This is a day that I will never forget; I believe somebody died in front of me. Before I get into the exciting finale of today I will briefly go through the activities that we did.
In the morning, we (the whole OIP group) participated in the welcoming ceremony hosted by UESTC for their first year international students. The ceremony was held at the old campus of the school, we had to take a shutter bus from the new campus to reach there. The ceremony ended with us taking a massive group photo with all the teachers, students and guests of the ceremony. After that, we headed back to the new campus and were free for the whole day. The student volunteers here then brought us to a telephone shop within the campus to purchase a local sim card. With the card purchased, we could contact one another if we were to be lost and decided to explore the campus and the surrounding area. We (Joel, Nicolas, both Daryl(s), Malin, Grace, Kian kuan, Erwin, Ying ying & Iryshad. All from TC11.) rented bicycles to travel around.
At 5pm with our transports ready, we set out of the campus toward the super market just out of the school to purchase the daily necessities we needed. We were told by student volunteer Huang Long that the super market there have more varieties of stuffs as compared to the student super market in campus. At the market the eleven of us stick together in a group and gathered all the stuffs we needed and by then it already was 8.40pm. The lot of us agreed to venture further away from the school to have our meals. We left the super mart and spotted street stalls right next to it. We had our meals there. The food was quite tasty but was too salty to our likings.
After the meal, while we were leaving, Malin and I decided to get some other food from another stall, the rest of them had to wait for us. While waiting for our food (Here comes the trilling part!), the loud sound of gun fire suddenly came from behind, it was a total chaos everybody started running away from the sound of the gun fire. I instinctively grabbed Malin’s hand and ran in the direction opposing from the source of the sound. In the mess our group got separated, the ones with me were Joel, Grace, Malin and Ying Ying. After getting away to a safe distance we stopped and recounted what just happened, I was worried if any of us got hit. There were a total of six shots fired. We stood and waited for a while until everything got under control. I told my group to stay put and wait while I walked toward the area of incident to look for our friends, they followed behind. I was relieved to saw them unhurt. We regrouped and left the place as quickly as possible. While we were leaving, I saw a man lying on the ground surrounded by a crowd. I believe nobody could possibly survive after being shot six times. Swiftly but cautiously we retrieved our bicycles parked outside of the market and headed back.
The group decided it was best to inform the teachers in charge. We informed the teachers and went back to our dorm. Back here at the dorm we discussed of the incident and can’t help but to believe that luck was by our side. If Malin and I did not stop to buy something, we would be in the path of the gun fire, and things could turn ugly. Today was a once in a lifetime experience for me and that’s it for today.
Signing off, (Ain’t gonna cheer today.)
Jerry Neo
No comments:
Post a Comment