The Blender and the Brick Fairy

From the first time I met my driver, Robert, he was fascinated by my electronics. To be honest, I think Robert fell for my electronics first, then decided he liked me second.

He is endlessly fascinated with the sheer range of electronic equipment Americans carry on their person or have access to. The fact that I have two cell phones AND a Blackberry made him whistle through his teeth. My two computers (personal and company) seem like an absurd amount of excess to him. When he saw the iPod, well, that just about did him in.

I tried to hide most of these things for the first few months I was here because I had no desire to be ostentatious about it nor did I have any desire to be robbed.

Nevertheless, Robert is with me every single day and, eventually, he saw the goods. Luckily, he is one of the most honest people I know and I trust him completely so hiding things didn't really make sense anymore. Plus, like most people who are the proud owners of Blackberry phones, I am as obsessed with mine as most other people are with theirs. When Robert saw me use it to get online directions when we were lost, he was stunned.

"THAT is a computer too? THAT is the internet? How can that be?" (Mind you, they have a version of a Blackberry here too but it never works and is more for show than for actual use)

I handed over my Blackberry and let him test it out. I told him he couldn't make any calls because of the roaming charges but getting online was OK.

Nowadays, my Blackberry is Robert's second most favorite thing in the world...after the Bible, of course. If we are in an area that has coverage, I let him go online and use it when I am in meetings. He is most fascinated by the GPS component, however, and has become the "direction guru" of all of his friends. He looks up locations and then text messages his friends on his own phone telling them where they are and where they should be going. I suppose this is a version of stalking but, hey, it gives him something to do rather than sit in the hot car and read the Bible all day long. (I am also not so naive to think he isn't doing a little side business with his little "Robert's Personal MapQuest Service" deal but it doesn't cost me anything so I don't mind).

Robert also has a bit of an endearing lisp and has never mastered the word "Blackberry" so it is now officially known as "Madame Boss's Brick Fairy." I like that much better, to be honest.

Besides my electronics, the other thing Robert has come to cherish about me is my obsession with food. The fact that I go out to lunch almost daily and then always bring him a small dish to try out has become a huge hit. We tend to like the same things (with the exception of Mexican food...which he finds completely bizarre and disgusting) so I just put in a double order when I am at a restaurant. It is usually less than $5 and he is trying to support a family of six on his salary so I figure feeding him is the least I can do. Plus, he is now my favorite restaurant critic and we debate various dishes daily. We disagree on the Chinese restaurant and the Indian restaurant but we find good qualities in both.

His all-time favorite, however, is the bacon pizza from the grocery store in the shopping mall. It is good, although I prefer a thinner crust, but I buy him three slices of bacon pizza at least twice a week. They are so used to me behind the counter these days that they always reserve three slices from the freshest pie for me to pick up between 1-2pm, when I get us lunch.

The other wonderful thing about the grocery store is that they have these huge machines that make super-fresh juice everyday. Since I am not a particular fan of fruit, I mostly avoided that station until one day about two months ago when I decided to test the watermelon juice (an approved fruit) and bought Robert a cup of the mango juice.

I might as well have given him manna from heaven. He was ecstatic.

"So fresh!!! So good!! So healthy for you!!" he exclaimed.

When I got back in the car later, I found him crying.

"What's wrong, Robert, is everything OK?" I asked, alarmed.

"You are so kind to me. My former boss wouldn't even buy me a bottle of water. And you buy me bacon pizza and juice. I love you," he told me.

Honestly, I was a bit embarrassed and told him that I loved him too but it was really not THAT big of a deal...bacon pizza and juice...

So, every morning for the past two months, he brings me my new favorite Ugandan staple, a piece of fried flatbread with an egg and vegetables wrapped inside, called, amusingly, a "Rolex" (from 'rolled eggs'), and I buy him a juice.

Because Robert has the tendency to get obsessed with things, I quickly learned that he was saving his money to bring his children and his neighbors to the store on his day off to buy them this juice. It costs 1000 Shillings for one small cup (about $.50) but that is a lot in Uganda if you don't have much money and you are paying for up to ten people.

