November 23, 2002

Do you ever wonder ‘why’, ‘why me?’ I have been asking myself those very two questions for the past week, the past year, I mean, since I arrived. Two Sundays ago, I returned home from my typical weekend foray in Praia food shopping, seeing the most current movie, networking for projects, and hanging out with fellow volunteers. My second cat, the white one who had been deathly ill just a month earlier, was not in the house. I didn’t think twice because I generally give them 48 hours to come home before I really start worrying. By Wednesday, I had secretly gone through the emotions of sadness, anger, denial, and then acceptance that he was dead. I even thought momentarily that it would now be easier to bring home one cat in a carrier rather than two. My life had become simpler – or had it?

Wednesday afternoon, I casually mentioned to Tinha, my forty-something neighbor and mother of six, that my cat had been missing and had she seen him. She said that her youngest son had just spotted him the day before when herding the goats in the riverbed downstream from us (the river is dry right now) and found it odd that he was so far from home. He was crying and then he bolted up the mountainside. She then turned to the mountainside facing our houses and said, “Look, there he is right now!” I had no my glasses, and spotted some white things, perhaps plastic bags, and was doubtful. Neighbors tend to hang rice sacks amongst the corn to scare off intruding monkeys. She then sent her seven-year-old daughter Ana over with two small neighbors to investigate, as I watched in awe and confusion from my front yard. Once they reached the white blob, it fled up the mountainside, and I was immediately frustrated and relieved all at once. I grabbed my house keys and a pillowcase, and decided to go catch him myself. The sun was just setting behind the mountains, and Tinha begged me not to go because it would be dark soon. I couldn’t leave him there though because I figured it had been four days since he had water and possibly food. He’s not such a good mouser. In fact, I have never seen him catch anything, although his brother catches large rats, spiders, and lizards.

As I climbed the mountainside in my flip-flops, I realized how dumb I possibly was. The dry earth kept on crumbling beneath me, the corn cracking as I grabbed it for support. I whistled for him, but there was no answer. After thirty minutes, I decided to give up because I was well up on the mountainside, and it was growing increasingly dark. So dark, that there was a small landslide beneath me, and I fell forward, my knee cracking into a rock, and my other leg forced into a split position. With my knee throbbing, I headed down the hill and wondered if my neighbors had seen me fall. That night, I slept lightly with my dreams interrupted by intermittent cat cries from the mountainside.

By morning, my neighbors were well aware that I was panicked because the cat hadn’t come home and they had heard its cries all night – even they hadn’t slept well. I put on my sturdy tennis shoes, grabbed the cat food bag, my camera, a pillowcase, and headed up the mountainside again at 6 a.m. I reasoned that the cat has probably gotten lost in the sense that he left my house down a familiar path and was scared by the neighbor’s goat herder up a mountain he didn’t know. I figured that, despite being so close to home, he didn’t realize how close he was.

As I ascended the mountain, my neighbors feeding their livestock, children walking to school, and cars leaving the valley became small specks. I never realized how high the valley walls were until I was increasingly higher and higher. I noticed things like an owl in flight. The eighty-seven year old neighbor who lives above me was even higher up on the facing mountainside. I wondered what he was doing at 6:30 a.m. I later learned that he leads their two dogs up there each morning to tie at the cliffs to scare away the monkeys. As I looked on from my perch, I could even hear the chatter of the monkeys, his tiny frame maneuvering through cornfields. I called the cat over and over, but heard no response. I contemplated climbing higher to where I assumed he was located, but then decided it was too risky. I dumped the cat food and headed home around 8 a.m., snapping a few opportune photos of my cluster of houses before leaving. I was surprised to see that my courtyard was largely visible from up above, but luckily not my latrine through the bathroom door!

While heading down, I ran through the events of the past week. I hated myself for sending Ana to see if that was really my cat on the mountainside. That may have been my only chance to get him before he died of starvation or dehydration. To make matters worse, Ana had sucked in her cheeks the night before when dramatizing for me what he looked like before he fled from her– thin, starving. I didn’t know whether to trust her, but I suddenly filled with this panic that my cat would die of starvation right before my own eyes because I had been unable to coax him down the mountainside. The stench would reach our houses, and scavenger birds would fly above. My karma would be tainted forever. It had been much better a few days earlier when I accepted his death as being quick and painless down river. Now, it was like a kidnapped child not being found and dreading the impending retrieval of a corpse. I admit that I have grown attached to my cats because they provide companionship in a sometimes-lonely village. My neighbors tried to be sympathetic and continuously comforted me with kind words that he was ‘resting in a cave’ and would return home.

