The Guesthouse of Broken Hearts
We've started talking here about life, and what we want and need to do. I've been contemplating something like turning the guesthouse into emergency shelter for American domestic violence victims here. At least when there aren't friends and family in it. Lately we had visits from two sets of friends.
Since the announcement of changes at the church I've been talking a great deal with a good friend of mine who used to live here. I love her dearly. I knew her marriage fell apart here, but I didn't know the depth or details of what happened. Apparently he was physically abusing her, and everywhere she turned they either refused to help her, or told her she was lying. The worst was hearing what the pastor and his wife I love did.
They showed up after she told them about the abuse, and told her it was her duty as a good Christian wife to stay in the marriage. Even with the abuse. That to pray it away. Be more smilingly submissive.
I was so angry when I heard this! It's the same ridiculous poisonous theology that has a body count of dead submissive wives. I thought that the pastor and his wife were better than that outdated nonsense. Sadly they are not. I'm glad they are leaving the church. The church does not need people who try to tell others to take abuse.
It's come to my attention that there were at least three other local cases involving abusive marriages where the couples were Americans here. There is literally no support here for American women being abused, and so many of these good Christian power mad controlling jackholes use the move to Costa Rica to tightly control and isolate their partners. Moving overseas suddenly can be more than wanting something different. It can be about removing choice too.
There's another American wife I know here who I am picking up on vibes that the relationship has possible abuse. I need to talk to her. She reached out to me recently about something involving her husband. I barely know her, but I do know the preening jerkazoid she is married to, and I've wondered for a while if abuse was part of that equation.
If he does what I think he might she'll be trapped, with her kids. No car, no way to get away. So I'm contemplating starting to offer the guesthouse to house these ladies like her. We're behind a 12 foot concrete wall, there are oodles of alarms and a guard for the neighborhood. Perfectly safe place to hide, lick ones wounds and make plans.
The Embassy here does handle expediting and helping get out women and children in domestic abuse situations, but they don't offer a place to stay for a few days before hightailing it back to the U.S.A. There's no reason why we cannot open the guesthouse, and take these broken families to the embassy to get their arrangements taken care of. I feel so strongly this is needed.
My first husband was abusive, but I left him quickly. One day I'll tell the tale here of what went down in that last worthless week before I left, where I was beaten for daring to apologize to someone he treated rudely.
I also have some small personal experience with being stranded overseas in a strange place with no way of getting help until the embassy intervened. Back in 1981 when I was footloose and fancy free I did the spring and summer semester through LSU in Innsbruck Austria, on a scholarship because I was always on the edge of poverty in my college years. I was madly dating a beautiful Italian man I met in Rome in those days. We didn't get to see each other too often and wrote long heartfelt romantic letters in a mixture of Italian and English.
His name is not important. He lived in a small Italian village. He proposed quickly and I said yes. I must have been crazy, because I realize now what I felt for him was not love at all. But I was so in love with the idea of love and marriage, living the rest of my life in Italy. The light, the glorious light perfect for art! It had charming possibilities.
Easter break I took the Eurorail to see him, and meet his mama. It didn't go well, and he broke up with me in an outdoor cafe there in Italy exactly one day later. While we were arguing in our two languages a gorgeous guy in a sports car who basically said something like "Hey baby is this jerk hassling you?" drove up. I threw my backpack into the backseat, got in his car just to make my Italian boyfriend mad. I was far more madcap and impulsive in those long ago days.
I ended spending the remainder of the Easter Week with this other guy, who was Greek. We tooled around Rome, and parts north, into Northern Italian, my most favorite place in the world. He lived in Rome and on my final day with him before I had to take the train back to Austria we were riding his motorcycle and were struck by a car. I broke my right thigh, he had scraps and bruises.
Before I knew it he'd ditched me and my back pack and broken leg in the middle of Rome. Later, once the cops took me to a local hospital for my leg they told me that the man was a notorious drug dealer. I was definitely a terrible judge of character. He surely didn't share drugs with me.
It took some days before the college program realized I wasn't there, and started to call around, including calling my parents in Louisiana and panicking them because I'd disappeared. It took the embassy a full week to find me in some obscure small Catholic hospital on the outskirts of Rome.
The embassy can be a good resource, but not everyone is near them, or can contact the embassy. People fall through the cracks all the time overseas. I worry about those here in these situations without any idea where to turn, or how to get away from an abuser.
If we do this it will have to be after the pandemic ends. I'll have to try and scare up the courage to talk to the lady I'm thinking of, and try to talk to the new pastor about the issues of domestic violence here in the expat community. I'm starting to think that the numbers are high, maybe much higher than in the U.S.
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