More Thieving Varmints!

We went to Blantyre this weekend for some general shopping goodness with our friend, and we had a really good time. We found lots of pretty sweet stuff that we really can't find in Mozambique, like cereal and coconut marshmallows. We ended up staying in a hostel in a dorm-style room for the night, as it only costs about $5 American. When you only make between $250 and $300 American a month, hostels just make the best financial sense.

When it got dark, we stayed in the hostel's bar area and played a bit of pool. We had locked our stuff in the lockers in our room because when I say "dorm-style" room, what I mean is that the door doesn't lock, and there are 3 bunk beds in the room, so we could have been sharing the room with up to three random strangers. We were gone for 45 minutes to an hour, but when we got back to the room, our friend's locker had clearly been broken into, but the thief had tried to put the locker hinge back together to make it look like nothing had happened. Our friend had about $250 worth of money stolen from his bag, which is a lot over here. It is what we make per month as volunteers, so it's kind of a big deal to be out that much money.

We also noticed that some stuff in the room had moved (a towel moved from a hanger to one of the beds, a toothbrush that was on one of the beds was now gone, etc.), so our first thought was, "Oh, it must have been the guy staying in the room with us, since we weren't gone for long and he was clearly in the room when we weren't here."

We reported it to the owner of the hostel, who immediately jumped to the conclusion of, "Yes, it was definitely him. He stayed here before when there was another theft." He advised us to report it to the police. It is interesting to note that in the same bag that the money was stolen from, our friend also had a laptop, but that was strangely left in the bag. In addition, our stuff (mine and Lisa's) was untouched, despite the fact that Lisa accidentally left her camera on the bed, and not in the locker. It was strange that the money was all gone, but the expensive electronics were still safe. However, since the room was clearly not a very secure place, I agreed to stay in the room while Lisa and our friend went to the police station to file a report so that we wouldn't lose more of our stuff. I waited in the room for about an hour, maybe a little more, before they came back with the detective to see what they would make of it. In that time, I never left the room. When the detective left, he told us they couldn't really do anything, but maybe we could get the guy if he came back to sleep. The owner of the hostel wanted to set up some kind of sting operation wherein Lisa, our friend, and I would try to sleep in the room and wait for a man that may have robbed us so we could sneak out and call the police when he went to sleep. We weren't really comfortable with that, so we asked to switch rooms, which they did agree to. We moved all of our stuff to the next dorm-style room down the hall. Our friend had the idea that we should go make pillow people in the beds that we had in our original room, so if the thief came back, he wouldn't suspect that something was amiss when we weren't there. After we had finished, we were getting ready to go to bed in the other room when Lisa decided she wanted to get some pictures of the room so she could blog about the experience, so she went down the hall to get some pictures while our friend and I were getting changed into pajamas.

Suddenly, I hear Lisa scream "AAAAAAAH! THERE'S A MAN! A MAN UNDER THE BED! OHMYGOD OHMYGOD! HE'S IN HERE!"

I thought that the thief had grabbed Lisa, so I ran down the hall to stop that nonsense. I passed Lisa in the hall, so I knew she was okay, but there was clearly someone in the room, who was probably the thief. I continued to the doorway, where a Malawian man who was very clearly trying to escape confronted me. When I got in his way, he shoved me into the door frame, but I was considerably larger than he was, so I grabbed him and shoved him into a bunk bed, grabbed the door, shut it, and held him in there as he tried to pull the door open. There was only one door going in this room, so it was his only escape. I held him in there for a few minutes until the police came and arrested him.

What had happened was that Lisa was taking a picture of the broken latch on the locker for the blog, which was right by one of the bunk beds, when she heard breathing. She looked under the bed, saw some legs, but was a little confused, so she lifted the mattress and saw this man staring right at her. It was then apparent that since we discovered the theft an hour and a half to two hours before, I had been in the room watching our stuff. The thief had come into the room, broken into the locker, stole the money, and then heard us coming, so he tried to make it look like there wasn't a robbery and scooted under the bed to wait for an opportunity to escape.

However, I never left the room, so he was stuck. Then Lisa got close enough to his hiding spot to hear his breathing.

