How I Tried (and Failed) to Believe that Barbara Was a Drug Addict

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When Barbara Struncova disappeared, all of her boyfriend’s initial statements about where she went involved her leaving in the middle of the night to travel—to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and/or Panama—either with some Czech friends who were finishing a surf trip or with an ex-boyfriend named Martin. We know that these stories are false because none of the Czech surfers took a trip to the Caribbean at that time, and Barbara’s ex-boyfriend Martin has never been to Costa Rica.

His first attempt to blame Barbara’s disappearance on drugs, as far as I know, came in early 2011. He claimed that (attempt #1) her family quietly shuffled her off to a rehab program in Czech Republic. It wasn’t a very good story, though, because rehab programs do eventually end, and people reappear from them. And where is Barbara?

Sometime in 2013, he began to admit that Barbara is dead. And I would like to thank him for letting her rest, for managing to say something true. Good job.

His claim (attempt #2), which I believe that he holds to even now, is that Barbara was murdered by drug dealers to whom she owed enormous amounts of money for her own drug habit and for drugs that she was trafficking to Europe.

Let’s talk about that.

Could Barbara have used drugs that I don’t know about? Of course. Lots of people do lots of things I don’t know about.

Could Barbara have suffered from an out-of-control drug addiction? That’s a different type of question. I tried to construct it as a possibility, because it’s important to be open-minded, but it keeps falling apart on me. Nothing fits. Maybe that story works better on people who haven’t lived in Tamarindo. Or who didn’t know Barbara. It falls wildly short for those of us who did both.

In Tamarindo, the two common street drugs are marijuana and cocaine, so we can assume he is accusing her of abusing those. Indeed, Bill spelled it out clearly in a 2012 written conversation (not with me) where he called Barbara a “coke head”. It makes my blood boil to even write that. I don’t need Barbara to have been a saint, but this is beyond preposterous.

Have you known anyone who does a lot of drugs? Smokes a lot of pot? Consumes a lot of cocaine? I mean A LOT of cocaine? As in, they have lost it and really need to be in rehab right now?

I have.

Barbara didn’t look like them. She didn’t act like them.  She didn’t hang out with them. She didn’t even know them. I try to think of one thing Barbara had in common with them, but nothing comes to mind.

Let’s review what we all know. When a person is using enough cocaine to need rehab, they most likely:
–Have unusual/irregular sleep patterns
–Express volatile emotions
–Exhibit erratic behavior
–Suffer from a chronically runny nose
–They’ve probably tried to stop on their own, and failed
–They hang out with other people who do a lot of cocaine

Barbara did not have or do any of these things.  She was clear-minded, reliable, and even-tempered.

And then there’s this. During the entire two years that Bill and Barbara lived in Costa Rica, they had housemates—other people who lived with them and observed Barbara’s behavior, sleep patterns and emotional fluctuations much more closely than I was able to. I have talked with eight of these individuals. Not one of them witnessed her exhibiting behaviors that suggest she regularly consumed large amounts of cocaine.

For these reasons, I don’t buy it. She could certainly have used drugs and I would never have known it. Big deal. But a drug trafficker? And an addict? In need of rehab? Organized by her family in Czech? And eight housemates never noticed anything? Please.

Could I be wrong? I could.  But me, you, eight housemates and dozens of friends?  Or could it be the guy who’s in jail for what amounts to being a liar?  Draw your own conclusion.

Next week let’s put the next piece of the story on the table under a bright light: The one about Barbara buying huge amounts of coke and smuggling it into Europe–with such success that, even now, it has never been investigated or even suspected by the authorities.

Today CrimeWatchDaily airs its premier episode.  If you live in the USA, this link will tell you when you will be able to see it.

Barbara and Bill: CrimeWatchDaily Investigates

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For the last 3 months, a guy who used to be my friend has been sitting in jail. Or whatever people in jail do—maybe a lot of pacing. He his name is Bill Ulmer, and he was the boyfriend of my friend Barbara Struncova, who disappeared in Costa Rica at the end of 2010. I don’t know what happened to her, but I do believe that Bill does and I do not believe that she is alive. Bill is not facing any charges related to Barbara, although her name was mentioned in court at the time of his arraignment. The charges he faces are:

(1) Misuse of passport
(2) Possession of identification document with intent to defraud
(3) Possession of a stolen identification document
(4) Possession and use of means of identification
(5) Aggravated identity theft.

