Mobb Salad

Literally 2 hours after the erection update was up (heh heh), my phone was stolen. Read on for a tale of mob justice. From Mbeya town, I took the dalla dalla to Mbalizi town, where I would switch to either a bus or a lorie truck that takes me home to Ilembo. Since I was carrying a bunch of things that I had gotten in Mbeya, I wanted to make it to the bus that leaves at 2. I arrived in Mbalizi at 12:45, and got off the dalla dalla and was carrying a box on my head, a backpack, and a plastic bag. I had just received a text message so I knew I had my phone just after getting off the dalla. My phone was in my little eagle creek purse that I keep close watch of because it has all that important stuff in it. When I got off at the dalla dalla stand, some guy offered to carry one of my bags. I have gotten to know a few people in Mbalizi and some people from my village are there sometimes, but I didn’t know this guy and he took my plastic bag from me and carried it for about a minute until I insisted that I was fine carrying it to the bus. He asked for 500 shillings and I said no, and so he put the plastic bag down and as I reached down to grab it (I later realized) he reached and grabbed my phone out of the eagle creek bag. Right afterwards I ran into two people from my village and they helped carry my bags. About 5 minutes later I was at the bus stand about to buy a ticket when I opened my money purse and saw my phone wasn’t there. I had someone call it and it wasn’t ringing. If I had voicemail this would have been one of those straight-to-voicemail situations. Bad sign. Somehow I immediately remembered the guy from the dalla stand and dropped my stuff and sprinted like a crazy person back to the standi. Luckily, I am the only white person in Mbalizi and as if I didn’t stand out enough I was carrying a box on my head, so people remembered me. I busted out frantic Kiswahili saying “Did you see where that guy went?” “He stole my phone!” “Thief!” “help!” The people, had in fact, seen where the guy went and they said he had ran “that way” and that I should go to the police. My stomach sank, I started doing the math in my head of the cost of replacing the phone and how annoying it would be to get a new number and to try to find all the numbers I had lost.

I was in that emotional purgatory of laughing yet wanting to cry in the Mbalizi police station when Inspector Jumanne walked in. (Jumanne is the word for Tuesday) So Inspector Tuesday walks in and I literally had the exact conversation that I had during a simulation in training where we practiced bargaining at the market, talking with village leaders, and explaining a fake crime to police. He was pretty sympathetic, but I started getting worried when he was inquiring more about my personal life than the crime that had just been committed, so I tried to steer the conversation back by saying, “Soo what do we do now? There are plenty of people out there who saw him.” That’s when Inspector Tuesday and I hit the streets and tried to find people who would ‘cooperate’. He literally did a wave of his hand to two groups of people on the corner, and they rounded up more people, and so on and so on, and then he said that they were going to find the man, because if the police went, the guy would get scared and run away. We then went back to the police station, where he suggested I just “wait it out”, like it was one of those afternoon thunderstorms that will come and go and then it gets really sunny and nice out. Which is pretty much what happened.

In less than an hour, a group of 50 people had found this thief and brought him to the station. My phone was miraculously recovered and returned to me in perfect condition. I was amazed. Tanzanians hate thieves and it apparently is not uncommon for mobs of people to beat up, kill, or burn thieves they catch so I was at least grateful that this man was brought to the station and he still had all of his fingers and was not on fire, but I felt really badly thinking about what might lie ahead for him. I had to face him immediately afterwards to identify him and the policeman was slapping him in the face. I thanked the police for helping me, filed a report, and since the bus left late, I got on it at 2:30, my cell phone safely stored inside my bra.