One of the worst feelings in the world is being helpless. You can’t do anything to help your situation and you can’t find someone who can do anything to help either. It’s like you’re drowning in an ocean and all you’re doing is kicking with all your might to stay afloat while you watch your skip fade from view.
Even to a point, such helplessness can be paralytic. Since you see nowhere to get succor from, you simply give up and not do anything because… what’s the point? I’ve been there, and even after reading so many touching stories, I can say that being helpless is something the majority of us have experienced at one time or the other in our lives.
In my case, I wasn’t just helpless, I was scared for my life! It wasn’t just me though, it was my family as well. But this was after my brother had stopped living with us, and I was the only adult male in the house. There was a week where every single night of it was spent in total fright.
There was a slew of robberies in my area during that period. These daredevil men of the underworld were robbing homes like child’s play. They would break in and cart away goods, you’re expected to cooperate with them or they’ll beat the living daylights out of you. Also, if you don’t have enough valuables to make them satisfied, you’ll get beaten as well.
And the horrifying thing about this is that they were not quiet about this. Imagine waking up by two in the morning to hear someone screaming for mercy from half a mile away. Right in your bedroom, you could hear as they dealt with residents. Many neighbors called the police, but in typical fashion, they never turned up until it was too late. They came in the morning, long after the robbers had escaped and the damage had been done.
It all came to a head when one of them killed a resident. I don’t really know the full story, I heard that he tried to stop one of the robbers from getting frisky with his wife, others said that he didn’t want them to take his laptop. Either way, the man turned up dead. And that only served to intensify the fear we were already feeling. It made things worse and nothing became more scary than the approaching darkness at the end of each day.
It was terrifying because as the days went on, they started closing in on our house. We knew it was only a matter of time before we got robbed and my Mom decided that we were not going to wait for them to come. Since we couldn’t rely on the police to protect us, we had to look out for ourselves. We decided to go and stay at my sister’s (who’s also married by the way and living with her family) place until the unrest died down. If we had known, we would have gone that very night my Mom made the decision. But we decided to do it the next morning. Big mistake.
That was the night they entered our compound. Our compound had eight flats, four of them were ground floor while the other four were upstairs. My family and I lived downstairs. As usual, we locked up, said our night prayers, and went to bed. However, to our shock, we woke up around 2 AM to hear heavy thuds from the flats upstairs.
The screams, the barks of the robbers, and the threats. Those threats still ring in my ear to this day. My Mom gathered us in the living room and began to pray but even my mind could not focus on that. All I could think of was that I couldn’t protect my family. If those guys decided to come into our home, there was nothing I could do to stop them.
I was terrified. And with every second that passed, I hoped and prayed that these guys leave us alone. After a while, I heard them walking about in the compound, muttering in hushed tones. My family and I remained huddled in the living room, not saying a word and blanketed in total darkness because we turned off all the lights.
After about thirty minutes, we realized that silence had fallen over the compound again. The robbers had gone. But neither of us stepped foot outside until daybreak. I was happy that they left without touching us, but I was still terrified that my neighbors had been hit.
The next morning, we found out that only the flats upstairs had been robbed. None of us downstairs were robbed. This is because they managed to climb the fence and latch onto a balcony upstairs. From there, they were able to gain access to the other flats upstairs. However, for us downstairs, the flats were not connected in any way. They were sort of stand-alone.
That was not the reason we were spared though. It was a more horrifying one. The last family they robbed, one of them got stabbed while in the process. We were told that the moment they started to see the blood, they ran away. I feel they didn’t want another murder on their hands.
Thankfully, the woman was not grievously injured. She didn’t even spend up to two hours in the hospital.
That very morning, we went to crash at my sister’s place. But we didn’t stay there for long though. Two days later, we heard that the armed robbers had been arrested. I feel it was because of the person that they killed. However, if the police had been up and doing, that man may never have died to begin with.
We returned home, but for a long time, we were traumatized. We locked our doors early and even stopped keeping our generator on past 10 PM. Once it was 5 PM, we’d rush home from anywhere we were and we would not welcome any visitors once it was past 6. It took a while for the horrors of that night to leave us, and now that I’m writing it out, I can’t help but remember just how terrified I had been.
And now I think, we didn’t get robbed, but we were so traumatized. What about the families above us that did get robbed? Even the ones that almost lost their mother due to the stabbing. Yeah, she fared well in the end, but if the knife had gone in deeper, or hit a vital organ, it would have been a different story. I can’t help but wonder how those families coped with the horror.
Anyway, it’s been years now, so it’s no longer as biting as it used to be. Since then, I’ve also been in helpless situations. Like during the #ENDSARS protest when I was stuck at the Lagos-Ibadan expressway for twelve hours, or during the spree of gun violence in Owerri when almost every day there were reports of unknown gunmen. And the story goes on…
However, in all of them, this was the only one in which I was totally helpless. And I pray to the high heavens that I never find myself in a situation like that again.
Helplessness is a terrible feeling!
