A Benevolent Thief

I had been looking forward to my upcoming vacation to Tanzania for some time. Village life was wearing on me, and the holidays had passed in their odd way of doing so here, by occurring with little fanfare and by leaving an empty sensation in my heart which I’ve come to learn is where “family” and “friends” generally reside. I don’t miss the commercialism or even the somewhat obligatory gift giving of the holiday season in the States but I do miss the ritual of celebrating with family. I spent this past holiday season with my adopted family, the Mcfarlanes on their island, and had exhausted a great deal of energy orchestrating a New Year’s Eve bash in the bush. I was ready for another piece of home, and it was coming in the form of my oldest friend, Nathan. I was meeting him in exotic East Africa, which I knew relatively little about past expecting there would be amazing food, great fabrics, better music, the Swahili language…. and a beach.

Dudu and I arrived in Gabs with the Vixen’s cousin Lloyd, and were staying with a former Peace Corps volunteer and friend of mine, Charles. His house is luxury personified for me; he’s got a pool, a bathtub (with HOT WATER) a washing machine and a tumble dryer. The first night we stayed there and had a nice dinner together with Charles and another American former Peace Corps/ex pat and the next morning he left for a business trip, but told us to feel free to stay in his home for another day until we flew into Dar es Salaam. Totally into the idea of saving money on accommodation in expensive Gaborone we decided to do just that.

The next morning Charles was walking out the garage door to the waiting car with his suitcase and as he was explaining to me the various doors to lock and keys for this and that, the power cut out. I had heard that especially in the lead up to South African’s World Cup celebrations this year that the occasional rolling black outs were becoming more frequent (Botswana imports nearly all of its power from its neighbors, the only power plant in the whole country is in the middle-in Serowe, which is-not coincidentally in the presidential family’s ancestral village. Whenever Namibia-who supplies the western side of the Okavango Delta panhandle- or South Africa-for the rest of the country-flips the switch because they need more juice it seems Botswana gets cut off) so to me this seemed normal. Charles appeared irritated at the turn of events but not confused, and for me being from a village where we never have real electricity (ie electricity not run from generators) none of this seemed terribly out of the ordinary.

Charles gave me some last minute instructions, promising to call me from his destination and was on his way. Dudu and I decided to run some last minute pre-vacation errands in the big city of Gaborone where we don’t get that often, so whenever we are there we have a list a mile long of things to try to get accomplished. We spent nearly a half hour smelling shampoos and marveling at the ingredients and packaging of conditioners (not exactly an efficient use of our time, but then it’s a sure sign of being bushwacked). We finished some high speed interneting, withdrew some cash to exchange to pay for Tanzania’s overpriced visa (100$ US!!!) had a great Indian food lunch and were just headed back to Charles’s with the hopes that the electricity would be back on so that we could wash our generally disgusting hand washed clothes. At this point everything I own is stretched out beyond recognition, and barring a complete wardrobe overhaul with new, properly fitting clothing (not gonna happen anytime soon) we were both excited at the prospect of trying to shrink things back to some semblance of a normal shape in the dryer.

To our dismay, not only was the electricity not on, but there was a new alarm blaring through the house. At just this moment Charles called, and I asked him about the new noise. It appears his house has several alarm systems, which like most things in Africa, work or don’t work properly at will. He tried to explain to me how to turn the system off, and I continued to try to disarm it for a half hour in vain. This is probably the point at which a normal person who has not spent little time in the developed world for the past two years might begin to suspect that something was seriously not right. Not being one of those people, and being quite used to things not working properly, I just accepted that even the big cities in Africa aren’t infallible, and chalked it up to another irritating problem which I had no ability to truly do anything about.

What we would learn later is that Charles’s house has another alarm system in place that I’m not certain that even he was completely aware of at the time.


This alarm was for when the wires of his electrified fence had been tampered with.


Someone had cut the electric fence.


And since there was no electricity to the house at the time, they were able to do so.