So I suggested to Robert that he invest in a blender.

He admitted to having always wanted a blender but, at about $50, it was just way out of his price range. When we did the math together, however, he realized that he would definitely be saving money in buying a blender rather than visiting the grocery store every weekend so he started saving.

I gave him a small wallet and he has been steadily adding coins to it over the past few weeks and, on Monday, he had managed to save about $30. I had to go to the local South African version of Walmart on Monday night to buy some new dishes and happened to notice that the blenders were on sale for $40.

Fuck it, I thought, and I bought Robert a blender. I made him give me the $30 in change he had saved because he had been so diligent about it but it was only $10 on my part and I knew it would make him happy.

He was thrilled but, as I mentioned, Robert is a bit obsessive so this week has been interesting.

On Tuesday morning he showed up with a fresh watermelon juice for me that was delicious. He tried (like all Ugandans keep trying, not matter how much I insist that I HATE bananas) to foist of some smoothie concoction on me on Wednesday that had bananas in it that I turned down.

By Wednesday night, he had blended ice cream and carrots together. Yesterday, when I went to the health food store to get my vitamins, he asked if I could pick up some of the "man powder" that males in the U.S. take to get more muscular. He wanted to put it in the blender with the ice cream/carrot mixture.

"Robert, you don't need that stuff. You need to work out regularly while taking that or else all it does is make you crap all the time. Trust me, you DON'T need it."

(Well, he snuck in and bought it anyway so I can imagine his whole family is going to be having an 'explosive' weekend).

Today, though, he appeared with his strangest concoction yet. When I got in the car this morning I caught a whiff of something odd but then dismissed it.

We had a half-day since I am leaving for Tanzania tomorrow morning and need to catch up on some chores so I had him bring me home at 3PM. He asked to accompany me to my apartment to give me a "special gift" and then he pulled out this Tupperware container of some odd brown liquid with little white pellets floating in it.

"Try it!" he encouraged.

Mentally turning my gag reflex off, I took a sip. Oddly, it was tasty enough but I just couldn't figure out what sort of fruit this could possibly be....

"Not fruit," he told me, "chicken feet."

I nearly threw up on the spot.

"Robert! Why are you putting chicken feet in the blender?!" I asked.

He smiled slyly. He had discovered the 'mega pulse' button and, after killing and roasting a chicken last night, he couldn't figure out to do with the feet and the remaining rice so...

He made pureed chicken feet soup in the blender.

I thanked him profusely and even accepted the container of chicken feet soup to be nice. When he left, I immediately threw it out, feeling a little guilty but knowing there was no way in hell I would be having THAT for dinner.

He called me after he got home to tell me that he and Rebecca (his wife) were planning on making a pig soup in the blender tonight and asked me if I wanted some tomorrow on my drive to the airport.

I quickly thought, "Hmmm, pureed pig pecker soup at 8am? No, I think I'll pass."

I hope he gets this whole blender thing out of his system soon though. We were charting much tamer waters with the Brick Fairy.

What Elizabeth Edwards and African War Zones have in Common.

For the past couple of weeks, my friends and I have been vigorously debating Elizabeth Edward's decision to come out with a book and go on a book tour based on her husband's infidelity. Some of them think, "About time! Let her stick it to his cheating ass!" Others think, "Why is she doing this? Making herself so much more vulnerable? What about those poor kids?"

Then there is me and a handful of my closest friends who think, "Either divorce him or stay with him...but don't disgrace yourself by becoming a the poster child of a 'bitter woman.'" As my friend Meghan says, "She was married to him for like decades, c'mon. John Edwards was smart but who would ever think he was honest? I never did."

I kind of feel the same way but with reservations.

I am firmly of the opinion that Elizabeth Edwards should either divorce her husband or make peace with the whole situation. I think dragging things out like this is bad on her, her health, and her family. I also agree with Meghan in that it must be impossible NOT to know your man is cheating or capable of it. But, then again, I am often wrong there too.

