 
## The

## Traveling

## Turdologist

By

Wendell Blue

Copyright 2015 by Wendell Blue

**Smashwords Edition**

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Costa Rica

Chapter 2: The Dominican Republic

Chapter 3: Ecuador

Chapter 4: Saudi Arabia

Chapter 5: Brunei

Chapter 6: Finland

Epilogue

### Preface

Many years ago I taught English as a Second Language in the Intensive English Program at Indiana University.One of my students was a lovely young Venezuelan woman named Miriam.Like many other Spanish-speaking students, Miriam often confused the English "b" and "v" sounds.She also struggled with the pronunciation of the English vowel sounds.After one particularly frustrating session, Miriam threw her hands in the air and refused to say another word.

Full of remorse, she came to have a word with me after class."I'm sorry, Wendell, but I always have problems with my bowels.They just don't sound right."Rather than place my ear against her abdomen, which was my natural inclination, I muttered a few inane words of consolation.Something along the lines of, "Keep trying and those vowels will get better."

My thoughts, though, were more like this, "You think **you** have a problem with **your** bowels?!?Honey child, I could tell you stories about my bowels that would take the curl right out of your lovely black hair!"

Oh, my bowels!For fourteen years they took me on a roller coaster ride across Latin America and the Middle East.Believe me, life ain't easy when there is an active volcano rumbling mere inches below your belt.

It all started when I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Latin America...

### Chapter 1: Costa Rica

"Oh, Lord," I moaned in my solitude, "Is it possible for a human being to sink any lower than this?"

Through the flimsy wooden wall behind me I heard the Lord's answer.

"Oink, oink!"

My heart sank.

"No, Lord, please.Don't do this to me!"

"Oink, oink, oink."

I heard the pig grunting as it trudged down the steep slope.Its grunts seemed to disappear in a "Doppler Effect" sort of way.And I had always thought that the Doppler Effect only applied to trains.

From my perch on the outhouse seat, I reached out and pushed open the wooden door to verify what I suspected.

Yes.There it was.Through the darkness and the heavy streams of tropical rain I could distinguish a sow's fat ass as it wobbled down the muddy slope.Just in front of it was the gate which I had left open in my haste to get to the toilet.

"No! No! No!" I cried, leaping from the toilet and dashing out into the night.Slipping and sliding through mud and pig shit, I took off in hot pursuit of the pig.I simply had to shut the gate before that nasty swine escaped.

As I rushed down the hill at 3 AM in a tropical rainstorm, something in my mind snapped.How could this be happening?I was in a beautiful country, surrounded by beautiful people.And yet I was engaged in a nocturnal footrace with a pig.

This was not how I had hoped things would turn out.

I was twenty-four years old, college educated and naked.My feet were enveloped in a mixture of clay, rain water and pig shit.My head was throbbing as a result of drinking too much alcohol earlier in the evening.Midway between my throbbing head and my shit-soaked feet, my intestines were screaming out, begging to be surgically removed and destroyed.If I had had a knife or a jagged piece of glass in my hand at that moment, I would have performed the surgery myself.

But there is never a jagged piece of glass when a person really needs one.

***

I won the foot race with the sow and closed the gate before she could get away.Having scored this minor victory, I returned to the little outhouse and finished excreting every ounce of fecal material from my body.When my bowels finally had no more to offer, I rose and made my final trip down the slope.Noiselessly, so as not to wake my host family, I entered the house.

Immediately on my right was an indoor bathroom, complete with flushing toilet.

Yes, the house had an indoor flushing toilet.So why had I gone outside during a tropical storm to an outhouse located in the middle of a pig sty?I guess the simple answer is that my parents had taught me to always try to be a decent human being.

Unlike houses in North America or Europe, my Costa Rican host family's house had walls that did not reach the ceiling.This was because there was no ceiling per se, just a tin roof.The "walls" were more like office partitions than walls as we know them. Between the walls and the roof was a large gap.This fact, combined with the flimsiness of the walls, ensured that sounds made in any room could be heard throughout the whole house.The parents of my host family, kind and decent people, had conveniently located their bedroom right next to the indoor toilet.I did not have the heart to subject them, in the middle of the night, to the blasts, moans and odors that were certain to come.