Oblivious to this fact (and later retrospectively, we realized that someone had likely been casing the house the whole day, waiting for the opportunity to carry out what they would wait until deep in the dark of the night to finish) we shrugged our shoulders and did what we were used to doing, which is making a plan. For a while we sunbathed and floated in the pool. Then we called Lloyd and asked what he was up to, and ended up going to his family’s house for dinner. He brought us back home around 10, at which point we were more than dismayed to find still had no power.


It was at this point that I realized something was very strange. Only Charles’s house and the gate next to it were missing power.


By now we were tired, irritated that our brief dalliance with luxury was being interrupted (sure, we were going on vacation but we would still be in Africa, and we were still generally broke, and really what we intended to do in Tanzania was “traveling” which on a Peace Corps budget generally involved some level of strange or uncomfortable conditions) and ready to move on to the next phase of our adventure. I called Charles to inform him of the continued alarm, which we could only both agree was weird, but as neither the security company nor the police had come, we didn’t really know what to do. So Dudu and I decided to just go to bed, and get up early and pack before our flight in the morning.

As is my habit, my clothing and stuff had basically exploded all over the room we were staying in. As we had intended to do laundry, Dudu’s had as well. Charles had told me where a torch was, and I grabbed that and headed back to the room to go to sleep. Dudu had locked the front door, but being tired and with the alarm still blaring, it appears that I didn’t do a very good job of ensuring that all the doors in the house were completely shut and locked.
It was an unfortunate series of coincidences and oversights.

We shut all the doors between our room and the blaring alarm and tried to go to sleep. As my (amazing, internet capable) phone hadn’t had time to charge without having electricity, I turned it off and put it in my purse so as to save battery in case we needed to make any last minute calls in the morning-which is something I never do. I always sleep with my phone in the bed with me, if not on my actual person in case of a random call or text from the States. I had consolidated many of the things I wanted to be certain to carry on to the plane with me rather than tuck in my checked bag in my purse, which was up on a table out of the chaos all over the floor. My laptop computer was out on the dining room table so that I would be certain to easily find it in order to send it with a driver who was coming to collect it in the morning to take to someone who would try to fix the broken back light. Dudu had forgotten her phone in Gumare. In another strange coincidence Charles’s house phone line had been disconnected for unknown reasons a few weeks prior, along with his internet.

The good thing was that Dudu and I are used to sleeping like puppies. Although the house has plenty of rooms and beds that we could have slept practically in different wings, we had decided to sleep together in the double bed in the room with the air conditioning.

Had we not made that simple decision, things could have gone very badly.

I woke up with the sensation of being unceremoniously jerked from slumber. As I came out of a deep sleep, I heard Dudu sleepily yet urgently muttering that she thought someone was in the room. I immediately told her it was a hallucination due to her malaria drugs (I used to be on the regime she takes and it made me have such terrible night terrors that the Peace Corps medical officer changed my meds-as we are required to take a malaria prophylaxis while serving in Botswana). As I said it I faintly saw a shadow pass through the doorway, which was the only source of light coming into a room in a house with no electricity at 3:30 in the morning. And I knew that it was not her malaria meds.

I woke completely with a gasp, terror tightly gripping my throat when I realized that indeed someone had been in the room with us. I could hear the alarm, which had been blocked out by several doors as we slept, as clearly as if it were in the room with us. The shrill sound had the effect it was meant to, which is to raise one’s anxiety level completely. This meant the doors had to have been opened, and both Dudu and I had been sound asleep. Which means there was someone, or perhaps several someones, in the house with us.

It was dark, and the combination of dark and a siren led to complete panic. My heart pounded and my stomach dropped out of my belly, and my guts began to churn. I’m not certain if we maintained some semblance of calm for each other’s sake, but we both moved towards the door; we needed to confirm our terror wasn’t a dream or the product of Dudu’s meds. A new level of panic descended as we peered out into the hallway to find each of the three doors leading through the corridor were completely open and the alarm blared as loudly as ever.

We shut and locked the door and stumbled back to the bed, the warmth of the place where our bodies had just been relaxed in a state of deep sleep the only comfort we could find to sooth our frightened nerves.