All of these charges stem from the fact that he left Costa Rica on or around Dec 23, 2010 (18 days after Barbara was last seen) using his brother Wayne Ulmer’s passport. We could discuss how Bill came to be in Costa Rica with a passport that didn’t belong to him, but that’s another story.

Since Bill has been back in the USA, he has told anyone who will listen that Barbara had a raging drug addiction and that she was trafficking drugs to Europe. I find these claims so ridiculous on so many levels that until now, I have refused to even address them. But as Barbara’s 36th birthday  approaches, and as CrimeWatchDaily prepares to air their investigations into this case, later in the month, I am feeling bold. And honestly? Really pissed.

So let’s go there.

Drugs?  Are you kidding me?  Before we delve into all the reasons why that is ludicrous, let’s examine why it is inappropriate.

It is inappropriate because engaging in illegal/immoral behavior is NOT a justification for a disappearance.  Even if Barbara was a drug addict (like he says) and even if Barbara was a drug trafficker (like he says), she still vanished from the face of the earth one night and THAT IS STILL NOT OKAY.

Can I get an amen?
Thank you.

Who the hell cares what her imperfections were?  Medical/personal/moral issues are ENTIRELY BESIDE THE POINT.

Even if she was a criminal (which she wasn’t), something terrible still happened to her, and Bill’s stories still don’t add up.  And he seems to come up with a new one every few years.

I’m sorry, people-who-love-Bill-so-much-that-you-are-still-trying-to-believe-him.  I am truly sorry.  I pray for you.  It must be a nightmare to have someone you love in the position he is in.  But use your brain, for the love of God.  If Bill isn’t lying, then everyone else in the world is.  And if you think by “everyone else in the world” I am referring to myself and my imaginary friends, wait until you see what CrimeWatchDaily has put together.

I’m just saying.  Prepare yourself.

In my next post, I will briefly (because it doesn’t take long!) examine why it is ludicrous to believe that Barbara was a drug addict.  Next, I will (again, briefly) examine why it is ludicrous to believe that she was trafficking drugs across the Atlantic–especially using the method Bill named.  Then we will move on to the question of how likely/unlikely it is that she was murdered (Oh!  So I guess she didn’t run off with Martin after all, or go to Czech for rehab?  Oops!) by a Costa Rican drug cartel.

bill and barbara

Reading #4 from “When the Roll is Called a Pyonder: Tales from a Mennonite Childhood”

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In this final reading from “When the Roll is Called a Pyonder,” learn about Mother Zimmerman’s foray in to swimsuit design, discover how to catch a snapping turtle without a trap, and ponder the pros/cons of culotte skirts with “flaps.”

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, find out what on earth prompts little pig-tailed Mennonite girls to begin writing things in notebooks.

Here’s to little Mennonite girls!  Cheers!

 

Happy Birthday!

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The other day, I had the most awesome idea.  Oh man.  It was a great one.  It was such a great idea that it pains me to tell you about it.  But I’m going to.  My book, “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder:  Tales from A Mennonite Childhood” turns one year old this month, and I thought we should celebrate, somehow.  Somehow that does not involve me jumping up and down, trying clever new tricks to get you to buy my book without realizing that it was a clever trick.  Something that might feel like a celebration.

So, I decided to read to you.  How awesome is that?  Man, I am smart.  I decided to video myself reading from my book–the best and funniest parts–and post it right here.  One, each week through the remaining weeks of August.

I picked passages from the book, divide them into 4, and sat down to video myself reading.  It’s really cute.  I make funny faces when I read that I don’t generally make in the mirror, so it kind of cracked me up to watch it, myself.

Too bad you’ll never see it.  Wordpress won’t upload it.  It says it doesn’t upload that kind of file.

