Three

Five years ago (ah, how rapidly time is passing in my old age) I spent six months working in Central America. A month of this time was spent learning (or, more accurately, failing to learn) Spanish in Guatemala. During this time, pretty much everyone I met was robbed. Some of these occurrences were more distressing then others. Nikki had her camera stolen from the bedroom of her homestay. Luckily, she had just enough money to buy another. Unluckily, she has not learnt from her earlier experience, and this camera lasted three days before being stolen. Some people had their passports taken when their bags were slashed. Others returned from a swim to discover that their picnic lunches had mysteriously vanished. We learnt to viciously guard anything that could be conceived as having any value at all.

My turn to be robbed came when I spent a weekend away from language school with my boyfriend in a romantic lakeside hotel. It was a cheap hotel, but there were locks on the doors, so we thought we’d probably be okay leaving stuff in the room. Coming back after dinner, we discovered we were wrong. The door had been smashed in, and the contents of our backpacks were strewn all over the room.

Fortunately, we had taken our passports and money out with us and, as we searched through the debris, we realized that the robbers hadn’t been able to find much of value. A few books had been taken, and the batteries out of my walkman (although, oddly not the walkman itself – clearly too old and crappy even for a Guatemalan thief to bother with). The only other thing missing was, you guessed it, my tampons.

Who would steal tampons but leave a walkman, we wondered. All we could postulate was that perhaps “western” tampons were hard to come across in this part of Guatemala, and could be hawked on the street (along with batteries) to passing tourists. That must be it, we decided as we got into bed. I plumped up my pillows and discovered that there, tucked deep inside the pillowcase of the bottom pillow, were my missing tampons.

This remains one of the great, unexplained mysteries of my life. Any ideas, please let me know.