Fort Knox, Vietnam

Our new apartment is on the second floor of a wide, concrete, 8-story building with eight units, adjacent to another building of identical character. The building sits on a wide, busy street with a constant flow of traffic. It appears to be a more commercial district, with a hospital across the street and stores lining the first floor of the buildings on each side, than a residential one, but with residential alleys tucked between each building. It is clean and relatively well kempt, for Ho Chi Minh City. It would not appear, to the average visitor, to be unsafe. But there is a woman in our building who apparently thinks differently.

In order for Steven and I to leave our apartment, we have to first lock our front door. We then lock the accordion gate outside of our front door. Finally, we secure the padlock that secures the accordion gate to the side wall. After all this, we are merely outside of our own door. We must then walk down the stairs to the front door of our building, which is a big metal, padlocked double door. The door has a hole about four inches by four inches through which you can reach to reaffix the inner padlock once you have unlocked it, opened the door, shut the door behind you and re-latched it on the inside, from the outside. The first day we entered our building we joked about the tight security. Little did we know it was only to get worse.

Our first morning of work, we locked our door, our gate, our padlock; walked down the stairs and found not one, but three padlocks between us and the outside world. Unfortunately, we only had a key to one of them. After a few tense moments, Steven was able to get the attention of the woman we had see come up the stairs as we were heading down and convey the message that we were trapped inside the building with no way to unlock all of the locks.

The woman came down and took the keys for the locks off of her key chain and handed them to Steven. Not knowing how she would get out without her own keys, but understanding by her gestures that we were to take them, we set about unlocking all of the locks and let ourselves out.

That evening, after an early dinner, we came back to our building to find that the woman had again locked on three locks on the door. Now, in order to understand the complexity of the dilemma that we face on these occasions, you must picture the inside set-up of the door. The door is a haphazardly constructed door of metal bars, covered by an iron sheet that blocks your view of the inside except for two openings on the sides with limited visability. The iron plate has the afore mentioned four-by-four inch hole which allows you to reach in and open the lock on the inside from the outside. All of the padlocks are on the inside. The first, main, and in our opinion, only necessary, padlock is on the latch that opens the door, directly to the side of the hole. The second, extraneous lock is below the latch, and consequently, the hole, forcing you to reach through the hole and down to get to the lock. This lock is made all the more difficult by the fact that it is a square key with only one correct way to insert it, leaving you with four possibilities and that much more time standing out on the street. The third and final lock is the most difficult. It is positioned well above the hole and you need two hands to open it, so you have to plunge both hands through the hole up to your elbows an incredibly awkward angle, learning against the door for support and feeling your way, completely blind, to the key hole. This whole process takes about 5 - 10 minutes (or maybe just feels that way) leaving us vulnerable to the muggers who our paranoid neighbor is trying to keep out in the first place.

We are hoping to figure out her bed time so that we can be sure to leave the building after she has turned in for the night (which has been as early as 8:00 p.m.) so that we can unlock all of the locks and re-lock only the main lock to keep her safe until our return.