Gypsies in Rasnik

Yesterday we went to Rasnik again. At the garden gate, there was un unpleasent surprise: the padlock was damaged, apparently by manipulation, and couldn't be unlocked.
"Somebody has attempted to unlock it and enter," my husband said.
"I wonder whether they have succeeded," my mother-in-law said. "We must check whether everything inside is in place. This could be expected. There used to be no Gypsies in Rasnik, but last year a family came to live here."
My husband called neighbor Vassil to ask for some instrument to cut the padlock. And we immediately learned how it had happened.
Vassil has keys of the house and has accepted the duty to keep un eye on it when we are not there. We had left some very old clothes outside to dry properly, so that to use them as rags. Vassil saw the clothes and thought we had forgotten them. So he unlocked the garden gate, collected them, but when he attempted to lock again, the padlock didn't behave normally and a small part fell out of it. (You can guess that our padlock was not top technology.)
I would not write about this minor incident if Gypsies were not mentioned. Like other Bulgarians and other Bulgarian minorities, I am not a fan of Gypsies. We have prejudice against them, and like almost all prejudice, it is firmly based on facts. Last year, about 100 meters from our home, a Gypsy was insulted and allegedly hit by Bulgarians at a cafe. He brought back a crowd of maddened Gypsies who attacked all Bulgarians at that cafe, killing a professor. (You see, I mention his degree, because if he were un unemployed man with 8 grades of educaton, somebody could say he must have been to blame.) About a week ago and a kilometer away from our home, a 22-year-old Gypsy man quarreled with several Bulgarian teenagers, took out a gun and shot at them. Three schoolboys were injured, a 14-year-old seriously.
Still, you see that when we rush to blame The Others for all our troubles, we are leaving the path to Truth and stepping onto the path to Hell.
By the way, several years ago the house in Rasnik was robbed by some young men who were not Gypsies. Two years ago, such young non-Gypsy men also wanted to rob it, but left when they saw that it was occupied. (My mother-in-law was there with her granddaughter.) Because of this incident, my mother-in-law supplied the windows with bars. I regretted it, because now the house has some similarity to a prison, and it will be harder to leave in emergency.