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.
I was born in the Andes of Ecuador and raised mostly in Central Mexico. I am American and lived for several years in Minnesota as an adult, but I live and work in Mexico again now.
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16 Comments to “dangerous stuff”
December 31st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
I’m very intrigued and curious, but being multilingual and creative storyteller like yourself, I’d imagine it would be easy to stay under the radar, unless there are other factors at play that I’m not aware of.
It’s funny because I was just thinking the other day that we should add a private forum for registered members. I’ll definitely add this in the to-do list.
To answer your question, I personally haven’t been in that situation, but I do know TCKs who have been in similar situations.
Why are you there and wow long are you staying in that town?
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January 1st, 2008 at 9:36 am
Why, thank you for calling me a creative storyteller. I’m flattered.
lol Hints are always more intriguing than facts! When you read the actual story, you’ll be like, “oh, is that all?”
I’m a missionary. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here; probably a couple of years. If I had kids I’d consider moving, but since I don’t, I’m staying. I love my job and I love my life here, and I’d rather be in a little bit of danger and doing what I love than be safe but unfulfilled.
And actually, life goes on as normal. We sleep, we eat, we work, we go shopping and go to church and talk with our neighbors… the only difference between now and a couple of years ago is the topics of conversations behind closed doors. I’ll just quote pieces of those conversations here.
“Yesterday I was on my way to class, when a new black pickup went by. It was full of men in the back, loading AK-47s as they raced down the street.”
“I was in the mayor’s neighborhood when I saw that she was driving home and being followed by a new black pickup with no license plates. When they stopped, a man got out and insisted on speaking to her privately. I don’t know what he said, but she looked frightened.”
“I work at the car wash, where they come with their black pickups. Instead of leaving the vehicle with us and coming back half an hour later, like everyone else does, they stay in their car and insist on being served immediately. Then they pay us five times too much and drive away before we can give them change. I’m scared that they’ll say we owe them, but I’m afraid to refuse the money. Last week they threatened to kill my uncle because they didn’t like something he said.”
“I saw inside one of their houses. It’s packed wall-to-wall with ammunition.”
“In one room, they have equipment that lets them listen in on telephone conversations. A few of them just sit there all day listening to people talk on the phone. They told me they’d kill me if I told anyone what I had seen.”
“Early this morning there were six dead bodies laid out on the street in front of my house. By the time the sun was up they were gone.”
“They came to my work yesterday and told me they’d kill me if I got in their way.”
“Something’s going to happen in my neighborhood tonight. I don’t know what, but they’ve warned us all not to be on the street after 10pm.”
“My sister-in-law had a baby the other day. We were getting ready to go to the hospital to see her, when her husband called and told us not to come. He said he thought one of them might be at the hospital.”
Well, there you have the feeling of it. Now there is nothing but dry facts left to go in my story.
Actually, the other day was the first real battle here between the police and the bad guys, and it made the international news, but I can’t find the link. It doesn’t really matter, since the news story has all the details wrong anyway. It is rumored that the army is going to come, but that has been rumored for several months and they haven’t come yet. It’s probably wishful thinking on the part of the populace.
I suppose things will continue in a fairly unstable way until a new balance of power is reached. I wonder how long that will take and how many lives it will cost. I don’t like to see these change taking place in this town, but there is nothing I can do about it besides pray. In the meantime, for the average citizen on an average day, life goes on almost normally.
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January 1st, 2008 at 10:16 am
My parents took our family to Suriname in the middle of a civil war. It wasn’t odd to hear the main road being dynamited. And one of my favorite childhood memories is sneaking out and watching when the guerrillas came and demanded that we give them our speed boat. They had the guns, so… (seeing them with the guns was the cool part, in case you are wondering.)
Along similar lines my mom just mentioned to me the other day that my little brother was doing something to the cleats of “Roni”… Roni is the major local “drug lord” or whatever you want to call him. (Oh, and he’s also a member of the country’s Parliament.) Yeah, that’s just the type of safe situation that I want my little brother in.
I love living abroad!
