I panicked and did everything wrong. In a desperate but stupid move, I tried to reach a small pistol that I kept in my bedside table drawer. "Don't do it, daddy," Maureen said in English, "the other one has you covered." I suddenly realized there was a third masked man in the room. He was aiming a Browning 9mm pistol at me and could have shot both Colette and me before I could have reached my gun…

I saw the man coming at me, I saw the gun, and felt the barrel as it hit my head. Then Maureen began speaking to him in Lingala in a steady but calm voice…

"We have a dawa," she said. He knew his black magic well enough to know that she meant a magic talisman that could protect us and do pretty ghastly things to anyone who harmed us. "Our whole family has a dawa." She said that anyone who hurt or killed us would die, as would all his wives, children, mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins. The dawa would kill them all. The gunman was beginning to look extremely solemn. And maybe a little anxious….

By then it was clear to Colette and to me that everything depended upon Maureen.