I know this personally. And I know it from friends.

Last Saturday, at about 2PM, as I was laying in bed wishing the worst of my Malaria symptoms away when my good friend, Amy, called.

I have been dragging ass for about a week and was reluctant to get out of bed but Amy never calls unless it's important.

Amy is someone who should be given whatever the civilian equivalent of a Purple Heart is.

She is one of the finest humanitarian aid workers I have ever known. She is no bullshit, no frills, and no nonsense.

I met her in grad school many years ago and, immediately upon getting my first post-graduate job in DC traveling in Africa, she abducted my ass and dragged me to Somalia where she was working at the time. I was staying in Kenya for those two weeks and bragging about how I had been to "war zones" in West Africa when she decided that I really needed to see a war zone, live and in-person.

Those were the scariest 48 hours of my life but I have never bragged about being in a war zone again and I gained a whole new perspective on the world's absolute shitholes and the people like Amy that go in there everyday and try to help.

Not for fame, not for glory...but because she really believes that she has something to offer and something to contribute. And she does...

So I have always looked up to Amy but when she called Saturday from her current hellhole in a county close to me, I was concerned.

I answered and she was chipper at first but then her voice started to crack.

"What?" I asked. "What is it?"

"I am worse than John OR Elizabeth Edwards," she confided. "I am in love with a married guy...again."

Then she started sobbing uncontrollably.

"How can I be such an awful person?" she asked. "How can I believe in women's rights the way I do and then fall in love with another woman's husband?"

"I should just be shot," she concluded.

No, you shouldn't, I said.

But how does one explain this when it is something no one talks about?

It is not having sex with your secretary on a lunch break or getting bored with your wife and having a quickie with the maid. It is day-in and day-out living with someone else who usually becomes your best friend in the worst conditions imaginable. For Amy, living in a war zone in Central Africa for twelve weeks with three other people, one the French soldier who eventually became her best friend and then lover, was an alternative reality. One that she has lived, many times, for sure, but still not one where the normal rules of "cheating" apply.

Back in the European capital where they both live, they are trying to figure out what to do next. For all the pain that it causes her, Amy tells me, the soldier is in a relatively happy marriage and has two teenage children. Nevertheless, they spent twelve weeks in a war zone watching, on a day-to-day basis, as children as young as three were carried in by their mothers blown to bits. Where Amy spent her days trying her best to get teenage girls who had been repeatedly gang-raped by militia forces to talk to the tall, white woman with red hair so that she could then tell their stories to the outside world in hope of getting some attention, if not actual help.

Where the French soldier, originally sent in on a training mission, was abandoned by all of his African counterparts and had to defend a territory (and Amy and the one other organization that stayed behind to help) from nightly raids aimed at driving them out of the area by violence and death.

Do I condone that Amy and the French solider had an affair and that now she's a positive wreck about it? No. But do I understand that, in certain cases, "black and white" on marital infidelity doesn't always apply because you find yourself in extraordinary circumstances? Yes, absolutely.

"OK, Patti, so then WHERE is the line?" my friend Lisa asked via a chat on Skype tonight. "Why does a woman like the French soldier's wife forgive him because he was in a warzone whereas Elizabeth Edwards can't forgive her husband for cheating when he was in a 'political' war zone?"

Good question. And one I can only speak bits and pieces to in any comprehensive manner.

Being someone who has lived in both worlds for a little while (albeit NEVER to Amy's extent and certainly never to John Edward's extent), I still think it is a bit different. Falling in love, even "temporary love," to feel alive again when you have basically resigned yourself to the fact that death is always imminent is one thing. Taking up with a videographer when your ego is in overdrive is another.

People that live almost constantly in the world of wars and humanitarian crises, in part, become societal pariahs. It's not like they can open a dinner conversation with what they last saw and they feel trivial and guilty when they come home because they are getting to do and enjoy things that the people who they work with day-to-day cannot...nor likely ever will.

