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.
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