My Philadelphia Story

For the past two trips home from Uganda, I have committed myself to doing whirlwind tours of the U.S. in short time periods.

Part of this has to do with the fact that my job, my friends, and my family are now so spread out that trying see as many people as possible, and get as much work done as possible, usually requires at least three to four stops. And the U.S. is a big place. Somehow I never realized that while living here.

In October, it was Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, DC and New York (with two final out-of-country side-trips to Dubai and Doha in the United Arab Emirates to finish off a crazy two weeks).

This time around, I tried to be more practical but didn't do so well either. I started in Florida again where my mother and brother live and then took a trip out of the country to Central America (Costa Rica) for five days. I had planned to finish out my last week in DC but, after realizing that I was doing nothing to cure my serious case of emotional and physical burn-out, I made a decision to go "home." Or at least what I consider "home" in the U.S....Philadelphia.

I was born in the state of Connecticut, part of a select handful of places in the northeastern part of the U.S. that locals like to snobbishly call "New England," and spent most of my early life there.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Connecticut. It is a beautiful state. But I never really felt at home until I moved to Philadelphia in my late teenage years.

I think it is because the last five or so years of my life in Connecticut were both traumatic and dramatic. They were riddled with so much personal and family-related pain that it took me about five years before I could actually return to the state without feeling a deep sense of unease and panic.

But Philadelphia saved me. Actually, and much more accurately, Philadelphians saved me. The man who took me out of Connecticut and brought me to Philadelphia in my absolute lowest state and the woman who then stepped in to make sure I never went back to that place of desperation are from Philadelphia. Later, the person who taught me to travel the world, appreciate culture, and be brave enough to speak and write my soul is from Philadelphia. The teachers who mentored me for four years of college were professors from Temple University in Philadelphia. When I was at a crossroads about living abroad, going to graduate school, taking jobs way outside of my "credentialed" realm, I found cheering support from Philadelphia.

In short, the place and the people that not only saved my life but also taught me courage, self-respect, and how to laugh were from Philadelphia. For fifteen years of my life, I lived, worked, and loved in Philadelphia. It left an indelible mark on my soul. It is the only place in the world that I will always consider "home."

Mind you, Philadelphia also has its flaws...as do people from Philly. Blunt to an almost polished extreme, racist--but not-- in a way that is impossible to explain to people who haven't lived in Philly for years, inflammatory, rambunctious, insular, protective, and suspicious. Yes...those are all descriptors of people from Philly. Hard to get to know, too.

But...I can't even remember anymore...it has been almost two decades, how or why I overcame those things. I think it is because my first formal introduction to Philadelphia is my best friend in the world (besides my mother), Connie, who is all but still none of the aforementioned characteristics. She essentially took me by the neck and introduced me to Philly and everything about Philadelphia. I also went to an inner-city school for college (which, by the way, is one of the best in the country) and you can't act like a paranoid asshole for long in that environment.

Philadelphia is by far one of the best cities in the world to come of age in. From the age of 17 until I formally left many years later, I couldn't have asked for a better education in the world. I cried each time I left and I cried each time I came back. Philadelphia creeps into your heart and your soul and you just can never leave it...no matter how many times you go away. I am a testament to that one.

So, after eight years in DC and one year in Uganda, I wanted "home."

It started last week in a bar/pub in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where my mother and brother live. The owners of the bar are from Philadelphia and it caters to a mainly Philadelphia crowd that come down during the winters to tend bar and work side-jobs in the sun. It, essentially, is a small piece of Philadelphia in south Florida.

I had been creeping around going back in because I thought I had become so "foreign" so as not to be accepted any longer. I live in Africa, I dated a Midwesterner for fourteen months, I felt I didn't have anything to say or contribute.

Plus, I didn't think I knew how to interact with men from Philly anymore. That was my biggest shame of them all.

Before I left Uganda, my French friend Sabine (formally known as "Monique" before she declared she had no problem with me using her real name) said, "What kind of man will get you back in the saddle? What kind of man is that one?"

I thought about it and said, "A guy from Philly."

"Why?" she pressed.

"It is just so uncomplicated. It is not hard to meet a normal, nice guy in Philadelphia. It is normal to go to a bar and meet someone you might be interested in. Philadelphia has a developed bar and restaurant culture and also various neighborhoods where you can go to meet people. Guys in the bars I would go to in Philly would be able to hold a conversation without asking me for my business card. No one really cared that much about that. No one asked about my credentials. You could just...well, have a conversation," I said.

"Well, I think you should make time during this trip to go home to Philadelphia, then, no?" she asked. "Sounds like you need some grounding and that is where you get grounded."

I don't have time, I assured her.

"Look, you spent all that time trying to be 'Washington DC' then trying to deny what you loved about your part of the country to your ex...why don't you stop denying who you are and what you love? Sounds like that city did you a world of good...but that's just my opinion...and what do the French know?" she said, and then smirked at me.

Then I walked into the bar in Ft. Lauderdale last Saturday night and was greeted warmly by all of the Philadelphians who I had known for years.

"Hey, hot shit, how is the book? I almost wiped my ass with it and then saw it was your name on the cover...hah, hah...just kidding! Welcome home!" Rick said.

"Patti! You carrying any weird tropical diseases with you? If not, come sit next to me...I want to hear about your travels! I will buy the first couple of rounds!"

"You in on the bet? We got quite the kitty going on here!"

"Hey! Come over here! Let me hug you...you been keeping up on the news out of Temple lately? Watching Villanova?"

I sat down in a booth with my mother and smiled.

Home...sort of.

Ten minutes later a very handsome guy named Chad sat down next to me.

"You a Philly girl?" he asked.

"Yes and no. I live in Africa now...but I used to live in Philadelphia," I said.

"OK, wanna watch the Eagles game? I would love to buy you a beer. You're very pretty...even if you're now from Africa and not Philadelphia...hah, hah!"

I smiled and relaxed.

"Hey, how are Ugandans feeling these days about Idi Amin? He was a crazy motherfucker. I felt so bad when I was a kid and saw that shit happening. That looked like such a beautiful country..." he reflected.

I sat up and looked at him.

"How'd you know about Idi Amin?" I asked.

It was his turn to look at me.

"You don't remember that?" he asked.

Yes...but no...I was only a kid...

"Big shot lawyer now? And you didn't know about Amin?" he jibed.

"I was ten!! I knew later!" I insisted.

"Yeah, Miss Tough Stuff, well, I knew THEN!" he laughed.

Point taken.

And so it went.

For two days, seven football games, nine rounds of darts, twelve games of billiards, and one very long night of dancing to Motown classics with fellow Philadelphians...I felt much, much better.

I arrived in DC this morning and had two "power meetings."

Then I stood looking at my ticket and hailed a cab.

"Union Train Station, please!" I said to the cab driver.

One and a half hours later I was in Philadelphia.

The same woman who saved my life nearly twenty years ago picked me up at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia at 1:30pm.

We went shopping, did a tour of her new house, went out and had dinner, and spent time in my hotel room laughing and crying about the past twenty years.

We were leaving the bar in the restaurant when one of the patrons made a off-color crack about someone on the television screen from an opposing team. He saw me smirk and said,

"Hey, I hope I didn't offend you!"

Connie, my friend, said, "You can't offend her. She's got thick skin...too many years here...and one in Africa."

So glad to be back home.

And, also, to go back home.

Death: The Ultimate Pina Colada Song

Once, talking to a friend who had come through a particularly brutal illness at the age of 41, he remarked, "Sometimes, Patti, you never know how good it feels to be alive when you have felt that close to feeling like you were going to die. That's when it's time to thank God."

I said I understood, then, and thought I did. But I didn't.

Now, I understand.

It started last weekend and I should have been paying a lot more attention, but I wasn't.

I had been working like a dog for the prior three weeks trying to get ready to a big week (this past one) of meetings, conferences, and workshops which my organization was hosting. I had nearly a non-stop VIP visitor's list that began in mid-November and would continue until mid-December. I didn't sleep well, didn't eat well, and spent far too many evenings up past midnight squinting at computer screen. In short, I had worn my body down to shreds.

So when Saturday rolled around and I felt unusually raw and tired, I chalked it up to stress and not taking better care of myself. I decided to spend the day in bed and give myself some time to recover.

By Sunday, however, after I had slept 18 hours straight, I found that I was more tired than ever before. In addition, I was beginning to get pounding headaches and felt like I had a fever. I called my driver, Robert, and had to beg off his school opening where I was scheduled to be one of the guest speakers. I felt awful, like the most terrible person on the planet, but I was in agony.

Every bone and muscle had started to ache and I couldn't get out of bed. I started treating myself with every known over-the-counter medicine I had. Thera-flu, Tylenol, Alleve, leftover antibiotics, anything I could get my hands on. They all worked for about an hour but then the symptoms would come raging back just as strong, if not stronger. By Sunday night, I was wearing sweat pants and two layers of shirts and couldn't keep a thing down. That evening was spent, throughout the night, with one of those fevers that produce the kind of hallucinations that are so realistic that you have to get up and make yourself walk around to shake them off.

"Grandma, is that you?" I wandered the halls muttering, scaring the shit out of my housekeeper and gardener.

By Monday, my head was hurting so badly I thought about cutting it off. It felt like my brain was too big for my skull and my ears wanted to abandon me altogether. I managed to make it to work but, by early afternoon, I was so dizzy I would end up sitting on the floor. Hadijah, my office manager, came in to find me, sort of lotus-position with my head to the cool tiles, and exclaimed,

"Patricia! Go to the doctor now! We don't sit on dirty floors here, that is terrible! Please get up..."she kept glancing out the door to make sure no one was looking in.

I went home and went straight to bed, waking intermittently but essentially sleeping with a raging fever, pounding headache and muscle spasms for another 18 hours. On Tuesday, I went with my driver, Robert, to the airport to pick up my boss and was shivering in the front seat in the glaring sun.

"It's the flu," Robert told me.

I was trending towards believing him because essentially everyone in the office had been befallen by some mystery illness that had many, although not all, of the same symptoms my current illness was characterized by.

I went back to bed after taking an impossibly hot bath to make my muscles uncramp. I managed to make it to dinner that night with my boss from DC and my colleague, Liz, but I was not in good shape.

