One morning in Zambia we woke up to a day that was totally different than any other morning before, ever or after.
There had been some serious unrest before but now our village had changed totally. It was like life had turned into black and white slow motion movie. I was maybe 6 years old and didn't speak English or Swahili so I didn't understand what was wrong. Only that everything was.
The
children didn't play or laugh. They sat or stood still with frozen empty faces. Nobody cried but everybody was silent. Our lively village was suddenly a zombieland.
Our little Finnish community gathered by the pool as every day we did. But that day nobody went to work. The adults gathered together with serious faces and muffled voices and everybody stopped speaking when us children went close to them. They were all very calming and very gentle which only made us understand this was something truly serious.
Late in the evening everybody of our Finnish community gathered at our home. Our parents made sure we slept so Katri and I pretended well to sleep. Then my 3-year-old sister and I held each other's hands and hid in a corner of our staircase that had no light so we could hear but nobody could see us in that spot. They decided whether to evacuate to Finland. Or whether to evacuate the women and children. Or only try to somehow send us children alone. Everybody had an equal vote, and they decided to do the same thing together, be it whatever.
The women decided. Each one refused to leave without their husbands. Each one refused to send little children - most of us couldn't read or write, or speak another language - across the globe alone.
There had been a meeting gathered in the capital Lusaka. Everyone who was anyone in our village had gone. There were always 2-5 random armed road blocks between our village and the capital, we were stopped with guns held on our heads and that was the normal routine.
I still admire my dad for how brilliant he was in these situations, every single time. He was always calm and cool, cheerful even. He kept our family together and strong. My mother was paralyzed with fear as they always pointed the guns at my baby sister Katri and I. Dad was never bothered one bit. He joked and laughed with the guerilla guys, made them relax, didn't pay any attention to the guns pointed at his daughters' heads. We followed his lead and stayed calm. Survived every time. My job was to hold onto Katri as she was so little and could have tried to make a run for something, make a sudden move, a loud noice. So I held onto her with two hands and amused her and did what dad said we needed to do.
But when Katri and I eavesdropped in our staircase we found out that everything had gone horribly wrong that night. Every local person who was anybody in our village had been invited to Lusaka for some important meeting. Car loads of men went. They were stopped and their names recorded at the road blocks.
Then, there was no meeting in Lusaka. Nada. They had been invited for some kind of a hoax. There were hardly any phones, mail or anything so things were rather random.
On their way back, in pitch black dark roads, one guy didn't fit inside a car. So he stood on the back of a pick up van and saw silent flashes, maybe guns with silencers. They drove into an ambush and everybody was killed. Kind friendly people who called out 'Jambo' whenever we passed by. Our friends, my dad's colleagues. The priest of our village. The shopkeeper. My best friend Thimbo's dad. Everybody lost somebody.
Only this year I found out that my dad had been a part of that motorcade. It was safer to travel in a group rather than alone so he'd gone with them. He was the only one turned back by a road block, not allowed through. Murdering Europeans had maybe more serious consequences than murdering our local friends.
The way we know what happened was that this guy who didn't fit inside any car had jumped off from the back of his pick up van when seeing trouble and flashes ahead. He ran back to a riverbank, where several large crocodiles lived. There was a large pipe for water by that riverside, for the rainy season of water to pass by and not slash down the only bridge we had for our capital, year after year.
He rather risked the crocodiles and hid inside the pipe by waterside. He heard them searching him by name. He knew they intended to kill just those people, name by name.
By foot, he came back to our village and told us that everybody had been killed.
Only this year 2023 my mother told me that my dad had been in that group, in that motorcade. He'd had business in Lusaka. I asked why she'd never told me before. She said she never in decades had dared to remember or think of it, how close we came to losing him. She had had to totally close it off.
I think it's the same for me. I must have heard and understood it that night when we hid in that dark corner with my sister. Somebody must have mentioned how close it was for my father to have lost his life. And I can only face it now, ten years since he's been gone from us.
My brave dad. He never complained about any of it. Never mentioned that seeing his little girls pointed at by guns may have been tough on him. Whatever it was, he kept us calm. Cheerful in the face of all that. I saw through him and because of his strength, even as a little girl, I had to be strong too. How much courage it must have taken from him to alone protect us all under those circumstances.
I can only try to learn from him and protect my own as he always protected us. Amongst all that he never even lost his smile, his jokes. I knew he didn't feel that but he pulled it all off anyways. For my mother, my little sister and for me. I have some big boots to fill. But knowing dad trusted that I can - I can.
