208 days to go - (non) Criminal Elements?
Much has been made of the crime stats in South Africa. There is, undoubtedly, a high level of crime and violent crimes in particular. But the statistics suggest that these tend to be focused in the domestic communities with little impact on visitors. I don’t mean to trivialise the seriousness of the situation but this weekend we thought we had our first personal experience of crime.
My wife thought that she had had her mobile phone stolen during a short shopping trip to a local Mall. Before reporting the theft she decided to retrace her steps to see if she’d dropped the handset only for it to be found by a stranger and handed in – optimistic you might think.
Well here’s the thing. The phone had been found, under the table that we’d had coffee at, by a young woman who had held on to it knowing that sooner or later the owner would call. In order to do just that my wife asked another, non criminal, stranger to borrow their phone. To cut a lengthy, but happy, story short my wife and her phone were reunited about two hours after she discovered its loss.
The morale of this story – there are statistics and there are statistics. There are security concerns here but there are also some very nice and friendly citizens, we’ve met loads.
Posted at 18:45 14 November 2009 by Gary Benham | Comments[0]
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