Hundredth + 1

I live in a dorm, with 9 other people. We were not segregated, gender wise. Not that it matters, I cant even remember the faces nor the names of the people I'm sharing the dorm with. It doesnt bother them either.

The dorm I live in, is just one of the many dorms at the Dorm Park. People from all walks of life. The dorms are mobile cells that can be easily moved from place to place. Think Trailer Park. Dorms were seperated from other dorms by just metal grills. It's basically a huge CELL that fits 10 people easily without any signs of looking as a cramped living quarter. The Idea? Prison cells. Difference: More Spacious and comfy, and its not black and white. It's colourful. No privacy (hence the grills). Don't ask me why anyone would choose to live in such a place.

Nothing specifically high tech is present at the Dorm Park. I'm talking about security. The dorm is accessible through sliding doors, yes, metal, and locking it means using one small pathetic padlock. Just ONE. Security: NONE. Ziltch.

When there are many groups of people living together in a small park, there are sure to be conflicts amongst the tenants. People stick to their dorm-mates, their groups, and fiercely defend themselves, watching each other's back.

I'm not that keen on internal political issues such as that, so I remained the observer and the person of a few words. Keeping mum about everything doesnt mean that I'm left out of the constantly boiling conflicts. That happens when you're in a group. I'm indirectly responsible for the things that my dormmates did, even though I had no hands on anything, but just because I am part of the group, it got me tangled in the mess.

Our belongings are simply left in our backpacks, we have no shelf units nor any storage units to keep our belongings. Oh, did I forget to mention that the people there are mostly backpackers looking for a cheap place to crash. New faces can be spotted almost everyday, perhaps that explains why I have problems remembering names and faces of even my dormmates. There is a silent unspoken rule that everyone understands, "We shall not take what does not belong".
It doesnt only apply here, in fact, it should be a universal rule that everyone know by heart.

Each morning all cells will be emptied, we are not allowed to stay in the dorm during the day, as part of a drive to make the people go out and explore the place. Or make themselves useful, earn a buck or two. Most people here travel on a shoestring, therefore they need to earn that extra cash to move along.

Emptied cells simply means that what seperates a thief from our belongings is that ONE padlock. Of course, its the rule of thumb that NO ONE should EVER leave anything valuable in a place like that. However, it sometimes slips our mind ...

We've been living here for the past 3 weeks, and everything feels safe. We formed a close knit relationship among dormmates, and everything just felt in place. Everyone fits in like pieces of puzzles. Theft rate, ZERO. However, things change when we start to take things easy, when we let our guard down, and make yourself vulnerable to threats. When you felt comfortably safe, that's when everything crumbles.

We came back one day, only to find the padlock lying in a awkward position. I knew something bad happened. Bad. GOsh. My things. MY things. NO. This cant be happening. We left the earlier the day, leaving behind all our belongings, since we decided carry nothing but IDs cos we were doing some volunteering work for the community. We don't need that extra 10 pounds on our backs for such work. Huge mistake.

I lost my entire backpack. Everything. My Oakleys, my cellphone, my PDA, my iPod, cash, and worse, my digital camera; along with hundred MBs worth of pictures that I wont be able to recover nor get a second shot of, clothes, my backpacking essentials. Everything. I broke down upon finding that. The rest of my dormmates suffered just about the same fate. Lost everything. The thought of losing so many things all at once is simply too painful. The material loss aint that bad, it was the intrusion into people's lives through their belongings that hurts. Felt "raped" of my things, and it felt dirty.

Bastards. Those who did the things they do. Taking things that does not belong. I'm disgusted. It hurts. The thought of it kills me almost instantly. Chicken shit losers who finds the easy way to get things that are seemingly out of their reach. I believe in Karma, just as how my sister use to tell me about it. It doesnt make me feel any better. Devastated, I decided to get out of that place. My trust was betrayed. I had myself to blame.

I sat at the sidewalks, mourning at my loss. It's still painful. A middle-aged couple stop by their tracks, and asked me if I'm alright. They're from Germany, residing in the hotel on whose pavement I was sitting on. Shuomo, a grand 6star hotel in the luxury strip of the city. I have no idea how far I've wandered penniless from Dorm Park, and ended up there exhausted and hungry. They offered to buy me dinner at a posh al fresco restaurant just across the street from Shuomo. God bless them. I shed tears of gratefulness and be reminded that there are still good people left in this world. Their generousity did not end there. The couple spoke in thickly accented English, we exchanged experiences over the dinner table, and there was a connection which established itself at the very moment we spoke. I spoke about giving up travelling, but the couple encouraged me to carry on. They offered to get me things that I might need for my journey, and offered some cash. They are way too nice, to a stranger like me. I didn't know how to thank them.

It's hard to trust people from a new place, because it has been broken once, and it could happen a lot more times in the future. It is not easy to build trust and it takes time. It's even harder when we had to build it from scratch, which is often the case in real life. But I guess that it is just part of life, it is something that we had to learn to deal with, so that we can train ourselves to be instinctive through experience.

...

Thank God it was only a dream. I guess that with this, I'd never ever leave anything behind, out of my sight. This is one of the dreams I had that I remembered with such detail. One of the meaningful things in life that we should never take lightly of.

*Based on a true Dream =)