I slipped past the indoor bathroom and my host parents' bedroom and came to the boys' bedroom."The boys" were the family's three unmarried sons, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty.All nice guys, but I had little contact with them during the three months that I lived in their home.

Silently passing the boys' room, I came to the third bedroom on the right.Sleeping alone in this bedroom was the reason that I did not pay much attention to the boys.For there, right between my bedroom and the boys' bedroom slept Virginia. Virginia was the family's sixteen-year-old daughter.I had met her within hours of arriving at my host family's home.It was lust at first sight.Perhaps I flatter myself, but I suspect that she was interested in me as well.

Many evenings, as I sat on the porch swatting at mosquitoes, Virginia would join me.

One evening, as we sat there together trying to make conversation, I mentioned that my shoulders were sore.To my delight, Virginia offered to give me shoulder massage.After considering her offer for a microsecond, I accepted.Once I realized that she was willing to do this, I frequently whined about sore shoulders.We spent many evenings on that porch.Just me, Virginia, and several million mosquitoes.Some evenings Jose joined us.Jose was Virginia's boyfriend.No shoulder massage those nights.

The porch was our romantic setting in the evening.In the morning it was the breakfast table.Countless mornings I lost myself in Virginia's beautiful brown eyes as I gagged on glassfuls of strong, unsweetened black coffee.Her brown eyes and pretty face made breakfast not only palatable but also pleasurable.Admittedly, though, some mornings were less romantic than others.Probably the least romantic mornings were those when her father, Claudio, walked through the house spraying DDT to kill the millions of flies who resided there.I found that the poison clouds in the air somehow detracted from the mood.Nevertheless, even on those mornings I was still lost in Virginia's eyes.It was a bit more difficult to see her eyes through the clusters of falling flies, though.

Massages, mosquitoes, coffee and flies.It seemed like we had all the ingredients for a perfect relationship.Unfortunately, the mundane duties of everyday existence eventually came between us.One of Virginia's duties in the home was that of changing my bed sheets from time to time.It was this duty that caused a wall to rise between us.Believe me, this was a wall that reached far higher than the partition between our bedrooms.

***

The specific incident that ruined our relationship took place the very morning after I raced the sow down the hill.I awoke and rose from my bed shakily.Then, slowly and painfully, I shifted the angle of my head so that I could look down at my sheet.I had a premonition that something was amiss.What I saw was heartbreaking.

There were two brown smudges on my otherwise brilliantly white sheet.One smudge, at the foot of the bed, had been caused by the mess on my feet.They had collected a lot of filth while running back and forth between the outhouse and the gate.The other smudge, near the middle of the sheet was more troubling.Humiliating, actually.

Looking at the middle smudge, I realized that I had been mistaken the night before.I had not squeezed out every ounce of fecal matter after all.I had unknowingly saved a small semi-liquid souvenir to deposit on my bed.

The stains, especially the middle one, were a depressing sight.

It was sad to realize that a grown man could make such a mess.What was sadder, much sadder, though, was the knowledge that Virginia was going to come into the room and see my mess as soon as I walked out.There was no way in hell that she would not notice those smudges.What could I do?How could I get rid of the evidence?

For a moment I considered swallowing the sheet.

Too big.

I considered burning it, but that was no good either.My host family was sure to notice the smoke coming out of the room.Besides, it frightened me to think about what I might do if the fire did not completely destroy the evidence before Virginia came rushing in.I would be honor-bound to burn her along with what remained of the sheets.Making things worse, I did not have my Swiss army knife with me.If only I had had it, I could have rushed out into the living room and carved Virginia's eyes out of her skull in a pre-emptive maneuver.

One by one my face-saving options ran out, and I sensed that my relationship with Virginia was about to change.Finally, exasperated, I simply walked out of my room and went to the breakfast table.

Just as I had feared, Virginia entered my room as soon as I left it.

It was difficult to enjoy my breakfast that morning.Virginia's humming stopped as soon as she stepped in the bedroom.I knew that she and I had reached the end of an era.No more evening shoulder rubs for me.No more getting lost in her brown eyes. When she emerged from the disaster area, my bedroom, we avoided eye contact.The magic was gone.

I began to spend more time with the boys.

