Adventures in a foreign land.

My wife Gina used to have nightmares which always involved her being threatened or followed or chased by some unknown, unseen figures. When we were first married she would sometimes jolt me from sleep into instant awareness by shooting upright in bed screaming! As time passed these incidents happened less and less until they were almost forgotten. So when this happened in Zambia within a few days of our arrival in Africa, I just held her and I reassured her that everything was OK; I told her that she was just having a nightmare and she should go back to sleep.

We were staying in a huge, 6000 sq. ft. ranch-style house on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capitol of Zambia. It had a 10 ft. high concrete perimeter wall topped with broken glass and covered with 3ft of barbed wire; all windows and doors were covered with steel grill bars; the outside area between the house and the wall was brightly floodlit; there were two huge guard dogs - a Great Dane and a Rottweiller loose in the garden; and there was a full time security guard who patrolled within the garden wall all night long. Of course we were OK, it was just a nightmare.

She had awakened with a scream in the darkened bedroom and said in a frantic whisper that there was somebody outside our bedroom window. I knew that there couldn't possibly be anyone there since the dogs were silent; apart from the nocturnal insect sounds it was totally quiet. We both lay back down, I closed my eyes and relaxed. Within a minute I felt her freeze rigid "There's someone there" she whispered frantically. I shot up and sure enough there were shadows cast by the floodlights moving on the window drapes. I leapt out of bed and ran to the window. When I pulled back the drapes my heart stopped, there was a group of 6-8 men; all armed with clubs, crowbars and machetes standing about 2 feet from me and looking directly at me. I let out an incoherent shriek which I think in retrospect was supposed to be like the audible weapon that the Maoris used in Robert Graves short story "The Shout." It didn't work, at least it only worked very temporarily. The gang fled to the gatehouse which was about 25 yds away, but then, clearly illuminated by the floodlights, they paused, re-grouped, and immediately started back towards us. I knew that we were in trouble.

We were alone and we were locked in the house. The owner, our hostess, was staying in an apartment in the city, the housekeeper who lived in a cottage on the grounds had the keys and he locked all the doors when we retired and re-opened them at dawn. There was no time to think, they were right outside and had immediately attacked the windows and the steel security bars that were welded over them. Glass flew, plaster and wood shattered, the noise was terrifying, but even more so was the image of this gang who were determined to smash their way into the bedroom with no thought for the bedlam that they were creating nor apparently were they concerned that we, the occupants, might be armed. They could not have known it, but we weren't, I didn't even have my pants on, I was standing there stark naked!

We fled from the bedroom down a corridor to a phone on a table in the hallway where there was a list of emergency numbers taped to the wall. Our hostess, the owner of the house, had explained what each one meant before she had left us. The first on the list was the universal emergency number 999, this was followed by four different police stations, the fire dept. etc. I began at the top, 999. It rang 30-40 times and no one responded, I couldn't believe it, was I in my frantic state mis-dialing? I tried again and still no response. I tried the first police station on the list, "Let it ring" I told myself, after about 30 rings I hung up. All the while there was this incredible pandemonium about 3ft. from my head as the attack continued on an adjacent window. Try the next one, "Oh God, it's busy, try another", this time it was the number of our hostess's apartment in the city.
Her phone must also have rung 30-40 times, and again with absolutely no response. All the while total bedlam. They were now attacking every window on that side of the house; the noise was horrendous and I was standing there stark naked trying to find one person who could help. I shouted to Gina to ask her to get me my pants and to lock all the doors as she returned; she went to our bedroom, grabbed the pants and then locked the door, similarly locking two corridor doors and pulling the keys. When she returned I was dialling the last number on the list, the Roma District police station.
After an eternity, someone, who was very obviously asleep, answered. He was befuddled and was not responding at all. Over and over I repeated, "There's a gang of robbers breaking into the house at 5557 Magoye Road, there's at least 6-8 of them, they're smashing their way in through the windows; the address is 5557 Magoye Road, do you understand me?" In film and fiction the policeman is instantly alert, his voice, his authority has a reassurance, you can imagine the radios crackling, patrol cars with lights and sirens speeding to your aid immediately. But in this case our man was still struggling with sleep or perhaps my unfamiliar accent was difficult for him to comprehend. He was my only hope. I kept asking him if he understood, did he have the address and could he send assistance and I wasn't getting anywhere. Finally he said that he thought that there might be a patrol somewhere and he would try! So much for fact and fiction. On that note of positive re-assurance I gave up on the phone, and from the level of the noise it sounded as though they must be almost through the wall. We fled. As we passed the kitchen Gina pressed the buzzer to Mr, Tembo's house several times to alert him, but at 5'3" and hardly 130 lbs. we knew that he wasn't going to be any help, we were on our own.


