dangerous stuff
Hi there. So, a little while ago I wrote a story and posted it. It was about a particular organization and some very dangerous things that are happening around here. About five minutes after posting it, I deleted it. I didn’t want the “bad guys” to read it and see my name — basically, I want to stay under their radar as much as possible. One of the reasons I had posted the story here in the first place was because most of the fun of being in danger is being able to talk about it, and who better to talk to than my fellow TCKs, who collectively have been everywhere and done everything? So I’ll try to start a conversation even without telling my story. Have you ever been just sitting innocently in some town where you happened to live, when all of a sudden you realized that very bad things were happening around you? Have you ever had reason to think that the town where you lived had become one of the most dangerous towns in the world? Have you ever realized that many things that are common knowledge but that are only told in whispers behind closed doors, are actually probably not known by the police or the military? In a small town, have things like “I think the body count yesterday must have been over twenty” ever been part of a normal conversation for you? If so, I’d be interested in reading your stories. I’ll post mine someday when I live somewhere else.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:56 am
the “bad guys” with black vans, dead bodies, etc sound awfully familiar.
these kinds of things happen all the time in Brazil, every day.
fortunately, the worse things happen some blocks away from where I live, in the hills (the so called “favelas”), but I know I’m not completely safe from it
violence is all over Brazil
it scares me
a lot
one more reason to move out of here
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March 16th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
I was a white kid living in Mindanao, Philippines, and while I never thought of my life as dangerous, I suppose most people would have.
My father was kidnapped, although that was two years before I was even born… Once, we found out that the pickup truck we had just bought was stolen. We went to the authorities, despite threats from the people who sold it to us. Eventually, they pushed my mother off her bicycle, breaking her arm, and called our house threatening my little brother. (We kept him home from school for a while). This was all while I was pretty young, so I don’t quite remember how it ended, but it ended peacefully (besides the broken arm).
Friends of the family have been kidnapped and murdered (the Burnhams), and bombs have gone off in the market in the city we lived in. My parents were once in a jeepney that got commandeered by bank robbers with guns. My dad has had death threats made against him several times, as have his coworkers…
While we were in Iraq, there were some cities we just didn’t visit, and on some days we didn’t leave the house due to security concerns… but again, I never really thought anything of it. It was just life. Normal. I guess it takes a lot to phase me… I just don’t get most people’s definition of normal.
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March 17th, 2008 at 1:55 am
“Have you ever been just sitting innocently in some town where you happened to live, when all of a sudden you realized that very bad things were happening around you? Have you ever had reason to think that the town where you lived had become one of the most dangerous towns in the world?” < —-Ingrid, this sounds like a lot of Stephen King novels which also usually take place in ’small towns’…lol
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March 17th, 2008 at 3:09 am
When I would tell my friends in the US about the bombings in Indonesia while I lived there… Well it would sound bad, because as foreigners we *were* targets… But not really. It wasn’t like bombs were going off every day in the city.
Familiar *places* were bombed. A hotel lobby where I quite often ate brunch on Sundays with family. The nightclubs in Bali. The Australian embassy. The Jakarta Stock Exchange…
But I never really considered myself in danger. You got used to the armed army/police guards at every building, lazily checking your car for bombs. You got used to the news that somewhere else in the country, the Muslims and Christians were slaughtering each other.
Besides, I didn’t like to give the impression that Indonesia was a dangerous country or anything… because it wasn’t. The chances of being bombed there were pretty slim even then, but I guess it’s the idea that there’s a chance at all.
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March 25th, 2008 at 6:53 am
I grew up in Luanda, Angola in the 1980s. When people hear about it, they usually ask ‘Oh, but that was certainly very dangerous, wasn’t it?’
Well, I always find it difficult to answer to that.
It’s just - normal. As a kid it’s a part of your everyday life, the power and water cuts (always due to rebel sabotage, of course), the nightly sound of gunfire, the curfew, the range of safety (i.e. how far you could venture yourself out of the city safely), the influx of refugees, the food scarcity, the amputees and the forced conscriptions. Obviously, looking back you realise that it was indeed a situation of danger, but as a kid it’s just normal. And BTW, I know that ‘guns, cool’ feeling all too well.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 6:09 am
I have plenty of stories although almost none of them happened to me personally.
Yemen. Some friends of my family were threatened by fundamentalists and had their car burnt out. (The civil war in the early 90s was way over-hyped by the way; It was pretty short and I know plenty of people who stayed through the whole thing.)
Lebanon. I lived in Tyre (southern Lebanon) for 8 weeks last summer. Crazy place, although it really didn’t feel very dangerous at all. There was still all kinds of carnage from the Israeli bombardment in summer ‘06… every single bridge from Beirut to the south was still out and UNIFIL troops and were everywhere. There was an apartment building in the center of town with the top 4 stories blown off of it by a bomb. I was told by the people I was staying with that 30-some civilians had died while hiding in the basement.
There were a couple of explosions, one of them killed seven Spanish UNIFIL troops and another one targeted UN troops on a local bridge. Also some idiot fired a lone rocket into Israel.. that was scarier than everything else that happened put together.
The people I stayed with had been there during the war. They told me horror stories of trying to get out of the south… At one point they were driving and about to round a corner when a van came zooming around the corner with someone bleeding in the front of it. Israeli bomb. Then they were staying at a monastery in “safe,” Christian East Beirut when one of the guys was standing out on a balcony. He went in to use the bathroom and seconds later the balcony was thrown back into the room by the explosion from another Israeli bomb…
Thank goodness none of that happened to me!
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