***

The cold shoulder treatment from Virginia made my life in Costa Rica far less joyful.I missed my massages and grew ever more resentful as I contemplated the change in her demeanour.The bitch!I mean, really, she could have been more inclusive.

What kind of teenage girl only wants to flirt with adult males who do not shit in their beds?One of us was clearly out of line in this situation, and I hardly think it was me.In the end I decided that one of us had to be the adult, and it looked like I was elected to play that role.I was, after all, the adult.Anyway, I had not gone to Costa Rica to impress young women.The Peace Corps had sent me and twenty others there for eleven weeks of language and technical training before officially accepting us as volunteers.

I slowly came to terms with the rejection by Virginia and dedicated myself to my training, which took place in a town called La Guacima.

La Guacima had a lot of things going for it, even though it was little more than one long road with a row of houses on each side.There were no side streets to speak of.The road running through the village was on a slope, so one end of town was called Upper La Guacima and the other end Lower La Guacima.A small bridge stood at each extreme.The bridges themselves were quite ordinary, each made special only by the eternal presence of a resident drunk.At any time of day, these men could be found passed out on their respective bridges.One or more of their limbs generally protruded out onto the road.I sometimes wondered if the town council had assigned these drunks to the bridges."Go forth, young men, and serve as unconscious welcoming parties of one!"Leaving their homes each morning, the two conscientious greeters probably kissed their wives good-bye, saying, "So long, dear, gotta go.Time to pass out on the bridge."

The strategically placed bridges and drunks made the town seem so symmetrical - and so welcoming!

***

The Peace Corps training center was located right in the middle of town.It had formerly been a chicken farm, and the classroom walls were made of chicken wire.Since the classrooms also had dirt floors, my hunch is that the Peace Corps budget is smaller than the American military budget.

The center's stated mission was to train us in Spanish, cultural awareness and vegetable farming.I suspect that its true function was to filter out nutcases before they could join the organization.Even a quick glance at the recruits gathered there was enough to reveal the need for a "loony filter."To my great surprise, though, the one whom I considered the biggest nut of the lot, Larry, slipped right through the filter.This was in spite of his best efforts to prove his mental instability.

Larry had struck me as a rare and exotic bird even before we flew to Costa Rica.Peace Corps had flown us all to Miami for an orientation session before we left the United States, and I was placed in the same hotel room with Larry.Right away his behaviour worried me.There was nothing specific that he did or said to frighten me, but I would have slept better if I had been allowed to go through his suitcases before we went to bed.Something about him just said "hatchet murderer" to me.

Like me, Larry had studied Spanish at university.This meant that our night in the Miami hotel room was not the only quality time we shared.We were also in the same language group of "advanced" students at the training center in Costa Rica.Our classrooms had formerly been chicken pens, so I spent a lot of time cooped up with Larry.

***

One day, just for a little variety, our instructor decided to take us out for a walk through some fields and forests.The idea was that we could have a casual conversation as we walked along, not only with each other but also with any farmers we encountered.Things went fine for the first fifteen minutes or so, but then Larry began to lag farther and farther behind.The teacher asked me to go check on him, so I did.As I approached him, I could not help noticing that his eyes were uplifted.He seemed to be gazing at the sky.Before I could speak, he said to me in an eerie voice, "Wow...this is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me."

"What is it, Larry?" I asked, not really wanting to know.

"It's my eyes."

"Yea, what about your eyes?"

"They won't come down."

"What do you mean they won't come down?"

"They are stuck."

I did not want to continue this conversation, fascinating though it was, so I told him that I would get the teacher.Off I hustled, only to have a nearly identical conversation with the teacher.

"I think we'd better go back.Larry has a problem," I said.

"What is it?"

"It's his eyes."

"What about his eyes?"

"They won't come down."

"What do you mean they won't come down?"

"He says they are stuck."

All the while I was hoping that I did not sound as weird to the teacher as Larry had sounded to me.We all headed back to where Larry stood, eyes still firmly fixed on the sky.Then in very awkward silence we walked to the nearest road and hitched a ride in the back of a truck to the training center.

Larry had long blonde hair, and I will never forget his appearance as we rode in the bed of that truck.He was resolutely facing forward with his long blond hair blowing behind him and his eyes fixed upwards.He looked like an Old Testament prophet.Or a nut.

