¿Dónde están mis pantalones?

A few months back when I reported about the attorneys going around town telling people that the Wife and I had stolen our children, I was pretty upset.  It’s a small town and when you’re trying to do business and people are willing to touch on an issue that is as hot and sensitive as adoptions/stolen children, well, I was pretty hot about it.

Today brought me to the worst feelings I’ve had about this place in 15 months.  Let me give you some background; on a frequent basis the Wife or I take the kids out into the neighborhood or in the empty lot next door and they kick the soccer ball around, climb trees and basically do harmless, old-fashioned kid stuff.  One of us always accompanies them for their own safety and to make sure everyone is well-behaved.

Over the last few weeks, there have been some strange happenings.  One of the kids told me that he thought someone had thrown a rock at him.  I didn’t pay it much attention since he couldn’t actually point a finger, but the next day he had a huge bruise on his leg.  It’s hard to place blame when you’re a rough and tumble kid and you have a mysterious bruise.

Well, a few days later the Wife was sitting with the kids and got hit by another mysterious flying rock.  She looked around and wasn’t able to place where the rock had come from or who might have thrown it.

Today the Wife and kids were outside playing when the two year-old suddenly dropped to the ground and after those long seconds of silence which preface an outburst, began screaming wildly.  We wouldn’t have had any clue except that at the exact same instant the Wife was hit by a small piece of brick which presumably ricocheted off the baby or originated from the same place.

The impact left a gash and a huge knot, not bad enough for an emergency room trip but pretty severe.  I surveyed the scene with a neighbor and we quickly ruled out about 270 degrees of the field as an origin for the rock based on the wall that separates the neighborhood from the street, dense trees and our own house.  The severity of the impact on the baby’s head and the substantial bruising left by the previous projectiles pointed toward a device, unless Nolan Ryan is hiding behind a tree and throwing 90 mph rocks and broken bricks.

We found nothing, but my suspicion was immediately centered on a kid with a slingshot.  Regrettably, we didn’t find such a kid, in fact, we found nothing at all suspicious, there are only a handful of houses around that could shield an assailant and the lay of the land is such that there just aren’t that many angles that would work.  However, it was obvious to me that someone has noticed a pattern of the gringo kids playing outside in the afternoons and has decided to use them for target practice.

I shared the story with Santiago, concluding, “I can’t believe it”, to which he replied, “Dude, that’s the way it works here.  They hate you because you have money and white skin and they’ll attack the weakest, most defenseless member of your family with a slingshot and then slip back into the shadows.  Even if you caught them red handed their parents wouldn’t do anything; they probably know about it and approve.  You’re lucky they weren’t using marbles, which is their favorite weapon.”

So, I hung up the phone and counted to 10.  I don’t lose my temper easily, but neither do I take kindly to people attacking my family.  The kids on the soccer fields who responded to gringo goals by throwing rocks was bad, the licensiados lying about my family around town was pretty bad, but this stuff is deadly.  A small child hit with a brick could be fatal, and I know better than to imagine that anyone here would care if a gringo toddler was blinded, impaired or killed by a Guatemalan kid with a slingshot.

It’s not that kids around the world aren’t bad and don’t throw rocks or use BB guns, but realizing that someone has staked us out and is methodically taking shots at little kids…and who knows how many attempts there have been that have gone unnoticed?  It makes sense that if you’re armed with a slingshot or some other device that you’re going to miss more often than hit, so somebody has been working hard at this.

So, I’m kind of down on life beyond the gated community at the moment.  It’s sinking in that it doesn’t matter how safe I feel around town if the moment my baby steps outside the door he’s target practice for would-be snipers.  I know some of you readers will laugh at my concern over what is undoubtedly nothing compared to the violence some experience regularly, but when I think about how close we came today to losing a child, I get sick to my stomach and wonder what my hand in it would have been since I am the one who brought my children into this culture.