25 November 2007

Some people are just disgusting

Background:

In our tiny neighborhood there is one woman who is schizophrenic. She's a really nice woman, when she's talking to you, but when it comes to her imagined friends, she uses all the slang and bad words in the book. Her family (husband, and children) abandoned here years ago and since then, she's lived here alone. We call her The Water Lady because she has an obsession with water. The landlords cut off the water to her apartments so she used to walk down the steps everyday, many, many, many times a day putting water in a bucket, taking it upstairs to her apartment and throwing it on the floor of her living room. I've been told her apartment looks like a cemetery.

Anyway, flash forward to about a month ago. The landlords took out the water faucet from downstairs so the woman started walking to other neighborhoods to use their water. About a week ago, they put a door on the stoop in front of her apartment while she was sleeping, locking her in. She was able to break down that door. This afternoon, while I was outside talking with a neighbor, The Water Lady came home yelling upstairs for a son: PEDRO! PEDRO! THE POLICE ARE COMING PEDRO! They had put a lock on her door earlier when she had gone out and (we think) her son was locked inside (that can't be confirmed since we never saw anyone come out).

Her family, whom we haven't seen the entire (almost) year we've been here came storming through the community doors, shouting and screaming and because me and the neighbor were the first people they saw, they threatened to sue us and beat us up. They called the police but aside from the siren of the cop car, I didn't hear or see anything else.

Now, what's bothering me about this whole fiasco is that I am essentially GIVING money to people who are heartless enough to do something like this to a sick woman. I've never liked our land lady, she carries a bad vibe about her and now I know why. I don't know what to do about this....I want to move, but we have no money, I just get a sick feeling in my stomach, a sick, guilty feeling for continuing to help this woman financially.

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