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January 1st, 2008 at 10:38 am
Of course the local drug lord is a member of Parliament! lol That’s the trouble with talking about “good guys” and “bad guys” — those nice neat divisions just don’t exist on an organizational level. And you can’t fully trust the government to be looking out for the innocent ones, or the justice system to work. It’s all about who has the power in a given situation.
Isn’t it funny how children view life so differently than adults? The adults are thinking, “How can I keep my children safe?” and the kids are thinking, “Wow, cool guns!” I can remember a few “adventures” from childhood that are fond memories for my brother and me, but that our parents probably didn’t enjoy nearly as much.
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January 1st, 2008 at 11:31 am
The funny thing about my life is, I’ve lived in the middle east for 4 years but I never did experience these things. The beauty of the UAE, in the middle of the warring countries, yet still soooo peaceful.
Anyways, back then, when the rebels were REALLY huge in the phils, they kidnapped my great grandpa and took him hostage. He was killed eventually, by those guys. Really, I don’t know him, never met him, but it’s sad how so much violence is going on..
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January 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
My dad was almost kidnapped in Nigeria.. story for another day… i’ve seen a lot of blood but not really violence. My Pakistani friend’s dad is kinda in with the Mafia in Medan, Indonesia. So my friend has the mafia boss’ number on his phone and if he’s ever in trouble with the cops he just gives them a ring… but they aren’t violent.. and if i ever get on the wrong side of the mafia for whatever reason my friend told me to call him haha… I guess mafia is in my blood. My great grandfather moved to Malaysia because he was working for the mafia and he killed a guy in China.. so fled to malaysia is more accurate hahaha….
I’ve been caught up in riots in PNG and Indonesia… I guess i do have some violent/danger stories… but I’ll have to organize my thoughts before scribing them.. Thats right Brice, i think i’ve found the topics for my next blog entry hahahaha
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January 1st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I was in Indonesia during the last of the Soeharto years, and was there when he was overthrown. Every fake election had these big demonstrations where big trucks of people waving flags would parade down the streets. Generally they didn’t even necessarily support the political party, but were paid a little money, given a little food and the right T-shirt and went and did it. For a long time it didn’t matter because the elections were rigged anyway, but they could still get nearly violent.
When he actually got overthrown was something else. Riots in the streets, police chucking tear gas, widespread looting, all that. There was a lot of anti-Chinese attacking going on too, because there was general resentment between Malays and Chinese minorities, and seeing as we were ethnically Vietnamese we were afraid of being targeted.
When we finally decided it was a good idea to evacuate, we went to the Finnish embassy, which was full of other expats trying to get out, some of them only with the clothes on their back. Got in a bus, with army escort and big parts of the city in anarchy.
A friend of mine told a story about how he was trying to get home from school with his family in the car. Rioters were coming from both directions of the street, and they were dead scared… and then when the crowd got to them, they were actually happy: They were carrying looted TVs and computer monitors, looted from shop windows, haha.
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January 1st, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Dan, I haven’t been in that kind of danger before — possibly being targeted because of my ethnic background — but it reminds me of a funny story. I was in Minnesota on September 11, 2001, and I did not leave my house for most of the day. My “foreigner instinct” told me that a lot of people were going to be upset, and that a few of them would take it out on the first foreigner they saw. I wasn’t scared, but figured I wouldn’t go looking for trouble either. It was several hours before it dawned on me that a) I wasn’t technically a foreigner and b) no one would think I was either! It was sort of an “aha” moment.
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January 2nd, 2008 at 5:56 am
Ingrid, that’s hilarious. I can so see it happening to me too.
Have any of you found that the “danger” gets normal? In the past two weeks, we’ve had an attempted bombing and a “successful” bombing about 2 metro stops down from where I live… in other words, in a place I go through most days. The first one was relatively exciting because it was “so close;” the second one which was in the same place wasn’t nearly as exciting even though the bomb actually went off [nobody was hurt, btw.] Maybe if I saw it happen it would be exciting again…
And then the question of whether to even mention it to my friends in the States, they might think I was in danger and just being brave, blah blah blah… So, I only told my girlfriend and immediate family so that they wouldn’t found out via news media.
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January 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
While wars and such can be dangerous and heartbreaking, this one’s heartbreakingly cute:
moar funny pictures
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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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