You know the end of the story – we made it out. If we had known the ending, it might have been easier to go through.
We started watching the news intently as our neighboring countries experienced political turmoil. It was interesting and concerning to watch these episodes develop, and yet we did not believe similar events would unfold in our country. There, the control and fear has been so absolute that we did not think the populous would dare move. There were announcements of a planned protest, but in a place where pre-planning is underutilized, we wondered who was calling for the demonstration doubted many would actually take to the streets. In the event that anything would take place, our school planned to call a day of “routine maintenance” on the day of the demonstration. We didn’t drive downtown that weekend. However, all was quiet, and school continued as normal.
But then there was movement in the east of our country. This was surprising, but it is still leagues away across the desert from our home in the capital. We still didn’t think much would happen in our neck of the woods.
Looking back, there were signs to the contrary: the children of highly placed families disappeared from school; announcements came promising lower food prices and free housing. Our embassy, though, was not acknowledging publicly the portents. The annual citizen’s meeting happened to fall about a week before the excitement began. We listened to the bureaucratic announcements about passports, visas and voting, but the open question time revealed what we all wanted to know: what were the official evacuation plans, just in case? The pc response was, “It is highly, highly unlikely that there would be a need for an evacuation.” However, they had just realized from Egypt’s experience that they could not count on communicating with us via mobile or internet (we were never counting on that), and they acknowledged that they were considering reinstating the old-fashioned warden system. This was not very heartening. After questions and follow-up questions they said that if we were ever in danger we could always head to the embassy (which means driving right downtown for us – an impossibility if events became heated), or head to the airport where at the least there would be an embassy representative with a high visibility jacket and megaphone looking for citizens. As events developed, we would come to rely on this, the only concrete hope for help they gave.
Publicly, the Embassies and our school were saying everything was fine, and to borrow the British phrase, advised us to “Keep calm and carry on.” As an emergency measure, we are always prepared with enough food and water to last a week. Now we tripled our stocks.
Over the week tensions grew and rumors of activity in the capital began, and we were reluctant to drive further than our local shops. We were told to be off the roads from 5pm until morning light. I became intent on restocking the rations we consumed while we still could. We refilled our oven’s gas canister, topped up the car with petrol and our phones with calling credit, and tried to keep our clothes and dishes washed in case the electricity would be cut off. Our usually quiet line of shops became frenetic with others doing the same. The first amenity to run out was phone cards. The only system available is pay-as-you-go. We were calling to check on friends, trying to get information about events around the city and attempting to get our affairs in order – all over the phone. We realized we needed more credit too late, and the stock was gone. We began limiting our phone usage.
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