Hiiraan Online

As George Bernard Shaw said, “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that is the essence of inhumanity,” I feel guilty inside, as many social researchers do, if my keyboard/pen ignores to shed the light on the destructive human behaviour in the society I live with. In other words, this is all about having a feeling of personal social responsibility.

Undoubtedly, you are now anxiously waiting to know what this article is all about; that is why you are now fast-reading by using  the skip and skim method. Take it easy, dear reader. The idea lies just underneath:

There in the homeland, in the Horn of Africa, the temptations to steal and cheat are very high due to the hunger and miseries in life; therefore, to me, it didn’t worth to write about stealing. However, that grape-stealing chilly afternoon in early February 2010 in a CCTV-camera supervised supermarket in Almelo (A lovely small city in the eastern part of the Netherlands), had prompted me to write about thievery and dishonesty to the public.

Sure, she was clever enough but honestly thief. Oh, what a shameful experience it was! I am very sorry for the word ‘she’, because, in nature, I feel compassionate to my opposite gender. This fellow countrywoman has just collected money from the cash-machine just beside the supermarket of her target to steal grapes. Thus, I definitely, do not assume this as an act of hunger but a decayed awful habit of enjoying theft. By the way, this article is not about ‘he versus she;’ professionally, it is, simply, up to the line of faith and integrity.

Allow me first, before I take you inside the supermarket, to share with you a story of ill-behaving and theft that I had once been told when I was in the motherland, Somalia:

Once, there was a hardworking thief salesman who works in a small shop that belongs to an old watchful man. The owner always was on alert and counterchecks his young salesman in smart way. In the afternoons, he used to tell his young employer to lock the door of the shop while giving him a space to show confidence. But make no mistake, the old man listens and counts carefully the sounds of the locks one to eight. He sometimes surprises the young boy by telling him to complete the locks. However, after sometime, the clever boy decoded the monitoring system of his boss. Then, the other day, he locks four and unlocks another four; and the old man just counted his traditional eight locks not understanding the trick of four minus four… Of course, you can guess what happened to that small shop. Later, the boy was captured and told his tricks under severe unlawful banishment on a kangaroo court.

Now, come in to the produce area i.e. first phase in PLUS supermarket in Almelo, which is itself tempting. In business wise, it is really attractive because green, smelly, fresh fruits and vegetables are neatly laid as they are designed to lure customers to buy but not to steal.

Then try to imagine to visualize a nicely dressed girl bending on bunches of green grapes sucking and swallowing some grapes softly not worrying or afraid that the grapes may stack in her gulping throat up and down.  Look, there she is, starting to pack the grapes into the pockets of her light-blue turtleneck. “Subxanallah, Glory is to God! Please, stop it,” whispered a shocked fellow countryman. To my surprise, “shhhhhhhhhh…., grapes don’t beep,” she replied.

Of course, she was lucky enough because she was not caught. She later explained-in a laywoman way-what she meant by ‘grapes don’t beep.’ She proudly explained: “I put the grapes into my pocket and left their package behind so that the grapes do not beep when I pass the counter or the exit.”  Sure, clever enough; she discovered how to cheat the barcode or the Universal Product Code (UPC) inserted in the products that, among other things, can also control the movement of the product when passing the exit.

Not only some Asylum Seekers from different nations in Almelo city cheat the UPCs by emptying the products into their stomachs and pockets, but they also buy stolen expensive bicycles in less than twenty euros. Believe me, there is an unbelievable religious understandings here: people go to the mosque to pray with a stolen bike that they intentionally had bought from a thief… To me, it is definitely, a ‘devil may care attitude’ but to them, it is normal.

Remember, these stolen bikes belong to the local inhabitants that the tax they pay has made possible to accommodate and entertain the Asylum Seekers. This is what the scholars call biting the hands that feeds you.

Honestly speaking, this is not an act of paying a gratitude to a host….

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