Fool me once, fool me twice

When I am on my home turf in the U.S., I consider myself to be a fairly "together", competent sort of person. I have my moments of forgetfulness or carelessness, but they're not too frequent, and the consequences are minor.

I see no particular reason why this should vary due solely to a change in location, but it seems to. It's as if I leave my brain at the border. Well, this particular border (U.S.-Nicaragua) at least, since I have successfully traveled to some 15 other countries without incident.

In the past five months in San Juan, I've committed a fair number of garden-variety gaffes, like locking the keys in the car; getting another key stuck in the lock of a gate; scraping the paint on the car's sideview mirror while parking really poorly; being cheated on prices at the market; and so forth. Nothing to stop the earth's rotation, and easy enough to overcome after a day or two of mentally berating myself.

Yesterday was different. I'm filling in for the weekend at the Internet cafe where E. works full-time, providing coverage for her co-worker who's on vacation. Long story short, a group of three thieves came in last night around 7 p.m. and managed to distract me well enough to make off with one of the laptops. The good news: the boss was more than understanding, saying that he was surprised it hadn't happened before now, and that were he working here, he had no doubt he would have been scammed multiple times. Also, though crime is definitely on the rise here--as is true worldwide due to economic conditions--Nicaragua differs from most of its Central American neighbors in that actual armed crime is still relatively rare.

The bad news: the scenario of how the robbery occurred was eerily similar to an incident 4 years ago when I was robbed at the real estate office where I worked at the time, which by the way was only two doors down from here. And yet, my instincts failed me again. "Me agarraron dormida," (they caught me asleep), I would say in Spanish. To put it mildly, I feel incredibly stupid and embarrassed.

I am generally a trusting person. I don't think my trust rises to the level of, say, Anne Frank ("In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart")--I've had enough kicks in the pants to be a little more jaded than that--but for the most part I find it spiritually healthier to give people the benefit of the doubt. I have exchanged words with afore-mentioned boss more than once when he has gone off on a profanity-filled rant about the thieving, useless, lazy, dishonest Nicaraguans. (Um...why do you live here if you hate the people so much? I don't see the point. But I digress.)

A good part of my upset about last night's incident has to do with my own wounded pride. I have, up to now, thought of myself as a pretty savvy or street smart kind of person--this after my globetrotting and living in a number of big cities both in the U.S. and abroad. My time as a consular officer in Santo Domingo was particularly instructive. During my first year, in the course of interviewing more than 10,000 people for tourist visas, I heard volumes' worth of tall tales and inconsistent stories, and examined reams of fake documents. This turned me into a super-suspicious person--enough so that I was ultimately compelled to quit the job rather than lose my soul to the darkness. In my second year, when I worked in American Citizen Services, one of my major duties was to help out fellow U.S.ians who got themselves into jams in the Dominican Republic--both victims and perpetrators of crimes, mentally or physically ill people, deadbeats or otherwise destitute folks, and so on. There were some doozies, and I hoped that I would never personally have need to visit an ACS unit overseas.

When I was robbed in SJDS the first time, I chalked it up as one of those things that was bound to happen sometime in the course of my travels. But really, these latest thieves must have thought "it was like taking candy from a baby" as they laughed their way off to the black market trading post. And I don't blame them. I am 99% positive that if the same folks had come in when either E. or her co-worker had been on duty, they wouldn't have even tried.

So now my question is, how many times do I let myself be duped before I wise up? How do I find the middle ground between ingenuous and mistrustful? I thought I was there already but facts speak for themselves. Ergh.