After a few days in the hospital and a few mega-doses of tranquilizers, Larry's eyes descended.He ended up passing the training course and went on to serve as a volunteer for

Nine (!) years in the Dominican Republic.

***

The village where Larry was posted in the Dominican Republic was far from where I lived, so we did not see much of each other after we left Costa Rica.I only went to visit him in his village once.Unfortunately, he was not at home when I arrived so I did not get to visit with him.

My presence in the village attracted the attention of many locals, since they seldom saw a white person other than Larry.I chatted with them for a while and discovered, not to my surprise, that they thought he was strange.(To be fair, though, I am sure that most Dominicans thought I was strange, too.)Before I left town, Larry's neighbors wanted to show me his outhouse.This seemed like a strange thing to want to show an unknown visitor, but they were insistent.One of the children, who was minding Larry's house in his absence, took out a key as we approached the building.

Yes, he kept the toilet under lock and key.

When we got to the top of the hill where the outhouse was located, I understood why the villagers had wanted to show it to me.It was an impressive stone monument, easily the most beautiful structure in the whole community.Larry had built this monument himself; soon after he arrived in the village, he hired an ox and cart to haul stones from a nearby river bed.That outhouse should have been somewhere near the Washington Monument or the World War II Memorialinstead of in a small village in the Caribbean.

It is a shame that they do not experience tsunamis in the Dominican Republic, because Larry's outhouse would not have even blinked in the face of a massive ocean wave. Those thick stone walls probably could have withstood a nuclear explosion.In addition to its strength, it was easily the most beautiful outhouse I have ever seen.

It would have been an honor and a pleasure to use that toilet.Unfortunately, my bladder and bowels were empty, so I could do no more than admire it.

Larry might have looked like a hatchet murderer, but that guy sure could build a great toilet.

***

Larry did not have a monopoly on erratic behaviour amongst trainees.

One of the three missions of the Peace Corps is that of giving foreigners the opportunity to interact with Americans.The reasoning seems to be that once they get to know us, they are bound to love us.

But what if the Americans we send to developing countries behave in bizarre ways?Will that also make them love us?

I ask these questions not in a disinterested way.There were times, I suspect, when Costa Ricans might have considered me an ambulatory argument for euthanasia.As an example, take the time two friends and I decided to wander into the rainforest.We got lost within minutes and walked aimlessly for hours.Eventually we came across a railway track which we could follow back to civilization.That was fortunate.Less fortunately, a very heavy tropical rain started falling as we walked along the tracks.Totally soaked and looking like something the cat drug in, we had to jump off the tracks at one point to let a passenger train go by.The passengers in the train all stared at us through the steamed-up windows.

"Gee, I wonder why everybody is looking at us?" I said.

"Maybe, just maybe, they don't often see gringos standing out in the middle of the rainforest in the pouring rain, dumbfuck."

"Yea, maybe not.But, still, the way they're looking at us, you'd think they thought we were stupid or something."

It was about this time that one of us noticed a really odd feature about the place we were standing.We were right under a skinny sapling.A dead sapling with no leaves.For miles around us in every direction there were luxuriant trees full of broad leaves which would have afforded protection from the tropical rains.We three were huddled under the only tree in sight, maybe in the whole forest, that had no leaves.Bucketfuls of rain poured over us as the curious passengers sped by.

Inside the comfortable dry train car a young mother whispers gently into the ear of her son.

"Look out the window, my child.These are the people the United States government sends to help us."

The child's eyes fill with grateful tears as he exclaims:

"Thank you John F. Kennedy for creating the Peace Corps!Thank you, American taxpayer, for funding the efforts of those soaked specimens standing by the tracks!Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Outside, the three waterlogged young heroes under the leafless shrub bow, humbly acknowledging the gratitude of the natives.

***

Larry, the certified nutcase, got through the training/screening process in Costa Rica.Nearly all of us did.I guess that in order not to pass the course one had to demonstrate an overwhelming incompetence in all facets of life.Many candidates appeared to be trying to do just that, but only a few actually managed to succeed at failing.

Eleven weeks after flying to Costa Rica we again boarded a plane, this time to take up our various projects in the Dominican Republic.Some of us went to plant vegetable gardens, some went to work in schools, and one went there to build a rock solid toilet.

