A Surprise Visit

It was a Friday and we got up early because Sue's mum, Connie, was flying in from London to visit us and our newly-born daughter in Tripoli. She would be arriving in the afternoon and we wanted to tidy up the house.

We had just started on the housework when someone rang the doorbell. Probably Mustafa popping in for breakfast, I thought.

I opened the front gate - and there was Connie, complete with suitcases! A Libyan man I didn't know was sitting in his car nearby. When he saw me greet Connie, he waved to us and drove off.

Once we'd brought her in and made her a nice cup of tea, she told us what had happened.

Somehow - and I still can't think how - we had got confused about the dates and so she had actually arrived the previous day. She waited for us at the airport but we never turned up. After an hour of two, she started to get worried.

She couldn't phone us because we didn't have a phone. The waiting period for residential phones in Libya at that time was about 11 years and it was in the era before cellphones.

She couldn't take a taxi either, since she didn't have our address. There were no residential postal deliveries in Tripoli and so, whenever she wrote to us, she sent her letters to a post office box.

Evening fell and still there was no sign of us at the airport. Now she was really worried.

She needn't have worried, though. This was Libya. As she sat waiting with her luggage, a Libyan couple approached her and the man asked her, in English, what she was doing. She explained. The man conferred with his wife and they both agreed that the only thing to do was for them to take Connie to their home for the night and then to bring her to our house the next morning.

And that's exactly what they did.

Of course, it wasn't quite as straightforward as that, because none of them had any idea where our house was. Connie didn't even know which district of Tripoli we lived in. However, she did remember that we'd once mentioned that there was a hospital nearby.

So in the morning the man loaded Connie and her bags into his car and started driving around the areas of the city that had hospitals. In each area, he went into the local corner stores and asked if anyone knew an English couple who had just had a baby. It didn't take long. The third or fourth store he visited was our local shop. The people there knew us and had a rough idea of where we lived. So they directed him to our area and he knocked on a few doors until he found someone who pointed him to our house.

Libya was a difficult place in many ways but the people were certainly nice.