Not being one to ever sit very still, I quickly got up and looked for my purse and phone only to discover it was gone, and with it, I imagined any plans we should have to head out of the country on vacation (passport, credit cards, cash for visa, camera -all inside). Due to the chaos of our unpacked things being all over the floor of the room, Dudu’s stuff (purse, ipod, ect), which was also sitting out on the nightstand next to the bed, was left untouched. As Dudu opened the curtain she caught another glimpse of someone outside, so she whipped the curtain closed again and we turned off the torch, left now in total darkness.

Without a phone to call anyone, any lights to turn on to better ascertain the state of the house and the situation, and the knowledge that Dudu had left the house keys (which also had the all important gate opener on it, which was still working despite the power outage) on the table in the living room, we were officially trapped. I remembered that Jody Foster movie “The Panic Room” and in a moment of bemused distraction thought, okay, change the setting to a foreign country with different languages and you’ve officially got a more tension filled thriller. And I’m living it.

Huddled in shock, we tried to make a plan. Should we wait until it gets light and try to see if we could get out? I was against this plan, as we had no idea how many people there were in the house, what they wanted, or if they would come back. We knew at least one man had been in the room with us, Dudu had clearly seen his silhouette. He had just taken my purse, and didn’t appear to have any intention of doing us harm, but we didn’t know if he had seen us for sure which was why he left, or if he knew that we had seen him. We weren’t certain what we might do once we got out of the room as we didn’t have the house/gate keys, and we didn’t know how he had gotten in, or if he was possibly still in the house with us. Even if we did manage to get off the property out of the locked doors and electronic gate (locks in Botswana, rather than having a knob or toggle on one side and a key hole on the other, tend to just have key holes on each side), we had no phone to call anyone, and no numbers of anyone we could possibly call.

In my own mind I generally believe that taking action and trying to make progress is better than waiting. Although my patience has grown here in Botswana, this was one of those extraordinary moments when waiting was literally impossible for me to do. I was also relatively certain that the amount of anxiety I was feeling course through my body at this time was eventually going to fill my body with the type of poison and tension that would make me physically ill, so I decided we should move.

We reluctantly went with this plan. At this point, I knew the adrenalin in my body, which was easily amongst the greatest I have felt in my life, would quickly be transformed into the type needed to seriously hurt or kill a man if there came to be a confrontation. We searched the room for an appropriate weapon. I grabbed the wrought iron lamp (in another moment of bemused clarity, I realized it was very similar to one I had admired at Pier One Imports during my mad housewife phase, and was very thankful that Charles had had most of his American belongings shipped here. It was solid) which Dudu was cognizant enough to point out to me that I should remove the shade and bulbs so that I could swing it faster and also so that should we bash someone we wouldn’t cut our feet, which were bare as our shoes were in the front hallway. She’s amazing.

With Dudu carrying the torch, and myself with the lamppost, we carefully unlocked the door. We searched the rooms on the far side of the hallway first, as we didn’t want to get in front of someone trying to leave. No one in the bathroom or the other spare bedroom. We took another deep breath and headed down the hallway, towards the only way the thief could have been able to come in, and thus would have to go out and let’s face it, could probably still be.

We came to a point in the hallway where there were three options. We checked each of the rooms and headed for the main open (window filled and thus most terrifying) areas of the house. As we crossed the threshold something startled Dudu. It ended up being a light from the streetlamps outside (another modern marvel we aren’t accustomed to, streetlamps) but as she sort of yelped and flinched I shouted something unintelligible and wielded my weapon.
We scanned the room; the new shadows which were produced from the lights from the street outside dancing through the trees onto the walls of the living room proved almost too much for our nerves. I yelped again as I looked down on the couch and saw that a notebook that had been in my purse was tossed on it along with some receipts from my wallet. We saw that the keys were no longer on the table, which was a good sign that the thief had left, but a bad sign that then we in turn might be trapped in the house.

