Security

Editor's note: This blog has been half written for months. It probably should have remained that way.

    Author's note: There is no editor.

Security...we all want it in some form, whether emotional, financial, spiritual, political or personal. The pursuit of it drives our lives and directs the decisions we make in life, sometimes to our own harm. Since this is a simple little blog I'll leave the analysis of codependency to someone with more experience and deal here today with personal.

Everyone wants to feel safe in their own homes. Anyone who has ever been burglarized knows that awful vulnerable feeling that comes when you come home to an open door and a ransacked house. That day was January 8th, 2000 for me. My reaction was to get a dog. Under the circumstances I feel it was a fairly measured and reasonable reaction.

Everywhere you go in Africa, the desire to keep belongings safe is in evidence. Shops have bars and shutters. Security guards loiter and large shopping chains have someone on every aisle. Having someone who can help you is a nice change but is not really the reason that they are there. There is a whole industry that supplies gates and shutters. If you have a gate, then you need to lock it but also protect the lock. Gates have a plate that covers the lock so you have to reach around and unlock a lock you can't really see, or some have the lock in some type of box.

Better neighborhoods are fenced with 8' concrete block walls. On  top of the walls is often a row of razor wire or electric fence. Some people have the loop razor wire with a electric fence strung on the inside of that.

As you leave town the fences thin out but where they can afford them people still have bars on the windows. Some places in the bush the mud brick homes have windows that have been closed up. I'm not really sure why they were there to start with but that's what I've seen. In the rural areas, social life really happens outside or in the open walled kitchen area not inside a dark house.

Perhaps the funniest security measure is the couple who have one end of a cable locked to their car and the other to their bed. Dad has to leave early some days, Mom's thankful that so far he's always remember to unlock it...so far.