It was cold and windy and our taxi crawled its way up the narrow streets of the hills surrounding Pristina. After checking in and being shown to our quarters, we found our self in a reasonably sized tree bed room, but it was freezing cold. We immediately fired up the heater before we continued to get settled. There was no place to hang our jackets, so I placed my bag in an upright position and pulled out the handle and put my jacket over it.
Me and Stine was travelling together with Kristian, a Norwegian journalist (very mature 36 year old man), and to save money we decided to share one room. It so happens, that one of us is a fairly big fellow with a measure of about two meters from top to bottom. That person, who rather wants to stay anonymous, managed to knock over my bag with the jacket on top.
A little while later the same night, I started feeling a little sick. My throat felt awful and I started coiffing pretty bad. I tried to fall asleep again but I kept waking up. In the end I decided to go to the bathroom to get some fresh water, thinking that it might help.
When I opened my eyes I immediately realized something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t see the room properly, not because it was dark, but all I saw was this vague grey color. I could also hear a kind of crackling sound, similar to that you can hear from your fireplace on your eastern holiday. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t see a lot, not before I looked down towards the end of my bed. An ice cold, chilly feeling ran down my spine (something that normally would have been described as fear), and I could barely believe what I saw. It was all like a liquid mix of dreams and reality.
A tall flame with a length close to a meter was licking at my feet, which I quickly redrew. My jacket had felt over the oven and ignited, and the flames were huge. There was no means of fire alarms or firefighting equipment that I could think of, and I started shouting out “Fire! Fire!”, at a reasonable volume. Kristian woke up pretty fast, but I had already decided to take matters into my own hands, literally. I leant forward and reached for my burning (synthetic) jacket. Without really being able to know, remember or see what I was doing, I managed to put my burning jacket together like a ball, and extinguish the flames.
During all this chaos, Kristian had also tried to wake up Stine. After giving her a rather hard shake, Stine raised herself up a little bit and asked, in her own half sleeping way, “What’s going on?”. “There’s a fire! Get up!” yelled Kristian, on which Stine reacted with a yawn before she laid down again and continued sleeping. This will not be easily forgotten, me and Kristian is joking that all you need to say is “Fire!” and Stine will fall asleep no matter where she is.
But back to the main topic, I was just putting out the last flames with my bare hands when the Germans entered, sneaking slowly in to the room while speaking German (or English with a German accent). The Germans who turned out to be Austrians was our neighbors who had seen a lot of smoke in the hall and decided to enter to see what was going on.
People rarely wake up because of smoke. Most people would just have died. But at the same time as all of this was happening EUS (Christian student fellowship of Serbia, my organization in Serbia) was having a prayer night in Belgrade. I’ve gotten confirmation that EUS students was praying for our safety, at the same time or nearly at the same time, that the fire was burning in Kosovo. So I just want to thank God for still being alive, because it’s nothing less than a miracle! Be careful with old heaters, and fire security is not a joke. Be thankful for every day you get!
By the way I also plan to write a blog post about the rest of our Kosovo journey when I have some time.
This is the oven in the hotelroom, after the fire.
This is the way I put my bag.
And this is how I put my jacket on top of it.
All the pictures in this article are reconstructed.
2 comments:
Takk Gud at det gjekk godt ja...det va close call, men trur Han har store planer for deg så Han kunne kje la det gå ille:) vurdert brannmannskarriere etter nok ein kamp mot flammene?? helt i kosovo...helt på høyden.
Wow! Takk Gud for at det gikk bra!
Litt for spennnende lesning det der..
Ej for min del kunna vel ikkje hatt det so mykje bedre akkurat no! He ei maks bra tid her i Uganda, virkeli kosa mej!
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