Sheltered in my Ivory Coast home as bullets fly, I am one of the lucky ones

Abidjan has been under siege for almost a week and the Ouattara government has imposed a daytime curfew

• • Share
  • 
  • 

• Pauline Bax in Abidjan
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 April 2011 17.17 BST
• Article history

A soldier loyal to Alassane Ouattara, right, looks on as women venture out in search of water on the outskirts of Abidjan, Ivory Coast Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Last month I cursed the thick concrete walls of my bungalow as I tried to hang a picture on the living room wall. Hammers and nails were useless. Even the drill failed. On Thursday, as I ran to find shelter from bullets whizzing overhead, I was glad to know the walls offered relative safety. Abidjan has been under siege for almost a week, and the fighting near my neighbourhood has been so fierce I had to hide in the bathroom to wait it out. There haven't been any gun battles in my street, but I live close enough to Laurent Gbagbo's residence to get woken up by heavy artillery almost every day. A stray machinegun bullet pierced the neighbour's metal garage door and lodged itself into his car. Another stray bullet tore through the living room wall of a family two houses down the street. Like most residents, I have been locked inside amid sporadic gunfire, the unnerving shocks of grenade explosions and the sound of helicopters circling over the city. When the shooting dies down, an eerie silence settles over the day, punctuated only by chirping birds. The Ouattara government has imposed a daytime curfew from noon. My friends have stopped calling because they have run out of phone credit, and as I have run out of phone credit myself, I have to use my boyfriend's phone to find out what is going on elsewhere in the city. I am all too aware that I am relatively well off. I still have three kilos of rice, two bags of pasta, and six cans of tuna in the kitchen cupboard, and the watchman miraculously found a crate of beer. Things began looking dire after a power outage that lasted for almost three days, including one day without running water. Abidjan is a hot and humid place, and food left outside the fridge starts to decay almost immediately. We were still laughing when we rinsed the dirty dishes in the swimming pool, and my boyfriend hooked up his car battery to a small inverter to power our laptops and charge our phones. But we had forgotten to buy a torch light and the car battery finished quickly, leaving us with the prospect of a communications blackout. This morning, the power came back. Having electricity feels like a luxury after two nights of treading around a pitch-dark house. I've also found out why two lone gunmen were emptying their AK-47s in my street last night, a deafening noise so scary I hunkered down beside the bed. A neighbour told me that Ouattara's troops are in control of our area now, and they were trying to ward off looters. These are small comforts in an absurd war that will mark Ivory Coast for years.