Amy is strong in that she is very, very honest about herself and what she does. Although I have lived on the periphery of these places and, at times, spent more time there than I would have liked, it is NOT a full-time job for me so I can be objective.

Amy, on the other hand, is objective in her own way. She has two therapists that she see regularly, she takes a mild anti-depressant, and she is a yoga fanatic---even doing it in the jungles of war zones to keep "her head on straight" so she can still work.

But, as last weekend proved, even Amy crashes down sometimes.

But she is single, which, to my mind, is an advantage in this case.When we last spoke, I told her that although I was sorry that she was feeling bad, she might want to look at it from the French soldier's perspective. They both came home traumatized and desperately in love, but she got to go home to her apartment to mourn by herself first and then with like-minded friends next. What did she think he was doing right now, I asked? "He's probably sitting at the dinner table with his wife and kids and trying to pretend everything is normal. And, I hope and I don't hope, that he is thinking of me. But, yeah, he is a much more uncomfortable place right now," she said.

The decision on Elizabeth Edwards remains up in the air among my friends but no one seems to likely to pass a stern judgement. Nevertheless, as far as infidelity goes, someone should send BOTH John and Elizabeth Edwards to a Central African war zone to hash it out. That would do more than any book tour for both their own marriage and probably for an insight into some other features of humanity.

(P.S. I told Amy I was thinking about writing a blog on her...she replied, "Please, by all means, get the word out."

Ants in My Pants

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time around my paternal grandmother. She was, for all intents and purposes, not the most stable person in the world but she worshipped me and would give into all of my childhood whims which frequently included expensive dance classes and liberal trips to the candy store.

She also, being of proper “Austrian lineage,” was a lunatic about cleanliness and would spend hours scrubbing my skin and my scalp with her fingernails when I came in from playing to ensure she had gotten all of the dirt off of me before I walked on her pristine floors. I rarely was able to cross the threshold after a vigorous session of racing around in the dirt with the other neighborhood kids before I was unceremoniously scooped up and deposited in a bathtub of hot water to be scrubbed until she was sure I was not carrying any unknown contagions into her household.

I tolerated all of this because the upside—the expensive dance classes and lots of candy-- seemed to outweigh being thoroughly scoured on a routine basis like a mutt off the street who had picked up fleas.

The one thing I never got used to was her liberal use of starch.

My grandmother starched EVERYTHING.

I went to Catholic school for twelve years and she took great pride in starching my uniforms, polishing my shoes, and making sure everything about me reflected that I was in some privileged institution. I learned to tolerate the starched uniforms but the one thing that got to me was that she also starched my underwear.

Despite the fact that no one was ever going to actually SEE my underwear in those days, sitting through two hours of morning prayers in a hot church in underwear that was so completely stiff that I couldn’t move without being jabbed somewhere unmentionable was completely intolerable.

My mother, after about the 100th call from the nasty old nun who would single me out for having “ants in my pants” and not displaying proper humility before God because I was shifting around so much, finally intervened.

“I don’t care if it is ‘proper,’ she doesn’t need her underwear starched and I am tired of the phone calls saying she is a bad Catholic because her ass itches. Stop starching her goddamn underwear already… you Hitler you!”

(I don’t think I need to mention here that my mother and grandmother did NOT get along).

So imagine my surprise when, more than two and a half decades later, I am having the same issue.

When I got to Uganda, I was adamant that I didn’t need a maid. I reasoned that I am only one person, I am pretty neat and don’t make too much of a mess, and I also don’t relish people hanging out in my house unless I invite them there. So I had determined: No Maid.

Still, it is so common here that I eventually gave in to my friend, Sarah’s, requests that I at least have her sister, Beatrice, come visit once a week to tidy up.

Beatrice is in her final year of high school and is desperately saving money to go to England next year on some Church trip. I like Sarah and like Beatrice so I figured, “OK, what the hell? I hate scrubbing the tile floors and washing windows so maybe it will work out if I have her come once a week…”

The problem is that I simply don’t have enough for Beatrice to do. She comes and spends a whole day here and, because I clean up after myself fairly regularly, there is just not a lot for her to do outside of scrubbing the floors and washing the windows. I tried to leave dishes in the sink one week but got so annoyed about having dirty dishes in the sink that I did them myself before she got here.

