Felipe Bizimungu a vendor and teenager was rewarded Frw25,000 for returning valuable items in a bag belonging to a French visitor Yannick Belfour 42 that had travelled from Burundi to Rwanda on urgent business.
Belfour told our reporter what had happened and his reasons to why he decided to give the vendor a large sum of money as a reward.
Belfour arrived in Kigali in the afternoon, Tired and in a rush for his evening appointment he quickly got off the bus to rush and make arrangements for a place to stay. In the rush to alight from the bus, he forgot his carryon bag underneath his seat.He realized the bag was missing after arriving at the hotel.
The carryon bag contained his cash, passport, and laptop, and on him all he had were his bag full of documents. The hotel management advised Belfour to call the police and report his property stolen, while on his way to the police station.
He later received a call from a man speaking to him in Kinyarwanda, but Belfour says was preoccupied with his own affairs on hand hang up despite the phone kept ringing.
He finally decided to ask the taxi driver to help translate, as soon as the driver hang up the driver pulledover and explained to Belfour that his belongings were safe and the man who had them was the one calling on phone.
As they arrived back at the Virunga bus park, and searched for the man, they instead found a young man around 15 years of age, moving through the crowd yelling out prices of his goods, sticking his head through windows of the buses while holding in his right hand, his small payphone and cards and on his left shoulder Belfour’s carryon.
Belfour was so shocked that he gave the boy a reward of Frw 25, 000.
“it wasn’t only because I was so relieved but because it also meant that the boy had looked in my bag in order to find my card, so he must have seen the Frw100,000 in an envelope in the bag and still didn’t steal it, I think he deserved every franc.”
“not only that when i asked him how he knew which number to call, he told me he looked for a card that had Burundian and Rwandan numbers on it, he used his own credit to call me, and even if I hung up various times he insisted, it is the initiative that counts.
Belfour concluded by saying “I knew that Rwanda was a safe country, but this has just blown my mind”.
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