Peru: Day Three - Part One

Day three started with a cold shower. So cold. I thanked my lucky stars that my hair didn't need to be washed (and I hoped that we would have hot water by the time my hair did need washing).

We originally had planned to have breakfast with a family in Chosica, but the timing didn't quite work out. The person from that family that Bergs had wanted to see ended up walking with us to the bus stop. She brought tamales for us to eat for breakfast, which I was pretty excited about.

We got on board one of those crazy buses and took a seat, backpacks and all. I had my smaller backpack (which I used when we had somewhere to leave our big backpacks) on my lap, and my phone in my front pocket. It occurred to me that my phone could fall out of my pocket, so I moved it to one of the mesh pockets in the front of my small backpack, holding it with my hand from the outside of the pocket to keep it from being pilfered.

Tragically, I had greatly underestimated the ingenuity of Peruvian bus thieves. Attend the tale of the theft of my phone.

A man got on the bus and reached up to hold the bar above his head. In doing so, he dropped a handful of coins, which came cascading down upon my head, and down to the bus floor. I bent over to help him retrieve the coins, releasing my hold on my phone. After straightening and handing the man his coins, I went to return my hand to my phone, only to realize it was gone. Desperately, I checked the pockets to my bag and the pockets of my pants, but it was useless. The phone was gone. And we had to get off the bus right then anyway, so I had to buck up and move on.

We crossed the road to the cross country bus station (or really just the place where the bus stopped; it wasn't a station by any means). Sitting on a plastic chair outside a roadside market, the theft of my phone sank in and I did start to cry a little bit. It was a very sad moment. Once I calmed down, though, I started to see how the situation wasn't so very bad. First of all, Bergs had free international texting, a fact we had only learned upon landing in Peru. She was able to text my mom and have her call to have my phone turned off.

Secondly, I had removed all of my pictures from my phone before leaving home. I had planned to use my phone as my camera, so I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room on my phone. All of the pictures that were on my phone were safely saved on my laptop at home. I had lost a few pictures from the last couple of days, but not very many. My phone had died the evening before, so I took all those pictures of Chosica on my camera anyway (which I had brought as a backup, just in case).

Lastly, I was safe. We hadn't been harmed in any way during the theft. I hadn't even realized it happened until it was over.

Before I went to Peru, I had prayed that the Lord would help me to see His hand on my trip. I had meant in the people we would meet or in the beautiful Inca ruins we would visit. Of course, He had another plan. It really touched my heart to be reminded that He was looking out for me, and that even though I had lost my phone, I hadn't really lost as much as I could have.