Hi there,
In this post I am going to tell you about an unfortunate event that happened in my house in Porto during the first home exchange.
Heidi, the American who was in my house in Porto, had arrived on November 2nd.
On November 4 we went hiking in the White Mountain National Park and at one point we had run out of internet.
We had been talking to her on WhatsApp while we were on our way to the national park, and she had told us that she was in the center touring.
When we were on our way back, as soon as the cell phone got a signal, messages started to arrive from my neighbor in the WhatsApp group that I had created for emergencies.
The neighbors had called him because there was a woman who had locked herself out of the house without keys or phone.
My neighbor was not in Porto, so he could not help her.
At that moment my head almost exploded because I could not understand where she was or how it was possible that she had left her keys and cell phone inside the house.
When I was writing to a friend, who was another emergency contact, Heidi wrote in the group to say that she was already inside and that the police had to open the door.
At that moment I almost had a heart attack because I imagined that they had broken the lock, the door and as the houses in Porto are made of plasterboard, surely, they had also torn off pieces of wall.
Heidi immediately called by video conference and put me on the phone with the firefighter who had opened the door, who asked me if this was my house and if I authorized her to stay there. I asked him if he had broken the door and he confirmed that the door had not been damaged.
The story is not to be missed. She was in the house; it was already dark, and she went out to spray her shoes with waterproofing spray she just bought that day. When she returns to the front door, she realizes she should have taken her keys with her.
Since it is an exterior door, logically it does not open from the outside.
Nor did she remember the neighbor’s name, who was the first emergency contact because he was in the house next door.
So, from the garden she started asking people passing by if they spoke English because she needed help.
I had already told her that in Porto everybody speaks English, except the people in my neighborhood since they are almost all elderly locals.
She asked several elderly people who said they did not speak English and went on their way. Finally, the neighbor who has a garage across the street came with his wife and then they brought their young son who spoke a little English.
She said that there was a neighbor whose name she could not remember who had a baby and who had the key to the house.
The neighbors understood that she had a baby who had been locked inside the house.
The neighbors set up a ladder to climb up the garden and passed her a phone so she could talk to the firefighters and when they asked her about the baby, she said there was no baby inside the house.
Finally, the firefighters arrived at my house, 8 officers, a movie scene.
Two of them came up through my garden breaking part of the plastic fence and part of the plant.
They opened the gate with a plastic card and were shocked to see no baby. They questioned Heidi and she explained that it had been a misunderstanding and that there was no baby.
From the security camera videos and the level of English of the two agents who questioned her, I don’t think they ever understood what Heidi explained and “the baby” will always be a mystery.
When I told the whole story my friend, my second emergency contact, she was horrified because how was it possible that, with only 3 days in the house, she had already put on such a show.
Heidi asked us to review the security camera footage as she had been asking for help in the hope that we could see her. We cried with laughter between the story told by Heidi and the security camera videos. We were also heartbroken when we saw Heidi begging for our help in front of the security camera.
The next day she sent us photos and videos of how the fence looked, offering to replace it, and we told her we would do it when we got back.
This experience helped us to place a big alert in the house guide and to emphasize this in case there are any clueless people in future exchanges.
Here is a compilation of the Security Camera videos: