From Gabrielle

‘Ello everybody! I want to say right off that my sisters and I are doing great (and no my parents are not holding a gun to my head =] ) I don’t know what to write about since my parents have written to you about all our exploits and now that we’ve settled everything’s kinda ho hum so… I’m going to write about our (or my) everyday life. I wake up whenever I feel like it (one of the major perks to home schooling), which is usually around 7:30. I’m always the last one up (shocking I know) and usually start on yesterday’s homework first thing. I’ve found this works the best because I can do homework while the power’s off and consequently the laptops are unusable (they last a whopping 5 minutes on battery.) I’m usually done with homework around ten and by that time the power is on and I can start my school day. I get ready for the day again whenever I feel like it. Some days it’s right after homework or for others not at all. For example, I’m writing this e-mail at 5:40 p.m. and am still in my PJ’s. I have a good reason today because I don’t have any clothes to wear. I have to wash all my clothes by hand, which is pretty time consuming, and so I wait and wait until I have hardly any clothes left to do my laundry. My family doesn’t call me the Great Procrastinator for nothin’. Admittedly not the smartest way to go about it, but many days I do school up until dinner trying to catch up. It’s dark by dinnertime and you can’t leave any clothes out after dark, as they will get stolen. It’s also been raining the past couple days so I couldn’t do laundry even if I wanted to. I’ll have to do them tomorrow rain or shine and will just make room for them on the clothesline that stretches from one side of our room to another. A bunch of our skirts and stuff are piled up on the clothesline (which also serves as something to hang our clothes up on) right outside my mosquito net and hang down in big blob. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and thought there was someone standing over my bed. Oh! That reminds of a little story I bet my parents haven’t told you yet. It was late at night a couple of weeks ago, and everyone had been asleep for a couple of hours. I couldn’t fall asleep however, and was glancing around the room when I saw the outline of a man as he walked by our window. This happened not long after our whole generator theft experience back in Cauquira so I was alarmed. “Bethany,” I whispered, “are you awake?” “Yeah,” she whispered back. “There’s a guy walking right outside Chaela’s window!” I’ll explain the layout of our room briefly so you’ll know what I’m talking about. As you walk in, Bethany’s right up against the left wall. I’m in the middle and have two sets of windows at my head that look out on our little porch. Chaela’s against the right wall and has another set of windows that looks out on the side of our house, which leads out to the main road. Anyways, a couple seconds later I saw another guy walk by. “Did you see him?” I asked Bethany. “Did you see him this time?” She hadn’t, but a minute or two later she saw two guys walk by. Both of the figures walked by the window from left to right and so appeared to be circling the house. “I think they’re going to try to rob us!” I said. We were both kind of freaked out by this point. Bethany then saw six men walk by our house at the same time. Two guys trying to rob you is bad enough, but six! I crawled out of my bed and got in with Bethany because I didn’t feel safe by a window. We could hear them talking by the corner of our house. I expected to hear them break into our house any minute. “Should we wake up Dad?” I asked. Now this is no light thing. When I was little, I once woke my dad up in the middle of the night because I had had a nightmare. When he woke up he spanked me and told me to go back to bad. I’ve been scared for life ever since. Waking up Dad can sometimes resemble waking up a sleeping bear and so neither of us was very willing to volunteer to be the one to wake him. We decided, for the moment at least, that we would rather face the robbers than Dad. The figures started again when it began to rain with flashes of heat lightning suddenly lighting of the room. Somehow it made the situation seem a lot worse. Bethany and I decided to go into the kitchen and see if we could see them from that side of the house. We crept out of our room into the inky darkness. As we were slowly inching our way to the kitchen windows, I noticed two forms looming in the darkness and walked around them. Bethany obviously hadn’t seen them because a crash behind me told me she had knocked over one of the chairs. We froze, waiting for someone to wake up. When nothing happened we crept to the window and waited… and waited. No one was coming by this window. Bethany went to see if she could see them through the window in the bathroom. When she came back she knocked into another chair. “What the heck are you doing? Be quiet! You’re gonna wake Dad up!” I whispered as loudly as I dared. When she came beside me she said, “What if Dad thinks we’re burglars and comes out with a hammer or something?” It wasn’t a very comforting thought. I asked her about the situation with the bathroom window. “The window is too high up but if I stand on your shoulders maybe I can see out the window,” she replied. After much consideration, we decided it would be unwise to try to get her to stand on my shoulders in the darkness and try to not knock over the shampoo bottles, body wash containers, etc. that littered the shower floor. We crept back to bed. We saw a couple more figures walk by the window but by this time the figures had ceased to scare us. We were tired and wanted to go to bed but first wanted to make sure no one was going to rob us. Minor detail. So we crawled on our hands and knees to the window. The window was closed and so we couldn’t see anything except shadows. We decided we should wake up Chaela and filled her in on the night’s happenings. I asked her if she was scared. “Ah, YEAH!” was her response. We decided that the window must be opened if we were going to see anything. You must understand this was a highly dangerous maneuver. With robbers circling the house, they might become a little suspicious if the window they were walking by suddenly opened up and three pairs of eyes glanced out. Bethany was chosen to be the window opener. She slowly, ever so slowly opened the window, while Chaela and I lay flat against her bed. She glanced out. “I don’t see anything” and then, as she changed positions, “Wait! Oh my gosh, there’s man right by the side of our house! I can see his shadow!” We all screamed and dove for the bed. Cautiously, peered through the window to see for myself. “That’s the tree’s shadow, you goof!” I exclaimed. We all discussed about what should be done next. Rather loudly, I might add. I finally told everyone to quiet down because the robbers would hear us, if they hadn’t already, as the came by the window. After about 20 minutes of this, we gave up. We were simply too tired (it was probably like 3:00 am) and didn’t care. We figured they would have robbed already if they were really going to, seeing they had been circling the house for at least two hours. The next morning we all told Dad about what had happened. The first thing he did was point out that the both doors had two locks on them as well as a chair in front of them if someone did miraculously manage to break through solid wood doors without anyone hearing them. Oh yeah, we had forgotten about that. Oh that’s right, all our windows have wrought iron covers on them too. We went outside and showed Dad where we thought the “robbers” and walked. There were no footprints. Dad said it probably the shadows of people walking on the road that runs by the gate that surrounds the complex that we live in the. The road is slightly elevated which make the shadows seem like they were right by out window. I told Dad that we almost woke him up. He said it was good thing we didn’t. I definitely agreed, as I imagined waking up Dad to find that the “robbers” were simply people walking outside. That would explain why we could only see them on one side of the house. The “running” figures were people on bicycle. We all felt pretty stupid in the daylight. This is a really long letter so I’ll finish telling you about my days in the next blog entry. I know you’ll be waiting with bated breaths to hear how I… (drum roll, please) do my homework! Lol. Speaking of which, I should probably go finish my English class. Yeah, more grammar.

Love you all and miss you!