Dont Read this if youre a Jewish Mother and someone you love is Joining the Peace Corps or going abroad

Hi everyone,
I am using a Spanish keyboard (which I´m used to but comes with certain frustrations when writing on Word with Spanish spell check and grammar check) which is located at my first host family´s house in Yanacoto, where I´ve been for the last day and night. Why on earth am I back in Yanacoto? For starters it´s a wonderful place, that I was way too harsh on in training, and I´m very happy to be back, but the real answer to that question of why im here is a long, complicated, and difficult story for me to tell. I want to say that I´ve debated long and hard in my head over whether or not to post this blog, and I want to state from the outset that my goal with this is not to evoke feelings of pity, nor is it to discourage any of my readers from joining the Peace Corps. I´ve decided to blog about it only because I feel like continuing my blog as if it didn´t happen would diminish the truth value of the blog, and probably lead my readers to confusing conclussions, about future things I say. It is better, in my opinion, to keep an honest blog about the experience than only painting a rosy picture. On Sunday the 11^th, I got into a cab by myself at 1130pm in the city of Cajamarca when I went out in search of a volunteer who had disappeared while talking on the phone and had been gone for over an hour. I did this without doing, as they tell you to do in training, checking the trunk (of station wagons) for people hiding. I was subsequently grabbed from behind by an unseen asailant hiding under a tarp and held from behind by knifepoint while the driver left the city for the countryside, which is a very quick trip in Cajamarca, while they went through my pockets, taking any money and credit cards I had, my cellphone, and my real Timex watch (which I had affection for FYI!). When I had lost my watch and everything except my passport and identification card, which thankfully didn´t interest them, I decided enough was enough, if they were going to kill me, it wasn´t going to be so far from the city that I would never be found, I grabbed the wheel of the car and drove it off the road, into a mudbrick structure. The driver then got out of the car, with the assailant still holding me from behind, ripped me out of my seat in the front. And the two of them preceded to kick me in the ribs and face until I was unconcious. When I came to, I´m guessing at 3 in the morning, driven by instinct, I started walking on the road back in the direction that I had remembered the car coming to, and while, every 10 minutes or so a car would pass and though I tried so hard to flag them down and get a ride back, the site of me, which must have been awful, persuaded noone to stop, and I didn´t make it back to my hotel room until I had been walking for about 6 or 7 miles consuming several hours. Once there (at 7am), everything was out of my hands. Several volunteers had been staying together, for our newly initiated monthly meeting in Cajamarca, and it was no secret that I had gone missing. Jose, our regional coordinator, arrived at the hostel in what seemed like 30 seconds, and I was at the hospital getting exrayed, and sitting in bed with an IV in my arm. I made out good in the grand scheme of things, I only had a broken nose some lacerations under my eyes, and some heavy bruising that faded by last Tuesday, and what was later in Lima described as a mild concussion. The broken nose may or may not need to be reset on Monday, and I am not excited about it. I was on the bus at 630pm Monday for Lima where I´ve been to the doctor, to the American embassy FSO (foreign service officer) psychologist, and other appointments. The American embassy is a trip in itself. I obviously have some amount of priority service over the average American tourist, but even so this thing is a citadel and it took 20 minutes toget in the building. The embassy was built during the times of the narcoterrorist/maoist activity of the 1990s and it is a fortress. I think America could easily take over all of Peru from the embassy itself, with fully armed marines patrolling everywhere, sniper towers, and security cameras everywhere. It is a fortress. I know it sounds weird, but in the States, where everything is on tape, you get used to the security cameras on buildings, you stop noticing them, but when you leave that life, you forget about them. They are not part of my reality here, and seeing them again which I know shouldn´t be a surprise, obviously its the embassy, but just being reminded was like being home again in some ways. Anyway the FSO psychologist didn´t seem to think this was something I wouldn´t get over, which was nice to know cause she´s a professional. Though I think I come from a long line of Crazy Rosen´s and Bernath´s, we aren´t the type of crazy that sits on a couch and talks about it, so I´m not worried about needing continued therapy or anything (this is important because I can´t get in Cajamarca). Being in her office was like being in any doctors office, hand sanatizer, english versions of magazines I wouldn´t want to read but did anyway just for the English. So I´ve been in Lima going to doctors and shopping and hanging out with nothing to do, and since the only other volunteer here is Edson, who got his nose broken as well, I decided to go to Yanacoto. There´s only so many whopper´s I can eat before its like alright, this isn´t comfort food anymore, so I went out to Yanacoto to hang out with my old host family, and the news travels so quick, they already knew what happened to me before I told them. There´s a lot of lessons to take from this, and one of the main things I´m most sad about is that I´m forced to consider having a female friend of mine with a plane ticket cancel her trip in April. Its important that I emphasize that this never would have happened in my site where I am known and protected by the community, if not a bit ostrasized at the same time. This happened for a lot of reasons, and some of them preventable, and though I´m not saying its completely my fault there are things that I will not do in the future because of it. I will not get into a cab past 10pm anymore. I will always check the trunk. I will not go out alone in the city of cajamarca past 10 oclock. The reality is that this isn´t my country, and not everyone knows why I´m here, and the reality is even if everyone did know, that doesn´t mean they´d care. I´m going to cut my hair, which I wasn´t going to before, because its very distinct and makes me instantly recognizable as a foreigner (like that scene with Namond in Season 4 of the Wire where Body´s like cut that off man the cops can make you all the way from East Side). If I can, I´m going to get contact lenses (noone wears glasses here no matter how blind, if you can´t see then you do something like watch repair for a profession and never go to the movies) , and I´m going to stop wearing a watch, time doesn´t matter enough here to bother. It´s hard to keep your vigilance up 24 hours a day 7 days a week but the reality of my situation here is I will have to, and part of why this happened was because I was reaching a comfort level of having been here over 7 months, and being over confident. I don´t mean to discredit the service of our greatest patriots, those in the armed service, but the truth is when they are deployed, they are in teams of a certain size, armed, and trained in combat. I am a target just for being American here as well, but I am unarmed, trained in peace building, and alone. Its a different set of challenges. If you are my good friend and if this is the first you are learning about the incident, I´m sorry I couldn´t tell you personally, I´ve admittedly been avoiding the computer. Anyway, this isn´t a pity Matt party. I am so glad that this happened to me, a former wrestler, someone who knows what pain is and how to continue through it, and not to a female volunteer, who continue to earn my respect as the bravest women in the world. I hope from my experience other volunteers in Peru can learn from it and perhaps if necessary adapt. I am by no means the first volunteer to be robbed and roughed up, and I am saddened to think about it, but I also know that I will not be the last. I am also extremely grateful for the outpouring of support I have received, and especially for Patty, Sal, and Paul for staying with me in the hospital at Cajamarca. The first couple hours were extremely important, and without you three, I would have been lost with Jose explaining medical things to me in Spanish I wouldnt have understood. I am also grateful to my two doctors here in Lima, Jorge and Suni, without whos caring action and unjudgemental understanding this also would have been much harder.

God Bless.

Mateo