I couldn't keep more than the soup down and when I went to the ladies room, I had a hard time finding my way back. I was completely disoriented.

Finally, on Wednesday, it all fell apart. I went to the office early after spending most of the night hallucinating about my dead grandmother, Eric Clapton, Shakespeare, and then sitting out on my porch talking quietly to my dogs about my philosophy on life as the sun came up.

I tried to sit through a full mornings-worth of meetings and tried to pay attention but I just couldn't. It was like I had forgotten the English language. My boss from DC, Paul, and Liz finally insisted, "Alright, that's enough. You need to go to the doctor now."

I kept repeating that I was fine as Liz propelled me out the door with a strong arm.

"See that panda in the corner?" I asked her.

"Yeah, OK. You get to the doctor now and I don't want to hear another word about it. And for God's sake stop babbling about pandas and Eric Clapton, you are delusional because you have a very high fever. Now get in the car and I will call you in an hour," she instructed.

I did my best a to keep quiet to Robert on the ride to The Surgery, the British-run clinic here, but I did scream a few times as the shooting pains that had come to characterize my headache started up.

Robert jumped and nearly swerved off the road. I focused on making no noise whatsoever.

When we arrived at the doctor's office, I took a number and tried to be as quiet as possible.

Finally, an hour later, a kind, young Ugandan doctor called me into his surgery.

"Hello, Patricia, I am Dr. Clayton," he said.

ERIC CLAPTON??!!!!

"What? Sorry? No, Clayton...with a 'y'" he corrected me, looking at me oddly. "So tell me what's going on?"

I described the symptoms, settled down for a brief exam, and then got the inevitable question:

"Have you been taking your anti-malarial medications all the time?" he said.

"Yes! Well, sort of. Mostly. I don't always take them in Kampala but I take them when I go outside of Kampala, especially to Gulu and parts of the North," I told him.

"ALWAYS?" he asked again.

Then I thought hard and realized I had been to Gulu two weeks ago for only a short day and a half and, indeed, I might have forgotten to take them. It was such a short time though!

"Well, maybe I missed just once a week or two ago...but this isn't malaria!" I told him.

He cocked his eyebrow at me, "Oh?"

(Doctors love it when their patients interrupt them to diagnose themselves...)

"I've had that before and it wasn't anything like this...this is horrible!" I finished up.

He ignored me and escorted me down to the lab while quickly ordering a bunch of blood tests, urine tests, plasma tests, and all other sorts of tests I couldn't understand.

"My plasma is fine!" I told him meekly.

A sweet, young Dutch nurse sat me down and said, "Have you been taking your anti-malarials?"

"No, I missed once when I was in Gulu, but only once!" I said.

"Once is all it takes, my dear," she said.

"I have had malaria before here in Kampala," I told her. "It hurt but it didn't hurt anything like this...it was painful but this is agonizing," I admitted.

"You know there are several species of malaria, right?" "The one prevalent around Kampala is ugly but the one found in Gulu and South Sudan is deadly; very deadly, very quickly. Now, I am going to do a quick malaria test and we'll know for sure," she told me.

The quick malaria tests are like pregnancy tests except you use blood. In about two minutes, however, you know.

Mine turned red (positive) in about ten seconds.

"Alright, we have to admit you now, at least for the night, maybe longer, while we finish these tests," she declared.

"No!" I insisted. "I promise I will take all of the medicines when I am supposed to...I promise I will call if I get more sick...I promise..." I trailed off.

"So you honestly think, given that you have been hallucinating for the past 48 hours, that you will be timely about taking these medicines every four hours? You honestly think that your housekeeper and gardener will now what to do if you have a seizure or slip into a coma? Really? Because with your temperature, that is definitely what's coming next..." she pushed.

I thought about the past two days of having Kate and Godfrey watch me walking around the house trying to find my dead grandmother and sharing Proust with my dogs and realized I couldn't possibly subject them to this.

"Alright, I'll stay," I said.

"Good. Now take these," handing me four huge tablets," and I will get you set up with an IV in a few minutes," she said.

I looked her straight in the eye.

"Tamara, I don't want an IV. I don't doubt the cleanliness and efficacy of this clinic but I really still have an aversion to putting needles into my veins anywhere outside of the U.S., and even there I rarely submit. I don't mean to be rude but, please, is there another way?" I begged.

"Yes, there is. But that is going to entail you drinking a minimum of ten liters of fluid ever four hours. The malaria that you have infects not only your blood, but your tissues. When we start killing them off with those tablets, you have to flush them out so they don't lodge anywhere and cause hemorrhaging. Can you drink ten litres of fluid...and by this I mean juice, not water, in four hours?" she asked.

I promised her that I could.

Then I went out to the parking lot to find Robert and send him to the store to get me ten boxes of juice...big boxes.

He was so thrilled to hear it was malaria he almost hugged me.

"Such good news, Madame Boss! Such good news!" he said.

This is quite sad, actually.

Most Africans suffer from malaria dozens if not hundreds of times in their lives. It is so common that me telling him I had malaria was like me telling him I had a common house cold. Much better than the mysterious "flu."

"No, Robert, it is not good news. Whites from North America don't get malaria so we have no resistance. And this is the malaria from the Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan, the bad kind," I told him.

Then he asked me what kind of juice I wanted. At this point the medicine was starting to kick in and I was beginning to get much worse (treating malaria is often much worse than actually suffering it) and I muttered, "I don't care, I am OK with anything but bananas. I like other fruit just fine."

As he walked off I had the fleeting thought, "And coconuts, I hate coconuts," but then shelved it away as so random that soon I dismissed it. I had never even seen coconut juice here.

I crawled back into my hospital room and made a series of phone calls to Liz, my boss here, my bosses in DC, and explained what was going on.

What ensued was panic as, I have said, North Americans don't get malaria where we come from so the mere mention of the word scares the hell out of people.

I finally dozed off about thirty minutes later when Tamara knocked on the door with my bagfuls of juice.

I peered inside.

Pina Colada Juice.

Coconuts.

10 litres of coconut juice.

I groaned and my stomach turned.

"Now, these two boxes, right now, in front of me and then I want to see the other two gone in an hour and a half," she said.

So miserable that I was resigned to my fate, I closed my eyes and slugged down the two litres of coconut juice, willed myself not to vomit, and went back to bed.

For the next six hours, I was admitted at 6PM, I was in a complete daze. I got up and took my medicine, slugged down a box or two of coconut juice, and went back to bed. I was sweating from the fever so profusely that my entire room smelled like a tropical island.

Finally, at midnight, a new nurse came on: Cathy the German.

Like most Germans, Cathy was no bullshit. She was kind and sympathetic, but also direct. My kind of doctor or nurse, in short. She came in and saw that I had failed to finish my pina coladas and went to get the IV fluids.

"Cathy, please...can I just have water? It's not that I can't or won't drink...it's just that my stomach hurts so badly from the coconut juice that I feel sick all the time, is there anything else?" I begged.

She returned with four liters of water and a syringe. In the syringe was a super-dose of painkiller and an anti-nausea drug. I dutifully rolled over and, within, ten minutes, was out cold.

I awoke again at 4AM feeling marginally better and wandered out to the nurses' station to find Cathy.

"Here, look at this!" she said, scooting over from the microscope.

I peered in and, previously gotten acquainted with looking at dog's blood under microscopes who had blood parasites, immediately felt myself recoil.

"It that mine?" I whispered.

"Sure is! We're all surprised, quite frankly, that you didn't seizure before this point," she told me, matter-of-factly.

"Cathy, I don't want to talk about it anymore. Just tell me, am I going to get better?" I asked.

"You should be just fine in about a week. You've got one hell of a case but you'll recover. Just don't wait so long the next time, what were you thinking?" she admonished.

I was out of excuses and went back to bed.

At 9 o'clock the next morning, Dr. Stockley, my normal physician, bellowed from the hall:

"Taft!!!! Where the hell are you...you insane cuss?"

Dr. Stockley is the owner of the clinic and a former British Navy doctor. He has no bedside manner to speak of, whatsoever, but he runs the best clinic in Kampala and hires damn professional staff. Nevertheless, we became friends when he treated me for my first round of so-called-malaria back in April and also fixed my leg after I got in a motorcycle accident in November.

He came storming into the room and said, "What the fuck is going on in here? It smells like I am in goddamn Tahiti or on the set of Hawaii Five-O...what is that shite?" he gestured towards the coconut juice on the bedside table.

I opened my mouth to explain and he held up a hand.

"I don't want to hear it. I would slap you if I didn't think you were going to throw up all over me with that vile coconut shite you've been consuming, Christ, girl!!"

"Alright, you can go home. Your temperature is back in normal range and your parasite count has dropped significantly. Someone loves your dumb ass because you should actually be dead by now, but just get out of my sight and take your medicines and CALL ME if you start talking to Elvis, your dead aunts, or whoever else you were seeing," he instructed.

I stood up unsteadily and went downstairs to pick up my bags of medicines and pay my tab.

(As a note on the asinine American healthcare debate...I have no health insurance. I get a decent monthly stipend to pay for healthcare costs but I do not have formal healthcare insurance as most companies will not insure Americans who have spent more than 35% of the past decade in a third world countries where they may or may not have been exposed to infectious disease. Thus, this put me shit-out-of luck along with many of my friends as the type of insurance that will cover us costs about 15 times what normal health insurance does. It also pretty much guarantees, now that I have had malaria twice, that I will never get decent coverage again).

Waiting nervously to hear the tally, I nearly fell down when the nurse said, "250 thousand shillings, please."

That would be about $125.

I couldn't believe it.

"That's it?!" I asked, shocked. This is a clinic that mainly caters to white people, afterall.

"Is that too much?" she asked, "We can set up a payment plan for you since you are such a good customer," she offered, pulling out the forms.

"No, no! It's fine. Thank you so much!!" I told her.

In America, a day-and-a-half of intensive care, antibiotics, bloodtests, and injections would have been over $5,000. Probably more. Probably a lot more.

When I got home, before I crawled back to bed, I checked the price that the drug I was given for the malaria, Lomart, was charged at, per pill, in the U.S. for someone without health insurance. $85. In Canada, $10; in the UK; $8, in France, $7. In Uganda? $0.08. Same maker, same drug, same everything. It made me very angry.

So I went to bed.

