The Spaghetti Thief

While we and most of the community where at a funeral for one of our teacher colleague’s brother, a thief broke down our neighbor’s door and stole some of her stuff. The neighborhood was abuzz with gossip when we returned from the cemetery. Apparently the thief took about the equivalent of $20 in cash, an iron, two pairs of pants, and... ten packs of spaghetti! It was a little unnerving to have a break-in literally ten feet away from our bedroom window. Our house is slightly more secure, with burglar bars on the windows and doors, but the old mortar holding them in is so crumbly now, Luc is convinced one good tug from a would-be burglar could easily remove the obstacle. We don’t have much to steal in our little house and people think we are poor since we don’t have a TV, which seems to be the very first sign of affluence here, but we are foreigners, and with no bank in the town, there have been times when we have had stacks of cash in our house. We put an extra pad lock on our main grate. In the end the spaghetti was his undoing. Some of the neighborhood kids starting investigating and spying into windows. The suspect was boiling a pack of spaghetti. That was enough to bring the police into it and he was apprehended and forced to give back three packs of spaghetti and the iron. He was just a rebellious teenager with nothing to do, not a serial criminal, so we’re feeling much safer now that he was punished and outed to the whole town as a robber. We can’t imagine a crook in America, going in to someone’s house and stealing… spaghetti. But this isn’t America…