### Chapter 2: The Dominican Republic

Nearly thirty years after leaving the Dominican Republic, I had the pleasure of dining with my wife, daughter and mother in a Burger King in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Hey, nothing is too good for my family!

My wife and daughter, both of whom had grown up in Europe, were surprised to see that one item on the brightly lit menu above the counter was a "Triple Whopper."There was even a picture of one, complete with three thick beef patties.

"Who could possibly eat that?" my wife asked.

"Not I," I responded before modestly ordering, as did my mother, the old-fashioned original Whopper which only had one thick beef patty.Unlike the innovative Triple Whopper, the original Whopper only had enough calories to sustain about five Ethiopians for a week.

After receiving our orders and sitting down to enjoy our meals, my mother was surprised to find that she had accidentally received a Triple Whopper instead of the original Whopper with its solitary thick beef patty.Since she could not eat the side of beef contained in her accidental meal, after a few moments of consternation she decided that I should take one of the patties.This way we both ended up with improvised Double Whoppers.

Barely had we had time to shift the beef patties before we heard commotion from a group of hillbillies seated at the next table.

"I didn't git my Triple Whopper!" exclaimed the 300-pound female ensconced there.Her rage-twisted mouth revealed several missing teeth as she complained about the injustice she was experiencing.

"Well, you jest march right up thur and tell'em you didn't git yer Triple Whopper!" advised her concerned father.

Following his wise advice, she did "march" back up to the counter in search of what was rightfully hers."Waddle" is probably a better word to describe the way she moved.Meanwhile, Mother and I hunched inconspicuously in our seats as we tried to hastily consume the evidence.

The story has a happy ending, as the mountain of a woman got her Triple Whopper and neither mother nor I got sick after consuming obscene amounts of beef.

***

How that meaty meal contrasted with my meals in the Dominican Republic!

I spent three years in the Dominican Republic in a small town called Loma which is located in the northwest part of the country not far from the Haitian border.There was no Burger King in Loma.No McDonalds, no Pizza Hut, no Subway, no nothin' except for a couple of diners run by local women serving local food.

The first dish served to me in Loma - and the last – was rice and beans.Rice and beans might not sound very appealing to corn-fed Americans, but the local ladies knew how to combine just the right herbs and spices in the bean gravy to create a delicious meal.After eating my first dish of rice and beans at the diner, I thought to myself, "If this is what the food is going to be like, I am going to love this place."

No truer words were ever spoken.That was exactly what the food was like for the next three years, and I did love the place.In the previous sentence, when I said, "That was exactly what the food was like for the next three years," I did not mean to imply that the food was equally tasty.I meant it literally.The food I had for my first lunch was exactly the same food that I was given for lunch every day for the following three years.Rice and beans on Monday, rice and beans on Tuesday, etc.

When I was served an identical lunch the next day, I speculated that the cook had noticed how much I had enjoyed it on day one and had repeated the meal especially for me.The third day I still thought she might be repeating the dish for my benefit.By about the seventy-fifth day, though, I was starting to arrive at the following conclusion:[lunch = rice and beans].

This formula did not only apply to lunches at the diner.On the occasions I was invited to lunch in different people's homes I couldn't help noticing that these two essential ingredients always appeared on the table.While there might be other items as well, the heart and soul of the meal was _always_ rice and beans.

Early on, there were times when I suspected that the locals were involved in a great conspiracy or hoax, and that I was the feckless victim.While I blithely went to one person's home after another in response to seemingly innocent invitations, somewhere in town there was a central planning committee making certain that I was directed to the one house in town where rice and beans were on the menu.Everyone else in town was digging into steaks, pizza, quiche, etc. as I was dutifully digging into yet another centrally planned plateful of rice and beans.

I might have been wrong about that conspiracy theory, though.

***

Given the popularity of the dish, I was surprised one day by the words of a young student named Mervin.Mervin lived near me and often came to chat as I sat on my back porch.One morning, after sitting with me for a couple of hours, he announced, "I should be going now.My mother will have lunch ready soon."

Feeling the devil in me, I did not simply bid him farewell as I would normally have done.Instead, I asked, "What do you think you will be having for lunch today, Mervin?"