I’m smart enough to get good ideas, but I’m not smart enough to trouble-shoot their technical problems.  There’s probably a way to make it work.  But I don’t know what it is.  So–sorry about that.  I guess I get to keep the birthday present I made you.

As a consolation prize, the following is the short segment from which the title is taken, since everybody wants to know what a Pyonder is.  🙂  So do I!

 

I don’t know what a Pyonder is.  We have a song we sing in Church about When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder I’ll Be There.  A roll is sometimes called a bun but I never heard anyone call it a pyonder.  Or there are rolls like toilet paper rolls or rolls like rolling down the hill and I don’t know which one you’d call a Pyonder.  It’s kind of a funny song.  But I know it’s about Jesus coming back and I know we have to be ready for that any minute.

–from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder:  Tales From A Mennonite Childhood” by Diana R. Zimmerman, eLectio Publishing, 2014

IMG_0431x

 

The Laundry Experiment

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From The Summer of the Riotous Walls, a work in progress

Before we even ran out of clean underwear or decided something had to be done about the bedding, the kitchen towels presented a problem. At least to me they did. How do you clean up a mess with something that’s dirty? Believe me, I tried. But no matter how careful you are, you only make the mess bigger. We started the summer with three towels, but there were only two left since Sheila accidentally set on one fire. They had to double as hot pads for removing boiling pots from the flames of our gas stove—an excellent way to set their little fringes ablaze, burn yourself, nearly set the house on fire, and destroy a perfectly good kitchen towel.

A coffee spill or two, cooking oil that missed the pan and has to be mopped from the stovetop, milk that landed outside the bowl, then a quick rinse in the sink, and soon the dish towels were crusty, molded, greasy rags, unrecognizable as anything intended for use near food. The classic trip through the washer and dryer wasn’t an option. We didn’t have a washer, nor had we received the revelation that we were living practically beside a laundromat. And yet something had to be done.

Finally a thought pecking at the back of my brain hatched itself into daylight and I knew what to do. The obvious is everywhere you look. Laugh all you want. Nothing I could do was going to make it worse.

In Los Rios, where I woke up on sunny mornings a few weeks ago, my mamá Hilda didn’t have a washer. She had soap, water and a cement wash sink against which she scrubbed our clothes to a fierce cleanliness never produced by an agitating tub of suds. I clicked off the list in my head: I didn’t have laundry soap, but I had various other kinds of soaps. I had water. No cement wash sinks anywhere, but there’s a cement slab at the base of our wobbly steps. Why wouldn’t that work? I filled a bucket with water, and grabbed a small plastic bowl to use as a scoop. I never did this in Los Rios. My mamá did it for me. But I watched, and how hard can it be?

“What are you doing, loca?” Beth asked when she saw me heading toward the door with my bucket of water and supplies.

“An experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“A laundry experiment.”

“I hope it works!”

“Me too. These towels are terrible.”

“Can I watch?” Sheila asked.

“Sure. Don’t laugh. I’ve never tried this before.”

“Did you learn it in Costa Rica?”

“Sort of.”

I had to fetch the broom and sweep the dirt from the cement slab before anything had hope of getting clean on it. I dumped a scoop of water on it to wet it, then spread the immoral dish towels out and poured water over them, too. I squirted them with a generous amount of dish soap. Then, I commenced scrubbing them back and forth against the rough cement, which—of course—produced more mud, even though a minute ago, it had appeared clean. I rubbed and scrubbed, slopped and scraped, dumped more water, squirted more soap.

“Cool!” Sheila admired.

Not terribly. Two of my knuckles were bleeding. My mamá’s knuckles never bled, whether because they were so toughened by the constant necessity of repeating this task, or because she had learned to do it without scraping them on the cement, I can’t say. I had to keep washing the blood away so that I wouldn’t make the towels worse, instead of better.

Getting the soap out was the hardest part. I had to send Sheila up to the kitchen for another bucket of water and I was making an enormous mess. I somehow managed to soak my shirt, and a puddle of mud had formed around my bare feet. I wrung and rinsed, twirled and twisted, beating the suffering towels up and down against the cement with one hand while attempting to pour water over them with the other. Mamá made it look a lot easier than this. If I had to wash bath towels and work jeans this way like she did, I think I would cry.

