Days after losing two childhood friends in a car crash, a Wanaka woman has escaped a house fire near Arrowtown - fleeing flames chasing her up the hallway.
Harriet Fyfe, 18, raced out of the house with her 17-year-old friend and her friend's father.
Fyfe woke at 4am yesterday to the smell of smoke, but did not realise it was coming from an electric blanket under her mattress.
If I had rolled over and gone back to sleep then, pretty much all of us would be dead, she said.
In the mid-1990s, while living in Wanaka, she had done exactly that - gone back to sleep - after smelling smoke from a fire which, she said, almost killed her mother
Source link: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4297272a10.html
He says he is the father of three children 'and I don t know how many more,' but spends his days together with 'Yohan,' the gang s leader, and two others in a shack furnished with a single mattress.
When not in their house, they patrol the slum armed with pistols and sawed-off shotguns, looking out for rival gangs and the drugs that they will later sell. They use guerrilla-like tactics to avoid their enemies, knowing an ambush could lurk around any corner.
'This is how we get by, selling,' says Yohan, as he separates small doses of crack on the mattress.
El Menor has no illusions of anything better coming his way.
'I was a Christian and went to school,' he said. 'But when I stopped studying everything got messed up and the street got me,' he said.
He says he s well aware his time is running out and it seems about every 10 minutes he is snorting more cocaine. 'An idle mind is the devil s workshop,' he repeats
Source link: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/29/america/LA-GEN-Venezuela-Photo-Pkg-Street-Gangs.php
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