Published: Sun, Oct. 19, 2008 12:30AM

Modified Sun, Oct. 19, 2008 01:29PM

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Sitting at the kitchen table in the couple's apartment in Ayden, Helen remembers vividly what happened next. Two Mazda pickups, bristling with armed police, were waiting for her. Their leader snatched the gate's keys from the employee and turned to Helen.

"This is no longer your property. You have 24 hours to get out," he told her. If you don't, "we'll kill you or put you in jail, whichever you prefer."

It was not an idle threat. In 2000, war veterans killed a neighbor after he refused to leave his farm.

The Herbsts prided themselves on the relationships they formed with their black employees, many of whom worked with the family for years. The couple had provided a pre-school on the property for workers' children, and a free health clinic where mothers could take their babies. Wally had hoped that his family's longstanding ties to the area would spare his farm from seizure.

Frantic packing

In the end, it did not matter. With the help of neighbors and friends and their vehicles, the Herbsts were forced to pack up as much as they could. Police pilfered from the trucks as the woman who would be moving into their home gave demands.

The Herbsts were barred from removing anything needed to run the farm, including tractors. The farm would be turned over to a local politician, and his wife wanted some things inside the home as well.

This irritated Helen, who picked up a pottery vase her daughter Pam had made in school.

"I said, 'Do you want this?' and she said 'yes.' I drew my hand back, and I turned around and smashed it on the floor."

She laughs about it now, but Wally and Helen haven't been back home since. Pam, who lives less than 70 miles from the farm, hasn't returned, either. "To be honest, I don't know if I'd want to go back," she says on the phone from her home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. "I'd rather have these pictures in my mind of how it looked when I left."

The Herbsts' son, John, returned soon after to tend to the cattle, only to be kidnapped and held for ransom at the farm.

The kidnappers had gained access to the Herbsts' bank records. They demanded exactly what the family had on deposit. Helen doesn't remember the precise figure, but it was millions of Zimbabwe dollars. It took Helen five trips with a suitcase to fill the back seat of her car with enough money to free their son.

Although she can retell almost the entire story without becoming emotional, Helen tears up when speaking of her three children, two of whom live in Zimbabwe. She is not sure when she will see them, or her grandchild, again, but Helen and Wally needed to leave.

It would not be fair, Helen says, to saddle the kids with parents who cannot make a living for themselves.

Starting over

The couple who helped bring the Herbsts to America, Tom and Bonnie Ellis of Raleigh, first visited Zimbabwe in the late 1980s. Tom, an avid hunter who has since retired from the state Department of Agriculture, had always wanted to track game in Africa.

A travel agent sent them to the Herbsts, and he hunted sable on the family's land.

The Ellises and the Herbsts became fast friends.

Tom and Bonnie have returned to Africa many times. After Wally and Helen were forced from their home, the Ellises treated the couple and their daughter Kelly to a Christmas trip to North Carolina.

Work in Africa dried up for Wally. Inflation climbed astronomically. A loaf of bread in Zimbabwe can cost more than $1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.

The Herbsts decided to move abroad.

Says Wally: "Eventually, all our assets were gone, and we thought" -- clapping his hands for emphasis -- "let's try America."