Needless to say, none of us slept well that night. Sadly, the police took the money that was stolen as "evidence", so our friend still lost his month's pay.

That was enough excitement for us for a while. 

Thieving Varmint

We have finally passed our 5-month mark in Mozambique. Some days, it seems like the longest 5 months in my life, and other days I can’t believe how fast it’s gone.  Lisa and I agree that we are much happier when we have so much to do that we don’t notice time passing. This past week, we were both at one of the upper classrooms of our school facilitating a REDES (an extracurricular group for girls) meeting. As usual, we were missing most of the girls because everyone seems to run about an hour late here. A small crowd of 9^th grade boys had gathered in our classroom (white people are oh-so-interesting to stare at), so I decided to try and share a visual riddle with them:

This riddle has only two rules:

1) Connect all 9 points using only 4 straight lines.

2) Your writing implement cannot leave the surface of the paper once you begin drawing your first line.

This has been my go-to riddle when I have some chalk and a bunch of students staring at me. I like it because it is easy to explain, and it occupies the students for at least 15 minutes as they try to come up with the solution. So all I need to do is draw 9 dots on the chalkboard, explain the rules, and then step back to watch them attempt to solve the puzzle over and over again. It inevitably leads to a herd of teenagers huddled around the chalkboard, staring and whispering to themselves as they puzzle it out. While they were working on that, Lisa and I talked to the one girl who was there on time for the REDES meeting. We talked about what projects we were going to do and why she wanted to be the president of the group. We walked around outside the classroom, hoping that the presence of azungu (white people) would draw in the other girls to the meeting. 

After about 20 minutes of wasting time, I tried to check the time on my phone to see if I needed to leave to give a class. To my dismay, I couldn’t find my phone, even though I was sure that I had brought it with me to the meeting. After searching around for about 5 minutes, I began to think that I may have been robbed. I shared this with Lisa and some of the other students. I held up Lisa’s phone (which is identical to mine) and asked if anyone had seen another phone of the same type. Nobody had, and I was a little upset with the thought that someone had stolen it. I tried calling it repeatedly from Lisa’s phone, but whoever had my phone was declining my calls. I became more and more sure that someone had taken it. Discouraged, I walked down to the lower set of classrooms and told our Pedagogical Director (our immediate superior at our school) that I think I was robbed of my phone. He seemed rather upset by this news, and he told me that he would see what he could do. I had to leave and go teach, but my mood was brought down a little.

The next morning, I went to the school early to go talk to the students before school started to ask for their help in finding my phone. When I got to the school, our Pedagogical Director (his name is Guilherme) asked me to sit down with him to talk. He said that he was troubled by the news that I had been robbed, so after I told him that, he gathered up the other teachers and started a collection to buy me a new phone. At this point, I felt compelled to stop him and thank him.

“That’s really nice, you didn’t have to do that. I can buy another phone,” I said.

“Wait, let me finish,” Guilherme continued, “Professors Leme and Peter were out looking for you phone last night. They came across a student on the street that said he thought he saw the phone in the hand of another student. They went to the house of the suspected student and confronted him in front of his family. After questioning him, he admitted to taking the phone. He gave it back.”

At this point, Guilherme unlocked his desk drawer and pulled out my phone. I was overjoyed.

“Thank you so much! I can’t believe you found it!” I exclaimed.

“There is one thing, though,” he said, “The thief thought we would be able to find his location if he left your SIM card in the phone, so he took it out of the phone and threw it into the river. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay, SIM cards are cheap. I can replace it.”

“I want you to know that this was the chefe de turma of one of the 9^th grade classes. We are taking his crime very seriously. He has been expelled, and we showed him to everyone in 9^th and 10^th grade, and let them know that he is a thief and he cannot be trusted. We don’t want anyone thinking that they can steal from any of the teachers,” he finished.

So, the end result of this story is that I got my phone back, but I don’t have a phone number to call with. That will be easily remedied. I can buy a new SIM for the equivalent of 50 cents American. Plus, I learned that my teaching colleagues are more than willing to help me if I have any kind of problem.  I’d say that’s a win.