Security Call  

                (This is being posted on April 18th and was written in mid-November. I am just catching up. It's still current.) Call me a break-and-enter without breaking and entering kind of guy. Peace Corps okayed this apartment as secure The steel bars on all the windows and doors would convince anybody, right? Let’s look again. I’m in here and my stuff is laying all about in my room. I’ll be away for the week. Here’s what’s happened in the past and what I could do in an hour here…and, remember, I’ve never broken into a house nor had the impulse to do so. Folks here, the poorer ones…or anyone, what do I know…have incentive and, Peace Corps tells us and my experience as a traveler tells me, we are targets for theft.

                So, I left the keys on the bed one day of the apartment I just left and locked myself out of my room. Easy, right? Go find someone who has another set of keys like the owner of the apartment, but, no keys. I had the only ones. The windows are barred with steel bars (rejas pronounced “ray-hass”) but there are louvered glass windows. I walked around to the outside of the window and rotated the windows open from the outside and removed one of the panes of glass. It was easy to lift out of its holder.  I begged a fellow the other side of an Anchor fence to give me a wire I could put a hook on. He elaborated and gave me a stick with a wire attached. It took him maybe 5 minutes. I could see the keys on the bed. I reached through the window with the stick with the wire with a hook on it, hooked the keys and lifted them out through the window; done!

                In my previous house I had, perhaps only a week before, locked the keys in my room on moving day. I’d had two sets of keys in my pocket and in some moving-day confusion, checked my pocket as I always do to reassure myself my keys were there and locked the door. Wrong keys. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, I dismantled the bolt and lock system on the door with my Leatherman tool (using the screwdrivers and the pliers) and had the door open in just under twenty minutes. My doña was watching on. She timed me. When I first discovered my mistake I thought we’d have to destroy the door. Then I thought about it a minute, took a more careful look at the way the blot plate had been fastened to the door and thought I’d have a try. Twenty minutes. Anybody could have done it. All they needed was a reason. Usually a laptop computer in the room or a camera or the rumor of some cash is enough and all that is a given if it’s the room of a gringo here.

                This house. I’ve been here just 24 hours. I have not gotten over the feeling that I have made a really dumb move coming here because it’s removed from my work and the friends I’ve made here and the last thing I want to do is set myself up to be even more socially isolated than I am.

                Flash forward to today and I’ll tell you that having the apartment a distance from the school made me buy a bicycle and that has been the key to a lot of good that has happened for me here. The hilly ride up to the apartment—which I am now doing several times each week from the town a hillier dozen km away, not just from the school which is much closer—has made me much stronger and healthier than I would have been and enabled a mountain bike ride, because I had the essential mountain bike and was in shape because of the distance and the hills, over some of the wildest and most beautiful country in the DR. So, get the inconvenient apartment. Buy the bike. Do it.

                The windows—slide-by affairs common here that lock from the inside (if you can call it “lock”…stay tuned)—were open. I went to close them because I don’t have a way yet to put up a mosquito net over the bed and mozzies were coming in. There is a little latch on each window that hooks into its mate on the window where it meets the window frame. These happen to be broken on every window in my apartment. The windows can be slid open from the outside. They cannot be locked. Even if they could be, the fact that they are broken and that I can’t find evidence of forcing from the outside—no marks or dents in the aluminum window frames—tells me that they were easy to break. I do wonder about the first time this happened. I am not all that high off the ground and a short ladder could be put up against the wall or even something like a plastic chair or a bicycle or moto. That side of the house is away from the road and in the trees that so prettily make the yard. They’d hide anything anyone was doing at my windows. How about the fiddle in its case? The case won’t fit through the bars but…open, with the contents already removed it fits through nicely. There goes the fiddle. And all the clothes I have not put in the closet. But, hey, the closet can be opened with a stick from the windows and everything I have in there hooked out. Everything, pretty much, but my large suitcase, can be made to fit between the bars and can be hooked out with a stick with a wire hook on it like the one the fellow so kindly made for me so I could remove the keys from the bed of the guy who had just moved in there…. Oh, yeah, that was me, but it could have been anybody.

                So I am leaving tomorrow for the week and, really, most of my stuff is available to some smart—or maybe they don’t have to be so smart…it wasn’t hard for me to figure this out—fellows with a ladder, and a stick with a wire hook on it and maybe an hour and a half of invested time. We have the disarming appearance of security without the fact of security in this house.

                Okay…so it’s not that simple. I hear my fellow volunteers—some of them, with the rest just staying out if it and concentrating on the next time they get to go to a movie, dinner and then to a bar in Santiago—saying, why are you making your time in the DR so hard? Their advice? Relax, go with the flow, don’t worry about it. Cheeze, man, chill…you worry too much. And, after all, this isn’t inner city New York. But, hey, wait a minute; doesn’t 10% of the world’s Dominican population, a million people, live in and around New York City? And they’re smart people. Everybody is smart people…they’re people.