"I don'tknow,"he replied, "I wasn't at home when mother prepared the food."

"You don't know!" I blurted out.

"No, I wasn't at home when mother prepared the food."

"But don't you have any idea what it might be?" I asked incredulously.

"No." responded the sincere young boy.

"Well, let's think," I said, not willing to let this go so easily, "What did you have for lunch yesterday?"

(After a moment's thought) "Rice and beans."

"And," I added, "Let's try to think back even further.What was it you had for lunch the day before that?"

(Another moment's pause) "Rice and beans."

"Now!" I exulted, "Let's think.What do you think your mother _might_ have prepared for lunch today?"

"I don't know.I wasn't home when mother prepared the food."

"Enjoy your lunch, Mervin."

***

I lost a lot of weight while I was living in Loma, but it was not because of my steady diet of rice and beans.When I arrived there in January of 1978, I weighed 180 pounds.Three months later I weighed 148 pounds.

Just as an aside, I should mention that you will not lose 32 pounds if you eat Triple Whoppers with any regularity.

So, how does a person lose 32 pounds in three months? It's easy! Painful, but easy.

Here is my four-step guide for dramatic weight loss:

1. Join Peace Corps.

2. Get sent to Latin America.

3. Get an intestinal bug from drinking unsanitary water.

4. Shit off the unwanted pounds.

In my case, my intestines began to grind and splutter almost as soon as I entered town.It was painful and disgusting - and yet, also rather fascinating, both to me and the residents of Loma.

Those good people had never known me without diarrhea, so everybody in the town assumed that this was my normal state.They greeted me accordingly.

"Good morning, Wendell!How are the intestines today?"

"Well, not bad, I guess."

On the one hand, I was glad that they did not seem uncomfortable talking about my condition.On the other hand, I wished that were not quite _so_ comfortable, not to say eager, to talk about it.I sometimes wished that they didn't have big smiles on their faces when they asked about my "squirts".

Naively assuming that my body would eventually kill off the intestinal bacteria and/or parasites, I did not take any measures to get better. Three months later, weakened and still squirting frequently and furiously, I went to a clinic in the capital.The first thing the nurse did was weigh me, and to my surprise I was lighter than I had been as a teenager.

The nurse sent me to the hospital where they gave me various medicines to ingest and stuck an IV needle into my arm.A couple of days later I was healed.The healing was temporary, though.As soon as I got back to Loma I had the next bout of diarrhea.In fact, during the three years that I spent in the Dominican Republic solid bowel movements became little more than an elusive dream.Always longed for, seldom realized.

That trip to the hospital was the first of many.But I sometimes wondered if it was really necessary to go as far as the capital to be healed?After all, the good residents of Loma had plenty of suggestions on how to be treated locally.

Closer to Home

The capital city of Santo Domingo was five bumpy hours away by public transport, so it was not a decision lightly taken to travel there, especially when one was sick.Loma, however, only had a very small public health clinic, and it was ill equipped to deal with any serious problems.Luckily for me, foreign government employee that I was, I did not have to rely on this clinic since the Peace Corps took care of my health care and hospital bills.

The townspeople, on the other hand, did not have the financial resources to travel to the capital when they were ill.In the absence of good public health care, they had to come up with their own remedies for the afflictions that plagued them.They were remarkably confident about the efficacy of their home remedies.Too confident, I thought.But, hey, I am no doctor.

My usual afflictions, diarrhea and hangovers, were very common among the local folks as well.Therefore, they felt very confident in advising me on the best treatments.For the diarrhea, they advised me to drink a glass of water into which "just a bit" of lemon juice had been squeezed.Never mind that the abundant bacteria in the water would almost certainly worsen the diarrhea.For hangovers, I was advised to drink a glass of water into which "just a bit" of lemon juice had been squeezed.As you can see, there was some overlap in the prescriptions for different afflictions.From hemorrhoids to hernias, the solution was always the same, i.e. a glass of water "with just a little lemon juice."

I am not trying to imply here that every affliction was always treated in the same manner.In fact, I can think of one serious medical case in Loma where the treatment given was probably not water with lemon juice.It was a most curious case involving an old man named Mayor.

