Shaken But Not Broken
Report Date: February 14, 2011
Re: Report - Republican Guard Incident
On February 14, 2011 at approximately 9:20 in the morning- although I don’t know the exact time- I was walking along the embassy fence that faces the Boulevard Maya-Maya. I had my camera with me, and I was taking photos- shooting photos across the boulevard where two members of the Republican Guard were sitting on the curb. One of the guards called out “Madame” and crossed the street. He walked up behind me and grabbed me, but more specifically grabbed my camera in an extremely tight grip. I was not letting go of my camera, but I wanted to discuss the situation with him, so we struggled. I had been taking photos of a billboard advertisement for the DRTV Internet service in Brazzaville. I do not speak French at a high level, and I was scared, so I continued to try to break free from his hold on me. We struggled some more, and I screamed. The American Embassy guards came to assist me, and the member of the Republican Guard released me when he saw the embassy guards nearby. By this time, I was rather upset and started to cry. I walked with one of the guards from the embassy back to the embassy reception area.
Date: February 14, 2011
Re: Staff Recognition/Appreciation
This is a letter to express my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to Mr. Bally Gassayes and the members of the American Embassy security team for their assistance on February 14, 2011. From the day I arrived in Congo in late August until today, I have always found every member of the embassy security staff to be professional, courteous and extremely helpful. I really do not know what I would have done without their support on February 14, 2011.
When I thanked Mr. Gassayes for everything he did to help me on February 14, his response was that he was only doing his job. I see both Mr. Gassayes and the guards at the embassy going above and beyond their job duties every day to make everyone at the embassy feel safe and secure, and for this I am both appreciative and grateful.
Sincerely yours,
Brazzaville English Language Fellow 2010-2011
Afterword
The member of the Republican Guard (a soldier who protects the President of Congo) who grabbed me and stubbornly refused to let go of my camera will be going to prison I was told by an embassy official. For how long, I don’t know, but the conviction of the delivery and tone concerning his fate leads me to believe he might be behind bars now. A Congolese colonel apologized to me personally after the incident, but I do believe that the soldier wanted to steal my camera. That’s why he grabbed me rather than politely tapping me on the shoulder and engaging in a civil dialogue about what he assumed happened, which was that I took his photograph. Stealing is easier if civility is disregarded.
But unfortunately for this particular soldier, his life changed in an ordinary instant.
The Year of Magical Thinking is a book I will never forget. Through the anguish and fog of grief, thank you Joan Didion for writing that book.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. "He was on his way home from work - happy, successful, healthy - and then, gone," I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an "ordinary Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States."
2 comments:
I am so very, very glad that this ended positively for you, though it must have been an emotionally harrowing experience. Good for you for screaming! I think that a lot of people hesitate to make a loud fuss, and don't get the help they need as a result!
Thanks for your supportive words Pam. I have discovered from unfortunate incidents involving men who are much stronger than I am that screaming at full volume directly- and I mean as close as possible- in their faces sometimes shocks them enough to release their iron-clad grip on me so I can run away. When I scream forcefully, I notice that they then look around to see who is witnessing the scene. This shocks them into an awareness of what they are doing. I realized I need to take a self-defense class. How much of what could be an appropriate reaction to an aggressive man is cultural? This is a question I asked myself. Self-defense that works in one country/culture may not work in another.
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