The Pan American Social Marketing Organization, or PASMO for short, conducts HIV and Aids training and outreach in schools and communities across the country. But this weekend some thieves helped themselves to about $20,000 in office equipment from PASMO's Office on Princess Margaret Drive. The story is interesting because the thieves struck twice did it twice, just hours apart.
Keith Swift Reporting,
Sometime during the course of Friday night a thief or gang of thieves broke into the office by prying open these burglar bars for what is known as the condom room, a room containing literally thousands of condoms and lubricants. Once inside, condoms however weren't the only thing they took.
Elisa Castellanos, PASMO
"They came in through our stock room, basically it has our condoms and promotional items. They came in there and it seems that was the entry point and then they made their way into office through the other doors, unlocked from inside, and probably had help coming from other people that came in through this front door area. Then they proceeded our BBC room took two laptop computers, and then went upstairs took the DVD player, and left."
PASMO's Program Coordinator Elisa Castellanos says they discovered the break-in on Saturday morning. The PASMO staff stayed at the office for must
of Saturday devising a new security solution. For a brief hour they left the office. That one hour was enough time for the thieves to hit again.
Elisa Castellanos,
"By seven o'clock the night, we went out to look for somebody to pick them up, to bring them to the office and between 7:30, when we left, to 8:30, when we came back, they had come in and taken the flat screen computer, a keyboard, digital camera, and made a mess of the different offices here. They were definitely searching looking for other things to take with them and that was basically it. So we were robbed twice."
Castellanos says the burglars stole just about everything - from condoms to laptops. All told the value is about $17,000 which has the NGOs pocket and spirits broken.
Elisa Castellanos,
"This morning I came in and it was hard. I had to take a breath and just kind of push myself to go on. We are NGO and I would like to humbly say that we are a poor organization working with limited resources to get as much done. We are here passionately working for our country, with the situation with HIV, and we want to get as much work done and now we've been robbed of the limited resources we have and it is sad but it is a part of things. We would want to get everything back and hopefully somebody knows something and would call us in."
Keith Swift,
How will this affect the work of PASMO?
Elisa Castellanos,
"Well definitely it will slow us down this week or two. There is a lot of information on the computer that we use on a daily basis. There is a lot of contact information that I use to dialogue with different partners and different people that we work with. Gladly though, I can say, that no names are there of our clients so there is nothing to put in any kind of danger the confidentiality of the people we work with."
Police are investigating, but no one has been charged.