I don't remember the next twenty four hours too well at all. All I know is that treating malaria is indeed almost as bad as suffering it.

On Thursday night at 11pm I found myself begging God, Allah, Yahweh, the Universe, whomever, to make it stop. It was getting better, but not without a fight.

I wandered out at 5am to try to get some tea and bread down and found Kate peering at me across the counter.

"Your grandmother here again?" she asked.

"No, I am done with that, I promise. Can you just make me some tea...and, um, I am sorry I have been acting so strangely the past week..." I said.

She shrugged as if to say, "Hey, white people are all nuts...what are you going to do about it?"

Last night, around 10pm, it started to go away completely. I felt so much better that I actually went out in the garden and played with my neglected, but erudite, dogs for an hour.

I couldn't believe how good I felt. I couldn't believe how good it felt to be alive.

I remembered my friend's words from years ago and added my own prayer to his.

Never, ever again without the anti-malarials, I can promise you that much. I think I'll be taking them in the Arctic.

Even though it was fun talking to Eric Clapton and Shakespeare for awhile there.

Gadgets

I have lived in my new home for about ten days.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I now have a full-time gardener/guard and a housekeeper who live with me. I haven't lived with anyone in about four years so this is an interesting adjustment.

The first night, Kate, my housekeeper/cook came to me with the can opener at 10pm as I was working on a legal memo for the High Court.

Kate, my driver Robert's sister, is wonderful but she has only worked for Somalis before me and, before that, had been raised in the same rural village that Robert grew up in.

She is super-smart and sweet as can be but she has no familiarity whatsoever with gadgets and electronics.

Robert insisted that this was a good thing as people who don't know the value of things are less likely to steal them (odd logic, but OK) but it does present other issues.

"Madame Boss (I still HATE this title and keep trying to get everyone to call me 'Patricia' but am having no luck), what is this...thing?" she said as she held out the can opener.

"It's a can opener," I told her.

Seeing the look of complete confusion on her face, I got up and went with her to the kitchen to demonstrate.

I opened a can of dog food for Ginger and Ssebo, my dogs, and handed it back to her.

She smiled at me and called in Godfrey, the gardener/guard, to show him.

The next morning, every can in my pantry was open. Dog food, tomatoes, kidney beans, soup, peas, and tuna fish. All open.

"Madame Boss!" Godfrey called, "Look, I have opened all of the cans! This thing is amazing!"

The other odd thing about having two employees who live with me is that I am fed all of the time.

Kate makes me breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I have never been a hearty eater but waking up every morning to a three-course breakfast is overwhelming. My lunch is always neatly packed in a container and ready for me at 9am when I leave for the office. At 7pm, Kate starts cooking dinner.

"There are plenty of leftovers from last night," I told Kate on Wednesday evening, after she made a massive chicken dinner on Tuesday night. "Don't cook dinner again, I can eat the remaining chicken you made last night."

She looked at me like I had fallen off the moon.

"My job is to cook for you and make sure everything is clean. If I can not cook tonight, then what am I supposed to do?" she asked me.

I felt embarrassed and told her to go ahead and cook, we'd figure out what to do with the leftovers.

By Thursday, I had enough food in my refrigerator to feed half of Kampala.

Wasting food in a country where people are hungry stresses me out. So I gave all of the food to Kate and Godfrey and told them to give it to everyone they knew.

Then we confronted the microwave.

"Thank you so much for the food, Madame Boss," Godfrey said, "But how do we heat it?"

I was in the middle of editing a 120-page legal opinion for the government, on a Skype call with a lawyer from my organization recently relocated to Tanzania, and doing the end-of-month accounting so I was completely distracted.

"Just throw it in the microwave," I said, not thinking.

Kate came into my office an hour later, looking upset.

"Sorry to disturb you but...it isn't working," she told me.

I went into the kitchen and discovered that all of the food, about 17 containers, were shoved in the microwave and the internal light was switched on but that was about it.

"Oh, it's OK, you switched on the light, not the actual microwave...here, let me show you..." I said.

As I proceeded to heat up seventeen plastic containers of food, Kate made an interesting observation.

"Americans are strange," she said, "Why do you need all of these things? Doesn't fire work just as well? Are all Americans like this? You need all of these...gadgets?"

Meanwhile, Godfrey was in the pantry opening the newest cans I had brought back from the store that day.

Godfrey is currently the most favorite person in my world right now, besides Eric, the handsome internet service provider who smells so damn good.

Like Eric, and hundreds of Ugandans, he fought in the civil war here that went on from the late 1970s to mid-1980s and he is half Ugandan and half Rwandan. He went back to the war in 1994 during the genocide in Rwanda on the side of the RPF (Tutsis) and is probably more loyal to President Kagame of Rwanda than President Museveni of Uganda.

He also speaks flawless English.

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that killed almost a million people in 30 days, Kagame often used aid money to hire instructors who were mainly Irish and British to teach his troops English. Sometimes at the expense of not giving his soldiers medicine or weapons. It was an odd strategy but, to this day, you will find regular foot soldiers from Rwanda who speak English perfectly, even if they cannot read or write. Godfreyi s one of those people.

But Godfrey has been at war for a good portion of his life. So living with me, my dogs, and my other pets in this huge house in Kampala overlooking Lake Victoria seems to be paradise. He wants to please me so badly that opening every can in my pantry seemed logical. He also knows I love flowers and puts roses from the garden in each room daily. He waits for the hour in the evening where we spend time on my balcony with me teaching him how to read and write English just as well as he can speak speak it. He wants to be a teacher when he saves some money for school.

As for me, I wait for our final ritual of the evening, training the dogs, just as expectantly. It is normally midnight when I wander outside to meet him and the dogs and we spend 45 minutes training them how to sit, stay, lie down, and roll over. Then Godfrey stays up all night with them reinforcing the command, like a drill sergeant. When I came out of the house Friday morning to go to work, Ginger ran up to me and immediately obeyed every command that Godfrey and I had worked on the prior night.

"You are amazing!" I told him. "How did you do that? It takes dog trainers in America weeks to teach a dog those commands that easily!"

He shrugged, it was easy for him.

The microwave was a different story.

Kate, clearly annoyed with American technology and gadgets, said to Godfrey, "You figure out how to use this machine, I don't want to be involved."

Godfrey stood beside me as I demonstrated the skills of "Microwave 101" to him.

He looked me straight in the eye and said,

"Madame Boss, this is amazing. But why don't we just heat this food on the stove? It is so much easier. This microwave is not like the can opener...now THAT has a purpose..."

I paused and declared that he was right. It made sense.

Kate was watching though, and discovered a new purpose for the microwave: drying clothes.

I saw her do it with a wet towel at one point and thought, "Well, OK, if that works, who am I to correct her?"

But then Friday, sitting in my office eating the leftovers from my breakfast at 7pm as Kate was cooking me up another round of dinner, I smelled something burning. I ignored it at first, thinking something must have spilled on the stove, until it became overwhelming. It didn't smell like food, it smelled like...plastic or something.

"Kate, what is burning?" I called from the office.

I heard her gasp and ran out to see what was going on.

I found my underwear on fire in the microwave. All of the tiny flowers and cute appliques that seemed so durable reduced to a smoldering, melted, pile in the microwave.

Honestly, I burst out laughing. Yes, it was a bit of an expensive loss but I just never thought to put underwear in the microwave before.

"Kate, why did you do this?" I asked when I could breathe normally again.

"Wasn't me, " she said, "These were the last things I needed to iron before cooking dinner and Godfrey thought they could dry in this...machine. It worked for the dish towels but not for these. I am so sorry, though."

I walked out onto the lawn, where Godfrey was training the dogs, and said, "Hey, Godfrey, don't put my, um, clothes...my women's clothes...my women's, um, underclothes, in the microwave anymore, please, they burn."

He looked horrified so I let it drop. No one has touched the microwave since.

Then there was the missing box of red wine.

Admittedly, I am obsessed with grocery shopping. It is both a practical and spiritual event for me...and even a social one. I love going to the grocery store and Robert and I go on a daily basis. It's not that I NEED to shop that much, I don't, but it is just a habit carried here from the U.S. that I never got rid of.

This practice confounds Kate and Godfrey who, rightfully, see it as wasteful. They also don't quite understand the products I bring home because I actually don't shop for basic staples at the grocery store (either me or Kate goes to the bustling African market for those supplies), I buy alcohol and whatever happens to catch my fancy on a particular day. I have a rule: I never spend more than $20 on anything but, prices being what they are here, I can sometimes do a lot with $20.

"Hey, Kate," I called on Tuesday night, as my colleague Liz and I were setting up for a series of long phone conversations on the computer with the home office and both felt like a glass of wine, "where is the box of wine I brought home yesterday?"

(Yes, I am drinking wine in boxes these days but that is because it is decent South African wine and not the crap found in boxed wines in the U.S.)

Kate came out to the porch and looked at me nervously.

"Which box?" she asked.

"The wine. The box of wine. I have looked all over the kitchen and pantry for it and I can't find it anywhere. Do you know where you put it when you helped me unpack yesterday?" I asked.

We went to the kitchen together and Kate opened the freezer to reveal a perfectly frozen 3 liter box of Merlot.

"This?" she said.

"Yeah, that would be it," I said.

"What IS it?" Kate asked.

"Wine. The grape juice of the Gods. The nectar of heaven. Wine..." I tried.

I had part of a bottle left in the pantry so I opened it and passed it to Kate. "Do you want to try it?" I said.

She hesitantly took a tiny glassful, took one sip, and spit it out in the sink.

"Awful," she declared, "THAT gives you pleasure? It's poison!"

Godfrey, on the other hand, had no such issues. He grabbed a coffee mug, poured himself a decent-sized glassful, and downed it in three minutes. He looked at me and then at Kate and said, "You see, she is from the village...but me, I know wine. I have lived in the city!"

("Yeah? But then why are you putting my panties in the microwave?" I wanted to ask but held my tongue)

"Wine's frozen," I called out to Liz, "how 'bout a beer?"

She didn't even blink or register any surprise.

"Stella (her housekeeper) keeps putting my Camembert cheese in the same drawer with the sponges. No matter how many times I explain or tell her that it is food, and not a cleaning product, she still doesn't believe me," Liz said.

I love Camembert cheese too, but sort of understood the mistake.

"So what did you say to Stella?" I asked.

