Where’s My Machete When I Need It?

Remember how I used to always get hassled by that gang of geese back in Guarambare? The ones that always squawked at me as I passed by their turf on the way to training everyday? They never attacked me, although on more than one occasion they told me that if I didn’t bring them a loaf of bread, they would rough me up. I did my best to appease them, and would give them pieces of my breakfast the way a little kid coughs up his milk money to the neighborhood bully. Even with these tributes, I never felt safe. I guess I always figured if I was to ever going to be mugged in this country, it was going to be by a goose.

One day last week I was riding a bike to one of the schools in the area where I work. I say “a” bike, because I was using another volunteer’s, (I was waiting to get the seat on mine raised). I was running early, so I decided to take a longer route to burn some time. I live near a river, and there is a great path that runs along side it which has incredible views. I stopped for a moment to check a text message which I had just received. The next thing I knew, there were two guys standing on either side of me, as I straddled the bike. The guy on my right held out his hand for a handshake, and offered me a casual Guarani greeting. Up to this point, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Having strangers in the neighborhood walk up and shake my hand is a daily occurrence. He asked me, in Guarani, something about my phone, which I had already placed back in my pocket. Since my level of Guarani is not very good, I asked him what he had just said in Spanish. He did not speak Spanish, and repeated what he had said before, in Guarani again. After looking down and seeing the knife which he held in his hand, I needed no translation. I handed over the phone, and turned to leave. Except it was clear that they still were interested in something else. I hopped off the bike and backed away. When the other guy started to walk towards me, I had a thought run through my head that, in retrospect, seems rather funny. I thought, “I wish I hadn’t worn sandals today.” I spun around and took off down the road. The second mugger chased after me for a second, but gave up after less than a block. Had he caught up with me, I realized later, I would have to explain to him with what little Guarani I have, that I did not bring a wallet with me, which is likely what they wanted.

My family here was horrified when I walked in the front door and explained to them that I had been robbed. After speaking with the Peace Corps office in Asuncion, I was informed that a police report needed to be filled out, so we headed over to the local station. The police here lack many of the resources you would expect them to have, such as a computer. Consequently, a crime like this has practically zero chance of leading to an arrest. I felt tempted to ask the officer taking the description if there was any chance of catching these guys, but I stopped myself after thinking of that scene in The Big Lebowski when The Dude asks whether there are any leads regarding his stolen car, and gets laughed at incessantly by a police officer.

All in all, far worse things have happened than this mugging. I escaped unscathed, and I don’t believe they were interested in hurting me. I only lost a cell phone and a bike, both a which can be replaced. The volunteer whom the bike belonged to was actually glad that it got stolen (after hearing that I was alright) since that bike was about ready to fall apart, and he’ll finally get a new one. The only real downside to all of this is where it happened. I jogged over by the river almost every day and now I can’t. People around here know that the area is dangerous, but everyone has been surprised when they find out that this happened in the middle of the day and not at night. I felt far less safe in many of the neighborhoods that I worked in while I was with AmeriCorps than I have ever felt around here.

It is, of course, a tad ironic that Peace Corps volunteers are targets of crime. We are, after all, here to help out the very people that cause crimes like this. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, Peace Corps volunteer to be mugged here, or anywhere else in the world. I think incidents like this only serve to strengthen the resolve that so many of us bring to our sites to affect the change that we recognize is needed. If nothing else, this incident serves as a very clear and direct message about the importance of our work.

This incident fits somewhat comically into a pattern that I now see concerning time that I spend over by the river. One day early on in my time here in Concepcion, I had stopped during a jog along the shore and was looking out across the river as the sun went down. I stood there, thinking about how happy I felt in my site, and ruminating on my experiences up to that point and those that had yet to come. All of a sudden, a guy who lives in a hut near the river walked up beside me and chucked a huge, unsealed bag of trash onto the shore just a few feet from where I stood, exploding into a heap of some of the vilest smelling waste I could have ever imagined. It was like a poetic Jack Handey “Deep Thoughts” quote that ends with a fart joke. A similar thing happened just a couple weeks ago as I was standing in another spot on the shore, having another experience in my head like the first time, when I looked down at my feet to find a muddy pig, eating trash and making some crude snorting noises. On the day I was robbed, I had started to think about how lucky I was to be able to take a route like this to work just before I met the thieves. Clearly, the lesson here is that you should refrain from having happy thoughts when you are near a river.

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Tagged as: AmeriCorps, Bicycle, Geese, Guarambare, Guarani, Jack Handey, Machete, Mugging, The Big Lebowski