The dish towels looked a heck of a lot better, believe it or not. They weren’t exactly white, but they were a lot less brown. Sheila had to get me another bucket of water to wash my feet, and then I walked up the steps and draped the dripping towels over the banister in the sun.

“There,” I said, when I walked back inside.

Beth looked up at me over top of the book she was reading.

I shrugged my shoulders and went to look in the medicine cabinet to see if, by chance, we had any band-aids.

Swashbuckling Through the Daisies

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I’ve decided that I’m done with “The Open Book Test.”  For anyone who was enjoying it:  (graceful bow).  If you don’t know what I’m talking about–don’t worry about it.  I was going to continue it for the whole of 2015, but I changed my mind.  That’s the great thing about having a blog.  It’s yours.  You can change your mind if you want to.

In place of that project exploring the past, I’m going to try come up with occasional posts about what’s going on in my mind in the present, and hope that they are reasonably interesting.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a particular kind of annoying person and how I fear I might be turning into one.  The ones I’ve met are usually ex-missionaries of some sort–people who once did something awesome and unusual, but then proceeded to live totally normal boring lives but continue to define themselves by the one interesting unusual thing they did 20 years ago.  I hate that.  It drives me crazy.  The other day I realized that I think I might be turning into one.  I felt like kicking a hole in the wall.

So.

So?

Well it seems like there are only two possible ways to avoid this or change it.

1.  Do something interesting and unusual now (take it out of the past and put it in the present)

2.  Redefine yourself (as in: use the mirror and not old photo albums)

I wish I could think of another option, but I can’t.

I’d like to do the first one.  I am dying to do the first one.  Honestly.  And I’m sure you’re wondering what the hell is stopping me.  It’s not like I have kids in school or anything.  I am married, though, to a wonderful man who is about as different from me as a person can be.  He’s unusual and exciting by nature.  If you know him, you know what I mean.  He’s also older than I am–not a lot, but enough–he’s had a significant number of health problems in the last several years, and he’s an Aries.  All of these things add up to: he’s not in the mood to do exciting, unusual things that don’t involve full health insurance and regular paychecks.  All things considered, I don’t blame him.  And then there’s this:  he IS doing something exciting and unusual.  He’s an Italian living in America.  This, for him, is as awesome as it would be for me if he took me to live in Italy.  So, there you go.  You get it.  We were all amped to join the Peace Corp a few months ago, and for about three precious hours I felt like I came to life again.  Then I discovered that he can never join the Peace Corp because he’s not an American citizen.  So I let that go, too.

The second one is not as fun.  It’s sad–or it makes me sad.  How do you do that?  I mean, how do I do that?  I don’t want to be a middle-aged community health worker living in a redneck town in a cold desert when the world is full of places with oceans and languages and sunshine and open windows.  In my mind, I am ready to take my surfboard and paddle out, but instead I take my scissors and walk around the house snipping off the heads of the roses that have bloomed.  Again and again.  Instead of packing suitcases I switch purses a lot.

It’s not easy.  That’s all I’m saying.  It would be a lot easier to do something hard, than to keep doing easy things over and over.  I’m standing here with my machete, ready to swashbuckle through the jungle, and then I realize I’m in a field of daisies.  It’s disappointing.  Tennessee Williams said something about that.

I can’t tell you how I’ve resolved this, because I haven’t.  I’m just posing the question.  That’s the difference between me posting from the past or posting from the present.  I can’t tell you how it turned out.

 

Gardening with a machete: Outside my house in Costa Rica, 2010
Gardening with a machete: Outside my house in Costa Rica, 2010

Eating Sandía in Bernabela with Ana la Gorda

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Cuidado con Ana La Gorda,
everyone says,
dicen que es tortillera, and
they point with their chins to
the neighbors who are
said to have
said that about her.

She roars up to the
house on her red dirt
bike in a cloud of sunshine and
dust, beeps twice and says
Vamos donde me tío a
comer sandía.

