Surprise Visit!

This is called a garafa. It is a gas tank we use to run our stoves here in Bolivia. Due to a small, but real, risk of explosion, we keep the garafas chained up outside our homes. A hose is used to move the gas to the kitchen when we need to cook. As you can see, we keep a chain and padlock on our garafa. If we don't, they tend to "walk away."

On Friday morning I got up and started to cook breakfast for Gerson and me. Much to my surprise, my stove wouldn't light. At first I blamed Gerson, since I had asked him several times over the last few weeks to refill our extra garafa because I knew this one was running dry. However, when he went to unlock the garafa to take it to get a refill so he could have his breakfast, imagine his surprise to find the padlack snapped open and the gafafa gone!

We quickly realized we had been robbed in the night. We have a fence around our property. Gerson decided to take our extra garafa for a refill (he still wanted breakfast!). While he was gone, I walked the property behind our house and found a HUGE hole snipped in our fence. The picture above is of the fence once it was fixed again! I was so shocked by it all, I forgot to take a picture of the hole! (I know, Keetha. The cardinal sin of a blogger -- to FORGET such an important picture!)

We called Gerson's dad to come and mend the hole. If you look closely at the wire fence in the picture, you can see where he had to wire it back together. By the way, we weren't the only ones robbed! Our neighbor, Miriam, also had her stolen that night!

Through this all, I realized I haven't even posted pictures of where we live. So, I'm taking this opportunity to do that as well. This is our home -- but we only live in about 1/3 of it! This house is divided into 2 apartments. We live on the side with the doghouse. It is a 3 room apartment (not including the bathroom) -- a living room (right inside the door, with the 2 windows, one on each outside wall), the kitchen/dining room (which has no windows and is the middle room), the bedroom (the last window you see on the far left) and a bathroom off the bedroom (with the window above the doghouse). It's a small little place, but it's cozy for the two of us. Miriam lives on the other side of the house.

This is also part of the property. Think of this as a picture taken from our small porch. As you can see, we have several other buildings on the property. The buiding beside the large truck also has 2 small apartmentes. The other building on the left side of the picture has 3 apartments, with the biggest one being in the middle. We have lots of neighbors -- all WGM missionaries and a lot of them teachers at the Learning Center.