I had my women’s painting group that afternoon, although I wanted to cancel it. Just before class, I heard the cat crying and ran out my front door in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. His brother (second cat) began crying, jumped my front yard fence, and crossed the riverbed towards his cries. Neighbors stopped their chores momentarily, as a Disney scene unfolded like in the movie ‘Homeward Bound’ where the cat and dog shared adventures on their way home. But then the cries stopped and the second cat headed back towards me in disappointment. After the painting group, many women invited me over to chat at their houses, a normal occurrence. I excused myself and headed home after Nha shocked me with, “He’s not coming home Elektra. He’s probably dead,” as she untied her donkey at the community center.

When I reached my house, a teenage neighbor jokingly yelled out to me that the cat had probably gotten a visa and immigrated to another country, a common joke in a country where 75% of the citizens live abroad and send remittances home. There is a scene in Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze where he questions how a crowd of Chinese spectators quickly turns into a mob around him. He wonders when that exact moment is that the smiles fade into angry shouts and aggression. I wondered the same thing. When exactly was it and how was it that my neighbors’ kind lies that my cat would come home mutated into brutally honest words of despair?

I decided to take my second cat in a pillowcase up the mountainside and release him in hopes that he’d cry and the other cat would appear. I was desperate. My second cat is similar to a dog in that he follows me and responds to my whistles. I had no fear of him getting lost. The cat and I sat up there on a terraced rock ledge for a while, him crying by my side for attention, and me waiting for the other white cat to appear. Before the sunset, we headed down the mountain together, and I snapped a few more photos of the majestic valley walls and shadows. You could see the small red-tiled roofs of houses a two or three-hour hike away.

That night, I got desperate and decided to light incense and pray a bit. I placed a picture of the cats up on my feng shui alter, which is where you ask for things that you want to manifest in your life. I decided not to listen to the radio and catch up the BBC World News or Voice of America as usual because I might miss his cries. Earlier that evening, my other cat had taken off hunting or in search of his brother. Part of me was hoping he would find him and they’d come home together. Slightly after midnight, I slid into bed and said a few short prayers for the cat. It’s been windy lately due to the lack of rain. People claim the Saharan sand storms have come early this year causing the recent drought. My windows were jarring with the wind blowing through them, and then my bedroom door suddenly moved a bit. I hesitated, listened, and then turned on my flashlight. There was the white cat sitting there cleaning himself. A shiver ran through me as I realized that a miracle had occurred in the Larangeira, The Orange Grove, my cluster of houses. I knew that some people could easily doubt the story, but how do you explain a cat appearing without a sound? I always hear this particular cat as he jumps through my iron gate and squishes under the kitchen door into the house. This night, he has appeared.

When he saw me, he began to meow anxiously, and I led him into the kitchen with tears in my eyes. For the rest of the night, he slept on my stomach and seemed very content to be home. The next morning, I left for the capital city with ease to do my regular food shopping, arrange the musical jam session the next weekend, and see friends. I spent Friday buying bulk food for upcoming events, soda and cookies, and then saw a corny romantic comedy at the U.S. Embassy sports facilities. Things seemed to be looking up again after another harrowing week.

Just a week earlier, I had received a thick pack of letters from ninth graders in Downington, PA who wanted to hear about my experiences through the Peace Corps World Wise Schools Program. Patricia, a fellow volunteer, and I had decided to jointly respond to their questions via cassette tape the following week. We were to meet Friday, make the tape, and then I could mail it off. However, she forgot about the agreement, and by Saturday morning, I had come to the realization that I was doing it alone. She said her tape recorder didn’t have good recording quality and that she, herself, had received letters later in the week from a school that she was now going to write. Basically, I had been given the shaft. As I was packing up my food and clothes Saturday morning to head back to ‘site’, I contemplated staying another night. I had only gotten permission to come in Friday, but the Country Director was on vacation. She wouldn’t stop by the Peace Corps Transit House and see me there. I planned on delivering the gifts I’d had for months to my host family during training later in the day. I also hoped to type out a response to the Downington Ninth Grade Center to email to their teacher.

