And.... Part B

Well yesterday was fun and festive but today we all kind of just forgot it was the 4th. I did have cute napkins and blue and red plates for church this morning but that was about it. We had a great gathering time and then the Davidson's, Thompsons and Lee & I decided to meet over lunch to talk about how to make our "gathering-time" better. We are always looking for new and better ways to get Peruvians involved, being intentional about building relationships ect... It was a great meeting and about 2:30 everyone was headed home with a bunch of tired kids.

We all went outside to see everyone off and all of the sudden I heard a bunch of commotion outside our garage door. If you remember about 5 posts ago when I talked about possibly having to move etc.. I mentioned in there that one of the reasons we live in the area we did was because it was a safer area of Lima. I have never felt any danger being here but there are definitely more precautions to take here that I wouldn't think twice about in the US. I specifically said in my post: "though "secure neighborhood" is a relative term." Well when I said relative, this is why:

This is how Kailyn reacted after she realized all head-rest, cd's, glove compartment etc... was GONE

This was the scene in front of our house for about 45 minutes. Our sweet little neighbor, Geta, was giving the security guards the 3rd degree for not patrolling the area enough. Gotta love her!

This used to be the spot where you could roll the window up, WHAT?!?

No glove compartment, no radio, no a/c control, no control panel, no head rest, NO NOTHING!

This is our teammates car after it was stripped of ANYTHING electrical. They literally took out EVERYTHING electrical and anything else they could rip out. They even cut the wire to the battery but I guess got startled and didn't take it. Their car was parked RIGHT in front of our garage, with our front door open (our front gate was closed though, don't worry mom), kids playing in the front and in BROAD daylight! I knew this kind of stuff happened ALL the time here but when it happens so close to home (or in this case in front), it's a whole different ball game. Our neighbors had a car stolen in front of their home by gunpoint a while back so this is now the second car incident in a pretty short period of time.

Justin and Alison handled it like champs, I was so proud of them. Our team also did a great job playing cops and robbers. John Mark called security (relative term also since they had just been parked in front of our house for their shift change meeting about an hour before this, WHAT!) Justin flew off on my bike, I took off running to find our security guard friend, Cesar who was a few blocks away, Lee jetted on his scooter, Alison talked to a guy who "might" have seen something and Tara tried to man-handle 6 extremely tired kids.

The car is not able to run right now so it's in our garage. I feel SO bad for them but they are really doing good. They are probably already burning cd's off of i-tunes since everyone of their cd's were stolen. I have to say that when you move here, it's funny how you start detaching yourself from your things. I've kind of had this expectation that something of ours was going to get stolen at some point so that's how I start looking at all my stuff. Alison called tonight and just said "I just started thinking about all the things I'm thankful for that didn't get stolen like my stroller and carseat." Way to look at the brighter side of things. I'm sure well all be joking about this in years to come but tonight I just sit here and look at these pictures and I'm in shock that this just happened right in front of my house and what STUPID things to rip out of a car!

Guess well all be going to "rougher side of town" to have a scavenger hunt and buy back all their parts.