Purse Snatched at SM City

So for anyone who is not aware of the situation, my mother-in-law, Ava, had her purse stolen at a local mall while we were eating lunch here in the Philippines. We had already been given instructions to keep our valuables close and she had placed the purse between her legs while we were eating. It was pinched in here legs not just setting on the floor next to her legs. She thought this was safe but it wasn't. My one piece of advice based off of this experience would be to keep the straps of your purse around an arm at all times when in an environment that might be unsafe. The purse was pulled from her grip and the thieves stuffed it in a larger bag and ran with it (these details were given to us by two girls who saw it all happen). There was a moment of confusion which gave the robbers just enough time to get a head start that we could not regain. We ran after them and searched the Taxis and Jeepnees in front of the mall. No luck in finding them. She lost her cash, digital camera and most important, her passport. At this point you start playing the “What if” game. What if we had sat at a different table. What if she had left her passport at home and not in the purse. What if we would have reacted faster and caught them. There are a lot of things that could have been done different but Ava summed it up by saying “Like my mom use to say. 'You can't change the past so lets focus on what we can do in the future” Wise words I thought. It's so easy to get mad and play the blame game but what good would that do. Though things seemed chaotic God showed himself to be in control. The two college girls who witnessed the theft spoke really good English and the father of one of them was a police officer in the area. They were very helpful with mall security and with the Tay Tay police. We had to fill out an incident report at the mall then we were escorted by mall security over to the police station. At the police station we had to wait to give our statements. I found it interesting that the police officer was hand writing everything in a record book. I expected everything to be on computers but we're not in Kansas any more (Springfield to be more precise).

With the formalities of reports done we returned to our home to call the US Embassy to see what we needed to do to get Ava out of the country. Her flight was suppose to leave that coming Monday so we had two days to figure things out and it was the weekend. We called the Embassy and they were closed until 7:30 Monday morning. Since her flight was scheduled to leave at 9:00 am Monday we canceled it and were going to reschedule it once we knew when she could legally leave the country. That evening Ava called family to let them know what was going on and that she would not be home as scheduled. She also worked on freezing all the accounts that could have been accessed from the cards in her purse. We tried our best to enjoy Sunday though we knew Monday was going to be a busy day. Monday morning we called the Embassy and were told that we needed to be there by 7:00 am if we wanted a chance to see the passport people because of the number of people who come daily. Since it was already 7:30 we knew this was a job for tomorrow so we went back to language studies and prepared for the trip to the US Embassy the following day. I'll give the account of that trip next time.