Continuous from the previous story… 前回の話の続き

This is what happened….

The morning after when I realized my backpack was stolen, some police officers came to interrogate our house staff. Helen and I went to work feeling quite anxious. When I came home late from work that day, Helen said to me “your stuff was found.” I couldn’t believe it. She told me the following story:

While we were at work, a cousin of our housekeeper happened to be visiting his daughter. The housekeeper told him about the burglary, and then his cousin went “oh I saw a guy selling a black laptop in a marker today in the village. I know he works for a security company.” They waited for Helen to come home and then brought her along to a police station. Police and the two men went to find this guy in the village and met him on his way to work (our house) for the night. He was interrogated, confessed and told where he was hiding the stolen items. It was an extremely lucky series of events for me to have my things back. Apparently the guard took it when the other one was sleeping and hid it in a tree. He was arrested and prosecuted in a court.

He was sobbing when the judge read his sentence, and I also felt like crying. Theft and particularly burglary are serious offence, and he got three years of imprisonment. There is absolutely no excuse for stealing. However, this guy gets paid so little despite how much we pay to the security company. He didn’t even know that this was a laptop, letting alone finding a good market to sell it. He has four kids and his wife is expecting another one.

I felt somehow partly responsible for this. I felt guilty that he is poor, that I have so much compared to what he has and that this severe equality exists in the society and a world that I do not have much control over. It just felt wrong, and this is one of the aspects of living here that I don’t like. It’s great that we have people working for us, but I will never get used to the idea and would rather not do this.

The other side of this incidence was that I got to experience the judicial system in Malawi. I gave a statement to the police, went to the court and almost had to testify (didn’t happen after all.) I used to do a volunteer work in Canada to accompany victims of domestic violence to a court. Now I can understand a fraction of how scary and traumatic it is to face your offender. It was extremely uncomfortable for me to see the guy.