By this time the tension was nearly killing us so we moved faster, confident with each square inch of the house that we covered that the thief was gone. As we passed by the hallway leading to the front door we were once again confronted by a sight that while usually symbolizing hope and good prospects had come to this point to confirm worst fears, an open door. As we quickly approached it, certain now that we were at least in the house alone, if not the property within the gate, we saw something that made us stop cold. The thief had used the keys to unlock the door, unlock the burglar gates outside the door, and then put the keys back in the lock of the door, where they now shone at us in the light from the streetlamps.

Dudu lunged for the keys and began frantically pushing the button to open the gate. We were FREE!!! As I looked down at the front step I saw my bag and the remains of my purse. I gasped and grabbed my passport, the plastic bag in which I kept my digital camera (where the guy had left an external jump drive) and my wallet, empty of cash, but with ID cards, credit cards and phone card intact. He had taken my pink leatherman (Thank you so much for sending me the new one, K-train!!!), my digital camera, over a thousand pula cash, my cell phone, another cheap cell phone that I was going to use to have a Tanzanian sim card (sorry P, you’re not getting that one back…).

As we rushed towards another gate in the cul-de-sac that had a guard, and more importantly, lights, a wave of relief began to wash over me. We woke the guard (how helpful, a sleeping security guard) and asked him to call the police as there had been a burglary, he sleepily protested that he had no airtime for his cell phone. Ready to wring his neck (had he been awake, he might have noticed someone digging through Charles’s car… but I guess that’s not his job. And if it’s not in the job description in Botswana, there’s little to no hope of it getting done.) I then shouted at him to call the security company on his radio (-who were also supposed to be monitoring Charles’s house. We then watched them drive past the main road three times. They never did end up coming. Apparently they had called Charles’s gardener’s cell phone when during the day when the power cut, but as power cuts aren’t rare, he didn’t think anything was wrong.) My increasing hysteria eventually convinced the guard to do something, so I think he ended up calling the security company and them eventually calling the police.

It was during this time that one of the most unsettling aspects of living abroad became clear to me. Which is that foreign countries are just not America. This may seem obvious, and something that smacks you in the face each day, which it does, but it’s not until a situation where you really want the reassurance that comes from an American standard of service and responsiveness that you really realize it. Although I’ve got the policemen in Seronga trained pretty well (once we got past the calling my cell phone drunk in the middle of the night issue) that if I call they better get their asses to my house now now, in Gabs we were anonymous. And public services, like most everything else, don’t tend to work in the siren blaring, flashing lights, people-in-cars-move-over-to-the-side-of-the-road-or-you’ll-get-run-over-and-it-will-be-justified type comforting efficiency of American services.

About a half hour later a cop car slowly turns off the main road, and the yawning officer wants us to walk him through the house. It’s still dark in there, he’s got no torch, and he is unarmed. I refuse, and he laughs at me. He also doesn’t have any airtime on his cell phone for us to call anyone. He offers us no comfort. He sort of wanders around the house with bemused curiosity, picking things up to examine them with absolutely no concern for possibly tampering with a crime scene, but rather with an apparent interest to see what white people keep in their homes.

A half an hour after that another car of police officers arrives. This one at least had airtime, which I use to call B, as his number is one I have memorized, and ask him to call a few people on our behalf (This sets the Peace Corps safety and security process into action, which is, I believe, probably one of the best in the world, our man Thuso works miracles). Thuso arrives within minutes, and immediately hugs me and asks if I’m alright, at which point it occurs to me to tear up a bit.

The next few hours pass in a blur, filled with telling and retelling the story as the uncomfortably dark night gives way to day. Thuso works his magic to get the crime scene investigator to come by the house immediately, although any possible evidence was probably destroyed by the first officers on the scene. Although there were plenty of hot ticket items in the house, the only things stolen were mine (when I realized my laptop was also amongst the things now missing there was another gut clenching, knee weakening reaction which was the closest I came to an actual panic attack as I sank to the ground in an attempt to find the wind that was suddenly knocked out of me.… There was a lot of writing that I hadn’t properly backed up as it was still in progress. When you’ve got limited electricity the last thing you want to waste time doing when you’re trying to work is to decide which draft is most recent on any one of three places. Luckily I had recently backed up most of my pictures, so I only lost the last few months, and many of my friends had their copies, and music… Well my ipod had crapped out on me on Christmas day anyways—Nathan brought me another one from the States—it’s been an expensive year thus far…so it would just be a matter of throwing my external hard drive into the orgy of the illegally downloaded bonanza that is the hallmark of any Peace Corps event.)

