Take a Bite Out of Crime

Now that the Angkor bike race is less than a week away (there's still time to donate!), I can reveal a secret: my bike helmet was stolen recently. Riding a bike without a helmet is a big Peace Corps no-no, so if anybody had known I was riding around without it, something bad could have ensued. Here's the story.

When I first arrived in my town, I locked up helmet and bike in the schoolyard every day during the hours when I taught. Then, people started asking me why I locked them up. "Gom aui kay luich," I replied, which roughly means "So no one will steal it." Well, people laughed at that. No one's going to steal your ridiculous foreign bike, they implied, nor your ridiculous helmet. Seeing as how barangs (and specifically Peace Corps volunteers and Mormons) are pretty much the only people in Cambodia who wear bike helmets, it would be silly for someone to steal such a distinctive helmet. I took this to heart, and pretty quickly stopped locking my bike up in the schoolyard.

Fast forward 18 months. One afternoon early in November, I proctored an admission exam for my computer class. As usual, I left my bike and helmet unlocked in the schoolyard, and didn't lay eyes on them for about 4 hours. When I came out of the exam, I found that my helmet, which had been hanging from the bike by its strap, was gone. I approached the only teacher left at the school, you might call him the disciplinarian/caretaker, and reported the loss. "I bet the little kids took it," I told him. There's a gaggle of small children who play around the high school, since it's such a stimulating environment (people! cows! a pond!). They like to ring the bell on my bike, and I figured they might've gotten curious about the helmet and taken it off to play somewhere else.

The caretaker reported to me the next day that he had asked all the kids about it, and they had said they hadn't seen it. "That's what they would say," I thought, but didn't say anything. I started asking other teachers about it. The strange thing is that their first response, when I said it was gone, was "Is your organization going to buy you a new one?" They have had so much experience with wealthy NGOs with money to spend that they assumed any loss would be quickly remedied by my "wealthy" NGO. I explained to them that no, since I had not locked the helmet, Peace Corps most certainly would not replace it, and further that I was pretty SOL, since you can't buy bike helmets anywhere in this country (as far as I know) and I would henceforth be breaking a big Peace Corps rule.

Once they realized I really did need the helmet back, it came out that some teachers had seen a student wearing the helmet around the schoolyard. At one point, a teacher saw him wearing it as he rode away on a moto. What a ridiculous picture that must have made. At any rate, no one thought to stop the student and ask why he had the helmet, though everyone knew that it belonged to me. And no one knew the student's name. The school's vice principal made an announcement to the whole school that whoever had taken the helmet should return it. This, sadly, produced no results.

By pure chance, shortly after that I went to visit a favorite student of mine who lives about 7 km down the road. I wanted to make sure he hadn't dropped out of school, since I hadn't seen him at all this year. Luckily, it turned out he'd been in school the whole time. I told him my story about the helmet, and he said he knew the student who took it. "But Teacher," he informed me gravely, "he is a gangster." Helpfully, he added, "It's OK, because he is also my friend."

I enlisted this student's help in getting the helmet back. Only a couple weeks later (I was on vacation for part of this), my student brought his friend the gangster to my house, where he handed me back the helmet. I silently rejoiced. I could once again conform to Peace Corps rules and simultaneously keep my head from being squashed like a watermelon by trucks carrying sand/pigs/tractors down the highway at reckless speeds.