"I did the same thing you just did with the wine. And got the same reaction. She thought I was trying to poison her with the cheese. Said it was the most disgusting thing she had ever tasted in her life. Then she told me that if I kept eating it, my tits would shrink," she said.

"Least you're not having that problem," she mentioned, pointing to my chest.

The emulsion blender was the final straw for Kate. It is a hand held-blender that basically eliminates the need for a conventional blender or a food processor, neither one of which is too common in Uganda. But I had bought this one in South Africa and it remains one of my absolute favorite gadgets.

Kate and I were busy making potato soup on Friday when I pulled it out to demonstrate.

Kate looked at me curiously and then gave it a go.

"I like this one. But I have seen these before. You have one in your bedroom drawer," she said, "so did Amina, my former boss. I just didn't know they were used for soup too..."

I was completely confused. "Too?"

What was in my bedroom drawer that looked like the handheld blender?

When it dawned on me I blushed three different shades of purple.

"Kate, that is not for soup, the one in the bedroom. Never for soup." I said.

She looked at me like I was a complete moron.

"I thought not," she said, "But this looks a lot like it. Do you want me to get Godfrey? He likes all of your American toys..."

"No, please don't get Godfrey. Most certainly DO NOT get Godfrey about this blender or the one in the bedroom...NEVER," I insisted.

She winked at me and we went back to cooking.

Maybe a return to simplicity is needed.

In the meantime, nothing has started shrinking yet but I am watching carefully.

Why we ask Why

So I did it again.

I talked to my ex for almost four hours last night.

I have no idea why I sometimes feel compelled to talk to him but I do. I think it is because I hate feeling like there is "bad blood" between me and someone else. I think it is because I am the polar opposite of someone who burns bridges in human relationships...I want to ensure that all of the architecture of my relationships is intact. I don't like feeling like someone out there is angry at me or disappointed in me. I don't like unanswered questions. I don't like having to ask, "Why?"

I wasn't always like this. In my teens through my mid-twenties I was one of the most destructive people you could wish to avoid. No, I was never cruel and I never set out to do bad things, but when they happened I would walk away with the buildings burning in the background and a trail of blood following behind.

I was ruled by a philosophy that said, "If this is good, then THAT has to be better!"

I applied that philosophy liberally to both people and things.

It worked wonders for me professionally, as I was always compelling myself to go for things that most people said were "impossible" to achieve at my age, being my gender, etc.

With human beings, however, it didn't work quite as well. Jobs don't have feelings, but people do.

I have always been good with friendships, but intimate relationships have been the problem.

Throughout my twenties I was the source of continual pain for my ex-boyfriend after another one of my little "dalliances" was discovered. I put him through hell. I never had multiple affairs but the couple that I did tore him apart. He couldn't understand why I was seeking outside of what was otherwise a very amazing relationship and good friendship.

We were together for the better part of eight years and, thank God, he is still one of my best friends in the world today. But he couldn't stop asking me "why" and that's what brought the house down in the end.

I have come to realize that an infidelity is like a splinter. You know it's there and you can still function with it because it is not crippling but when you start paying attention to it, then it starts getting worse. It itches and burns, you try to dig it out and it gets lodged in further, until you have created a mortal wound in an attempt to only get out a splinter.

"Why? Patti, why?" Ed would ask, night after night.

I couldn't explain. To this day I am not sure if I can honestly offer a good answer.

Finally, he left. He couldn't ignore the splinter anymore even though I was long past trying to inflict any more damage on the relationship.

"Karma is going to catch up to you and kick your ass," he told me.

He was right.

Within two months I got involved in what very well may be termed, "The most disastrous relationship of my life."

It sent me reeling into a depression that lasted, on and off, for two years.

When I got clear of that mess I declared a "dry season." No more men for at least six months.

Then I got back together with a former boyfriend who, to this day, I swear is gay.

Obviously, that didn't work out too well and I tried again to not get involved with anyone of the male species for three months, realizing that six was unrealistic.

After making that grand declaration, I got assigned to work with the U.S. Marine Corps for three months and spend eight hours a day around perfectly fit and handsome men in uniform.

"Why, God, why?!!!" I kept asking.

My mother, of course, found this all quite amusing.

"You are being tested, Patti. You and your grand statements. But hang in there, the Universe is just having a laugh at you. After all the crap you pulled with your ex-boyfriends over the years, this is your penance," she said.

Ha ha. Very funny.

Amazingly, with a near snag of almost getting involved with a married Marine, I managed to pass that test.

I was triumphant.

"See?!!!" I said to my mother, "See how I did that? Karma is satisfied now. NOW I can have a normal relationship and my debt for all the pain I have caused is paid."

"Maybe," she said, "but I don't think so."

Cynic.

So then I met Scott.

If someone could have held up a bigger warning sign that said, "DO NOT GO HERE!!!" than all of my family and friends held up to me, I don't know who that person is.

"So tell me about him," my mother said, "HONESTLY, no romantic bullshit, please."

Married, but getting divorced. Two grown children. Army. History of infidelity. Handsome. Incredibly smart.

"Are you completely out of your mind?!! Have you lost every last shred of sanity? Now you are not testing karma, you are just being an asshole," she said.

"What the hell is wrong with you? I know you don't use drugs but have you suddenly started smoking crack or shooting heroin? What the hell are you thinking, girl?" my Marine friend J, screamed at me.

"Patti, please don't do this. Please. I know this scenario. I know how it is going to turn out. I did this very same thing and I can promise you that it doesn't turn out well," my best friend, Connie, said to me.

Kay, a former Army police woman, was even more forceful, "I am NOT letting you do this. You know better. You know this cannot turn out any way but completely screwed up. I know these guys...I was one of them. I absolutely forbid you doing this. Don't you dare..."

Well, I didn't listen to anybody.

And it turned out just as badly as everyone predicted. Maybe even worse.

So when I see Scott online sometimes, I can't help myself.

Honestly, he really is a good guy. He is all the wonderful things I thought about him but he is also all of the fucked up things everyone warned me about. I knew that going into it and could never fully commit, so it is no wonder our relationship got on like two neighboring houses on fire. But I still can't get over the fact that he cheated on me and had an entire other relationship going on while he was still telling me, "I love you, you're my soul mate."

That's why I ask "why."

"Why?" I asked again last night.

Obviously, these conversations never turn out well.

But, like a baby with wet fingers crawling towards an open light socket, I go right back at it when I see him online.

My friend Liz is constantly amazed. She is the polar opposite of me. She is grounded, slightly cold, and able to shred people apart and not feel the slightest twinge of emotion. She's an amazing lawyer for that reason, but she treats people and things the way I used to.

I called her this morning to admit what I had done...like an addict who smoked a forbidden cigarette or a diabetic who snuck a piece of double-chocolate cake.

"Oh Jesus, not again, Patti?!" she said, "Really? Again?"

"I just want to know 'why?'" I said.

"Why WHAT? What do you want to know?" she demanded.

Before I could even start, she said, "Listen to me and don't say a word, OK? He left you for a suicidal tax accountant, OK?"

She continued:

"For me, I would be laughing my ass off if this happened. What did you tell me about the laws of karma? It doesn't just work for you that way, my dear, it works for everyone that way. For now, just picture them sharing a calculator together and get over it. It's not in your hands any longer."

"But I just hate feeling like there is someone out there who is upset with me. I hate being upset with someone out there to the point that it creeps up and annoys me every few days...it's like a splinter," I protested.

There was silence on the other end of the phone until I heard a loud WHAP.

"What the hell was that?" I asked Liz.

"I just killed a ladybug that was crawling on my wall in the hotel room, it was getting on my nerves," she said.

"Ladybugs are good luck, Liz, just like praying mantises, you're not supposed to kill them," I scolded.

"Oh well, I guess, according to your karmic rules, I will be coming back as a ladybug," she joked.

Since Liz clearly had no sympathy for my plight, I called Monique, my French friend.

"Yes, I asked 'why' too for about four months and then I decided to drink his entire expensive wine cellar and get a dog that attacks him every time he comes in the house," she said, upon hearing my tale.

"I don't want revenge, Monique, I just want to understand," I said.

"If I were you, I would just say, 'thank you,' and enjoy the rest of your time here," she said.

"Who am I thanking?" I asked.

"God, the Universe, whoever you pray to. I know you are spiritual so that's what I would do if I were you. It didn't work, you don't need to understand 'why' but you do need to thank God for making sure you didn't get involved in something that was going to take you off your path. This relationship was taking you off your path. So say 'thank you' and let it go," she advised.

"How did you get that information?" I asked.

"I don't know, I just felt compelled to say it to you. I don't know where it came from," she admitted.

"Now, come over and let's drink champagne all day and make bread. I just got a new bread machine from France and I am dying to test it out," she said.

"I hate champagne, Monique," I reminded her, "Plus I have a date tonight with Eric, I don't want to be drunk."

"Ah, right. I forgot. OK, then I am coming over to your house. Just tie that stupid goat of yours up. Last time she ate the hem off of my skirt!" Monique said.

"Tomorrow we can make bread and drink wine all day," I said, "Not today."

"Tomorrow the sky might fall down and the yeast will not rise...stop being so American, I am coming over now," she said.

I was about to ask "why?" but then shut my mouth.

"You need a man!" A Story of Recovery

I flipped out on my driver, Robert, yesterday.

This is a highly unusual scenario as Robert is one of my best friends in the Universe and the fact that I am having any modicum of a normal life here in Uganda is due, in a large part, to him.

Robert and I also have a multi-layered relationship that allows for human fallacy. He knows I hate to be late so he is always on time, I know he hates to be out past 9pm so I make sure I end all of my meetings early. Sometimes I am late and sometimes he stays out all night with me, but there is a give-and-take going on at all times. It is very typical of Africa (and not just Uganda) and I am used to it by now. I know what upsets Robert and is unacceptable to him just as he knows what upsets me and is, ultimately, unacceptable. We work around each other but despite the fact that I am his boss and he is my employee, we don't have a typical relationship.

I have thought long and hard about this and I have recently read an excellent book on the toic ("Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles" by Richard Dowden) that seems to confirm my conclusions.

First, Americans are not and never have been "colonizers." It is just not in our blood. You can say a lot about Americans but being "colonial" just doesn't occur to us. We make some bad mistakes because we are an individualistic society where personal freedom and success is prized above intricate relationships but we are not, by nature, overlords.