Mayor had no medical education.Indeed, Mayor had no primary education.This lack of training was no hindrance to him, though, when a medical need presented itself.

Mayor was about sixty years old when he embarked on his medical career.He only turned to healing because of the extreme need of his wife's niece.The poor girl was having epileptic fits with distressing frequency.Mayor could not stand to see the girl suffer and abruptly announced one evening that he, Mayor, was going to cure her.Having thus spoken, he took her into a room where he performed some type of secret ritual to heal the girl.

Neither I nor anybody else will ever know what went on in that room, because Mayor was very secretive about his techniques.There was a considerable amount of conjecture among relatives and neighbors at the time, but it was just that – conjecture.Both Mayor and the girl were tight-lipped about the procedure.

Whatever he did, it worked.To the amazement of everyone, particularly in light of Mayor's lack of medical training, the girl began to improve after receiving the treatment.The frequency of her fits declined.The only noticeable drawback, or side effect, was a swelling of the patient's abdomen.

Nine months after the treatment, a seven-pound side effect was born.From that point on, Mayor had two "wives" - his original wife and her 20-year-old epileptic niece.She moved into his house, and they formed a lovely trio.

No one can say with certainty what it was that Mayor gave the patient once he got her behind the closed doors of his private "clinic", but I'm guessing it was **not** a glass of water with a little lemon juice.

Whole Lotta Lovin' Goin' On

To be honest, I realize that bestiality is a topic which is, at best, of only passing interest to most people.In fact, I suspect that most people do not believe that it actually occurs.Sure, there are plenty of jokes circulating about farm boys and sheep.But deep in the hearts of the people who tell these jokes, I suspect, is the belief that this activity only exists in theory and in jokes, not in the real world.

During my teenage years I heard (and told) many jokes about men having sex with different animals.I never believed such things really happened, though.After all, I grew up on a farm myself and was constantly exposed to a whole menagerie of sows, ewes, mares and hens.In all the years I was in close contact with these barnyard females, I never once had sex with them.Call me boring, but the thought of copulating with cows does nothing for me.It is not out of deference to bulls; other animals just do not turn me on.Some people might mutter about my blatant chauvinistic human speciesism, but there you are.I am just not programmed for loving animals.

At the age of twenty-five, about a year after my arrival in Loma, I discovered that not every male in the world shared my indifference to the charms of female domesticated animals.And I did not learn about this second-hand.I got the information straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.More accurately, I was informed by two distinguished local gentlemen who, in their youth, had engaged (frequently and enthusiastically) in bestiality.

This revelation occurred on a Saturday afternoon.As was often my habit, I was whiling away the afternoon hours at the home of a friend of mine.This friend, Raimundo, was the principal of a local school.A mutual friend of ours, Alberto, was there as well.Alberto was the principal of the high school.Both were kind, educated men with whom I had spent many hours in pleasant conversation.I thought that I knew them well.

So there we were, sitting on Raimundo's front porch engaged in a reasonable and decent conversation when suddenly the conversation took a surrealistic turn.Raimundo asked me, "Wendell, when you were a younger man, was there any particular kind of animal which you liked to screw?"The question was stated so pleasantly and in such an ordinary tone of voice that I assumed that I had misunderstood the question.After all, we were conversing in Spanish, and this would not have been the first time that I had misunderstood something said to me in Spanish.Besides, based on my life's experience, it seemed that when an educator and community leader asked me about animals, it was far more likely that he was asking, "Did you have a pet?" rather than, "Did you fuck your pet?"

Ever polite, I asked Raimundo to repeat the question.So he did.And once again I got the same message.This time I had been ever so attentive to the question, so I decided that it must be a joke that the two of them were playing on me.I gave a polite little laugh and commented along the lines of, "Right, sure, I used to love to screw all the animals in the barn.Doesn't everybody?Ha, ha."

Hey, I have been accused of having a twisted since of humor, why shouldn't guys like Raimundo and Alberto be allowed the same type of humor, even if it was at my expense?

Raimundo, realizing that I had not taken his question seriously, hastened to reassure me that he was not joking."Why, all the young boys around here like to screw the animals," he informed me.Then, motioning in the direction of Alberto, the high school principal, he added, "Alberto here preferred to screw chickens because their little twats would flutter while he screwed them."Raimundo, at this stage, ingeniously used his thumb and index finger to illustrate the fluttering motion of Alberto's hapless fowl victims.