I mentioned that the house was large; one day for no particular reason I paced the distance from the master bedroom to the kitchen; It was 55 yds! And the house extended 2 more rooms beyond the kitchen, probably close to 200 ft. total. On another occasion I looked in every room in the house, seventeen in all, to determine the most secure place in the house in the event of whatever. I certainly didn't anticipate anything like this, I didn't anticipate anything, but I suppose our being there alone, being so far from anyone we knew, and being generally somewhat security conscious caused me to check it out "just in case." Well, here we were right in the middle of "just in case!"

I knew that the size of the house and the endless rooms would give us a small degree of security. The place was so large that we kept discovering "new" rooms even after we had been there several days. We ran to the far end of the house, through the kitchen to what seemed to be a servant's bedroom. Off that bedroom was a tiny steel grill enclosed patio that had a toilet and a shower, primarily for outside use. It was the shower that we'd been using, since for some unknown reason it was the only one of four in the house that had hot water. When we'd passed the main door of the house and Gina had buzzed Mr. Tambo I'd noticed the dogs, they were there, right outside the door and totally oblivious to the bedlam that was happening on the other side of the house! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! In the mythology of guard dogs Rottweillers were second only to lions in their ferocity and aggressive natures. Ours was standing there with a glazed look and wagging his tail. His Dane companion was similarly quite unconcerned. I screamed at them to try and get them excited, I stood there screaming through the closed door "Kill, Kill" over and over as loud as I could. I don't know why I chose to scream that specifically, but I just wanted to get them agitated, excited, involved! They both stood and looked at me, tails wagging, as though I was silly, not a tinge or a trace of guard-doggedness, just a canine blank happy stare.
When we reached the guest bedroom I asked Gina to wait there for me, I was going back. I had decided that it would be better to have the dogs in the house with us, so I was going to go back to get them. I had to unlock the main door and then unlock the two padlocks on the steel grill, which enclosed a tiny entrance patio. I seized the Dane by the collar and tried to pull him into the house. Years of conditioning had brainwashed him into believing that he wasn't allowed into the house. So when I tried to drag him in he just dug his heels in and it was an impasse. It was like trying to drag a donkey through a door that he didn't want to enter, but I succeded. I then seized the Rottweiller and dragged him, also protesting, into the house. I started to re-padlock the grill, but at that instant the robbers came running around the end of the house. They came straight for me swinging their clubs and machetes at my hands as I fumbled with the padlocks. For the first time I saw them very clearly in the floodlit doorway; the only word that comes to mind as I try to re-create that scene is "crazed." There was a frantic quality in their eyes as we stood for an instant staring at each other separated only by an unlocked gate. I retreated into the house and locked the door, why I'm not sure since it was surrounded by two floor to ceiling plate glass windows, which was all that now stood between us and them. I grabbed the Rottweiller and ran, dragging him back to the bedroom where I'd left Gina minutes before.
The bedroom had a clothes closet along one wall with a large storage cupboard above it. Gina was nowhere to be seen and then I heard her whispering frantically "Come up here" She was hiding in the cupboard which was about 6' wide, 3' high and 2'deep, and about 6' from the floor. It must have seemed like an ideal hiding place to her in her terrified state, except we couldn't lock the bedroom door that was between us and them, there was no key in the lock. I demanded her to "come down," but she was terrified and not about to vacate her hiding place. She pleaded with me to come to where she was, but I knew that there wasn't any security there and insisted that she come down, I didn't have the time to explain why. There must have been something in my voice that clinched it because she very unwillingly came down and we exited that bedroom with the Rotweiller in tow into the shower/toilet area. I locked the final door behind us. When I looked around, the area we were in was only 6' wide by 3'deep with a padlocked steel security grill between us and the garden. The bars were 1/2" steel and were spaced about 7"-8" apart. As I looked around assessing our situation, I suddenly realised that we were alone, the dog was gone! There was nowhere he could go but he certainly wasn't there! The only place he could have gone was through the bars! He must have weighed 150 lbs, built like a truck, but he must have gone through that grill as quietly and quickly as if he were a cat.

