We returned from those trainings in Papantla at about 9:30 at night. Something was very weird when I walked into the house ahead of Mom who was gathering stuff from the minivan.

The kitchen door which leads to the garage was wide open. The pantry door in the kitchen was also hanging open. I thought it very weird that Hermana Marquez, who helps us with the house, would leave door open. The garage is behind an electric garage door, so it was no big deal, but still, is was very odd and my neck hairs started to stand on end.

I walked to the stairs to drop off my first load of stuff--my laptop and camera bag. The front door was ajar. It was open about an inch. There was a light on upstairs. I could see the glow from the bottom of the staircase. I checked the door and saw that the lock had been destroyed. Mom was just coming into the kitchen from the garage. Neck hairs now standing at full alert, I hollared at her to get into the van fast. She did not argue. Wasn't that nice of her?

I quickly backed out of the garage and told her that we had been burglarized. I was not certain that the house was empty. We were now parked down a street perpendicular to the front of the mission home. Mom mentioned that she was so glad that we had taken our laptops with us when we left town. Laptop. Dang! It was sitting inside the house on the stairs.

I drove back into the garage and hustled in, grabbing the laptop and the camera bag. Yes, my neckhairs returned to full attentive status. I would have felt much better with a baseball bat in my hand.

We returned to the surveillance point where I began making phone calls. Protocal is to contact the Area Presidency. No one answered. I called the Church attorney in Mexico. No answer. I continued to try to talk with someone. I needed to verify local area policy. The policy is that when something like this happens, we don't call the police. There is an abundance of corruption. Some say that you don't really know whom to trust. So, we don't call the police because one or more of them may be involved.

In the meantime, I got to the regional FM (Facilities Management) supervisor, who was called to be a stake president last week. He sent help. I got through to Elder Tenorio of the presidency who verfied that we do not talk to the police but that the new Church security guy would call me.

Within 20 minutes FM man Mariano showed up and right after him, Abel. We went into the house. As we were entering Benigno and Luis arrived with another fellow I didn't know. We searched the house thoroughly and no one was inside. But, someone surely had been.




The upstairs, where we spend all our time, was ransacked. It was a fairly orderly ransacking with no vandalism. Having been on the scene of a few hundred burglaries, I have certainly seen much worse. It is obvious that the burglar(s) was looking for things easy to carry. Dang it! Why didn't he take our dinky little TV? We could use something a lot bigger. That is for sure.

The saddest news is that they took Mom's jewels. She doesn't have too many, but what she has all have a story to tell: her cartouches from Egypt; my grandma's real gemstone (I don't know what type of stone they were) earrings that Dad gave to her; a turquoise necklace I bought her in Albequerque on an IACP Convention at a time when we really didn't have any money; her pearls which I bought at an drug seizure auction in Cedar and had Wayne Clark string--I think they are the ones our daughters wore at their weddings; things with more sentimental value than dollar value.

They also took a nice ancient Mayan "piece" I had aquired. It was wrapped up in a cloth in the bottom of my underwear drawer. But, the underwear all ended up on the floor, so it was stolen--that and Mom's iPod which was in her little desk with all her Spanish gospel stuff on it (maybe they will listen and get baptized. . . maybe not) and our Wii including the Mario Brothers Go-cart discs and steering wheels. We haven't even looked at those since Christmas week.

There are a couple of important points:
1) We are safe and feel very protected, even directed. When we stopped by the mission offices on Friday night on the way home, I picked up a basketball and shot for maybe 10-15 minutes with the office elders who were just coming home. I think that I have not ever done that. We are always tired at that time of day and are trying to find our way home to bed. We have deduced that the little creeps (not the missionaries) had just left or that we interrupted them as we came into the garage. They went out the front door, the same way they came in.
2) This has nothing to do with the violence that you read about and see in the US news. That is all very true and very bad, but it is all way north of us. That does not mean that there is no crime or violence in Veracruz. Of course not! I am not yet that naive. But, this was a random home burglary and one which could happen anywhere.