I went into the front yard to
try to see where Nunu had gone and I shut off the generator, so I could hear if
Nunu called for me. I grabbed Molly’s leash and while she apparently isn’t much
of a guard dog, she makes me feel safe.
Nunu comes back, no sign of anyone. He is really mad, wondering
how a motorcycle could have got passed our guard. We both really like Bounassa
but you can’t help but wonder was he involved, motorcycles don’t just disappear.
That’s when Nunu goes back to the porch and looks for the tire tracks. He finds
them and they lead to the back of our house, not the front. He realizes that
someone cut a hole in our fence (chicken wire that we installed to keep our
beautiful view and ocean breezes). He goes around our fence and he and Bounassa
take off in that direction.
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| The fence from outside the yard. |
I go back in the house with Molly and I walk in circles in
our living room, praying, freaking out, praying, I should lock the door, more
prayers, I need to do something. I pick up my phone and start typing a message
asking some friends to pray with me and as I lift my finger to hit send, the
screen on my phone changes… it’s Nunu calling, he found the bike!!!!
But he doesn’t have the keys and with the bike in it’s
locked position it’s really hard to move. He asks me to get the neighbors guard
(our neighbor is out of town) to bring him the keys as he doesn’t want to leave
the bike. I walk toward the neighbors screaming “Guard! Excuse me! Guard” in
Portuguese. The only response is two dogs barking and growling at me. We have
some friends, Jonas and Erica, who just moved about 200 feet up the road and so
I ask Nunu if I should go to them, knowing he is thinking of my safety first.
He says I should. I realize Molly is in the house and my best bet for passing
the dogs at night is to have her.
I lock the house and Molly and I make our way down the road.
I’m calling our friends cellphones as I run in my hot pink PJ’s, while making
kissy noises at the growling dogs (I hope someone got a good laugh)… they don’t
answer their phones. As I get to the house, their guard is gone and so I’m left
shouting for their help.
I hear the deep sleep in their voices as they try to figure
out who is calling their names and just what is going on. Now the three of us
are on our way to find Nunu in the bush behind our house.
Nunu tells me which way to go and we are blindly going by
the light of our cell phones. He says he can hear me getting closer and we keep
shining our lights toward each other. Eventually I can hear him clearly without
the phone.
Nunu and Bounassa had tracked the tire marks of the bike for
about half a mile, maybe longer. And found it sort of hidden behind a bush. I
told Nunu that I have a new nickname for him… CSI =)
We have no clue who did this or how many. At the very least
3 to 4 people because they had to lift the bike up over a fence that is a
little over 3 feet tall and the only damage was to one of the handle bars, I’m
guessing from the impact as they tried to throw it over the fence.
The creepy part of it all is knowing that we were watched.
The night before we didn’t run the generator, no doubt in my mind the generator
made a great cover for the noise. They knew our routine.
As with so many things here, I hate that we have to go through
it but we do learn. We will be meeting with our guards later today talking
about how important it is to not get into such a fixed routine. We will have to
put up a better fence, one without our beautiful view and we will need to get
some dogs that bark! Lastly a block fence will need to be moved up on our
priority list.
Thanks to all of you who regularly pray for us, we so appreciate
and feel your prayers!
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| Motorcycle in it's new nightly home, our living room. |
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| Fence two days ago. They had to lift the bike up over the bamboo part! |
