Thief in the Night

Okay, so it started about 2 weeks ago.  I was pretty hungry one afternoon and since I keep a small stash of food in my room, I thought I'd make myself a nice peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I reached into my grocery bag and could not find my peanut butter and jelly which I had used to make a p&j sandwich a few days prior.  Maybe, I thought to myself, I threw it out accidentally.  On the weekends when I got to Dar, often times, I throw away food that I know will perish during the few days that I'm gone, but I would never throw away peanut butter and jelly, so I dismissed it, still wondering what happened to it.  About a week later, I realized my umbrella was gone.  I hadn't needed to use it in the past week or so because the rains had passed so I don't know when I misplaced it, I just knew it was gone.  I've even noticed that over time, I've had fewer pieces of underwear....

Fast forward to last week, I had a frustrating day at work and the other interns were in my room for our nightly "debriefing/ venting" session.  To make us feel begtter, I thought my Maxwell CD might do us some good.  I reached over on my bed, and my CD case my the CDs and DVDs I'd brought and my portable CD player were gone.   Now, I never take my CDs out of my room, so I knew someone had been in my room stealing stuff, but how could they get in my room?   All the rooms have unique locks and the their is only one key per room (i.e. no locks) so how could they get in?  Still, I dismissed it and thought perhaps I had a chunk of memory loss and just couldn't remember where my CD was.

who the hell steals peanut butter and jelly?

Well, on Sunday, when we returned from Dar, one of the other interns returned to her room to discover her entire CD collection was gone.  This was more than a coincidence, so we finally reported it to the owners of the guesthouse who, initially, insisted that we misplaced our stuff and should look for them again and there there was "no way" anyone could get into our rooms without a key because they had no spare keys.

AHA!! Turns out, the manager of the guesthouse replaced the locks  on ALL OF THE DOORS in the guesthouse and made 2 additional spare keys without telling anyone.  He admitted that he had the keys, that no one else knew about them or where they were, but refused to admit that he'd been going into our rooms and stealing stuff.  So he was driven to the police station and we were required to go and make a statement.  They questioned him, but he wouldn't give any info, so one of the policemen left the room and came back with a big ass rifle.  He took the suspect outside, as I was told to "torture him" until he confessed.

Over the course of the last few days we've discovered several items missing between the 3 of us:  hiking boots, underwear, CDs and DVDs, portable CD player, money, a cell phone, umbrella, duffle bag, socks, sole inserts for shoes, body lotion, etc.  There's little hope that any of the items will be retrieved since he probably took them to Dar to sell.

So much for a pleasant farewell from Africa...  But I'm still trying to figure out who the hell steals peanut butter and jelly?