night visit

Well we weren't supposed to post about this until we got home, but Lexi accidentally did yesterday so Ms. Bottoms said we could since we've all talked to our parents and they know we're safe...

So the night of June 16th at 10:30, about 15 men roll up to our gate in a huge jeep with machine guns. Our guards are supposed to keep us protected and not let people in but you don’t really say no to an AK47. I am 75% asleep when Lexi walks in and tells all of us we need to get our passports. Apparently, Peter went outside and one of the men told him there was a big problem but they couldn’t tell him what the “big problem” was until they saw “documentation”. After all our passports were rounded up, Peter went back outside to show the men our passports and find out what was going on. Meanwhile, I am in my room with Lexi, Rachel, Betty, Ms. Bottoms, Tracy, and Kevin, who is standing guard at the door. Kevin likes to act like he can protect us from anything and tells us not to worry because he’s “ready to kick someone’s ass”. We all have no idea what is happening so naturally, I, being the biggest scaredy-cat, take a peek out the window. Big mistake. That was a biiiig gun 20 feet away from me. So I curl up in a ball on the corner of the farthest bed away from the door and start bawling which doesn’t help anything. Lexi is shaking uncontrollably and Kevin wisely announces that we probably shouldn’t blog about this. Besides me trying to keep all the snot in my nose, there is no sound in the room and we are listening to Peter talk at the door to one of the men. He is firing questions at Peter, asking if we came here to work. Side note, before we left for this trip, Ms. Bottoms and Ms. Hartman drilled into our heads that if they ask us why we are going to Tanzania at the airport, we say for tourism or for photography but we absolutely DO NOT MENTION that we are going to be doing work. So the men have heard that we dug a trench and there are 2 huge coils of pipe sitting smack dab in the middle of our front yard. Looks like we’re caught. Peter denies that we came here for work and when asked if we know anything about the pipe, Peter replied, “yeah, its sitting in our front yard”. So after an hour of straining to hear what’s going on, the men finally leave. We have a big meeting on our hallway floor and Peter and Erin tell us that the men were the River Police, who we passed on our way to the Internet café yesterday… It’s hard to miss 8 mzungus crammed into a jeep, going 10 mph on the main road of town when people on bicycles are passing us. Anyway, the police didn’t know we were here and were “concerned for our safety”. So it makes sense that 15 of them need to show up at 10:30 at night with machine guns to tell us that they are just looking out for us. Also they didn’t tell us the point of their little visit until after 58 minutes of scaring us half to death. Welcome to Africa.