Salad Screamers: December 12

The morning started with another shower and a wonderful breakfast. Wonderful not only because it was free, but included all you could eat granola, eggs, toast, fruit, yogurt and juice. We tried to eat enough so that we wouldn’t have to spend any money on lunch and we did a pretty good job of it. After checking our e-mail (with pictures!) at the PC Office, we were off to another physio appointment for Kelli. Although the deep tissue massage left Kelli cringing and gripping the sides of the table, she tried to remain positive that the ends would justify the means. With the afternoon open, we decided to walk to a nearby mall where we couldn’t resist splurging on smoothies and were delighted to find an independent movie theater where we thoroughly enjoyed Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers. Afterwards, we picked up groceries for dinner and quickly began the walk back to the backpackers so as to not be caught on the streets after dark.

Just as dust was setting in, Joe noticed three young men following us. Not terribly worried as we were only a few blocks from the backpackers, we made a sharp right. The three men followed, crossing the street with a wide right. The men proceeded to slowly cross to our side of the road and continued to follow us. Starting to get a little worried, we crossed the street where we saw one of the backpacker’s employees getting into his car. He offered us a ride, but as we were at most a five minute walk away we politely declined. As the car pulled away, the three men again crossed to our side of the street, two in front of us and one behind. At this point, we could no longer pretend that they were headed in the same direction as us. We were sandwiched and before we could attempt to cross the road again, one of the men in front turned around and grabbed Joe’s arm. Watching as if it were all taking place in slow motion, Kelli took a few steps towards the street and started screaming. Pretty confident that none of the men had a weapon; Joe wrenched his arm free and started yelling “awa! tsotsi!” (no! thug!). The three men just stared at us for a few seconds before slowly moving away.

Although nothing drastic happened, we were pretty astonished that none of the other pedestrians, and there were quite a few around, even flinched. However, when you live in the ‘crime capital of the world’ in which pictures of murdered bodies appear daily on the front page of newspapers and anything not stapled to your body is free game, our incident probably didn’t even register on their radars. After we got our breathing and heart rates to within normal range, we concluded our trip to the backpackers where we immediately informed both the staff at the backpackers and the PC duty officer of our incident. Although nothing was stolen, we felt that the backpackers’ staff should be aware in order to warn their guests and that the information would help the PC alert and train future volunteers (plus, they like to keep statistics on all that stuff).

The PC duty officer kindly listened to our story, thanked us for reporting it and offered us sleeping pills. We politely declined, as the incident left us more angry than scared. Speaking of angry, the backpackers’ employee, incidentally the same one who had offered us a ride, was furious when he learned what had happened. He spent the next five minutes searching for a big stick and trying to convince us to come with him to track down the thugs so that he could “beat them”. We declined, telling him that we did not believe in violence and that he could potentially get hurt provoking the men, whom we assumed were drunk from the smell of alcohol on their breaths. Unconvinced, the employee sped off in his car carrying a large metal pole.

Sitting down to a nice salad and soup (thanks to Kelli’s screaming), we had a good laugh retelling the story to our fellow PCVs. The laughing was the result of the realization that we fought the thieves for a plastic bag of salad ingredients, a water bottle, a map and a rain jacket. Our money and phone were relatively safe in Joe’s money belt, which would have taken a lot more effort to obtain. In an effort to make light of the situation, our friend, who was able to contribute more than a few mugging and robbery stories herself, christened us the ‘salad screamers.’