Thankful

Last Saturday, I decided to go to Maseru for shopping, lunch, and cold beers with my friend Heather.  Meeting up with Heather every weekend is my guilty pleasure here in Lesotho.  We are lucky to live close enough to town that going shopping is like a getaway into a completely different world from the small villages where we live.  We even found a restaurant that looks like an Applebees on the inside and serves draft beer and burritos (on a side note, I haven’t tried the burritos yet.  The last time we went, I was worried that they would turn out awful and ruin my cloud nine feeling).

We began last Saturday just like any other weekend in town.  We met at a small café inside the mall and sipped on mugs of dark roast drip coffee, bitching about problems with our houses, problems with school, problems with our friends.  We charged up our iPods and read the local newspaper.  Heather ordered yogurt with granola.  We planned out everything that we would do in town: first the post office before it closed at 11am, then shopping at Fruit ‘n Veg for bulk oatmeal, then schwarmas for lunch, then Pick ‘n Pay for grocery shopping… then, finally, our long-awaited beers at Spurs. 

It was a great day.  I send two letters home, bought mango and green peppers at the store, ate an incredible beef schwarma, ran into a few friends in the mall, and ended the day with two frosty, cold Castles.  By late afternoon, I was ready to get home and catch the tail end of the local soccer game that was being played next to my house.

Heather and I shared a cab to the taxi rank.  I got off before her.  I quickly made my way through the lines of dirty white taxi vans.  I was carrying my backpack filled with food, my clutch wrapped around my wrist, and a grocery bag in my hand.  I pushed my way through the crowds of people and found the taxi labeled “Morija/Matsieng” and crawled in.  Once I had settled into my seat, I reached down to pull out the 15 rand it costs to get home, and realized my clutch was gone.  My heart dropped.  I had it wrapped around my wrist only seconds before, and now it was nowhere to be found.  I started frantically looking under my butt, under the seat, inside my backpack, around the floor… it was nowhere. 

The woman seated beside me noticed that I was looking for something, and she asked for my phone number so that she could start calling my phone to see if we could hear the ringing and track down the clutch.  She said that it was turned off.  Strange, because only minutes before, I knew that it was “on” inside my purse.  I just knew that someone had to have cut the clutch off my wrist and turned off the phone, hoping to steal everything.

The worst part of it all was that I had made a trip to the ATM just that morning.  I wasn’t entirely sure of my PIN number, so I had written it down on a small slip of paper inside my clutch, tucked in nicely right next to the ATM card.  Surely by now, someone must have bolted to the ATM and taken all of my money.  I started to cry.

                By the time I got off the taxi at my stop, my eyes were red and watery, and all I wanted to do was to get home.  The soccer game was still going, and as I rushed past, I heard people calling out my name.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone, let alone allow them to see me crying.  My host sister came running over and I told her what happened, and she quickly ushered me home to call the Peace Corps.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that they could do at 6pm on a Saturday.  They said that early Monday morning, they would call the bank and cancel my card, and I was to come back to Maseru to report the incident to the police station.

                I got drunk alone on Saturday night and went to sleep, hoping to forget about everything.

                Sunday morning, I woke up to my sister knocking on my door and the sound of a man’s voice outside.  I peeped outside to see Maphoka’s smiling face telling me that they had found my phone.  One of the teachers from my school was standing next to her.  I thought it was a joke.  The teacher, Thabo, told me that I should get dressed and come with him.

                Walking to a nearby village, he explained to me that he had seen me exiting the taxi the night before, visibly upset, and tried calling to see what had happened.  My phone was still off.  He tried calling again on Sunday morning, and a woman answered my phone, asking him if he knew the owner of the phone.  He said he did, and she said to meet her in a nearby village.

                We waited along the side of the road, seated in the shade next to a shop.  I think Thabo knew that I was nervous, because he tried to distract me by chatting casually about American basketball.  All I could think about was how careless and stupid I had been in the taxi rank.  About a half an hour later, the woman pulled up in a taxi.  She got out and slowly made her way over to us.  She was a big lady wearing a floppy white hat.  She addressed Thabo, not me.  They spoke for a few minutes in Sesotho, and then she asked me what I had lost.  I tried my best to answer her in Sesotho, waving my hands in the air to tell her that everything was gone.  She reached down, unzipped her purse, and pulled out my clutch, smiling.

                I jumped forward and started hugging her, and she was laughing.  She told me to look inside and make sure that everything was there.  She confessed that she had taken 10 rand to cover the taxi fare to come meet me.  I took out a 100 rand note and gave it to her.  At that point, I would have given her everything.  It was hard to express how thankful I was in Sesotho; I just started babbling in English to her about how she had saved me.  All she replied with was: “you are my friend!”    

                We walked back along the road together, and she and Thabo talked.  Later, he explained to me that she had seen someone pick up the clutch from the ground in the taxi rank.  She approached them and saw the contents of the purse, and told them that she knew the owner of the purse.  Apparently, she lives in a nearby village where I teach, and she had seen me walking around last week.  She took the purse and got in a taxi headed towards Morija.  When she got there, she pulled out my photo I.D. and started showing it to random people along the road, asking if they knew who I was.  They told her that I lived in Matsieng.  So she went to Matsieng and did the same thing.  It wasn’t until Thabo called that she headed in the right direction towards my village.

                I know that I am very lucky.  Everyone that I have talked to says that these kinds of things never happened.  The woman could have easily made off with my phone, cash, and access to my entire savings account in Lesotho.  Instead, she skipped work for an entire day to look for me.  She didn’t make any phone calls with my phone.  She took a little bit of cash for transport, and she was honest about it.

                The worst part of the entire situation is that I didn’t even ask for her name.  This angel just appeared out of nowhere, and I have no idea who she is.  I’m determined to find her again, just like she found me.