The Legend of Ali Baba, Part II
I got up and started running….running through the wet muddy knee-deep field, feeling very vulnerable in the open field that he could still see me if he wanted to. Finally I made it to the path through the bush. And I ran…thinking – what was in the bag? My camera! My passport! Argh! That would be a problem. And I stopped running, tired, but still walked fast.
Hmm….how much money did I have? About $3 worth – OK. No big deal. Was my journal in there? No, I think that’s in the tent. Wait! You have to run! And I started running again, my thoughts running wild, thinking this guy would jump out of the bush at me.
Where’s my sunglasses? Or my capulana (sarong-type thing I had over my pants)? Or my headscarf? They must have all fallen during the struggle. Well, I can’t go back for them now! Argh! I kept running, walking for a rest, and then remembering I had to run again, following the path.
But wait? Where’s the path? Oh man! Where’s the path? I can’t get lost now! Ok…stop…don’t go further, so as to not get more lost. I turned around and looked for the path. I found it by identifying my sandal prints in the sand…good thing most of these people are barefoot.
I ran the rest of the way back to the airstrip and finally to the village. I stopped running when I could see the villagers ahead, feeling safe, and very much back to civilization. I was conscious of my appearance – I must have looked a mess – dirty from a long day of walking, not to mention rolling on the ground and running through mud; my hair a stinking mess, and conspicuously without the Mozambican adornments I had with me on the way out. I figured the best thing I could do was to start to tell people – it was a small island, afterall. News should travel like wildfire.
I ran into the first family on the road – the last family I had talked with on my way out to the airstrip. “Hello,” I said, out of breath. “Uhh….can you help me? I’ve been robbed.” They looked at me, seeing I was in a bad state. I told them what happened. I described the guy – “he was wearing a shirt with US dollars on it.”
I pointed at my neck, which was burning, saying I think maybe I had a cut. “Eeeeeehhh!” the ladies and children said, looking at it, sticking their fingers in it while I pulled away. By their reaction I figured I should be bleeding to death. (In the end it was just a few scratches.) Two gentlemen volunteered to go out and look for my things. They told me to go rest in my hotel and would let me know if they found anything. I thanked them a million times over and continued down the road, where the group of Muslim men were still convening. (I later learned this was a funeral they were attending.)
One of the guys looked at me – “What happened?” he asked. No sooner did I start to tell him my story, but I had a group of probably at least 50 Muslim men around me, intently listening to what I was saying. “Did you have money in your bag?” “Not much, but I had my passport, which is the most important, and my camera.” I described the guy again. “This has never happened on the island” they assured me. “Well, lucky for me to be the first.”
Just as we all agreed it was good that nothing worse happened, the sea of men parted and – behold! A motorbike with driver was waiting to take me to the police station. I thanked the men and climbed on the bike. The breeze on the bike was refreshing, although it didn’t last that long, as the island isn’t that big. As we pulled up to the police station, to add insult to injury, I fell right on my ass getting off the bike. Ugh! Let’s get this over with.
We walked into the old, semi-dilapidated Portuguese colonial building. The front doors were wide open, the building practicallly empty. There was no one in the first room. In the second room was one desk/podium-type setup, but still no one. “Hello?” we called out from the back garden area. I heard voices. “Yes, hello?” Again. The voices were coming from behind a wooden door that was padlocked from the outside. “Those are the prisoners,” my companion told me. Prisoners? I thought. Yes, of course, the prisoners.
I went outside, willing to give up for the day. “Sit here and wait” the guy told me and drove off on his bike. I sat on the front steps of the building, continuing to hate life. He drove up again. “Anyone come?” No. He drove off in the other direction. Silence again, as I noticed people looking at me holding my head in my hands. I just wanted a shower and to sleep. He drove past again, going back in the original direction. I sat and contemplated how much it was going to suck to go all the way back to Maputo for a new passport.
Finally the motorbike man pulled up with an officer on the bike. Without saying a word to me, the officer got off the bike and proceeded past me up the steps into the police station. He was a little man, and his uniform was quite big on him. I followed him up the steps and into the back room where the desk was. He stood behind the desk, shuffled some papers, and motioned for me to sit down.