I get on.
No tengo miedo de las
tortillas ni de las tortilleras
ni de las fat girls who
drink beer in the cantinas
like men.

Ana La Gorda parks the moto in
deep mango shade
beside Tío Lencho’s watermelon fields in
Bernabela.
Fat green fruits lie in the sun like
luxurious crocodiles
basking between the rows.
On a makeshift wooden bench, Tío
Lencho lops monstrous melons into chunks
with flicks of his slick machete.
Coma, he says.
Coma, Ana explains.

We sit there slurping
like las locas, sweet sandía juice
dripping from our
elbows and chins, making
mini moon craters in the
dust between our feet.

What Happened to June?

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My plan for June blog posts was interrupted in the last weeks by two wonderful things: first the arrest of Bill Ulmer, and second, a two-week trip to Italy that my husband and I have been needing to take for the last ten years. I say “needing” because he is from Italy and it has been fifteen years since he has been back to visit friends and family.

As for Bill, my understanding is that he is being held in federal prison in Atlanta at this time, waiting for a hearing in North Carolina. This information trickled in to me through the fog of jet lag while I was in Italy, so I do not know if it is completely current or what, exactly, we are waiting for. I would love to hear from any of you who have a story to tell about your friendship with Barbara or with Bill.

As you can see, I have decided to use his real name at this point. He has not been convicted of anything I have suggested in “Remember Barbara,” but I think it is clear that I have not made this story up out of my head.

Only a few short weeks ago, I supposed that the only thing I would ever be able to do in honor of my friend Barbara’s disappearance is stand here waving this flag of her story, hoping that it might find its way to the people who need to hear it in order to remain safe. So for me to learn of Bill’s arrest about 10 days before I left for a vacation was like a beautiful gift from the universe. I know that as long as he is in federal custody, everyone is safe. I do not mean that I think he goes around with plans to physically harm people–I mean “safe” in a broad personal sense.

We had the best time in Italy! Jet lag is horrible and coming back through US Security/Customs is a dreadful experience even for US citizens with clean a clean conscience (!), but the trip was wonderful! We spent several days in Milan visiting brothers and their families, then we went to San Remo where we spent a few days with my step daughter. After that, we came back to Milan but flew to Sardinia where my brother-in-law has an apartment in a coastal town called Alghero. Definite highlight of the (too few!) days in Alghero is that we got to surf. The waves were terrible and the boards we rented were even worse (mine was a tri-fin missing the middle one!!) but the sun was hot and the water was close to warm SO CLEAR that you could see the rocks and sand in water too deep to stand in. Wow. I took hundreds of photos, walked for miles every day, ate like a horse, gained five pounds in two weeks, bought a whole pile of cheap, cute dresses at the markets and was pleasantly surprised at the prices of things. I was sure that with the Euro stronger than the dollar, everything would be terribly expensive. Not even. Go out to dinner at the beach: get an appetizer, two main courses, a carafe of wine, two coffees, a grappa, a zambuka, a tiramisu… you can’t spend more than 40/50 Euros. Amazing.

Now it’s time for me to get ready for work.  Let me see…what still fits after 2 weeks in Italy? Happy Monday, everybody. Unless something incredible happens, next week we’ll be back to The Open Book Test and other revelations…

Random street in Milan. No, it is not a movie set. Yes, random streets actually look like this.
Random street in Milan. No, it is not a movie set. Yes, random streets actually look like this.

 

Il Duomo di Milano. Freaking scary. I get it about the art, but this place has a vibe that is TERRIFYING.
Il Duomo di Milano.
Freaking scary. I get it about the art, but this place has a vibe that is TERRIFYING.

 

Public street in the old section of San Remo. Kind of blurs the lines between what is "inside" and what is "outside."
Public street in the old section of San Remo. Kind of blurs the lines between what is “inside” and what is “outside.”
West coast of Sardinia. Punto Torres, maybe? Remains of old look-out towers on every point.
West coast of Sardinia. Punto Torres, maybe? Remains of old look-out towers on every point.