Second, Ugandans have really never had a colonial experience. This was a British colony ruled indirectly and most Ugandans have no memory of being "a colony" of Britain. I have spent time in about 20 sub-Saharan African countries by now and I have never found a place quite like Uganda.

In Kenya, I wanted to die when a waitress bowed to me after I gave her a generous tip. In Congo, I cringed when I went to shake the hotel bellboy's hand and he quickly slipped on a white glove and kneeled. In Sierra Leone, I wanted to hide my face when the Lebanese bartender, in perfect ear shot of her African employees, scoffed, "Stupid dogs, the lot of them!"

It's not like that in Uganda. Unfortunately, many Asians who live here treat Ugandans badly but, by and large, Ugandans are not a colonized people. This is good, at least for me, because no one considers my skin color too much before considering my friendship. I don't get preferential treatment because I am white unless someone is actively looking for something.

In short, Ugandans don't expect to be treated badly because they are African and, as an American, that works very well with my American culture of treating people based on the individual, not any of the other stuff (OK, some may argue that Americans are prejudiced against Muslims right now but that is a topic for another time).

This is why Robert and I are friends and this is why he got so upset when I lost my mind this morning.

"Madame Boss, what is wrong with you? You never yell or get angry...I am only ten minutes late...what is the problem??!!" he asked.

I used to have a bad temper. I used to explode a lot.

That left me almost completely when I came to Africa. Getting angry and having a tantrum here is counter-productive. It won't get you anywhere. Africans (maybe with the exception of Nigerians and Somalis) consider outward displays of anger to be the highest form of disrespect. If you get angry and express it loudly, you will be ignored.

Don't get me wrong, Ugandans are very blunt, but having a complete meltdown in public will do nothing to help you or your cause.

That's why Robert was so confused.

He looked at me solemnly and said, "Madame Boss, don't you think it is time for a man now? I think it is time..."

Of course, in America, this very conversation would be counter-productive but Robert is my friend and he knows me, intuitively, as well as most of my American friends who have known me for more than a decade.

"I don't know, Robert, that seems to be too quick. I don't think a man will help...I think I just need to be without a man for a few months," I said.

Robert whistled through his teeth and shook his head vigorously.

"No, you need a man. You have been in a bad humor since you came back from America last month. Only moving to our house (everything between me and Robert, from my house to his children, is "ours"), playing with the dogs, cooking, and gardening seem to make you happy. But that's it. So it is time for a new man. Now, Boss, now, now," he emphasized.

"Robert, I am not in the mood to go hang out at the country club for hours on weekends when I have so much to do here...where will I find this man?" I asked, joking.

"Well, what about Eric?" he asked.

It wasn't like I hadn't considered it before.

Eric is my internet service guy. He went to school and has a Master's degree in computer science. My internet service here is amazing, unlike most places in Uganda, because of Eric. I pay for a home subscription and get a corporate one because I refer business to Eric on the side. I have probably referred him, and his company, close to $6,000 in the past four months, but, then again, I am paying $120 a month for what should be a $300 per month service. My internet works when the President's doesn't. It's that good.

But it all works out in the end. This is Africa.

Eric is also ridiculously handsome and smart. He is Bugandan, the dominant tribe in Uganda, but he is almost six feet tall and smells so good that sometimes I schedule a service call just to see him and talk to him...and smell him.

Over the past six months we have become friends and we text message each other on a daily basis. Sometimes it is just silly stuff but we always keep in contact. Eric is a friend.

Which is why I was so nervous about Robert's suggestion that it should be anything more.

"Eric and I are friends, Robert. I don't think it is possible to date him," I tried.

"Madame Boss, if I may, you are being so ridiculous right now. In Uganda, men and women are not 'friends' unless there is something else going on. This may be common in America but it is not in Uganda. Eric has always liked you, I promise," he said.

I got even more nervous and went to my office manager, Hadijah, for her advice.

"Yes, I know Eric. He was married for one month to a lady who was the sister of my boss but he broke the marriage because he couldn't stand to be so constrained. He went to school in England, you know, and he was also one of Kagame's (President of Rwanda) soldiers in 1994, so he thinks a little differently," she said.

"We're friends," I told her.

She laughed.

"Yeah, OK, you're friends. I know you talk to him all the time but that doesn't mean 'friends' in Uganda, Patricia. I was waiting for you to wake up to this. No one wants to approach you because your last boyfriend was a Colonel. No one accepts that you are single. Eric is brave in that he has pursued it this long. But, like I said, he is different. You should give it a try, I will watch him carefully," Hadijah said.

This is another fine and upstanding African trait: everyone is connected so you are always protected.

"OK, Robert, do the matchmaking," I said in the car today as we were running errands, "I am sure it won't work..."

It took ten minutes and he ran into the store to find me.

"Eric is so happy right now, Madame Boss!" he said, "He has liked you for six months and he understands muzungus (whites/foreigners) but he is different...I think it was all that time in the Rwandan army and in England...but he likes you. AND there are no other girlfriends, I made sure!"

Robert was so happy that it was contagious. I felt myself starting to get a better attitude.

Then, suddenly, I was nervous.

I have dated a South African and a Nigerian before but I have never dated a Ugandan. I am ridiculously anal about culture so I was a mess.

"What do I do next?" I asked Robert.

"Invite him for dinner. He knows muzungu food so cook that one I love...lass-att-ee?" he advised.

Also known as lasagne.

"OK, I can do that. But when is dinner?" I asked.

"Tomorrow, 7pm, at our (your) house," Robert said.

I was a little stunned, I am not used to having someone make my dates for me...but, again, this is Uganda.

Eric called me immediately.

"Hey, I am a bit nervous and I figure you must be feeling the same...is tomorrow night OK?" he asked.

"Yes, it is OK. Do you like lasagne?" I asked.

"I think so but I will let you know for sure when I taste it," he joked.

"But first we should look at your hard drive, I am a little worried about it's health," he said.

In my mind the thought raced, "Yes, PLEASE, let's look at the hard drive first, preferably mine and not the computer's!" but I said nothing.

Then, two hours later, he called again.

"Hey, Trish (no one has ever called me this but no matter how many times I correct him, I am always 'Trish'), I am in the area. Do you mind if I stop over?"

I had a momentary panic attack as my housekeeper, Kate, and I were peeling potatoes and figuring out how to use our new grill but then thought, "What the hell, he has seen me in worse states so why not now with potato peels in my hair?"

So I said "OK," and Eric arrived ten minutes later.

He walked in, took one look at me, and laughed.

"You are covered in flour and potatoes, what are you making?!!" he asked.

I tried to explain as he grabbed my hand and dragged me out to the balcony with the bottle of wine he had brought.

"Let's not be nervous, it is no different than before," he said.

"It is. Now you know I like you and now I know you like me," I said, feeling like I was ten.

"I've always liked you. In Uganda, men and women are not friends unless there is something else going on," he related.

(Thanks, I got that one by now)

After our second glass of wine, we relaxed and he put his foot over mine on the outdoor table.

"Better, right?" he asked.

Yes, much better indeed.

Eric left an hour later without so much as a kiss passing between us. He is still coming for dinner tomorrow night but I am no longer nervous.

I called Robert a few minutes ago and said, "Eric came over, he is really a nice guy. Thank you for setting this up."

"No problem" was all Robert said.

Women keep the World Together

This morning, at 6am, my phone started ringing.

I tried to ignore it but it was insistent. I finally got up and looked to see it was my friend, Monique, calling.

I picked up and said, "Are you crazy? I am not getting up this early to talk to you unless you have discovered some growth of an unspecified nature or have just been visited by Martians...otherwise, forget it!"

She laughed her perfectly dismissible French laugh and said, "Today, I made a bastilla!"

I sat up and tried to clear my head. This was a big announcement.

A bastilla is a pastry found in North Africa, mainly Morocco, that might be the most delicious thing ever invented. It is layer upon layer of soft phylo dough with a center of either ground meat or fowl, scented by amazing spices and normally covered in powdered sugar or honey. I know this sounds disgusting but, trust me, it is not. It might be the closest thing to heaven that I have ever eaten on earth. I am not a big fan of the "savory and sweet" fare but this dish is one that most of my friends, including my friend who is a Michelin-star chef, will wait for hours in lines at Moroccan restaurants to try. Monique, a Parisian soon-to-be ex-wife of a soon-to-be ex-diplomat, is a baker...although not formally. She stays up all night and makes baguettes and sweets for a small distributor in Kampala, but not formally. Formally, she is an economist.

I met Monique through another friend, Jane, and we instantly got along because Monique stays up all night baking and I sometimes stay up all night writing. We both pour our souls out at least twice a month; her in her darkened Kampala kitchen and me in my home over my keyboard. Monique's in the middle of a messy divorce and I am still smarting from an ugly breakup so it just seems natural for us to talk at 2AM when everyone else is sound asleep. I sometimes call her at 3AM and say, "Hey, can you just take a look at a few lines for me? I am not sure if they make sense. Can you just have a look?"

She always agrees. And so I normally also pick up the phone at 2AM when she is rolling out dough or waiting for a souffle to rise. We are also normally on the same schedule, meaning that we are both up all night on given weekends. She drinks champagne from her husband's wine cellar of the oldest vintage while she bakes. I drink red wine of the newest South African vintage and listen to Coldplay, Elton John, and the Dave Matthews Band while I write. She's getting her husband back for his betrayal, I am normally just weeping because I don't have an inch of revenge left in me anymore these days.

But, whatever, it works for us.

She is one of the few friends that I have that keeps my schedule. I grew up loving and appreciating good cooking and she grew up loving and appreciating good writing so we can just automatically connect...even in the middle of the night.

The announcement of the successful execution of the bastilla was huge. I was exhausted, having spent four days in Northern Uganda and moving the final things into my new home. She had just gotten the most recent divorce papers from a husband, that she has two children with, who had failed to show up another night...out with his lover and not even trying to cover it up anymore.

"I am sorry to wake you but I had to tell you...it's not the egg wash! You should never use the egg wash...it is only water that is needed!" she said.

Then:

"Who did you talk to last night? It was him, wasn't it? I KNEW it! Dammit!" she said.

