Me: So Njeri,* did you enjoy your long Easter weekend?
Njeri: Well, on Saturday night (about 2:30 am), I woke up in the night and heard men cutting the bars on a window next to my apartment. They had big guns – AK47s. The woman next to me has a shop, and they were after her phone credit of 5,000 (about $80). They also took her TV and her DVD player. As I moved back away from the window, I bumped a plastic container on the floor, and they quickly shined a torch (flashlight) in my window. Thankfully, they didn’t see me. I heard them telling the woman next door to be quiet or they would shoot her.
I went back to the bedroom, woke Nicholas up (11) and told him to be quiet. He was surprisingly not scared. He told me not to scream until they moved further away. We overheard them saying that they would not enter our apartment and the one on the other side because they knew that one of these two apartments had a gun, and they weren’t sure which one it was. When they finally moved further away, Nicholas told me to call for help, so I screamed out the back window and woke the neighbors. It took them a while to figure out where my voice was coming from, but one of the neighbors has a security alarm, and triggered it. At this, the robbers packed up and quickly fled with the TV and dvd players. They had already entered three of the ten apartments in our complex.
I’m extremely grateful to God for sparing us that night, but it’s been hard to sleep since then.
*Njeri is our househelper and a very close family friend.
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