You never know how you’re going to react when something like this happens. Living overseas, you hear stories about dangerous situations happening. The thing is, you never really expect to experience it yourself.
Three nights ago, me, my team, and Team Aliza went out to eat for a squad mates’ birthday. We got back, and shortly went to bed at around 10. We always sleep with our windows open, because, well, we’re living in Africa, and it gets kinda hot here. My sleeping pad was directly parallel from the window, and there was about 3 inches of space between my bed and the wall. In the middle of the night, a man broke in through the window above my pad, and came into the room where me and my squad mates were sleeping. One of the girls woke up from a deep sleep, and felt like God was telling her, “think!” She saw a figure crouched at the end of my bed. She asked, “what are you doing?” thinking it was probably one of the twelve girls that lives in the room. This is her account of what happened next: After saying that, it clicked: there was a black man crouched in our room staring at me. At this point, I was the only one awake. He came at me so fast I didn’t have time to move. He stood over top of me and then half straddled/sat on me…attempting to make me be quiet. In that moment it was too much and I let out a blood curdling scream as I struggled to push him off of me. In that moment everyone woke up and started screaming as I ran across the room yelling, “GET UP, there is a man in here!” After she screamed, the man tried to get out of the room with a squad mates purse, through the window he had come through previously. In his attempt to get out, another squad mate grabbed the purse from him, and in the scuffle, he fell on top of me. He then got out the window and ran away. The police were called, and safety precautions have been implemented for our safety.
The events that are written about above are what actually happened, but I want to explain what I was thinking during the whole time. Almost every night on the race, I sleep with a sleeping mask and ear plugs. I was in a deep sleep, and because I had my ear plugs in, I couldn’t entirely hear what was going on, just that there was a lot commotion in the room. In my thought process, I just thought there was an insect or rodent in the room, and everyone was yelling because of that. I still had my ear plugs and eye mask on when the man fell on top of me, and I thought it was one of my squad mates trying to get away from the said rodent or insect. As you can tell, I was very disoriented during the whole event.
Reflecting back, God’s hand of protection was on everything that happened that night. For example, I almost always sleep on my back, and very rarely do I sleep on my stomach. That night though, I fell asleep on my stomach, so when the man fell on top of me, I wasn’t physically hurt. God also protected me by keeping me half-asleep, to protect me from having to re-live what happened.
Even though this was a scary event and not something anyone wants to go through, something like this entirely displays the character, love, and goodness of God. Will you choose to follow Him, even when bad things happen?
