Butterfinger Blues

Please excuse me while I take a break from a very slow-moving recounting of my now not-so-recent trip to Taiwan. Suffice it to say in the meantime that the trip was wonderful and beautiful, and pulling up all the pictures again from this current state actually leaves me feeling a bit...icky.

I haven't been blogging much because life seems to be dragging its feet as of late. It's now no secret that I'm in the middle of transferring to a new town, and have been for what feels like a lifetime. Finally in the very very very last stage - waiting for some signatures from an outside volunteer coordinating agency, the thing having already been approved by the entirety of Peace Corps Philippines right down to the housing in my new town - my current town of Lila seems intent on getting in a few more sucker punches before it spits me out into my next assignment.

The latest is a particularly cruel incident involving a disappearing Butterfinger.

Now, to fully appreciate the magnitude of this tragedy, it helps to know just how valuable American junk food is to those living long stretches without it. Something as simple as a Butterfinger, by virtue of its sudden scarcity, takes on a whole new meaning. Covetous feelings abound. So when, last week, a few of us PCVs found ourselves suddenly awash in American chocolate bars after the visit of a very thoughtful member of the Faces of Tomorrow team (four bars each!!!), our bug-eyed selves had a hard time not devouring them all on the spot. I immediately ate a Babe Ruth and through great personal strength tucked the other three into my refrigerator. This was Thursday, and I managed to eat only one more bar before the weekend arrived. So far so good.

The weekend came and went. It was a typical, fun weekend with good friends, but the Butterfinger remained staunchly in the back of my mind. Which is why yesterday, returning home mid-afternoon, I walked straight to the fridge before even setting down my bag. The door swung open, a cloud of cold air rolling out over me and into the sweltering Philippine heat, and the Butterfinger was...gone! My brow furrowed, and mind racing, I pushed all the other items around, searching. But both my intended snack and its companion had disappeared.

Despite being the only person with keys to the locks I had installed, I texted the caretaker to ask if she or anyone else had been in my house while I was away. Perhaps she had come in for some reason, brought her kids, and they had helped themselves to my fridge while their mom was busy upstairs. But while I was waiting for her reply, I began to notice the other signs: the contents of my backpack pulled out onto a chair, another bag lying in the middle of the floor, my favorite Gerber knife absent from its usual spot on the coffee table, and, in an odd and petty twist, every single chocolate item in the house - gone.

Ugh. Both oddly and luckily, nothing of real value was taken. Though my computer and kindle were with me in Tagbilaran, my cameras were at home and still in their bag where I left them. My passport, strategically buried in a box of odds and ends, remained unmolested. Though I suppose that was smart. A gorgeous, bright orange underwater camera might raise some eyebrows if it suddenly appeared in town, but chocolate is easily disposed of. The curious thing, of course, was how they - whoever they are - got in. The lock still intact on the front door means the only other obvious point of entry is an upstairs window. The window can be prevented from opening by inserting a nail into a hole in track on which the window slides, but with the Philippines' humidity, neither wood nor nail maintain their integrity forever. With enough force, Butterfinger.

The whole thing has me feeling a bit morose, but if the break in had happened six months ago it would have likely been the last straw. At this point, it comes on the tail of many other invasive events: peeping toms, drunken men leaning over the fence, finding someone else's pictures on my computer back when I was still living with a host family... In a society that already has very few inclinations toward privacy or the notion of personal space, being a tall, white, female foreigner in a town completely unaccustomed to such apparitions is something of a perfect storm. I come home feeling completely overexposed, and I come home to hide. Which is why finding someone has eaten the Butterfinger right out of my fridge is almost, ALMOST, funny.

The lesson here: When live gives you four candy bars, eat them all at once.