Killer Phones!

"What? No. How is that possible?"

I'm listening to Amaniel speak with his girlfriend over the phone.

"Wait, wait..." He rolls his eyes at me as she continues talking.

He and I have just finished lunch near the Omdurman souk. For 2 SDG ($0.70USD), we each dined on timeas, a Sudanese falafel. Packed with garlic, timeas are nothing short of excellent. The white bread they're served on, however, is less than desirable, but it's all the country has to offer. Now we're headed back to our place in Bah'ry, but Amaniel is stuck trying to decipher what his girlfriend is telling him.

"But there's just no way... hello? Hello?" he says into the phone.

He looks at the phone, confused. Placing it back in his pocket, he looks up at me.

"Must have run out of credit," he says.

"Everything ok?" I ask him.

He smiles and lets out a single burst of laughter. Amaniel does this when he knows he's about to say something funny.

"She told me that phones are killing people." he says.

"What?!" I exclaim.

"Yeah. She said that people are receiving calls from an international number," he continues. "When they answer it, the phone lets out an electric shock strong enough to kill them."

"Bullshit." I tell him.

"I don't know, man. Is there a way for a phone to do that? Like if the number was able to tell it what to do?" he asks me.

"Absolutely not," I reply. "It sounds like a bad horror movie, or at least a scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall."

"That's what I told her! Not the Sarah Marshall part, but that it's impossible."

"Totally." I say. "Maybe, just maybe, I'd believe it if everyone was walking around with the newest iPhone, but all these crap Nokias? No way."

We both laugh as we jump on the bus to head home.

A few hours later, we're back at our flat. I'm sitting in my room when Amaniel rushes in. He shows me his phone.

It's ringing. The call's an unknown international number.

We look at each other, unsure what to do. He tries to hand it to me; I place my hands behind my back. Finally, it stops.

"We're idiots," he says.

"And hypocrites." I respond.

"Apparently, everyone is talking about it though." he tells me. It seems he went down to the shop to buy more credit and the guys there told him the same thing as his girlfriend. All across Khartoum, the people are scared to answer any calls coming from international numbers for fear of being shocked to death.

We google the number Amaniel received and get nowhere. The country code is +11, which isn't a real country code.

If I'm honest, what I think is really happening is that the government has started the rumour in an effort to limit the people's contact with the outside world. Telling them that answering any international call might get them killed is a fairly good way to go about it too. It might seem crazy, but this is the same government that sometimes presents me with this screen when I'm online:

Dead End on the Information Super Highway.

A little strange, no?

Maybe I'm making too much of it. Maybe some 13 year old started the rumour and things just got out of hand. Maybe not.

Either way, if you plan on calling me from an international number, text me first.