Around 1:30 p.m., I headed over to the Peace Corps office. Time flew by, and by 7 p.m. another volunteer named Audrey arrived to use the Internet. She surfed for clothes, placing items in her figurative shopping basket that she would never buy, and I raced to finish my 50K email to Downington. Basically (laugh), I had started a memoir of my experiences, hence why I stayed there all day. Around 9 p.m., Audrey and I decided to walk together to my bus stop. Buses run until 10 p.m. on most days. She would then continue on home after leaving me. I had my black nylon messenger bag freebie from AIDS Conference and a cheap beach bag with gifts for my host family and supplies for the pool. My intention had been to finish earlier and get to the U.S. Embassy pool for a few hours before seeing my host family. The plan has been foiled by my abridged memoir!

As Audrey and I stood at the bus stop chatting for a few minutes, I asked her again her route for walking home. When I realized that it passed a great ice-cream parlor, I asked her if she wanted to get something to eat there. She said she’d get a beer, and then we continued walking. The conversation drifted between how the Country Director would soon be moving her to another island because she was getting so much racial harassment for being Chinese and the things that I felt were unsafe about living in Cape Verde. By the time the ice-cream parlor was within sight, we were in a very dark area just minutes away with a four lane street to our right. I heard someone behind us and turned to see a twenty-something year old guy about five feet behind me. My intuition immediately shouted that he was way too close to us, considering we were walking beside a street on a dirt sidewalk that was about thirty feet wide. But in those few precious seconds where you realize something, you never know whether to react until it is too late.

By the time I turned back to Audrey, he was on me grabbing my black messenger bag. To me, it was like the camera shot in the Blair Witch Project where they are running through the woods. It was him running up to me and grabbing my bag with all of his strength. He was taller than me, probably six feet tall, and I remember the silhouette of his strong arms due to his tank top. If I were asked to identify him in a line-up, I surely couldn’t. Those two minutes were like an eternity, images blurred with shouts and struggles. I realized that I was not strong enough to withstand him standing up, so I immediately fell to the ground clutching my black bag to my chest. I was grabbing it, and he was grabbing it. We were both struggling while I screamed, “DEIXAMMMMMMM!” (Leave me alone!) in Criole.

I don’t remember what was Audrey was doing, but she later recounted to me her own fight. At one point, I remember seeing cars, taxis coming down the street towards us, and nobody stopped. They later said that they didn’t immediately stop because they thought we were feuding lovers. It wasn’t until they realized that I was on the ground and screaming that they should do something. Again, it seemed like 10 minutes that this guy and I were struggling over the same bag. In my head, I quickly inventoried its contents, wondering how much money I had and if there was anything else of value. I never really contemplated giving him the bag because I don’t think a victim really thinks that way on adrenalin unless there is a weapon involved. In that moment, it was like a brutal wrestling match where I was screaming and he was silently dragging my bag and me around a dirt path.

I remember being on my back at one point, and trying to kick him in the groin really hard, but not knowing whether I was successful. I kept imagining my pepper spray, gifted from my mom in the USA, in the front pocket of that black bag. But he was so strong that, had I relented to get the spray, he would have had the bag in his arms, dragging me behind him. Meanwhile, Audrey was screaming and he wasn’t stopping. She feared that he would attack her, but she was also afraid he was possibly kicking me in the head or stomach. So, she began hitting him and finally started to throw rocks at him. At one point, he looked up to see her hold a large five pound rock that she hurtled at his head and missed, hitting his back. It was at this point that he fled up the nearby hillside through the trees. Cars had finally begun to stop, and I was laying face down, thinking he was standing there gathering strength for another attack. The taxi drivers pulled me up off the ground, and I could see him easily one hundred feet away on the hill. Then there was a gunshot, and I nearly dropped to the ground. The taxi drivers were going off in Criole to each other about what had happened while Audrey and I sifted through the events. I thought that the attacker was shooting at us from a distance, but it was actually a taxi driver who ran after him and tried to shoot him. The drivers laughed as they saw that the guy hadn’t gotten anything of mine and had, in fact, left his flip-flops behind.

The first thing that Audrey claims I said was, “Shit, I have to report this to Peace Corps, but I can’t because I am not supposed to be here.” The taxi drivers comforted me into a taxi, and I assessed the damage: filthy wrapped gifts for my host family, the front pocket flap ripped off my black bag, bruises and scrapes on arms and legs. He hadn’t gone for the beach bag because he knew the money would be in the bag closest to my body. Part of me felt triumphant to have succeeded in keeping the bag, but the other part of me didn’t know what to do. The police are so corrupt here that reporting an attack would do nothing if I didn’t remember his face and nothing had, in fact, been stolen. Audrey said she would walk on the well-lit part of the street home, which was right above us where the guy had fled, and I was taking a taxi. I didn’t think to insist that she also take a taxi because I was the one that was covered in dust and bruised. I told her not to report it because I wasn’t sure that I could report it.