The Peace Corps staff was extremely helpful throughout the ordeal, helping me replace my stolen living allowance cash and Thuso even rushing us to the airport so that we didn’t miss our flight. The thieves have used over 450 pula (about 75 dollars) worth of airtime—once even answering the phone when Thuso called them, which might hopefully give the police enough leads to try to track him/them down (but then being that it’s been two months since the incident, I’m not holding my breath on getting any of my stuff back).

Although the experience was one of the most frightening I’ve ever experienced, I quickly discovered the impact living in Botswana has had on my life. Despite being pretty much broke, having my most significant (and by that I mean mostly that they really help in maintaining my sanity in the bush) worldly possessions taken from me in what was an incredibly unsettling, invasive and terror inducing situation, I was almost immediately grateful. I had had someone with me, and I hadn’t been hurt. The thief had left me my passport, ID cards and credit cards, which basically meant I was still able to go meet Nathan on vacation. It could have been so much worse.

Once we were at the airport hours less than 8 hours after the incident , Dudu and I began to refer to the incident as the “bugglery” and stating that we had been “bugglah-d” playing on the Batswana accent in talking about it. We had to make a joke in order to keep our spirits up. We laughed uneasily about it, myself mostly to keep from dissolving in a puddle of tears. My level of anxiety remained through the roof, and my stomach and bowels took quite a while to recover (although this was tough to say if it was the impact of travel and constantly changing water or stress. I had a headache for most of vacation that felt different than the constant neck tension that I’ve come to self diagnose as dehydration but I’m overall pretty used to feeling kind of sick as normal.)

As we constantly checked in each other throughout the day, frequently touching each other’s hands or sneaking glances back and forth to make sure the other one was still there, we kept repeating how glad we were that the other had been there for it, and that we hadn’t been alone. I found myself extremely nervous when Dudu went to sleep on the plane, and found myself obsessively checking on her and silently hoping she’d wake up. I couldn’t’ really sleep or do much of anything requiring any level of concentration. Being alone, which I’ve also become to feel quite accustomed to here even in a room full of people, was a terrifying prospect. Through the whole of vacation I insisted on sleeping in the same bed as Nathan, even if we stayed in a room with two big beds. At one point when we met back up with Dudu the three of us all slept in one kind size bed. Dudu got up to go to the toilet, and came back into the room and lifted the mosquito net to crawl into bed. This woke me up and startled me and I was immediately screaming and grabbing around for Nate.

I’ve realized that being here, living in an experience where continuing to move forward focused mostly the methodology of making a plan and surviving has reduced the amount of time it takes an incident to transition from terrifying to what can be laughed about to nearly non-existent. Having little regular control over various aspects of my life has helped me accept things like this that happen. While my level of trust in things happening as planned has become nearly non-existent, my level of trust in strangers has generally increased (in the bush at least). Although I did my fair share of obsessive dwelling about what I had done wrong in allowing this incident to occur, I still stayed at Charles’s house on the way back through Gaborone back to the village. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it did definitely give me pause as to whether I wanted to live in Gabs next year, I’ve decided it’s not enough to deter my decision.

I realized what being a white person in the capital city of a southern African country means. Regardless of the reality, people think you have... stuff worth having. I’m not in Seronga anymore, where a luggage lock is what protects me from intruders at night. My village pretty much protects me and looks out for me. You don't get that as much in the big city. Despite my terror at the incident, I immediately understood how lucky I was that it was only stuff that was taken from me. The horror stories of the crimes committed in South Africa, of a long oppressed majority taking back power through both stealing and physical violence and even murder are common. I get that if I’m going to live in this place for the next year, the country bumpkin who has been living in the bush better recover her city girl ways pretty quickly.