The dorm (stealing)- Carlie

                This last Thursday I felt like I was a dean in the dorm.  I was doing the morning shift which is 6 am to 1pm and had just finally sat down to eat breakfast around 10:30 when someone started calling my name.  I went outside our fence and one of the moms was standing there crying and seeming upset.  She started rattling off in angry French, gesturing to the woman/babies living quarters.  With my limited French I could only understand a few words, such as money, 2000 Francs, and sleeping.  When I was not able to put those few words in a sentence that made any since, I took the woman to Wendy to find out the whole story.  With the help of a translator we were able to find out that someone had stolen her money, 2100 Francs to be exact.  That the equivalent to about 4 US dollars.  We went back to the woman’s living quarters and had all the women come into the building and then we shut the door and started asking the women if they had seen the money.  All the women started talking at once in their native language, shouting and gesturing.  It was a good thing that our translator was there that day because I couldn’t tell what was going on.  I felt like I was on the set of the show the Real House Wives of Orange County!!  It was total chaos!!  When our French translator informed us that no one was admitting to taking the money we decided to put the building on lock down and search the women’s stuff.  Wendy and the translator started going through the women’s belonging while I stood by the dorm keeping the visitors and masons (who were working on the outside of the women’s building) from getting in.  That’s when I decided that I was going to call the building the dorm.  It reminded me so much of being a RA in high school.  Even though these are adult women with children, I felt like was babysitting a bunch of high schoolers!!  They seemed to feed of the drama and chaos.  When the searching the belongings didn’t reveal anything we decided to strip search the two women on either side of the women whose money was stolen.  But still we didn’t find the money.  That’s when I noticed that during the strip search we hadn’t checked the head wrap of one of the women.  I mentioned it to our translator who took the head wrap off the woman and that’s where we found the money.    The other women went crazy, yelling, laughing and talking excitedly all at once.  I thought that maybe they would be more upset at the women that stole, but instead they acted like this was all a game or something.  Once I opened the doors they went outside and started telling the masons who were working ( who had been looking and listening in one of the windows the whole time), and the other visiting women.  It took a good hour before the women had calmed down, and we could start getting back to our normal daily routine.  The women who stole was asked to leave and we searched all the rest of her stuff to make sure she didn’t take anything else.  We decided to keep her on a outpatient bases because her kid did need our help.  But she couldn’t be trusted to stay at the nutrition center.