Dinero?? Dinero??

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So... I think I should write about my worst night in Brazil: last Saturday night, also, conicidentally, my first night in this country. I thought about just attaching in this journal the blurb that I wrote just after this incident occured, but I decided maybe some hindsight could do me some good. So here goes the story.

We arrived to Florianopolis in the evening and were taken by private bus from the airport to our Pousada in Lagoa, a very touristy and wealthy area of the island that is a mixture of Atlanta´s Buckhead (the way it used to be) and Midtown with bars, restraunts, cafes, shopping, and little kitshy stores. Think of the little strip off of Peachtree Street with JR Thomas and Shipfifers, and that´s what these places look like. Anyway, we got to our Pousada with no difficulties and we had settled into our rooms. I was staying with Sohmer and Shannon in a three person suite on the bottom floor of one of the buildings. We were so excited to be in Brazil and to finally have a kitchen that as soon as we had dropped off our bags we were at the store buying food supplies for dinner--a cabbage and vegetable stirfry with red pepper and pineapple sauce. Yummy.

We cooked dinner and enjoyed each other´s company greatly and had opened up the windows ever so slightly to get some ventalation to cool off the room from the kitchen´s heat. After enjoying our dinner and cleaning our dishes we were hanging out on my bed (also the living area couch) watching South Park in Portugese and talking with Dillon and Ivan when from the window we here this "hey! HEY!" We thought maybe it was someone we knew telling us to be quiet, so we all turned and there, in the window, five feet from where I was sitting, less than 3 feet from where Dillon was sitting, was a man climbing into our window with a gun pointed directly at us.

"Dinero! Dinero!" (prounounced Gee-nero in portugese) he said, waving his gun at the four of us. Dumbfounded, we sat there confused as to what to do. He was whispering in a harsh tone and pointing the gun at us still, telling us things in portugese and motioning for us to be quiet. I remember thinking "what the hell is happening?" before registering the gun and his demands for money. Ironically, he picked the worst night to try and hold us up, because none of us had been successful at taking money out of the atms earlier that evening and had to buy groceries with our debit cards. "Dinero! Dinero!" he continued, climbing further into the window and making that "I am a bad ass don´t mess with me" face. As he kept bableing in portugese we kept trying to tell him that we had no money. I had seven argentine pesos in my purse. For what seemed like forever, but was probably only five minutes of arguing with a man in a gun, Sohmer got up, out of her chair, walked over to one of the windows, shut it, and told him Boa Noite (good night) and waved her hands at him. We all started talking really, really loudly, and Sohmer even started laughing. I think we all understood that if we made lots of noise he would get nervous or do something, not just argue with us about non existant money. Clearly the man had never before been refused money in a hold up and was very uneasy at being halfway through a window and halfway on the street with seemingly crazy foreigners laughing at him and telling him they had no money. He eventually left the window, but not after making his wolf like face at us and waving the gun around some more.

Once he left we slammed the window and closed all the blinds and locked the doors and just sat there, dumbfounded, unable to speak. I was more scared than I had ever been before in my life, half expecting this man to come back through the window at us. For five minutes we sat there, waiting, processing, when we decided we needed to do something. As we have no phones in our room, we had to wake the owner of the Pousada and try and explain what had happened to us. They were in a state of disbelief, telling us in portugese that things like this never happened here. We called the police. It wasn´t until near 2 in the morning, in the rain, that the issue was settled, the police had taken descriptions and notes and the owners guaranteed the presence of an armed guard outside of the pousada the next evening. Regardless, I could not sleep.

You think you know how to respond in situations like this. You think you will know exactly what to do and do it immediately. The more I think about it, the more I know that we should have just given him what we had and let it be. If something like this happens again, that´s exactly what I will do (or I tell myself this at the moment). Nothing material is worth risking your life. We were lucky that this man was scared, that he wasn´t high on drugs, and that he wasn´t desperate enough to fire his gun. We were extremely lucky.

I am hoping that what happened that night was my one horrible experience in Brazil, and in life in general, and that I will never have to repeat that again. But believe me, I´m not pushing my luck. My already cautious guard has been hiked up a notch and I know that when I come home to America that extended guard will still be there, and should be. I realized that what happened to me that night could have happened to me anywhere, even in my home in America. I realized that I take for granted safety, and that I need be more cautious in life in general, not to the point of not enjoying myself, not to the point of mistrusting all of humanity, but simply to a point of higher safety and security. I will be taking a self defense class in Atlanta at the bare minimum and will be locking my doors to my house and my room every night this fall living in Homepark.

So that was my one bad experience. Hopefully it will all be up from here!

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