Rom was awakened by the sound of a car scrunching over gravel at 2 a.m. He looked out the window and saw his car sliding downhill. Swearing under his breath for not putting the hand brake on, he braced himself for the inevitable crash when the car collided with the gate. But surprisingly, the brake lights went on. Suddenly Rom was sleepy no more. Thieves! Barefoot and still in his lungi, he ran outside, yelling and screaming. Instead of escaping with the vehicle, the car thieves ran away.
The gate was locked and they hadn’t been able to jimmy it open so the burglars had unravelled the chain link fence. They could have driven off with the car except a large eucalyptus tree blocked the path. Had they made an opening anywhere else on the fence, they could have made a clean getaway. Even then, in the early 1980s, Rom felt the “rascal problem”, as it was called euphemistically (‘blarry lascots’ in slang Pidgin, which in English means ‘bloody rascals’), was out of hand in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where he spent two years on a crocodile project.
That wasn’t Rom’s only run-in with rascals. One night, he returned home late after a movie to find someone had forced the door open. Careful not to make a noise, he tiptoed into the house. It was empty but he found a screwdriver lying on the floor. A torch lay nearby, its batteries spilled out. Something had frightened the thieves away.
It was probably a pair of green tree pythons that lived in the large window near the door. Every window had glass louvre panes on the inside and a mosquito screen on the outside. Rom added a couple of branches, and the enclosed windowsill had ample space to hold snakes. Being the snake nut that he was, every window doubled as a terrarium. While looking for valuables to steal, the burglars must have seen the snakes and scrammed. When Rom travelled to the interior on field trips, he hired a tribal warrior to guard the house.
Around that time PNG was going through a transition. A lot of the Australian and New Zealand expat workers were leaving and their posts were being filled by Asians. The Filipinos confronted the rascal problem head-on. One of them showed Rom a wooden replica of a pistol he had fashioned, complete with a barrel hole. Each end of a strip of very high tensile rubber was attached to either side of the “pistol”. The “bullets” were six-inch iron nails whose heads had been sawn off, and the business-end sharpened and tapered. The “pistol” is held with the left hand, and like a catapult, the rubber is pulled back while gripping the nail. It was accurate and deadly.
The situation in PNG is even worse now. Last year, when a friend was away from home, five men smashed into his house at 3 a.m., ripping the four steel security doors from their hinges. They punched his wife, and pointing a gun to her head demanded car keys, money, credit cards, and other valuables. Once they decamped, the woman and her son ran next door for help.
After this incident, our friend installed four extra heavy-duty security doors, surveillance cameras around the house, an alarm system, emergency radios monitored by an armed response company, hired two full-time security guards, bought an attack dog, and even stocked some firearms.
It may seem like over-kill, but while the rascals were mainly looking for food and booze in the old days, they have become hardened criminals. Besides, even some law enforcement officers were not beyond suspicion.
I told our friend: “Had I been in your place, I would have gotten the hell out of there, pronto.” I doubt I have the strength of character his wife showed, all the modern weapons and security systems notwithstanding. He replied: “I didn’t marry a delicate princess.”
