Some Not So Good News

I was planning on blogging next about the trips I took to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but instead I'm writing about our house being robbed on Monday night.

Around 8:00 pm, four young, masked black dudes came into the house with knives while three of my roommates were home (luckily for me, I was not home when this happened). Two of my roommates tried to fight back and got roughed up a little, but not too bad; one guy got a lightly bruised eye and a fat lip, and the other has a swollen ankle. They tied up my roommates and stole all the laptops and desktop computers in the house as well as various other electronic devices, including my camera, my USB stick MP3 player, and my OLPC laptop.

The laptop isn't such a huge deal since it wasn't all that useful and contained no personal data, but my camera was a nice one and had all my pictures on it; I had downloaded them to Pedro's computer, but that was stolen too. They also stole my damn flip flops (Ipanemas, nice ones) that I bought in Rio and some other trivial stuff. Thankfully my passport and all my important documents are still there. Curiously, they didn't steal my DVDs.

Apparently this kind of thing is common and it isn't. You hear about people getting mugged or robbed or made to withdrawl money by street thug types, but my roommate Thomas said he's lived in Barão Geraldo for 7 years and this is the first time this has happened to him. My roommates said robbers like to target student houses because students are relatively rich and relatively lax about security; with so many people living together (in our case 8), friends come and go and you don't necessarily know everyone. Consequently, the door is usually unlocked when we're there. There's nothing we could have done much differently to prevent this; the robbers jumped our gate and came in through the front door which was unlocked since people were home.

According to my roommates, it's usually young black guys who do this kind of thing; while Brazilians themselves may be less racist, it is still unfortunately the case that in Brazilian society the darker you are, the poorer you tend to be.

Fuckin' social and economic stratification breeding crime. I want my camera and my sandals back...