the wild, wild west?

Or is it the wild, wild caribbean?  I know that there are some of you that wonder what we do with our days.  Its always hard to sum them up as at any moment the unexpected usually happens. Well, one of those days happened a couple of weeks ago.  

As many of you know, Miguel is working on a fairly big construction project.  With the big construction projects in this country, even the little ones at that, come common issues with learning which employees you can really trust and which of them you can't.  Along with that, come the problems of different construction materials that decide to grow feet and walk away. Well, we had an issue with an employee this past November whom we started to distrust and who quickly fled the work scene just to turn around and sue us instead.  For what you may ask?  O the tricky, slimy lawyers that do exist in this world will be able to find some minor detail to trip you up on.  So anyway, not to dwell too much on that issue, needless to say we also had some material turn up missing as this whole scenario started to take form.   We had a pretty good idea who the thief or thieves were and had some witnesses, but the witnesses decided not to get in the middle of the mess and wouldn't testify.  So for lack of some good hard evidence we had to let the issue rest and move on.

A few weeks ago now, there was a watchee (what they call watchmen here) at the construction site who saw some random guys loading up rebar from a vacant cow pasture next to the construction site.  Upon taking notice and calling out to the men, they quickly sped away in the truck they were driving.  Miguel's brother, Daniel, was actually the watchee and he quickly took off on a motorcycle to get Miguel.  Miguel happened to be home when Daniel arrived, and he tore out of the house before I knew what was happening.  Shortly thereafter, Garrett came by looking for Miguel and all I could say was that he tore out of the house in a hurry.  The next thing we know is that Miguel is calling me and telling me to run down to the police station to get some police back up.  Miguel and Daniel had found one of the Haitian robbers in a nearby town and had chased him down and had him locked up in a house.  I leave Garrett with Diego and run down to get the police.  Lucky I had some extra change in my pocket as I needed to buy gas for the police's motorcycle before they sped off to help Miguel and Daniel.  I went back to the house to await the outcome.  

In the end the Haitian was forced to speak and identified 15 others who had either bought the stolen rebar or were hiding it out. All of them were carted off to jail.  Miguel spent 2 days loading up and collecting all the stolen rebar, and by the end of it we had actually collected more rebar than what we had originally gone missing.  Since it was all stolen material, not necessarily from us, the police said to take it all. 

And that gives you a glimpse of random occurrances that happen in  our lives on this end.