Malta is a Safe Place to Live

Yesterday, I chatted for a bit with a Maltese florist in front of his shop, and he asked me how I am. I said OK. It was nice to chat with him for a moment. And then he asked how my daughters are in the US.

So instead of saying fine, OK, as I usually would, I told him about a phone call I got from one of my daughters who lives in New York City (where, by the way, all my EFL students long to visit or return to if they've been there).

My daughter has an internship in the Bronx. I always try not to think of where she works and I always pray that she'll be safe. And then she called me yesterday and "reminded me" why I don't want to think of where she works.

This happened a block from where she works, a place she has to pass by every day on her way to work. A young mother was pulled from her car-where she was strapping in her two children, five and eight years old-and shot in the back of the head execution style. Murdered in front of her two kids at 7 AM in the morning.

My immediate question to my daughter was: Did they think it was a random shooting or something personal against the young mother?

My daughter told me they think the murder occurred because of something in this poor woman's personal life. But they still hadn't caught the guy who did it. All day during work she heard helicopters overhead, and then passed by the crime scene on her way home.

My first reaction? Relief. Relief that it wasn't a random shooting, the kind that occurs every day in New York City and other parts of the US-like in shopping malls, universities, offices.

That is wasn't a random shooting made me feel better.

How sick is this society that we're relieved when we hear that a close-encounter murder was random? That-yes-it was something this woman did that caused her to be murdered in cold blood in front of her children. That yes, maybe if my daughter had been walking right by at the same moment, the bullet wouldn't have (G-d Forbid) hit her because it was specifically aimed at this young woman's head.

The florist looked at me as if I told him my daughters lived in Afghanistan instead of one of the world's most "classy" cities, and then said told me he'd never want to live in the US. Nothing against Americans, he said. He just wouldn't want to live there.

Malta has crime. People's mobiles and wallets get stolen all the time. Women-including myself-have been approached by foreign men-looking for sex. It's disgusting. But you're alive and intact afterward. And I have walked home at 10 PM at night in Malta and I wasn't afraid. It took me a year to believe I could do it-but It was true. I could walk relatively unafraid down the streets in Malta at night.

My daughter sent me an email last night (when I was having trouble sleeping) that she planned not to go to her internship the next day. She felt stupid about it but called her supervisor who was very supportive. My daughter has only two more days she has to attend this internship for the semester.

My daughter asked me if she thinks it was OK that she just didn't go in after the murder near her place-where the guy is still loose. I said yes, she did the right thing. I wouldn't have gone in either.

My thoughts go out to that poor mother and her poor two children. The day we can just go to work the next day where something like this happens and think nothing of it-that's the day it gets even worse than it is even now in the good old USA.

Ilene Springer is author of An-American-in-Malta.com.