Once in a Blue Moon, Things Don’t Fall Apart

By Cecilia Russell
BAKU , Nov 22 2024 – The drive home is uneventful. Our Bolt driver is a careful driver—the bright, half-moon provides a delightful end to an evening of song and good food. Our last night as an IPS team at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

A short friendly spat over who will hold the ample leftovers is settled, and my phone slips off my lap and onto the floor. Forgotten.

About an hour later, back in the room, I look for it. My backpack gets pulled apart; jacket pockets checked, rechecked, rechecked again. It’s simply gone.

“Call 112,” my colleague Umar Manzoor Shah WhatsApps me. I know he is still awake as he has to write a story for the next day, and we persuaded him to abandon his post and join us for dinner. The WhatsApp web is still working on my computer. “Call from the landline in your room.”

Searching for the missing phone online.

I do, then when I realize that I have called emergency services. I tell the very kind woman on the line that my phone is lost—it isn’t an emergency, just a lost phone.

“We can help you,” she insists, and a few minutes later (and at this time very close to midnight), there is knocking on my door. I do what I would consider unthinkable in South Africa and open it to find three smiling young men there.

I explain about the phone—explain it could be on the Bolt or in the shuttle from The Grand to the Polo Residences. What it looks like, my name, my number, all the possible details.

All the time I feel slightly embarrassed because it’s a phone, not a real emergency, and the only loss really is that it will be inconvenient, and I would have lost the lovely video of the incredible singer from Kasa Masa where we had dined with my colleagues crooning to the theme song from Titanic. Video only uploads on wi-fi.

The group of men leaves with promises that tomorrow I will have my phone. I am impressed at their concern, but mostly I find it incredible the interest shown in this lost phone, something seldom seen back home.

I made tea, opened my computer, and decided to try to trace my phone. iPhones are easy to trace, so I check online for the ‘how’, check into ‘find my devices’, and voilà—there is the last trace of it at The Grand.

I call emergency services again to say I have found it, and a few minutes later my three young men reappear.

We check its location again, and it’s moving back to town, this time in the Bolt. We ping it online, as it makes a loud noise. Somebody answers—they phone him on my phone. They video call him—he shows me my phone—and I identify it by its colorful flowery cover.

The men laugh and joke—they will be back in half an hour with my phone. It arrives, they do. And so it’s recovered.

Nobody is more surprised than me—this service is a real bolt from the blue. Not expecting another, but life may surprise me, until the next blue moon in 2037.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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