Back at the Transit House, lights were on, the guard was out front with a friend, but no other volunteers had decided to stay the night. The phone does not work, and I was dying to call both of my two closest Peace Corps friends to ask what to do. If I reported the attack, I could possibly get kicked out of Peace Corps for being in the capital city without permission on Saturday night, I could be put on a behavior contract where I am not allowed to ever go to the capital, or they could ban all volunteers from the capital city. All I knew was that I was in deep shit because I had stayed without permission. I took my pepper spray and phone card, heading to the nearest phone booth. I told the guard jokingly that if I didn’t come back, he should call the police. We both laughed as I walked away. Nobody was home. I headed back to the Transit House and made some food to eat while playing the events over and over in my head. I didn’t have any serious wounds, but I was aching and bruised from the struggle – I looked like a war casualty.

The next morning, I packed up and was getting ready to head back to site when Audrey stopped by. “I was worried sick about you all last night,” she said. “ I was trying to call the Transit House, but the phone kept ringing. I wasn’t sure if the driver had even taken you home.” We ran over the events again, and she told me about how she had tried to beat him with rocks. She was scared to live right near where it happened, and told me to report it. We both agreed that to keep me out of trouble, I would lie about the time it had occurred. By claiming it had happened around noon, I would not be penalized for staying an extra night without permission. Even if it was work related, Peace Corps was bureaucratic and would make my life hell. I called the Medical cell phone from the house adjoining the Transit House. Milucy, a fifty-something Cape Verdean nurse, answered, and I explained what happened.

Her first question was, “What time did it happen?” and I lied. It was noon, but she said she couldn’t see me until 2 p.m., and I assumed that she didn’t want to miss her Sunday afternoon lunch, which really pissed me off. I told her that I wanted to see her to assess my scrapes, but that I had to get home that day. Would Peace Corps provide me with a car to get me back to my village if I stayed to see a doctor? She said she would call Helder, the Community Development Director, who was the temporary PC Country Director until Barbara returned on Friday. Helder quickly called me and advised me to stay. He said that PC would not give me a car, and that I should stay another night anyway. If I didn’t document my wounds, PC would not cover them if they got infected. All of this was so beyond me. There was no compassion in his voice, and it was just as I had imagined it. PC bureaucracy dictating my every move and then being so cheap as to not offer me a ride back to my village, considering my condition.

In calling them Sunday afternoon and claiming it happened Saturday afternoon, they had basically assumed that I had been barely injured and was fine. Helder and Milucy even said that on the phone, but I didn’t want to argue with them. I just wanted what I wanted. I wanted to see a nurse and get home all in one day. When I reached site around 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, I took out my video camera and documented my injuries, which I plan to turn in when our real medical doctor gets back from her month long vacation in the USA December 5th. She is very understanding and compassionate. Her and her husband Jerry, who gives certified massages, are the only two Peace Corps people on staff that I really like, and possibly the reason why I have stayed so long. Before I left on Sunday, Audrey was furious and said she would see Helder on Monday and complain to him because I wasn’t just mugged, I was dragged all over. At site, all of my neighbors and the other villagers stopped to assess my injuries and hear the story. Many said in honestly that I would have lost the bag had my friend not been there, and another guy said I needed a third friend to kill him.

In my head, I ran through the scenes over and over. What if I had let go of the bag, which was still strapped to me, and just clubbed him in the face right above me? What if I had sprayed him in the face? Would I have beaten him if he had been blinded on the ground with pepper spray in his face? What if he had had a knife or gun? Would I have survived? What would I have done?

I have spent the past three days reading, painting the community center, and recuperating. Peace Corps has not sent a messenger with any urgent message to contact them. They are obviously not worried about me. I am counting the days until I go home for Christmas, and have begun to realize how safe my village actually is. Everyone knows each other, and they all look out for me. I go to sleep at night with two cats curled by my side and the occasional bark or growl of Bruce, the neighbor’s dog, sleeping at my front door. This week, sweet Bruce has begun to follow me around and protect me. I figure that it’s like having a pet dog without all the work. I feed him on occasion, and he is ultimately the neighbors’ when I leave. Given the imminent threat of ‘extraordinary attacks’ on the USA, I often wonder where it is safer, here of the USA?

End Note: I am recovering very nicely. My bruises have almost disappeared. I find solace in knowing that it could have been much worse. Three weeks until I home, just three weeks.