She mostly occupies herself with hand-washing my laundry (which I immediately then rewash in the washing machine because I hate stiff clothing that is line-dried) and polishing all of my furniture.

But now that she is used to a regular income (which I later found out is about 8 times what Ugandans pay their housekeepers who come once a day, NOT once a week), I just don’t have the heart to fire her.

So we play a game of me trying to figure out what she can do to occupy her for 12 hours and her doing the same on her end.

This has not had positive results.

Two months ago I found her polishing my pictures. No, not the frames, but the pictures themselves.

As she scrubbed my boyfriend and mother’s faces off the prints, I told her that really, REALLY, I did not need her to polish my photos.

Then she decided to wash all of my print and textile wall hangings that I have gathered from my travels. As I watched a very expensive and rare Ghanaian print bleed down the wall and saw a 200 year old Georgian tapestry begin to crumble before my eyes, I told her that, under NO circumstances, was she to wash the wall hangings.

And that’s when she started starching my underwear.

I didn’t notice it at first and thought I had missed rescuing a pair off the line on my balcony when I pulled them on one morning.

Then, everyday that week, I found that I had the same problem. I would sit in meetings and be extremely uncomfortable and start shifting around because something was just “not right” about my clothes...specifically, my underwear.

I finally caught her in the act the next week with a mammoth-sized bottle of the Ugandan equivalent of “Spray and Wash” in her hands as she wielded it over my Victoria’s Secret undethings on the ironing board (I also hate to iron so this was an activity that I did agree to and she enjoys doing).

“Beatrice, please, please don’t starch my underwear! I like how well you iron but I don’t need my underwear starched, it makes me uncomfortable and it isn’t necessary…but thank you!”

She looked uncertain.

“But you have important meetings, you should be well-presented,” she argued.

(Instant replay of my childhood).

“Thank you, Beatrice, I appreciate that. But really, no one at these meetings is seeing my underwear so can we stick to the shirts and the pants ONLY?”

She just doesn’t buy it.

So for the past two months we have had the starch wars. She brings over her bottle, I find it hidden under the kitchen sink or in my closet, I throw it away, and she buys a new one.

Now I am hiding my underwear. I keep it balled up on top of my refrigerator or in my safe.

I just know there has to be another way…but I haven’t found it yet.

This weekend, while I was away in Rwanda, I left Beatrice a note asking if she could wash my plants on the balcony that are constantly being choked by street dust and grime.

When I got home, they were gorgeous. All shiny and looking brand new.

Then they dropped all of their leaves in 24 hours.

I picked one up and sniffed. The unmistakable smell of starch.

On top all of this, I was sitting in my office talking to my colleague yesterday when he observed, “Why are you so jumpy? Is everything OK? It’s like you have ants in your pants or something…”
I didn’t know where to begin but I don’t really understand the karma of starched underpants.

Or why, twenty-some odd years later, I still have ants in my pants.

Confronting Ghosts in Rwanda

My mother and I often debate the concept of "evil" as a human condition.

I know this sounds strange but, both of us having been raised and spent our formative years in fairly strict Catholic families, and having later found a general sense of spirituality to replace or augment our concept of religion, we often talk about principles that didn't sit well with us from our childhoods. For me, the whole Catholic/Christian concept that there are "good" people and "evil" people never made much sense. I have just always refused to believe that people come into the world being "evil" and are predestined to do evil things. I do absolutely believe in the notion of karma and that we come back to work out some lessons from previous lifetimes, but I just never bought into the whole idea that one is doomed from the beginning.

My mother disagrees.

