“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”
After a total of eleven months in Latin America and daily warnings of the thieves here, it finally happened to me. I got robbed!
I was walking down a kind of messy/crowded street with my backpack on, and as I was reaching the end of the street, I automatically reached back to check that the little pocket on it was closed. It wasn't, and my phone and wallet was gone from it. Fuck fuck fuck, I thought, pulled of my backpack and started looking through it, but nothing else was gone.
Honestly, that was not so bad. I lost an old cellphone (thank you Ewa for giving it to me, I'm sorry I can't return it), about 50-100 SEK, a USB stick and my master card. A bit annoying to loose the card, but my mum <3 helped me to block it immediately so no damage done! Interestingly, I was carrying a macbook, our passports, my camera and 700 SEK as well, and left in the opened outer pocket was our dictaphone, a cable to it and my swiss knife.
So I guess sometimes you are lucky. I didn't get a gun pointed to my head, I didn't even notice it. It means as much to me as if the things had fallen out of my back, because I know it was my fault. I know it is way too easy to open that pocket and take whatever is in there, but I guess I had to learn to not do it by failing. I want to emphasize that Bolivia, or the other South American countries I have been to, are not more dangerous than other places. I am sure there are an equal amount of robberies, rapes and murders in NYC or Barcelona or Paris, but there is more poverty here. Poverty which drives people to the edge of human dignity, when you have nothing more to loose. People here are far, so far from "evil". They are just incredibly poor.
And why are they poor? Because of a world system that makes people in the western world rich on the expense of people in Latin America, Africa and Asia. That is why there are entire populations in poverty, and some of those, out of despair, end up pickpocketing. So who am I to blame them?
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