Women are simply amazing.

I have always sort of known that, having been raised by a strongly intuitive mother, grandmother, and best friend. But sometimes I forget this and get caught, as I did with Monique, into thinking I am invisible.

"Come over now! You have to taste this bastilla and I have just opened a new bottle of 1964 champagne. Get on a motorcycle taxi and come over now!" she barked.

I was working on about two hours of sleep and probably still a little buzzed from the glass of Cabernet I had at 3AM.

But I did it. I pulled myself together and got on the back of the lone motorcycle prowling the streets at 6:30AM and made my way over to Monique's house.

I literally fell into her kitchen, tripped by her dog, a big hulking German Shepard that would sooner have sex with you than kill you.

"Monique! Get Dick (named after Dick Cheney in some bizarre French version of humor that she finds hysterical) off of me! I am not in the mood to be mounted at this hour!!" I yelled.

She came rushing in, covered in flour and notably tipsy.

She shouted something at Dick in French of which I only caught, "Stop! We love Obama now!"

She sized me up and said, "Why are you talking to him again?"

Quickly followed by: "Here, try this champagne. I know you are a pagan and don't like champagne too much but just have this glass and then I can open a bottle of 1976 Bordeaux for you next...but just try this one first!"

I sighed and tried to rationalize.

"Monique, I have to move some more today. I can't start drinking at 7:30Am. I will be drunk all day and nothing will get done."

Dick was humping my leg with eagerness at this point.

"Who cares?" she asked. "Take a day off. No one is going to punish you, you are an adult. And I just made the most amazing bastilla that we must try. But not until you have some champagne or wine...you must remember that God gave us the ability to eat, drink, write, bake and fuck because he wanted us to be happy."

Then she screamed at Dick the Dog, "Get off of her, you are making her nervous!!"

Dick retreated into a corner but I swear he winked at me first.

I took the glass of champagne, had one sip, and handed it back to her.

"This tastes like some old French man's balls!" I said.

"Well, that might explain a lot of things about me, I guess," she said as she had her house cleaner fetch a bottle of Bordeaux from the wine cellar.

One hour later, no bastilla in sight, I was getting drunk.

"So tell me why you talked to him again? I thought it was finished?" she asked.

"I don't know, I still love him and I don't like messy endings. I don't want it to be bad between us. He is not a bad person and I am not a bad person. It just didn't happen at the right time," I said.

She smiled and said, "Americans, always so idealistic! Here, have some more wine!"

My head was beginning to pound but I drank it anyway.

Dick skulked back into the room and put his head in my lap.

"Look, Dick loves you!" Monique said.

"Monique, I am a wreck right now. I feel like my life is falling apart and I can't do one thing right. I think my boss is upset with me, I just found out the my secretary tried embezzling money from our company before I caught her, I spoke to my ex last night and it was fine until he called me back and then it descended into the same fight, and, and...well, I am drunk at your house at 10:30 on a Friday morning and I don't think that is really OK either..." I finished.

She sat down on the Ottoman foot rest in front of me and held my hands.

"Patricia, sometimes things fall apart as a way of coming back together again, do you understand? Americans are so uptight about having everything 'right' but there really is no need to think that way. I don't know why my husband is leaving me but, right now, I don't really care either. We had a good time and we have two beautiful children. You and S had a good time and maybe there is unfinished business but, for now, RIGHT NOW, it is not up to you. So finish your wine, keep telling me your stories about the judiciary in Uganda, and lighten up a bit. This is not going to kill you."

I felt like I was going to cry because her words hit such a soft spot with me. She was right.

I finished my glass and let Dick crawl up onto my lap. He weighs half of what I do but he seemed comforting. He settled into my lap immediately and licked my chin.

Monique said, "OK, good...now that you are drunk and happy...now is the time for the bastilla!"

She came back from the kitchen a few minutes later with a covered plate.

She uncovered it and showed me the most perfect bastilla I had ever seen. In perfect Moroccan style, we dug in, with our hands.

It was likely the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my life. Monique had nailed it. This was perfect.

I was so happy that I grabbed her hands and kissed her sugar-covered fingers.

"How did you do this?!" I asked.

She turned her head for a few seconds and said,

"I just said, last night, that I needed to create the perfect thing. I love to cook and I have tried to make this so many times and I have never gotten it right. Now, I got it right...do you understand?" she said.

Yes, completely.

We ate the entire bastilla and drank an entire bottle of wine. We passed out at noon on her plush rug in her plush living room with Dick sleeping between us.

I awoke at 3PM and got back on a motorcycle and came home. I took a shower and then went straight to bed.

Monique called an hour ago to announce that she thought she had a good grip on a new pastry recipe.

I said I was writing the story about last night and this morning.

One day, we will both sleep. But not tonight, not tomorrow, and probably not for awhile to come.

But women really do keep the world together.

Cheers, Monique.

And, thank you.

Ugly American: God has a Plan?

One of my closest friends here, let's call her Jane, has decided to get back together with her ex-boyfriend.

We were all nervous about the decision, "we" being the flock of hens that describe a group of us comprised of Ugandans, Americans and French women that watch over each other's every move. We were nervous because Jane and Sam had broken up so many times in five years that it just didn't seem like the best decision to give it another go but, hey, that's what she decided to do so we eventually just shut up when she brought him here to Uganda.

I met Sam three weekends ago. He is almost absurdly handsome. He is also very smart. I was tricked for a few hours until I saw it. The "freak out" factor.

I watched, in a very beautiful and posh Kampala restaurant, as Sam descended into chaos. He was nervous, of course...who wouldn't be in front of this many hens?...and started criticizing everything and everyone. He spoke to the Ugandan servers in a manner that you would have thought appropriate in colonial times (p.s. Ugandans speak perfect English). He enunciated every word, jumped when the waiter put the dinner cloth on his lap, and sniffed his food like a dog about to be poisoned.

I said nothing because I remember tormenting my own ex-boyfriend, Ed, fifteen years ago when I first moved to Hungary. Granted, I didn't insult my hosts but I know the feeling of being scared and out-of-place. I know how it feels to have culture shock. I watched Sam for a few minutes and thought, "There before the Grace of God..."

But this weekend I just had to speak up.

I saw Jane and Sam again in Gulu, Northern Uganda. We were in one of the best restaurants in the city. And this "city" is a former war zone. A REAL war zone where at least one of three people have been seriously affected by war. You can pretty much be guaranteed that the person who is serving you or speaking to you at any given minute has lost a family member--or his or her entire family, been abducted, raped, tortured, or otherwise devastated by the 23-year long war that ran in this part of the country until three years ago. The war in northern Uganda did not get big headlines like the genocide in Rwanda or the American disaster in Somalia but I can promise you that it was just as devastating in so many ways...

So we were meeting with a bunch of Ugandan friends from Gulu for dinner and I made the mistake of recommending a dish to Sam that didn't meet his expectations. When it was put in front of him, same as Kampala, he sniffed it like a dog and then proceeded to deconstruct it at the table, cursing the entire time. I saw Jane go pale across the table and try to start a new conversation. We all tried to start a new conversation.

I knew it wasn't going to work.

When Sam stood up and marched in a rage over to the waiter that had served us and started screaming, I finally found, as my friend Liz says, "my pair."

I walked over to Sam and said, "Stop. Now."

He looked at me incredulously.

"What the hell are you talking about? This shit is inedible. There are bones in my chicken! I can't believe they serve this crap. I am not paying for this!" he screamed at me.

"Sam, stop. Now. This is not the time or the place. Please stop...the person who is serving you and the person who you are now screaming at is a former LRA abductee...he can no more control what the chef did than you or I can. Just stop it, this is not America," I pleaded.

Sam wasn't having any of it. He continued screaming.

I went back to the table where we all sat in a sort of stunned silence for another twenty minutes.

When Sam returned everyone ignored him. Jane passed him her dinner, apparently edible, and he quieted a little as he ate all of her food. Then the waiter brought him an entirely new dish, bones-free, which he refused. He said, audibly, "I hate this fucking place!!"

I closed my eyes and prayed. I was humiliated by this person. I was humiliated to be an American. I knew, to a level, his frustration, but this was way beyond anything I ever pulled when I was 22 and living in Hungary. This man is 34 and in "Africa-lite," as I have come to refer to Uganda.

He eventually realized no one was speaking to him and turned to me with apologies.

"I have a bad temper," he said, "I apologize...but THAT was ridiculous. I can't wait to get to Ethiopia in two months! I am sure they know how to cook food there!"

I wanted to continue ignoring him, I was humiliated. I frequent this restaurant all the time and most of the service staff are friends whose phone numbers are all in my mobile phone. In Gulu, as in most former war zones, people rely on person-to-person relationships since there is nothing else left. The fact that I had gotten two of the best rooms for me and Liz, arranged a huge dinner at the last minute, and gotten the best waiter in the restaurant (the one Sam screamed at) is because I have been there at least seven times in the past six months and we all talk on the phone regularly.

I wanted to ignore him...

But I decided not to.

"Sam, I used to be a little like you. I know how frustrating it can be, trust me. But this is Uganda. Uganda is probably, other than Ghana and South Africa, the most friendly country in Africa for Westerners. You are going to Ethiopia next, right? Well, I have been there too and if you do what you did tonight, they are going to kill you. And I am not joking. They WILL kill you," I said.

He scoffed at me and went and got Jane.

"She's telling me Ethiopia is dangerous. Listen to the world traveler!" he joked.

Jane looked at me like a dog who had been kicked too many times. I wanted to hug her but didn't dare.

As they left, the server who Sam had screamed at sat down with me, Liz, and two of our other companions. He brought a bottle of wine with him...that he paid for.

"I'm so sorry..." I started.

"It's OK. It's not your fault. He says he's going to Ethiopia next?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Well, what happened to you in Ethiopia?" he asked.

I smiled.

"I got the worst food poisoning of my life," I declared. "I was so sick that my hair hurt."

The server looked at me and raised his glass. "Yep, exactly! And he thought the chicken was bad here! God has a plan!!"

We all laughed.

Ugly Americans...but maybe God...or someone...does have a plan.

Oprah or Bust

Yesterday, over lunch, my colleague Liz made an interesting and accurate observation about Ugandans:

"It takes about three months for them to trust you and about another three for them to even consider you as a friend...once they do, however, you're in for life. It's kind of like Italians...reminds me of my mother's family."