“Yes. What happened?” I recounted the story in detail, including the small talk I made with the guy, everything. “What is your name?” “Tania O’Connor.” He spelled Tania alright…I started to help him with O’Connor. “O.” “O” he confirmed. “C.” “S.” “No, C.” “S,” he continued to write S. “No, O’Connor – O, C.” “S.” “No! It’s a C! Not an S! Here. Let me write it.”
I walked around to his side of the desk while he shuffled through his papers to find a page to write on. In the end he had me write on the bottom of the sheet he was already writing on (which was just a blank sheet, not any sort of form.) “Do you want me to write it on the top, where you’ve started it?” “No, on the bottom.” I wrote ‘O’Connor’, with the apostrophe, which might have screwed him up even more. He proceeded to copy it from the bottom to the top of the page.
“What is your mother’s last name?” “Skiba.” I stood up and wrote it on the bottom of the page, just underneath O’Connor. He copied it from the bottom to the top of the page. “Who is Skiba’s father?” “What?!? Skiba’s father?” Now, anyone who knows anything about the history of my family knows that this now gets confusing, particularly since my mother has remarried and changed her name. “What could you possibly want with my stepfather’s father’s name?” I thought to myself, thoroughly confused and completely bewildered by the increasing absurdity of the situation.
“Your mother’s father…what’s his name?” “Shanileck.” I got up to write it, but I couldn’t remember how. “I don’t remember how to spell it.” “What do you mean you don’t know how to spell it?!” he barked at me. “I don’t know! I can’t remember.” (You’re the one who couldn’t write a C, remember?) S-C-H…no. S-H..something. My mind was fried! I had to take a breath and remember back into the days when Grandpa used to recite it for me to learn…it all came back and I wrote it down.
“Did you have money in your bag?” “Yes, 75 meticais.” “Seveny-five thousand?!?” came jeers from the sidelines, as there were now a few others in there listening. “Uh, no. Seventy-five. Seven. Five. That’s it.” I went through the other things in my bag…he was insistent for me to list everything, including my sunscreen, bug repellant, etc. “But the important things are my passport and my camera. Those are the only things I care about…even just my passport.”
“What did the guy look like?” Now this is what I’ve always feared in a crime scene…I have no idea how to describe someone’s appearance. “He was wearing shorts, no shoes, and a shirt with US dollars on it.” (I knew the shirt would be key…as people are very poor, their wardrobes are very small; people are lucky to have a change of clothes sometimes.) “Was he a little shorter, a little round, have lighter skin, and marks on his face?” “I don’t know about the marks on his face, but he was not too tall, and yes, a little round. His skin was lighter, and he was wearing a shirt with US dollars on it.”
“Ali Baba!” he shouted out, as if he just had some sort of revelation. “Uh, excuse me?” “Ali Baba! It was him!” “His name is Ali Baba?!” Could this get any more surreal? Ali Baba. Incredible. “Yes. We saw him going out to the bush. He’s a little thief. He’s known to steal papayas and other stuff from the fields. He also steals people’s chickens at night.”
The people thanked me and apologized, reiterating that this had never happened before on Ibo. “We don’t like theives here. We’re going to find him, and when we do, he’s going to Pemba.” (A lot of people said this to me. Pemba is the main city…whether he was to banished from the island or was going to jail, I never figured out.) “You come back here tomorrow at 7am and we’ll see what we’ve found.”
I went home and showered, feeling better, but still a little shaken from the day. I sat with the ladies at the guesthouse and told them the story. “Ali Baba! I’ll punch him when I see him!” said one. “This has never happened before on Ibo,” said another. I told Alafo Mado, the appointed guide, who was very emotional over it. He proceeded to tell me the events of his day, in such a heated manner, as if he had been robbed too: “…and then we were waiting, and the guy wasn’t there because he was at a funeral, and we had to wait longer, and I wanted to break my fast because the sun went down, but I had to wait…”
I talked with Fawn and Meredith, explaining that I wouldn’t leave with them tomorrow since I had to see if they recovered any of my things. It was therapeutic, though. We couldn’t help laughing until our stomachs hurt – his name was Ali Baba!
Tags: Ibo Island, Mozambique, Mozambique, Tag Index
Tania