When Death Comes Knocking...

This is my approved group, I am sitting inbetween Ernie and Shelby!

These are the two drunk, crazy fast men, who almost "killed" me!

What’s the closest you have ever come to dying? Strange thought right? It came about when I put the mental hospital’s treatments into perspective. What they do, or seemingly so in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, is get the patients as close to death as possible without actually killing them. They tweak brains, and lobotomize patients, but as we all know, that’s not what killed McMurphy in the end, Brodmen did.

So, I began to think of past times when I for at least a moment, thought it was the end. The most recent occurrence that comes to mind only occurred a few months back. I was at a market in Lusaka Zambia, with my friend Shelby. We had to get into what were considered “Approved groups”, they had at least five people, and one must be a guy. The girls all circulated through the guys each week, and this week our group was overseen by none other than Ernie Chao. Ernie, an 18 year old Canadian born Asian, was the comedian of the group, but had no ability to keep four girls safe from the Zambian men. We the girls however, continued in oblivion. We started to notice how unsafe we were the deeper we went into the market, Ernie would wonder, or vise versa, and no one would say anything. When two men noticed my camera and asked if they could get a picture with me and Shelby, we called Ernie over to take it. As I approached the two men, I noticed the mass amounts of alcohol seeping from their breath and skin. Shelby and I glanced at each other in fear. They latched onto our shoulders for the picture, Ernie snapped it, and we stepped away. The man nest to me grabbed my arm, and the other put his arms around Shelby. I yelled out for Ernie, but he had kept the camera and wandered away. I screamed and smacked the man holding me, then running towards Shelby to release her. We shared a quick “oh my gosh” and started sprinting away. It was the fastest I had ever run, and after traveling up and down the aisles, we ran into an artist we had bought from. He asked us what was wrong, and put us behind him. The non uniformed “security” then came and took the men away. Shelby and I were traumatized for the next few market visits, and Ernie was no longer considered part of our “approved group”. I wrote about the day in my journal, commenting, “In a matter of seconds I had imagined exactly how my life would be one they took us to their village” along with, “it was our own version of Taken, but we got away”.

The picture above is the picture we took before the drama of it all.

If you comment this post, tell me a story about your “near death experience” no matter how realistic or dramatic it is! I love finishing stories that go open ended like mine and Shelby’s, so many things could have happened!