She is absolutely correct. Ugandans are extremely friendly and polite but you might as well budget at least six months to a year here before you are really going to go anywhere "deep" in a relationship. I have thought a lot about why this is true, having spent time in other African countries where time frames are much shorter, but have come to no solid conclusions.

It's not so much that Ugandans are cautious, it is just that they take their time in considering the merits of your friendship and their willingness to invest in the relationship. They don't rush to befriend you (like, say, Nigerians) or attempt to ignore you (like, say, Ethiopians or Somalis), they just take their time. And, quite frankly, I don't blame them. This is a gorgeous country filled with some of the most generous and loving people I have ever met. They are just not about to squander those resources too quickly. But, as Liz observed, once you're "in," you're in.

Ugandans, like most Africans even of the poorest resources, will not hold back on giving you love, support, money, advice or whatever you need. It is always a give-and-take relationship---you need to be willing to give and take too---but nothing is ever withheld and you are always allowed to have bad days and make stupid decisions and still know that your friends will be there no matter what. It's a societal and personal safety net that I have come to rely upon heavily. And, yes, actually, quite a bit like the Italian one that operates in my family as well as Liz's.

The one exception to this rule, and the real topic of this blog, is one of my favorite people in Uganda. I can't give his name but let's just say he is the equivalent of a Supreme Court Justice in America. He is one of the most beloved and visionary Ugandans out there and a magnificent legislator. Unlike most "big men" in Uganda, he does not wield improper power and does not seek political position. He is just a damn good judge and an enormously kind human being.

The best part of the whole deal is that he likes me too. A lot. And he liked me from the very beginning, without the three or six month test.

The reason for this is that we share a common bond: we both want to be on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Actually, that bit wasn't revealed until last Wednesday but it came out in a discussion over how to further both of our personal passion: writing.

You see, both Justice J and I are writers. He writes poetry and I write...well, whatever...essays, blogs, etc. The reason that Justice J and I get along so well is that during our first private meeting, after all of the big shots in my company flew off to America, he asked me a direct question, sitting across from me in his office behind his big, intimidating, desk:

"What do you love, Patricia? Tell me what you love. And I don't mean all of the things on your CV (resume)...what do you really love and want to do in your heart?" he asked.

I decided to be completely honest with him.

"I want to write books," I said.

At that point I pulled out the battered copy of the book that I had co-authored on peacekeeping and had just been published by Georgetown University Press and set it on his massive desk.

He raised his eyebrows as he flipped through it and said, "How old are you?"

"Thirty-three," I answered.

"This is quite an impressive feat. You should be proud," he observed.

Then he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a massive volume on the rule of law in Africa published by Cambridge University Press in the early 1980s. He was the author.

"Wow, this is amazing," I said. "How old were you?"

He winked and replied, "Oh, around thirty-three."

Then he asked me if I liked poetry or if I wrote it.

I told him that I loved poetry but it was not my genre. I was an essayist and maybe, one day, a novel writer but definitely not a poet.

He then proceeded to spend the next hour reading me his poems. Some were really good, some needed some work, others were simply inspired...but it was clear that this man, this amazing judge, had some serious talent that rested far outside of his "official" position as the leading judicial figure in Uganda.

"So what do you have...besides this?" he asked, pointing to Georgetown book.

"I have written probably 125 essays over the past four years," I said.

"Can I see them?" he asked.

I hesitated. Some of my stuff is pretty racy and I didn't want this judge thinking I was strange...but I agreed to print off a few for him and delivered them to him the following week.

I heard nothing for a month. In that time my heart raced and my mind entertained tremendous fears. Had I just lost my job? Had I insulted or scandalized a judge? Was my writing so bad that he didn't even want to comment? I lived in terror.

Then one day his secretary called and told me to be at his office at noon. It was a matter of "official business," of course, but I was still nearly wetting my pants because I was so nervous.

For the first hour, we talked business. For whatever odd reason, he seemed to suddenly accept me and my company. For eight weeks I had been knocking on doors and struggling to get more than a few minutes of face time with folks and was treated with kind indifference (see above about Ugandan culture) and then, in a heartbeat, it all changed.

"This is quite brilliant," he said, holding out the dozens of legal opinions that me or my organization had delivered over the past two months. "And this is particularly good, I appreciate someone who can condense a lot of heavy material into one digestible piece," he continued, holding out my explanatory cover letter.

He was sitting across his huge desk from me.

"I like Americans and I lived in the U.S. for almost fifteen years. I have never been particularly receptive to people descending on Uganda trying to 'help' but you are doing solid work. Keep it coming," he said.

(After that point, in December of 2008, I never met a closed door again).

Then, as I was about to leave, he said:

"And these...I really like these!" he was holding out the printed essays that I had delivered a month prior.

My heart was in my throat.

"You have excellent timing...which is something I lack in my poetry. I can find ways to improve your essays but perhaps you can also find ways to help me improve my timing in my poetry," he said.

After that, I spent most Friday afternoons in his office listening to him read his poetry.

Eventually, around March of this year, he asked me to start printing my blog entries for him.

And, in July, he called me in to tell me that his book of poetry was being published by a major Kenyan publisher. I sent him flowers and an expensive pen.

He asked me to come to his book launch and consider traveling with him on his book tour. There was no way I could justify this professionally so I had to turn him down although I would have loved to have gone with him. Besides being an amazing poet, he is a fantastic orator.

He came back to Uganda briefly in October to watch me falling apart. I was going through a horrendous break-up with my boyfriend at the time and was a wreck.

After a meeting where I started crying for no reason whatsoever, he pulled me outside of his judicial chambers and said:

"Are you writing this down? Some of the best writing comes from pain. Stop crying and start writing!"

Then he hugged me. Other than a handshake, it was the first time he had ever touched me. I felt like a complete asshole sobbing on his judicial robes but, hey, it was what it was at the time.

I didn't see him for another six weeks until this past Wednesday. I knew he was back in the country and I called to make an appointment with his secretary, Betty, who I also adore.

"Oh, Patricia, I wish I could help you but the Judge is only back for three days and then flies to Tanzania and South Africa. He is fully booked with appointments and even your Ambassador is going to have to wait. I can get you in the first week of January, though," she said.

I was crushed but then decided, on a wild bet, to circumvent the system. I have Justice J's private phone number but I rarely use it as Betty always gets me in to see him. But January was too long...I had to see him on professional matters and waiting until January wasn't going to work.

I dialed with nervous hands and he picked up immediately.

"Patricia! Good to hear from you! Tell me now, what is a 'margarita'?'" he asked.

I was confused for a moment and then realized he was referring to one of my blogs, "A Blue Margarita on a Monday."

I laughed and explained and then asked if he could possibly fit me in to his schedule before January.

"Yes, of course. Come at 11am tomorrow morning. I will shift things around," he replied.

I was stunned but still grateful. I sent up a silent prayer to God and the Universe for constantly blessing me with people like this judge.

The next day I met him and his deputy in his office. We no longer sit across from each other over the big desk but next to each other on the couches and chairs in his office. Liz was with me, and she was nervous as this man is so beloved and famous not only in Uganda, but around the world. We had a fabulous hour-long meeting and arranged what my organization could do here over the next twelve months. He loved Liz, and it is hard not to, and the whole meeting was a success.

As we were leaving, he pulled me aside and said, "I am writing a new book of poetry, have you gotten those essays of yours published yet?"

I admitted I had not but that I was still writing.

"Patricia, I want to be on the Oprah Winfrey show...what do you think about that?" he asked.

I smiled and admitted that I had the same ambition. That I have watched her show, read her magazines and recommended books, and had secretly hoped that she would discover me some day. Oddly, this Justice did too.

"I often think when I read her magazine or the books she recommends, 'Hey, I can do that just as well or better!' but then I retreat and don't do anything about it," I admitted.

"Me too!" the Justice said, "I think that a lot but I have all these connections...I met this person on a plane and this other person who is the neighbor of Maya Angelou (both the judge's and my favorite poet) but I can't seem to get Oprah to read my book!"

"I will figure it out, I promise," I told him.

"Good, I know you will. I'll be back in December, you are on my calendar already. Keep writing, Patricia so we can be on Oprah together!" he said as he closed his door.

Later, I came home to find an envelope on my landing from the Court. Inside was a poem titled "A Strong Cup of Coffee on a Sunday." It was a poem, mirrored on my story about my breakup with my ex-boyfriend called "A Blue Margarita on a Monday," written by the Justice. It described his relationship with a woman in his village in the late 1970s and early 1980s during the Amin terror. It is a gorgeous piece of writing. I didn't notice the hand-writing on the back of the envelope until a day later.

It said: "Oprah or Bust!!"

So, yes, Liz was right. It takes time to gain the trust and love of a Ugandan. But thanks to this Justice, and our shared bond as writers, my life here is full of grace. And poetry.

And yes, "Oprah or Bust."

Only You

Yesterday, at 10pm, I had an Albanian weapons trafficker serenading me from my parking lot.

Indeed, it is a bit of an odd thing to happen on a Tuesday night in Uganda but, as I have come to realize about my life, if something bizarre is going to occur, it is definitely going to happen to me.

Four years ago, on a bitterly cold and snowy night in Georgia (the country of, not the American state of) I was almost killed in a thirteenth century bathhouse after a night out at the bar with a bunch of Georgian gangsters and their Russian girlfriends. In Georgia, people basically go right from the baby bottle to the vodka bottle and everyone getting drunk and naked together in the bathhouse is a pretty standard Friday night activity. Why I was involved in this whole scene is too complicated to explain here but, suffice it to say, I am extremely familiar with Georgian culture and their, um, cultural relics, by now. However, since almost every male in Georgia over the age of 12 owns a pistol or an AK-47, so carrying guns is about as common there as, say, wearing shoes would be in the U.S. But after drinking copious amounts of vodka and partying in a medieval bathhouse until 5am, guns become rather dangerous things and have a way of being knocked from slippery ledges and going off. Luckily, no one was hurt in that particular incident although some damage was sustained to the beautiful old marble walls, but no one seemed very upset about the whole thing.

Except me, of course, I was beside myself.

So yesterday started off as a relatively normal day and I could never have anticipated how the evening would end...but with me, it's usually like that.