I have been contemplating the concept of evil a lot over the past few days since I returned from Rwanda. I went there with two good friends over the weekend because, in my line of work, the genocide that took place there 15 years ago holds so many lessons and questions on the nature of human beings. Plus, Rwanda is right next door to my current home, Uganda, and not visiting seemed wrong. If not to pay respects, then to try to understand how something so awful as almost a million people being systematically slaughtered over the course of 100 days could possibly occur in this day and age. I wanted to understand although I don't think I am any closer to it now than I was before I went there.

My first encounter with that scale of, for lack of a better word, "evil," was in Poland in 1999 when my best friend and my boyfriend visited Auschwitz. Even then, as horrific as the scale of atrocities that were perpetuated against the Jews during WWII seemed, I was somehow detached. It had happened nearly fifty years before...surely we had come farther than that by now?

It came closer to home when I got my first job in DC working for my now current boss helping to compile evidence for the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal that was prosecuting Serbs who had masterminded some of the worst human rights abuses during the war in Bosnia. I would read witness statement after witness statement, reports from NGOs working on the ground, and first-hand accounts of a massacre that had occur ed in the town of Srebrinica where nearly a thousand men and boys were systematically massacred in ways that do not bear repeating here.

The word "torture" doesn't even begin to describe what happened at that place. And I would read, day after day, blow-by-blow accounts of what, in my mother's mind, could only be described as "evil."

It was then that I found out that I had another place inside of me that I could go to when confronted with such things. For the first few months, I was a wreck. I had a hard time sleeping, I drank too much, I was constantly irritable and I took up smoking again. I couldn't talk to anyone about how I felt because doing so would require me to talk about what I was reading and I didn't think burdening anyone else's soul with that information was a good thing. So I just created this space in my mind where I could go when I had to read these things for work that was, in short, a place where emotions were not allowed in.

Years later, and having spent the majority of my time working with marines, soldiers, aid workers, human rights advocates, and a whole host of other folks who LIVE this day-to-day, I realized that so many of us have created those spaces as a means to live and not become numb. I am, by no means, the best or the most honorable among them. I could probably never do what my boyfriend or many of my best friends do on a daily basis. The fact that they are as human and compassionate as they are despite the fact that they have to cope with these things on a regular basis humbles me constantly.

But, still, Rwanda got to me.

It wasn't so much the Genocide Memorial Museum, which is extremely well-done and an honor to the victims, but the fact that my colleague, Nate, and I went exploring further. We both felt compelled to see the rest of it. The parts that were NOT for public consumption and the areas where few tourists venture because they are the sites of horror laid-bare without being dressed up.

We spent that Sunday in a church that saw 5,000 people massacred in one night on 30 March, 1994. We were taken around by one of the three sole survivors of that night who was 5 years old when it happened. It was NOT dressed up.

Again, like recounting my time reading the testimonies of victims from Srebrinica in Bosnia, nothing I can write can ever do justice to what I saw that day. I never knew that one could still smell blood on clothes 15 years later.

I had to walk out of the church at least half a dozen times in our four hours there to get some air.
The most powerful moment, however, was not that Nate and I, as Americans, bore witness to the remnants of that atrocity. The most powerful moment came when my Uganda friend and part-time driver, Eddie, took the tour with us. He kept saying to the Rwandan guide, "I can't believe this really happened to you. How could we not have helped? We were right next door to you...Please, brother, I am so, so sorry. Please forgive me. No one in Uganda really believed it was true, but it was true, I see that now. Please forgive us for not helping you."

He was close to tears by the time he left.

I walked away from the experience and shut down a bit.

Nate and I have not talked about it again. Our friend, Janice, who was traveling with us had begged off of that particular part of the trip and never asked, in detail, what we saw. I think she knew.

Scott had warned me before I went about the after-effects and I was as arrogant as ever. I said I "knew" that I would be able to cope with whatever I saw.

And I can, eventually.

I am going home in June. I think I am going to re-visit some conversations with my mother. I still don't believe in "good" and "evil."

But sometimes it is hard to explain that level of cruelty.

However, like Eddie, I have come to realize that shutting down, while necessary, is not always a good thing.