We were extremely quiet speaking only in whispers; If there were any of the robbers close by we didn't want to reveal our location. But at that instant I saw over the garden wall, about 25 yds away, the neighbor. He was standing on his patio with a light on and looking directly towards us. I threw caution to the wind and shouted to him as loud as I could "Help, call the police, we're being attacked by robbers." I repeated this at the top of my lungs over and over for at least 2 minutes. But he just stood in the shadows of his patio and stared at us, it was like shouting at a statue, there was no reaction, no recognition, and no acknowledgement. Finally he turned, walked into his house and the door closed behind him. It was a very depressing moment, his total neutrality left me feeling very alone, and now the robbers were in no doubt that we were still in the house and they must know pretty clearly, exactly where we were.

The shower stall was a typical shower stall 6'x3' with a shower at one end and an area 3x3 behind the door. The door was a flimsy wooden affair that wasn't lockable, but if I sat on the floor with my back braced against it I could wedge my feet against a step up to the shower. Gina sat at that end silently terrified. She had the foresight to grab 2 kitchen knives as we ran through, nothing that you'd want to stake your life on, but they were all we had and were better than nothing. I took them both, one in my hand and the other tucked into my belt behind my back. I knew that the robbers had 3-4ft. long steel re-bars and 2ft. machetes. If it came to it, our only advantage, if you can call it that, was that we were in an enclosure, in darkness, and they could only attack us one at a time. Prayer might have been appropriate but I'd never thought much in those terms prior to then, so it didn't occur to me. The only thing that did was how to react when the time came, which I was sure it would. I had visions of them attacking the door with me braced against it. They would realize immediately that it wasn't locked and that the resistance was me. Therefore the logical thing to do would be to smash through the lower door, I didn't reach any conclusions on how to deal with that possibility.
The night was silent; I could hear my breathing and thought that anyone else close by must also. Earlier we had heard sounds of activity but now there was no indication of anything. I assumed that it must be because they were at the far end of the house and were being very quiet. With the door closed on that tiny space it became suffocatingly hot. During the day the temperature was in the high 90's, at night, probably in the 75-80's. I remember that we had been sleeping with only a sheet and a mosquito net. It became stifling,

I couldn't breath, the humidity was horrendous and I was aware of sweat trickling down my back. I decided that I must open the door to get some air and I told Gina what I was going to do,"Please, please don't open the door, please", she beseeched me in a frantic whisper. Beseeched is not a frequently used word, but it's the only one that conveys her terror at the thought of the door being opened. But I felt that I had to open it, so I moved my position slightly and cracked the door about 2"; the cool draft of air was wonderful, delicious. In an effort to waft some air back to where Gina was I tried to open and close the door gently but rapidly a couple of times. The silence was shattered when I misjudged it and accidentally banged it closed with a loud noise. We were rigid, the noise sounded as though it must have reverberated through the entire house! But they still didn't come. I remember trying to estimate the passage of time but I didn't know what time it was or what time this nightmare had started. I realised that when your senses are deprived it's almost impossible to estimate time. I wondered how long until dawn, there were no clues, no lightness of the sky, no bird chorus, just our breathing.

At some point, after what seemed like an eternity I began to think that perhaps there was a possibilty that we were going to be ok, that perhaps the robbers would take what they could find and leave. We couldn't hear anything, maybe they'd already left? Then I started to think about the bedroom. It contained everything we had with us, all of our money, close to $2,000 in cash and unsigned travellers checks plus our camera gear-3 Nikons with motor drives plus half a dozen lenses, our passports, plane tickets, clothes, everything. Everything that we owned was in that room, and that was the room that they were smashing their way into when we'd fled. There was no doubt in my mind that we'd lost everything. Gina had on a pair of pants and a T shirt, I had a pair of cotton pants and that was it, that was all we had between us!.

I thought about the nightmare of dealing with the Zambian Government, Zambian Airlines, American Express, the US Embassy etc; and as I began to think that we might escape this nightmare ordeal, I realised that it might, by the light of day, seem like "out of the frying pan and into the fire."But for that moment we still had to deal with our current set of problems.
After what seemed like eternity I heard voices outside in the garden, I peered past the edge of the shower door and saw the silhouette of a figure against the first light of dawn as it walked past the grill. I didn't recognize him and thought for sure that it must be one of the robbers now coming to look for us. Two or three seconds later another figure walked past, it was Mr. Tembo our housekeeper. My most immediate thought was that they were holding him and forcing him to show them the house. I was reluctant to reveal our location but on impulse and perhaps without thinking I called his name and he came back towards where we were. He couldn't see us in the shadows, but he said "You can come out now, the police have arrived" I remember asking him to bring a policeman to the grill so that we could see him. He said something and a man with an automatic rifle walked back towards us and stood there, It was just beginning to get light, it was 5:30 am.

