Never a dull moment...

I've written a little about our "guard" Y and his troubles...
Well, we'd recently come to realize that Y's brother-in-law (B), who was our guard first, still thought of himself as being in our employ and in charge of who was going to guard/work at our house... You can imagine how we felt about that!! B had gone off to Wamena about 1.5 years ago to try to become a government worker. He didn't tell us he was going, he just left. Apparently he didn't tell Y either but Y very aptly continued his good work for us as he had been doing most of the work already anyways. After a number of months B returned but didn't work for us anymore and we assumed that Y was receiving the money for his work as we were giving it to him. As it turns out, he felt he had to give it to B and B in turn gave him a very small portion of the money in spite of the fact that Y had done 80% of the work and B had done nothing, the sons/brothers having done the other 20%. You can imagine how we felt about that!! So we talked to the MAF guy who had found us B to begin with and he agreed that the situation was not good and that something had to be done. So tonight Hugo went down to talk with B and the MAF guy, P, about the whole situation. Compounding the whole problem is that since Y went to Wamena to deal with his wife's family, the son of B has been "guarding" here. He's a 16 year old guy, N, who also works as a motorcycle taxi during the mornings and goes to high school in the afternoon. I sort of trusted him but not anymore. As it turns out, a week and a half ago Hugo and I went to a friends house for the evening and asked R to babysit the kids. While she was babysitting, N asked her to come outside and she went thinking he wanted to show her something. He said, "Bapak and Ibu went out." He then proceeded to proposition her... YIKES!! R freaked out and went inside and locked all the doors. She didn't tell us when we got home because it was quite late. She should have told us earlier but she hadn't been to our house until today. Many of the men/guys here watch movies that they shouldn't. It's a serious problem here. So after R told us that story, we said to eachother that those guys need to be fired and we want Y to work for us. When Hugo went down to talk with the MAF guy and B about the whole situation, B really didn't get it. He basically said that he would work or no one. And Hugo informed him that he no longer had our trust and that we just want to feel safe. He didn't bring up the misdeeds of his son, although the MAF guy knows about it. R was there too and she said that B was being very hard-headed and seemed to not understand at all. He said to Hugo that he felt Hugo didn't like him... hmmm.... Sadly because of the crazy culture here we are left with two options. We can have B work for us with Y being his sub or have a completely new guy. This makes us very very sad because we really like Y and feel safe when he's working and we know we can trust him. As a Westerner we think, well, why can't he just work for us? Well, there would be constant problems with B, the brother-in-law. These are a very hard-headed people who are very slow to forget any perceived slight or misdeed done to them. We aren't sure yet what the fall-out from this will be but in the meantime, we have no guard or yard guy... (yards here take a ton of work to keep up as everything grows like crazy...) P's son, who guards across the road and our other neighbours guard are going to keep an eye on things in the meantime until we get things worked out. Please pray for things to reach a peaceful conclusion and that the safety of our family is not in jeapardy.