As an expat in Tunisia chases after a stolen phone in Tunis, she discovers an unexpected culture of community-mindedness.
“You live in Passage? You must be careful there; it’s not a good area.”
Spoken with grave faces, this was the reaction of nearly half of the locals and foreigners I met when I told them where my husband and I had been living for the past five months and counting.
“You live in Passage? Ahlan wa sahlan, welcome, this is real Tunis!” the other half would respond jubilantly.
In the early days of my time in Tunis, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to these starkly different impressions of my new neighborhood. To the former, I would equivocate, shrug lightly, and offer that I had yet to feel unsafe but would keep my wits about me. They’d double down by warning me to at least beware of pickpockets. To the latter, I laughed in camaraderie while silently wondering what they meant by real Tunis.
Passage is a bustling neighborhood in the heart of downtown Tunis, Tunisia, which derives its name from the metro station at its center. Lively and loud, the neighborhood is situated minutes from the old medina (city), Avenue Habib Bourguiba, El-Fateh Mosque, several produce and thrift markets, and countless restaurants and cafes. Also located a short walk away was my work building. One truly cannot beat the convenience of Passage.
Though I had lived in Tunis for less than half a year, I quickly grew to walk with the swaggering confidence of someone who had grown up weld al-houma, a child of the neighborhood. My walk to and from work each day brought me through the full length of the major downtown artery, Avenue de la Liberté, where the aroma of roasting chicken and mlewi sandwiches drifted down the sidewalk and tempted me into asking my husband if we could eat out more nights than we should’ve.
Unfortunately, my stride wasn’t quite so swaggering on this particular day as I hobbled my standard route home from teaching a 6 pm to 9 pm class on blistering feet that ached from too many hours in stiff shoes. As I passed cafe after cafe, the nighttime chatter between friends over coffee and cigarettes that spilled out onto the sidewalk was background noise to me, muffled under the sound of my husband’s voice over the phone.
“I’m sorry you had to work so late. The good news is dinner should be ready soon, and we can relax tonight.”
“Amazing, thank you! I’ll be home in a few. I’m just turning the corner onto our street.” I could see the oversized green door and white balconies of our French colonial-era apartment building just ahead.
As I approached the building, I shifted my phone to my left hand while extending my right arm behind me to dig through my backpack pocket for my key. I finished my walk and stood directly in front of the door, fumbling to pull out my key and muttering about how much I couldn’t wait to take off my painful shoes. I was too preoccupied to feel the presence that was quickly coming up behind me. And in the blink of an eye, my phone was in the hands of a hooded man running down the street.
Alas, I had fallen victim to a certain flavor of cockiness that can arise when you travel to several pickpocketing hotspots without ever having your belongings taken. Suddenly, I realized I was not, in fact, invincible.
I’m not sure what it says about my fight or flight instincts, but my reaction was to stay firmly planted and yell profanities at the sky while watching the hooded figure grow smaller with distance. Tunnel-visioned by my own shock and frustration, I didn’t realize that my distinctly foreign voice shouting strange English expletives had caught the attention of the street around me. That is, until I registered people talking about “her phone” and noticed a group of approximately ten neighborhood boys abruptly hightail it in the direction of the hooded phone thief. I caught eyes with one of them, who waved at me encouragingly as he took off.
Well, if they’re going after him, I should probably go after him, too… right? I thought to myself, almost begrudgingly, knowing that I had significant lost ground to make up for.
Doing my best to ignore the blisters on my heels, I ran to catch up with the group.
Suddenly, we were on the chase, and it felt as if I were living in an action movie montage. Urgent shouting. Fingers pointing in all directions. A sputtering motorcycle drove by. A boy in our group caught his attention, explained the situation, hopped on the back, and the pair drove off ahead of us to continue the chase on wheels. They zig-zagged in and out of the grid-like streets, cutting back with updates. Processing the events around me on a 15-second delay, I surprisingly realized that I was having fun. But after a whirlwind 10 minutes, the group slowed to a jog, then to an aimless walk. We’d lost him.
A young man, no older than 27, who later introduced himself as Yassine, turned to me. “Can you track the phone?” he asked.
My face went pale, and my stomach dropped. My mind recalled the memory of dropping my backpack containing my heavy laptop in front of my apartment building in a thoughtless effort to lighten my load before joining the chase. The two of us turned back immediately.
~
After hanging up the phone, my husband, Jakob, returned to diligently chopping vegetables. He expected me home in no more than five minutes. Ten minutes came and went without my arrival. Starting to worry, Jakob called me again. But the hooded man running down the street with my phone in hand did not answer.
Concerned as to what was taking me so long, Jakob headed down the spiral staircase to the entrance of our building to see if he could spot me. Instead, he caught the eyes of the mlewi sandwich shop owner across the street. The shop owner pointed at my backpack, lying on the ground next to our building’s front door. Jumping to the extreme conclusion that I had been kidnapped, Jakob frantically asked the shop owner where I had gone. The shop owner gestured up the street, signaling that I’d gone that way. Slinging my backpack over his shoulder, Jakob ran in my direction.
~
Our paths crossed at the intersection two blocks up from our apartment.
“Are you okay? What happened?” Jakob’s words tumbled out, his voice equal parts panic and relief to see me.
While explaining the night’s events in between sharp inhales to catch my breath, I simultaneously booted up my laptop to open the Find My Phone app.
“You should really go to the police station to report this. They’ll help you, or at least try,” Yassine intervened as I managed to switch my phone into ‘lost mode’ remotely.
“The location still shows it hasn’t gone far,” I narrated as we all converged around the screen. The small icon demarcating my phone on the virtual map lurched westward every few seconds. We sat watching the map auto-refresh until it stopped.
“He probably turned off the phone,” Jakob sighed defeatedly.
“Please come with me, I’ll bring you to the police station,” Yassine urged. With few other options left at our disposal, we followed his lead.
On the way, we took the time to formally introduce ourselves. Against the backdrop of a bizarre and unexpected evening, our conversation was exceedingly normal. We chatted about our work, how long we’d been living in the neighborhood, and about life in Tunis broadly. I forgot about my blistered feet. Maybe they were just numb now.
Yassine dropped us off a block before the police station and wished us good luck. We thanked him profusely and parted ways.
~
I woke up the next morning groggy, as if I had a hangover, but without any of the drinking. The events of the night prior felt like a distant dream. Instinctively, I reached for my phone on my bedside table.
Oh, yeah. Right.
The morning felt slow and hazy. Jakob poured coffee while I sat on the couch, speaking my stream of consciousness aloud in a sort of disjointed reflection.
“I can’t even be mad, you know?”
Jakob nodded, curious where I was going with this.
“If this had happened in New York or Boston or Washington, DC, nobody would’ve looked twice. I’d have been written off as crazy. But last night, I had the whole neighborhood crew chasing down the street trying to get my phone back without me even asking for help! I honestly wouldn’t even have considered running after it myself until they all took off. That amount of support–for a complete stranger, no less–feels special.”
“A type of community-mindedness we don’t have in the United States and Europe,” Jakob affirmed with a soft smile. I nodded in agreement.
Perhaps all the people who warned me that Passage wasn’t a ‘good area’ had a point when they told me to beware of pickpockets. But had I listened, I would never have known the community behind real Tunis.