Mr. Tembo unlocked the grill and we walked out; as we walked around the house towards the main door, the one where I'd struggled with the dogs I saw a plainclothes white man and another uniformed officer with an automatic rifle, they were both standing ankle deep in broken glass just inside the front door. We were both barefoot so I gave the plainclothes man the various keys that I had in my pockets and asked him to fetch us some shoes from the second bedroom down the corridor on the right. He returned a couple of minutes later with two pair of shoes, both Gina's. She went to get me a pair and came running back a few seconds later shouting "They haven't taken anything, everything is intact!"

We couldn't believe it, they had stripped the center section of the house of everything removeable, furniture, TV's, VCR, drapes, food, utensils, carpets, everything. But because we had locked all the doors behind us as we had fled they hadn't gone into that end of the house. My opening the main door grill to get the dogs gave them easy access, they only had to smash the large plate glass windows at the front door and they were in. At that point they must have given up on trying to break in through our bedroom, though they had came very close. Two of the bars welded to the window frame were broken and it it wouldn't have taken very much to break one more. My grandmother always said that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth! How liitle she knew.

It turned out that the "plainclothes man" was a visiting professor of Geology at the University of Lusaka, his name was Vaughn. Apparently there had been so much of this happening that he and a group of locals had formed, what he called a "vigilante" group. The problem was that the police didn't have cars, (Zambia is a very poor country) so the "vigilantes" would use their personal cars to transport the police. They would patrol the neighborhoods at night and communicate by walkie-talkie. Our "police dispatcher" had the address totally wrong, it turned out that there was no such address. They knew that something was happening somewhere but they didn't know where. While we were standing in the yard talking about all of this I noticed that the Great Dane was throwing up, I looked at the vomit and saw that it contained large chunks of what looked like pork fat, it didn't look like anything that he was regularly fed. Then the Rotweiller also began to vomit. The dogs had been poisoned which accounted for their unusual behavior. Apparently it was a common practice for thieves to throw poisoned meat over the wall an hour or so before they came over. Both dogs were rushed to the vet, the Rotweiller almost died but finally pulled through three days later. The Great Dane was ok.
We had to go to the police station to make a report at 9 A.M., our new-found geologist friend said that he would return and drive us there. We spent the intervening couple of hours packing our things and talking through the events of the night. We talked to the "security-guard" a man about 5'2", 110 lb. His job [for which he was paid almost nothing] was to walk around the property all night long and keep us safe from attack. To protect us he carried a stick. His story was that the robbers came over the wall, overpowered him by throwing a coat over his head and tying his hands. He said that he heard them talk about killing him, but one of them had said "Not now, later." He was left tied up in the guard shack. When they left they took his keys to open the gate, they were laden down with large "sacks," actually they were the drapes from each room which they tore down and used to create "swag" sacks.
When Vaughn returned he commented "That by now everything would be dispersed throughout the compound" "What do you mean" I asked, "Which compound, in fact , what is a compound? "You haven't seen the compound" he said, "I'll show you." Whenever we had left the house to go into Lusaka during the week that we'd been there we had always turned right outside the gate and walked to the highway, about a mile away and taken a bus into the city. That morning as we left in Vaughn's car, we instead made a left turn out of the gate. There was a bend in the road and as soon as we were around the curve I realized that we were in the midst of the most poverty ridden shanty town you could imagine. Nothing but rusty tin shacks, cardboard "houses", open sewers, not a trace of green anywhere, just dusty brown dirt. There are shantytowns in every country, but this was worse than anything I'd ever seen. There was nothing, no water, no electricity, no paths, no gardens, nothing, just poverty.

Suddenly it made sense, "our" 6,000 square feet mansion on the edge of this ghetto was too much, it was there everytime they had to walk into town, everyday they had to pass it with its lights, TV, music, gardens, privilage, everything. "They" decided to share the wealth and unfortunately for us they chose to do it the week that we were there.
We went to the police station and made our report, and then we went into town to find a hotel: there was nothing! Every room in the four hotels in town was full. It was about 10 am and we hadn't slept a wink all night, so we went through the InterContinental lobby, out to the poolside and ordered breakfast; then we dozed until mid-afternoon when a friendly Irish woman in a dripping bathing suit sat down next to me. "Well how's it going?" she asked, "Are you new here?"
I told her the story and she immediately offered to let us stay with her. Her name was Brigid O'Connor and she was the librarian at the British Council in town. What a lovely lady, we stayed with her for about 3-4 weeks and had a wonderful time and made a wonderful friend. All's well that ends well!