Mossie repellent gets nicked

I arrived back at work today after a week’s absence to find my newly purchased bottle of mosquito repellent had vanished. Someone had taken it! This is the first time that something of mine has gone permanently missing at my work place. I often find my books and paper work on other colleague’s desks (people just take and don’t return, a consequence of communitarianism) but my mossie repellent is nowhere to be found.

I just hope that whoever took it (and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is one of my colleagues as our office is so open to the outside world that we constantly have outside people traipsing through) knows what it’s meant for and that it’s highly poisonous. All of which I doubt given that the language on the bottle is in English.

It’s also perplexing as to why a Timorese person would want a bottle of mossie repellent. They spend their entire lives living with mosquitoes (as a colleague says, they’re our friends) and simply cannot and do not smother themselves in DEET (if they could afford it, they would slowly die from poisoning). I can therefore only surmise that the person who took it, doesn’t know what it’s for.

Category: Timor-Leste (East Timor)