No place like home

UDUPI: "There is nothing more precious than our own lives," reflect Dr Vrinda Bhat, glad to be back on home soil along with her husband Dr Giridhar Kamath and daughter Ashwini (4), after a horrendous ordeal in Libya.
Speaking to The Times Of India from their residence in Bennanje, Udupi on Sunday, the doctor couple who has been in Libya for the past two years, narrated their two weeks of horror in Sebha, Libya.Vrinda said, "We now know the importance of the freedom we enjoy here."
Vrinda (38), professor of Forensic Medicine and her husband Giridhar, a professor in Prosthodontics (Dental) were working at Sebha Medical University in Libya.
"We were in a different world there. We were lucky to have taken the first flight out of Libya, organized by the ministry of external affairs on March 5. The Gaddafi government had stopped transmission of all TV channels, except BBC and CNN. Shop shutters went down, mobile phones became jammed. We were confined at home, surviving on stocked food," she recalled.
He scariest moment she said, was on a night when she saw armed men rush up the stairs of their building to fire from the terrace. "Another time, my husband came back from his way to the medical store after seeing barracks full of gun-toting men on the streets," she said.
The locals took advantage of the situation as the currency value fluctuated. The riots reached a stage where even foreigners could have been killed. Those who tried to escape, the couple heard, were looted. "We waited for two to three days at Sebha airport with travel documents, in a chilly climate of 4 degree celcius. Our predicament was unexplainable," she said.
When they finally boarded a flight to India, the couple's relief knew no bounds.
"The Tripoli airport was closed and the flights were, luckily, routed through Sebha. So we managed to get home safe on March 5," the couple beamed.