21 Jun Botswana — Our Home was a Gated Community

When you live overseas on Uncle’s dime, the government assigns you a house. In Botswana, the one they assigned Peggy and me came with a-hundred-and-twenty-nine keys. At least the ones we could hold in our hands and count. The others, the keys we couldn’t get at, were locked away in a strongbox bolted to the wall, so we never knew how many keys we actually had. And it wasn’t just keys we needed to deal with.

Each door was fitted with a peephole and an intercom that let us decide on a case-by-case basis whom to let in. That could be a weighty decision, given the massive, hand-thrown deadbolts to unthrow. And, because the American Taxpayer had an investment in keeping those doors, peepholes, intercoms, locks, and deadbolts safe, the whole ensemble was protected by an outer set of burglar bars that came with its own set of keys. With three outside doors, this added up to thirty-nine keys just for getting into the house. And, of course, we didn’t have just one of each, we had his-and-her sets.

Fourteen more keys loafed in a dresser like featherbedded union members whose jobs had become obsolete. These bore mysterious labels such as, Bar Bathroom, although the house did not have a bar. For all we knew, the previous resident had taken the bar with him when he transferred to Nairobi. No matter what had become of the bar, we couldn’t locate any sign of the bathroom that went with it, and the Bar Bathroom key, and its thirteen brothers, remained on the payroll with nothing to do. We never discovered what the keys in the strongbox might have been for, or how many there were, because the previous resident had misplaced the key to the strongbox. A final wad of seventeen keys resided in a Ziploc bag in the kitchen. Since they didn’t come with labels, we had no idea what to do with them.

The yard was enclosed by an eight-foot concrete wall. The part of the wall facing the street was topped with wicked-looking, curved steel spikes called tigers’ teeth. The walls on the side yards, by eight strands of electric wire and, in the rear, by tigers’ teeth and electric wire. In the evening, we could relax in the warm African twilight listening to the gentle crackle of electricity.

Like the best medieval castles, the wall had one, and only one, gate. The gate was plated with steel armor that might once have protected a battleship. The gate also had tigers’ teeth on top.

Notice the steel gate with the tiger’s teeth, the eight-foot-high concrete wall beside the gate, also with tigers’ teeth, the pole holding eight strands of electric wire atop the wall along the side of the house, the burglar bars on the windows, and the sliding steel burglar bars across the alcove for the front door. Not shown: the heavy wooden doors; the pedals to stomp and make the burglar bars fall away; the locks, dead bolts and steel door protecting the bedrooms; the smoke detectors; the CO2 detectors; the lights that light up the yard at night; the radio to radio the marines; the deadbolts, the peep holes and the intercom at the door; the 16-zone burglar alarm; the 129 keys; the his-and-her panic buttons and the security firm that comes by three times a night.

We could operate the gate with a button we kept in the car so we didn’t have to risk stepping out into Africa and opening it ourselves. For times when the power went off, we had a key that let us disconnect the electric motor and work the gate by hand. We kept that key in a second strong box built into the wall inside the front door, which added more keys to our inventory. In case someone got past the gate and the tigers’ teeth and the wall and the electric wire, the area around the house was lit like a prison yard. Security lights glared through the windows, kept our bedroom as bright as an operating theater, and murdered sleep in neighboring homes for blocks around.

Every wall in the house, interior and exterior, was made of concrete thick enough to absorb rocket propelled grenades, and required a hammer drill to hang a picture. Every floor was paved with ceramic tile, as was the roof. The fact that it would have taken napalm to set the place afire hadn’t reduced the enthusiasm for smoke detectors, or for a CO₂ detector, to warn us when the napalm got out of hand.

Every window was covered with its own set of imported steel bars. None of those cheap, local bars for Uncle, thank you very much. The American government accepts only the finest in South-African manufacture where steel bars are concerned. Then, because steel bars can block your escape if the concrete and tile spontaneously combust, the windows were fitted with pedals you could stomp and the bars would fall away.

The house had its own citadel which some wag at the embassy had labeled a safe haven. Safe havens seal off the upstairs of houses from the downstairs with locked and dead-bolted doors protected, naturally, by steel gates requiring more keys.

Because the house we lived in didn’t have an upstairs, the door and the steel gate protected the bedrooms from the front of the house. Since there was no way for intruders to know which part of the house they were supposed to intrude into they might wind up in the safe haven by mistake. If that happened a different protocol applied. We’d ask them to wait while we rummaged through heaps of keys trying to find the ones to unlock the gate and door so we could flee to the unsafe part of the house and lock the visitors in the safe haven. In the dark this could take more than a moment’s rummaging.

To give us time, Uncle set us up with a high-tech burglar alarm that divided the house into sixteen zones. That way when a surprise visitor let himself in, we could track his progress through the zones by the lights blinking on the control panel. We had to use a key to open the control panel.

If the visitor came too close, we could push one of the panic buttons built into the wall next to the bed and alert, I kid you not, the Marines. If the button was too far away, we could use one of the portable his-and-her panic buttons designed to be worn around our necks like dog tags. Or call the Marines directly on the two-way radio.

Regardless of whether we called the Marines, Tuesdays at 0700 they called us to check if the radio was working. All of us. Everybody associated with the American government. They made their way alphabetically (sometimes anti-alphabetically, you never knew with those Marines) through every call sign Americans used, while we sat on the bed wondering, Who’s Port Townsend? and, What kind of American would want to be known among Marines as Tinkerbell?

Tinkerbell was, most likely, a friend. The American community in Botswana wasn’t all that big and everybody tended to show up at the same parties. But as much as we’d have liked to discover the truth about Tinkerbell, nobody, as far as I know, gave out their call signs at social gatherings. Just too many ears and . . . well, you never know.

One thing we did not have was a Neighborhood Watch. Not that Uncle wouldn’t have wanted one, it’s just not all that easy to keep tabs on whatever’s happening on the far side of an eight-foot wall topped by tigers’ teeth and electric wires. Which, when you thought about it, seemed to defeat some of the person-to-person contact that was one of the reasons for our being in Botswana.

To provide the human touch in all this, Uncle hired a security firm to come by three times a night and peek over the wall to make sure things were okay. There was a place for everything on our side but, since we tended to be unpatriotically sloppy about making sure everything was in its place, sometimes things didn’t look as okay as they should have, the phone would go off at two in the morning, and a Marine would inform us of what was amiss.

Those could be puzzling messages when you’re half asleep. The explanation, which usually came the next day, often involved a security guard noticing an objective fact, such as that we’d forgotten to close the burglar bars protecting the front door, then calling the Marines and reporting, in Setswana-accented English, something that sounded to a sleep-deprived Marine like, “The butler bars are open.”

This was close enough to get the ball rolling and, I think, pretty impressive given that the security guards were making their reports in a language they did not grow up speaking, and how very different that language is from English. Still, being awakened with the news that your domestic staff is in danger of fleeing into the African night can be unsettling.