Life in Zambia presents an often unique set of problems and resolutions, each with their own lessons. In this post I want to talk specifically about lessons involving things lost; sometimes found again, sometimes not.
Robbery is not a common thing here in Zambia, though having dealt with it every few months I can say it’s far more common than any other place I've lived. Many of the incidents had an element of luck to them, some did not. Each had a lesson to be gained from it, though there sure are a lot to learn.
My first experience with robbery here is tied for both the luckiest and stupidest. Having left our gate open as well as our front door I don’t think there could've been a clearer invitation for a passing opportunist. I came home around midnight to pack for an early morning trip to find my computer and camera missing. After waking up my sleeping roommates I started to look around outside when I heard footsteps behind our garage. I turned the corner in time to see someone climbing over the wall into our neighbors’ property. My roommates and I headed him off outside their house, catching him just before he disappeared into the cane fields. Upon capture he immediately confessed that he had hidden all the items in the same cane fields, after making probably 4 or 5 quiet trips into the house full of sleeping people. We were wary of entering the fields alone, but of course there’s no 911 to call here, so my roommate took my car (a minivan at the time) to go pick up police officers from the nearest post. Once we had some backup we trudged in a line through the dense, unnerving cane until we found all the items. At that point, in some bizarre version of a childhood car trip, I loaded the armed police in through the sliding door, put the tied up thief in the trunk, and then returned them to their station.
Lesson learned: close the gate, lock the house. Luck rating: 9/10
Our second theft also occurred at home about a year later. Up in the predawn hours, my roommate and I followed the sound of water to a leaking tap outside. Well, not leaking exactly; gushing. Perplexed, we debated how it could have broken overnight when we suddenly realized, this was the spot where our washing machine had once sat. The tap hadn’t broken; its receptacle had been forcibly removed.
Lesson learned: lock the gate. Luck rating: 8/10 (some months afterwards the police showed up at our house with the stolen machine, something of a small miracle)
Petty theft takes some serious confidence, which I learned some months later. I borrowed a friend’s car on a day mine was being serviced. That evening I came out of the branch to find that the side view mirrors had been stolen. Luckily they had only pried the mirror part from the housing. But they’d done it right outside the front door of a bank. With a security guard. In full view of my office. They must’ve really needed the cash.
Lesson learned: keep the security guard by the cars. Luck rating: 5/10 (replacing the whole mirror apparatus would’ve been very expensive)
This is one I’m going to include even though it’s not a theft per se and it’s going to make me look like an idiot, but it’s a good story. We had been grocery shopping and, in a moment of monumental forgetfulness, I left my iPad in the cart we had been using. We hadn’t even left the mall before I realized, but enough time had passed for probably 50 people to cycle through the supermarket. We ran back and began frantically checking every cart and basket we could see, whether or not they were in use. I looked like a crazy person trotting back and forth down the checkout lines, peering anxiously at people’s grocery selections. Emily, in a more practical move, asked the management to view the CCTV footage. It wasn’t long before we saw our poor, oblivious selves on the screen abandoning our cart, and a woman grabbing it not 10 seconds later. A minute or two after that in the footage we thought we could see the same woman leaving the store in a hurry, without having bought anything. That seemed to be the end of that; hours of searching at Shoprite and useless trips to police stations left us empty handed. We returned home, defeated. Acting on an afterthought, I went to the “find my iPhone” website and, behold, there was the tiny blinking beacon of my lost tablet. I must have left the internet turned on while looking up measurement conversions. In an adrenaline-fueled rush we dashed out to the car and, following the map on the computer, set off on the hunt. It was all the way across town but we were there in no time, and quickly realized the problem: the map wasn’t detailed enough. There were at least 15 houses around the dot, each subdivided into multiple family apartments; how were we ever going to pinpoint who had taken it? I started the only way I could think of, going door to door, trying to determine who looked like they had just found a computer. After a few houses it was clear this wasn’t going to bear fruit, but we were so close! In a last ditch effort I hit the button which sounded an alarm on the iPad. Not five minutes later a woman called, saying she had found my number by going through my email, and that she had the computer. She asked where she could meet us, to which I was able to reply, just come out of your house. In no time I was reunited with it, as improbable as it had seemed a few hours before.
Lesson learned: don’t be a forgetful idiot. Luck rating: 15/10
The most recent addition to my robbery portfolio, and certainly the hardest to swallow, occurred just last Thursday. I had gone to withdraw my salary which had been deposited by mistake to my account at another bank rather than at FINCA. Because I only have one free withdrawal a month, I took out the whole thing at once. After leaving, on the way to deposit it at my branch, I stopped to get some food. A few minutes later, when I came back to the car, I found the driver’s side door slightly ajar and the envelope with the cash gone. My heart just sank to the ground; right away I knew that that money was long gone. Still, I stomached the police station to bring an officer back to the scene, where he pointed out to me how my lock had been jimmied and told me it’s a common thing to be followed after making a withdrawal at a bank. He told me these guys are professionals; they were probably in and out in a minute and the chances of retrieving the cash were essentially zero. Again I endured the bureaucracy of the police station to file a report, not because I thought it would help, but because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. In the end, it’s money, and if they were going to follow me and take it anyway, at least I didn’t have to get hurt I guess. Still, I’ll be kicking myself for this one for some time to come.
Lesson(s) learned: be careful with cash, split it up or keep it on you. Always look over your shoulder as you leave the bank. Luck rating: 0/10
