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12/12/2005
Living in fear
My husband and his family members have been staying here, the house that we’re currently residing in, for decades! Decades! And when they bought the house, this place is a budding city with promises of being one of the most developed areas in our State. True enough, it has become so.
This area (I shall name it MyCity) is now one of the best place to raise a family and at every corner, there’s either a supermarket or a convenience store. There’s a popular mall here that people from every other places in Kuala Lumpur come to and sometimes, it might even seem as though the world is here. It’s a torture, sometimes, but I am proud to be a part of MyCity and have decided that this is where I want to raise my kids. This is going to be my city, my home town. I love it.
A place that used to be the perfect place to raise a family, in the past decade, has turned into Living Hell! In front of my house, there’s a settlement or kampong whereby lots of foreign workers or illegal workers come to set up their base. Their little kampong houses are sometimes even bigger than ours because they get their materials cheap, no need to pay licenses and labor…they build their own, don’t they? Anyway, as the years go on, I have seen how they have progressed from building single story, one-room wooden houses to the now three-storey brick houses with ‘hostels’ on the ground floor.
Illegals who come here without visa or permit will come to this little kampong and get a place to stay in the ‘hostels’ because the owner of the house likes helping his own kind. I understand that but this makes our place very dangerous to stay in.
There are illegals walking around in front of our houses all the time. Over the past 7 years I have been staying here, we’ve lost countless items. I have lost 5 pairs of shoes to illegals who climb over our gates and take our brand new shoes. Oh, they’re smart enough to leave the old ones behind. My kids have lost 3 pairs of shoes…Joshua – 2 and Jared – 1. My husband lost 2 pairs and I can’t remember the pairs of shoes others have lost – my father-in-law, mother-in-law and brother-in-law. One time, we caught an illegal (his wife waiting outside) taking out ladder from our yard! My maid screamed and he ran! But we know how he looks like now.
And then we’ve lost a bicycle. Since we have an automatic gate, I applaud them because it couldn’t have been easy to haul a bicycle (an old one with those silly-looking handlebars and a basket to boot) up the gate and pass it on to the other person outside the gate. We’ve lost a light bulb too, only recently. In its place, we found an old pajama which the robber must have used to turn the light bulb with because of the rain. Or maybe they decided to strip in the middle of the robbery, who knows what they’re thinking. Maybe stealing is kinky!!??
Oh, and we’ve lost tools like hammers and stuff and my husband got his car stolen about one and a half years ago too! My husband spent the one whole month of carlessness swearing. The inconvenience.
When my husband and his siblings were young, this house was broken into. My brother-in-law was awakened and pushed into my sister-in-law’s room and thank goodness my sister-in-law acted quickly. She had a large, huge (it’s MASSIVE I am telling you) baseball bat (not even a baseball bat because it’s too huge) that she used to knock the lights out of the intruder. He ran screaming…and my father-in-law (I think) ran screaming after him. But he was one of those ‘orang minyak’ (men who put oil all over their bodies so that they are not so easily caught) so, we didn’t catch the guy. I think there was an accomplice. Can’t be too sure.
And my neighbor moved away some time back, about a year ago, because there was an intruder who scared the living daylights out of her. The husband was at home with the kids and the wife just came home. She opened the gate and walked into the house with her handbag. A man came in from behind her, used a helmet to knock her right in front of her door and tried to pull the handbag away from her. She hung on and screamed. Her husband who was in the living room sprung into action and they fled on a motorbike.
And then there was this one time my mother-in-law took the kids out to the field (padang) nearby and she was carrying Jared. We had two bicycles, she was on one of them, carrying Jared (I think) and another maid was with her carrying two other kids. She was merely chatting up with her long-time friend when someone on a motorbike yanked her gold chain from behind giving her a nasty burn on her neck. They took the chain and left a befuddled and terrified mother-in-law, maid, neighbor and kids trudging home fearfully.
I love MyCity but the location of MyHouse has become impossible. Just yesterday, we found out that my husband found out that someone went into his car (we leave it unlock sometimes when the car is parked inside the house compound) and took his touch-n-go and SmartTag! That’s a couple of hundred dollars worth of toll fees in there and the cost of the cards and the tag?? In total, I think that’s already RM320 gone….just like that!
It’s just the thought of people coming into the house compound so easily, helping themselves to the stuff we have out on the compound makes me sick to my stomach. Everytime I want to open the gate, I am scared.
Thank goodness we’re going to be moving to a new place soon.
09:05 Posted in Being human , Blog , Family | Permalink | Comments (5) | Email this