What an Hour!

I absolutely adore argan oil.  I use it daily on my face.  And while we made three 100 mL bottles during our cooking class experience, I decided that wasn’t enough.  I wanted to grab two more bottles before we left.  We went out on our last evening, shortly after 5:00 pm, to walk over and buy it.  While buying it, I pulled out all my cash and gave it to Jon so he could figure out the exact change to make the purchase.  I told him to keep it so all our cash was amalgamated for converting since we were leaving the country the following morning. Which turned out to be very fortunate!

We started walking back, and bam.  A guy on the back of a motorcycle racing past us snatched my purse.  I had the strap looped around my wrist and was also holding onto it tightly.  But, physics.  He was flying down the street and his momentum ripped the purse out of my hand and the strap off of the purse.  I started running down the street screaming to stop the man in the orange jacket, he stole my purse.  I screamed the same words over and over about five times.  But within seconds I lost the guy since there’s no way I can outrun a motorcycle.

I thankfully had my phone in my pocket, which is standard practice for me.  I don’t like to keep it in my purse but on me, partially hidden.  Our passports were thankfully back at our riad, and I had just emptied my wallet of cash, which was fortunate.  But my credit cards, driver’s license, etc. were all in there.  And in 14 hours we were heading to the airport!  I was renting a car under my name, which we were picking up the next day, as well.

Before going to Morocco, one of Jon’s concerns had been safety.  How safe is it for tourists?  That’s not just a Morocco thing, but an everywhere we go thing.  I had assured him multiple times that everything I read about Morocco talked about how completely safe it is, and that crime against tourists is virtually unheard of.  And when it does happen, locals jump in to protect and defend the tourists and police crack down hard on crimes against tourists.  Tourism is their main industry and one they value immensely.  So, when this happened, I was beyond shocked.  While we are always aware of our surroundings and try to be vigilant and safe, this caught us off guard.

The girls were completely distraught when it first happened.  They thought I had been hit by the motorcycle at first and had been badly hurt.  They were screaming and inconsolable.  Then they realized I was not hurt as I was sprinting down the road, but no less distraught to learn someone had stolen my purse.  I stayed calm and logical throughout the entire process, which helped them to settle reasonably quickly.  But sadly, this is an incident they will never truly forget, and they lost a piece of their innocence today.

Jon’s amazed at my ability to stay calm through things like this.  I think in large part that’s thanks to my job, where I see awful things happen to people all the time and am of the general opinion that as long as no one is hurt and everyone is ok, that everything else can be dealt with.  Things can be replaced, but people can’t.  We tried very hard to convey that lesson to the girls to help them process the incident.

We walked straight to the police who mill around the tourist area nearby, watching the ground hopefully on our way.  We were hoping that he’d have opened my purse, realized there was nothing of value to him in it, and tossed it on the ground somewhere.  We saw nothing.  We chatted with the police, who were very nice and immediately began taking all the information.  We were told there are security cameras in the area, so maybe they would be able to get some info from that.  Knowing we were leaving the next morning, that didn’t reassure me a whole lot, and assumed that would be the last I ever saw of that purse.

They escorted us to the police station where I sat answering questions while they filled out a report.  What kind of motorcycle, what did the two men look like, what did my purse look like, where was it stolen, etc.  I was in there for over an hour when suddenly there were about 6-8 cops that walked in.  One sat my purse down on the desk and I stared at it in stunned disbelief.  I was like, “That’s my purse!  Where did you get it?”.  They didn’t let me touch it at first, as they wanted to look through it, open the wallet to confirm my ID matched who I was, and whatever else they were doing.  But they quickly handed it over and asked me to confirm everything was there.  And it was.  I was beyond shocked and happy.  I jumped up and hugged every single police officer in the room.  They all laughed and seemed incredibly amused by this.  My kids also sat on the chair laughing at “silly mommy”.  It was 1 hour and 10 minutes since it had been stolen.

I asked how in the world they found it.  They said that people chased the would-be thief for over 2 km.  There were no cops in the area when I was running down the street, but apparently, locals do come to tourists’ aid.  One (maybe more than one?) of them began the chase, the police got involved in the chase as well, and the man was apprehended, complete with my intact purse.  I guess it’s true that locals and police take crimes against tourists seriously.  I cannot imagine having a large group of locals and police in London, Ontario trying to chase down and apprehend a thief to return my purse.  The thought is laughable at best.

I still had to sit at the station for more than another hour, finishing filing the report and getting all the paperwork in order.  I signed 6 pages of a statement, all of which was in Arabic, so I’m going to just have to assume that he wrote everything down properly that I signed off on!  They even brought the thief into the room and asked if I could identify him.  I couldn’t.  It happened really fast and I only saw him from the back, never saw his face.  But they told me it was him.  They put him on the other side of the room to await whatever justice came his way after we left.  He looked to be in his mid to late teens.  I was tempted to speak to him, mainly to tell him how much he terrified my children, but in the end, I didn’t.

This was one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.  And while the purse snatching could have made me feel negatively towards Morocco, it actually had the opposite effect.  I actually think far more fondly of their country as a result.  I feel much safer, knowing how truly valued people and their safety are to the police and locals.  People there had been unfailingly kind and amazing our entire three weeks, and then when we were victims of a crime these amazing people stepped up en-masse to help us, though we were complete strangers to them.  Wow.  Truly amazing.

Even more unexpected was that we received text messages from the police officer who took my statement a few days later.  He reached out to see how we were, if we needed anything further, to make sure we enjoyed our time in Morocco, and to let us know that he hoped we would return again and to reach out to him if ever we are back and need anything.  I think it’s safe to say we will be returning to Morocco again at some point in the future!