The mother of all blog posts

So, it would be safe to say that the past week has been exciting. Not necessarily exciting in a good way, but exciting nonetheless. Last Thursday night, Miah got invited out to play futbol-cinco with some of our Tico friends (and Zack). After the sweaty, hard-fought tie, we all decided a pit stop at the local bull-riding festival was in order. We stayed there most of the night and didn't make it home till about midnight, at which point we set about our typical going to bed tasks... toothbrushing and the like. It wasn't until Leslie walked in to the bedroom and said "Miah, come take a look at this" that we knew something was amiss.

There was glass strewn all over our bedroom floor and the curtains for the window were flapping about wildly even though the window was closed. Immediately, we walked through the house only to discover (much to our dismay) that the guitar, the laptop, and both of our IPods were gone. We began cleaning up the glass in shocked silence, waiting for our emotions to kick in to what had just happened. We both felt an overwhelming sadness, not anger and not fear, and spent the next few hours talking and re-evaluating the world around us, since sleep was not going to find us anytime soon. The next morning we went to the office to talk to our boss and then into Santa Cruz to talk to the judicial office to open an investigation. Thankfully the lawyer who works for our organization was a great help to us and walked us through a process that we would have never known exisited otherwise. This was especially helpful because everytime we went to the local police office, it was closed, and therefore not much help at all.

We spent the remainder of the day around the house, in sort of a weird mood that we couldn't break. All our entertainment had been taken, so we read and read and read (which also continued for the rest of the weekend). That night, two investigators showed up and questioned Miah about what happened for a second time. Then they began CSI 27 de Abril, dusting for fingerprints and conducting a full search around our house. The rest of the weekend was uneventful (although we did get to watch some of the basketball tournament, extremely happy to see college sports again).

Monday morning we finally got a new pane of glass to fix the window and two members of the Foundation's construction crew started welding metal bars for our doors and windows. A friend in town came by to tell us that he found out who the thief was and to return the IPod speakers that had been stolen. He suggested we go talk to the thief in person and see if we could get him to return the stuff without police involvement.

The suspect's house was not 100 meters down the street from us, but when we got there, only his parents were around. We began the toughest Spanish conversation we've had yet, explaining the situation and that his son's name had been given to us. They did not even question what we said and offered that we could wait until he returned, so wait we did.....for two awkward hours we sat at the thief's house with his parents glancing over at us every so often and the mother trying to be hospitable by giving us each an orange. When he finally arrived, we showed him the speakers and said we were told he was the one selling the stolen items. He quickly got defensive and kept demanding to know who had told us. We said if we could just get our stuff back, the issue would end there, but he refused to cooperate. So we contacted the police again, and are just hoping that they act quick enough to recover our things.

Apparently he is having trouble selling the items, because everyone in our town and the neighboring town know that they are ours. It is extremely frustrating because our stuff seems so close, but there is nothing else we can personally do to get it back. It is very encouraging that so many people have been willing to help us though, and their kindness just reinforces our belief that we are doing the right thing by helping the people here. We'll keep you posted as to what happens, and hopefully this story will have a happy ending.

Love,
Team Wander