The Silver Lining...Sort Of

As some of you may know, our house was broken into a little over a month ago, which was, of course, an unpleasant experience.  Following the break-in the local police came to our house along with various other people, including several photographers.  I think there were about 30 men standing around our yard asking me questions in Indonesian that I was not doing a good job of understanding or answering in my state of stress.  Anyway, I assumed the photographers were part of the police investigation…and then this newspaper article made its way into Chris’s mailbox at work a couple weeks ago…

Yes, that’s an ever-so attractive (ugh) photo of me looking like I’m about to get sick (I felt like I was going to at the time), and Sadie, the poor dog that the robbers poisoned.  The headline of the article roughly translates to:  “Hostility toward a pilot’s house, the thief poisoned the dog”.  It is clear that the dog poisoning was a main focus of the article, although there are a couple of very intelligent quotes from yours truly that appeared to be lifted directly from the police report we filed including,

“They gave the dog poison, but she didn’t die, just threw-up”

and

“While someone was in our house my husband was flying and I was out eating.” 

My favorite is the quote at the end of the article, which I clearly did not intend to be published in the newspaper…

“We had money in a drawer, but they didn’t take it, they just stole my laptop.”

Great, let’s advertise in the paper that we have drawers full of money in our house (we don’t, well, not much money anyway) so any other interested thieves can start planning their next visit.

The best part about this article is that it appeared on the front page of the paper, the FRONT PAGE!  This gives you some insight into just how small the island we live on is, and how Westerners are viewed here (borderline celebrity status at times).

So there you have it, Sadie and I were front page news on the island of Tarakan, and I clearly came off as both attractive and eloquent (bahahaha, far from it)…I can now say I had my proverbial 15 minutes (or 1 day) of fame.  Likely this will be the only time I make the front page of any paper (hopefully, unless it’s for something a lot more fun than this), so I have to smile a little about that silver lining to an otherwise not-so-great experience.