One of my supervisors from DC had been in town for the past week and, although she is normally very easy to deal with, someone switched her "tormentor" button on before she boarded the flight to Uganda. For the past week, I have endured some of the most intense professional scrutiny of my entire existence. This was coupled with fairly liberal doses of personal attacks. She questioned my accounting, she questioned my reports, she questioned my relationship with our clients, she questioned my choice of local staff. She yelled at them, she yelled a me, she yelled at my favorite server at my favorite restaurant. It was relentless. I was so tired and demoralized by Monday night that it might has well have been a Friday after a week from hell. She also managed to upset or insult not only my local Ugandan staff, but also my American lawyer colleague, Liz, who is basically out here working for free to help me on the project.

When my supervisor finally got in the car yesterday afternoon at 4pm to leave for the airport, Liz, and I looked at our watches and said in unison: "I need a drink!"

Although it was certainly much earlier than I prefer to drink, I think if my supervisor hadn't left when she did, Liz and I were going to start pouring gin into our water bottles in order to get through the day. We were both, utterly and completely, undone.

So we rolled into my favorite restaurant at 4:30pm and contemplated the menu. After debating various choices in getting ourselves a glass of wine, we decided to be realistic and just order the bottle. We kidded ourselves that it really wasn't THAT much wine, as our friend Kay was supposed to be joining us later, but, in reality, that bottle was all for us. We definitely needed it.

An hour later, halfway through the bottle, we had started to relax.

"That very well may have been the worst week of my entire life as a lawyer," Liz related, "And I have gone up against some really mean judges."

"She's normally not like that," I said, "She is normally quite nice...I'm not sure what was wrong with her this time..."

Liz, not one to mince words, told me, "Patti, either she needs a man or she needs a sedative. In either case, when she's back out here in January, I plan on arriving with BOTH in the backseat of the car when she arrives at the airport. I simply cannot go through that ever, ever again."

We agreed and finished the bottle of wine. By now it was 6pm.

"Are you feeling it at all?" I asked Liz, referring to the wine.

"Not really, let's get another bottle," she said.

Before I could protest or try to reason why, exactly, that drinking two bottles of wine on a weeknight was probably not the best idea, the waiter zipped off to fetch it for us.

"We have a meeting with a Supreme Court justice at 11am tomorrow, you think we'll be OK?" I asked her.

"Sure, it's only 6pm and we probably won't finish the whole thing anyway," she replied.

Yeah, right.

Two hours later, with half of the second bottle gone, I looked over my shoulder and noticed an extremely large white man sitting behind us staring intently at our table. Since Kampala is small, and all the ex-patriots know each other, I was curious because I had never seen this character before. He had an intense, frightening look about him and, standing at least 6'4" and easily weighing in at 300lbs of pure brawn, I would have remembered.

"That is one scary-looking dude," Liz opined. "He could snap your neck with one hand."

Because we were now staring at him, he mistook our curiosity and, within ten minutes, the waiter brought over yet another bottle of wine, courtesy of Mr. Big and Scary. Both Liz and I immediately refused (two bottles of wine is excessive, THREE bottles of wine is suicidal). He was taking none of it, however, and insisted that we keep the bottle...at least to take it home and drink it tomorrow.

"Now what do we do?" I asked Liz, "I am not in the mood for that sort of male attention at the moment but I am sure he is expecting us to at least invite him to join us."

Liz suggested we just ignore him but, naturally, that didn't work. Within a half hour we had a new drinking buddy.

After exchanging the normal pleasantries, we started talking work. When Liz asked him what he was doing in Kampala, he paused for the slightest moment and then said, "Opening a pizza restaurant. I am also opening one in South Sudan."

At this I burst out laughing. This dude, so beaten up from God-only-knows what kind of physical violence, had definitely not spent any significant amount of time making pizzas...unless he was really, really bad at it and kept burning his face in the oven.

Liz seemed to be buying the story, however, and asked him what other locations he had opened pizzas restaurants in...

He paused again and said, "Well, let's see...Afghanistan, Sudan, northern Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, well, now Uganda..."

Because I was definitely feeling the wine by this point, I had lost any sense of trying to be discrete. This man may have been opening pizza restaurants, but pizzas sure as hell weren't the only thing he was delivering.

"You're Albanian," I said to him.

He looked surprised.

"How the hell did you guess that?" he asked.

I related that I had spent a good deal of time in Kosovo and had been to Albania itself a few times and definitely knew the accent. I also knew, from time spent in those two countries and in other less-than-savory points around the globe, that Albanians did tend to run very successful "pizza restaurants."

He looked a little nervous but then settled himself back down. When he got up to go to the bathroom, Liz said,

"Why are you laughing at his story? Why is the pizza business so funny?"

"Liz, he is not a pizza maker, he is an weapons trafficker," I told her.

"No! That can't be true....and how would you know..." then she paused.

"Nevermind," she said, "given your former line of work and the places you have been, you're probably right."

Larry the Albanian returned and sized me up.

"So you know a lot about the pizza business, then? You have been to some of these Albanian pizza restaurants?" he asked with twinkle in his eye.

Liz, who is actually a practical person and not insane like I am, said, "It was nice to meet you, Larry, but it is getting late and we have to go."

At which point she stood up and walked into the wall.

I told her I would take care of the bill and, since the restaurant is right across the street from my flat, I could just walk home but that we should definitely get her a taxi.

"Are you nuts?! I am not leaving you alone here with an Albanian arms trafficker!! You could be....well, shit, I don't know...shot or something," she said.

I assured her that I was going to be just fine and put her in a taxi.

When I returned to the table, Larry was looking thoughtful.

"What did you say to her that made her leave so quickly? Did you tell her about the Albanian pizza making business?" he asked.

"Sort of," I said.

He laughed.

"I like you, Patricia, I like women who are experienced in well, what shall we call this? Setting up enterprises in difficult places...you must have many contacts" he said.

All of a sudden I got the distinct impression that he thought I was either involved in such an "enterprise" myself or at least knew a lot of people who were.

"Look, Larry, I am really just working for an NGO here and serving as a legal advisor to the government. I only know certain things because I have traveled a lot in my life..."

("And have spent too much time dining with war criminals in the Balkans and drinking vodka with gangsters in Georgia to know your type" I thought, but left that whole part out).

He smiled again.

"OK, whatever you say, Patricia. I do like talking to you though...and you are quite beautiful so that makes it even better..." he said.

Oh, shit.

I quickly put my hands under the table and switched the ring I normally wear on the middle finger of my right hand to the fourth finger, the wedding ring finger, on my left.

"Thank you Larry, that's very sweet. But I am married," I told him.

"You just did that under the table, I already looked so don't pretend now. I would like to get to know you better...shall we get a hotel?" he asked.

This was so blunt that I started to laugh again.

I told him that although he was a nice man and I wished him well with his, er, pizza business, I was leaving as it had gotten late and I needed to work early the next day.

He clamped his enormous paw of a hand over mine on the table, pinning me to the spot.

"Please, Patricia, I really do like you. You are very intelligent for a woman and I have lots of money and could treat you very well. Men like me need women like you...women who know the ways of the world, who aren't afraid to confront the dark side sometimes, who realizes that sometimes illegal solutions are the only ones in times of war and conflict, who..."

As I sat there listening to this, I thought, "Hmmm...where have a heard this whole line before? Oh, that's right...it was from a gangster in Georgia four years ago before I almost got hit by a stray bullet in a bathhouse in the middle of the night..."

I interrupted him.

"Larry, again, thank you. But I really am just a legal advisor and I really do need to be going now," I said.

Larry clearly wasn't accustomed to rejection.

As I walked out of the restaurant, he followed me, imploring me to reconsider, telling me I didn't know what, exactly, I was giving up.

I crossed the street to my apartment building quickly with him in staggering along behind me. At one point, he just missed getting run over by a car.

"Jesus, Larry! You're too drunk to be walking around like this, you're going to get killed! You don't want to die getting run over by a motorcycle after your other ventures where you certainly be killed much more easily!" I said.

Nevertheless, he didn't stop.

I walked up the three flights of stairs to my flat while he was trying to negotiate the first and shut the door to my apartment.

I called Liz immediately to report that I was home and safe.

"Thank God, I thought you were going to be kidnapped and mailed back to Albania in a pizza delivery box..." she said, "And, by the way, what is that awful noise in the background?"

I listened carefully to what I thought was a radio from a car downstairs and realized it wasn't a recording...it was live.

"Oh Jesus, that is Larry...he is singing to me in Albanian from the parking lot," I said "And he has no shirt on...he has taken off his shirt..." I said, looking out my window.

"Only you, Patti, only you," Liz sighed. "I used to think, when we first started hanging out, that some of the stories I had heard about you and your past adventures from other people couldn't possibly be true...but, in the past five months, I have realized that they most certainly must be. In all my thirty years and in all my own fifty countries traveled, I have never, EVER, been serenaded by a half-naked Albanian arms dealer in my parking lot...NEVER."

"I don't ask for this shit, Liz, I told him that I wasn't interested and I know I wasn't flirting with him...I don't know how this happened," I said.

At this point, Larry had decided to kick it up another notch and add my name to whatever Albanian love song he was singing, thereby ensuring that all of my neighbors would know exactly who the recipient of this late-night insanity was...

"Well, whatever the case may be, I hope you get some sleep tonight...he will get tired eventually," Liz said.

It was my turn to sigh.

Having spent a lot of time with Albanians (and Eastern European men, in general), I know they do not give up easily. Larry was no exception.

Finally, about two hours later, one of my neighbors decided to call the police and put an end to the torture the entire building was experiencing.

I was mortified...in this community, word travels fast and I knew by morning that everyone in Kampala's small ex-patriot population would have heard of this.

Indeed, when I got to the office this afternoon after my morning meetings, I stared down all of the white folks who work in the building who started giggling when they saw me and said, "Don't say a word, not a goddamn WORD!!"

My American friend, Jessica, who works in the office next door, came in and sat down.

"Jess, please, I have a pounding headache and I can do without the teasing," I said wearily.

"Oh I am not here to tease you, I am here to commiserate. Remember, I lived in Albania and Kosovo for three years and I know how those men are...but I actually found it flattering...you should look at it that way," she related.

Somehow, I just don't.

And to think...it's only Wednesday.