As I sat there stunned, Alberto smiled and nodded to indicate that, yes, Raimundo's words were true.Raimundo went on to inform me that he, on the other hand, had been more ofa "goat man" himself.

"Hmmm..." I wondered."How do you reply to such a revelation?Should I congratulate him on a wise choice of animals?"

As I looked at the size of the two men with whom I was sitting, I could not help thinking that Raimundo's passion for goats was somewhat more normal than Alberto's passion for chickens.I guess everything really **is** relative.Otherwise, how could I have sat there and thought that there was anything normal, from any perspective in the universe, about screwing goats?Especially in a world where half of the human beings are females.Why not keep it in the species?It might be different if, say, there were only one female for every ten thousand males.Perhaps in such extreme circumstances, and with a little tastefully applied makeup, a young goat might turn a head or two.Especially if the head belonged to a lard-assed, acne-scarred teenager with bad breath who realizes that that is the best he can hope for.I do not understand it, though, under any less extreme circumstances.

Maybe it was my conservative upbringing which caused me to have such a closed-minded attitude about inter-species dating.

After hearing the revelations about my two friends, I did my best to maintain an air of dignity as I sat there between those two former barnyard Cassanovas.Beneath my calm exterior, though, were some turbulent emotions.Probably not as turbulent as the emotions of the chickens whom Alberto chose to give some lovin' to, though.

I remember thinking to myself, "Nothing on earth will surprise me after this!"

My conviction about eternal unsurprisability was soon put to an extreme test.The very next time Raimundo opened his mouth, in fact.Sensing that he had shocked me, and perhaps feeling that he was on a roll, he then informed me that I would be hard-pressed to find any young male in town who was not actively involved in sex with animals.The teenage boys with whom I was working in the youth club, for example, were not only engaging in bestiality, they were doing it in the goat pen right next to my house!At least that is what Raimundo told me.I was not convinced.First of all, the boys he referred to were the children of upstanding community leaders.They had been raised properly and were intelligent young men.

Even now, so many years later, I still look back at those young men with whom I was working and consider them to be wholesome.I have to admit, though, that in order to do so, I have had to adjust my understanding of the term "wholesome."My current definition of the term includes young men who have had frequent sex with female goats.

Convinced that Raimundo had simply been putting me on, I casually brought up the topic with some of the young boys in question.Equally casually, the boys confirmed what Raimundo had said.They even informed me when and where they did it:Friday evenings in the goat pen next to my house.

After receiving this information I saw both the boys and the goats in a whole new light.Perhaps I should mention that the goats in question were no more attractive than any other goats I have come across.Therefore, I have to assume that the boys chose them because their pen was conveniently located close to the center of town.

Incidentally, anyone tempted to complain about the location of their home should first remember what those goats had to put up with because of the location of their pen.Given the option, they would probably have preferred a lower-rent district away from the center of town.

There are two possible conclusions which can be drawn from this story.One is that the boys in Loma are unusually perverted.The other is that there was a whole lotta fuckin' goin' on in the barnyards of rural Domincan Republic.My final comment on this sordid matter is that if I am ever reincarnated as a female goat, I hope I will reside in a place where people are more likely to milk me than to mount me.

Breeding like Rabbits

As mentioned above, I bucked the local trend and never had sex with an animal.I certainly did encourage it among animals of the same species, though.The school where I worked participated in a program organized by the international aid organization CARE.CARE provided rice which was used to offer the children a free meal each day.CARE also provided the school with a large number of breeding rabbits which I tended.And breed they did!Countless mornings I would start the day by transferring a doe in heat into the cage of a buck so that he could impregnate her.

The little boys in town just could not get enough of watching the rabbits screw, so they would watch out for me heading towards the rabbit building.As I walked across town each morning en route to the rabbits, a host of little brown and black boys would join me in what looked like a scene from The Pied Piper.By the time I reached the breeding station, it was not unusual to have around ten little guys tagging along.As this became a daily routine, we developed a kind of chant which we repeated as we marched across town...

(Me):"Where are we going, boys?"

(High-pitched chorus):"To give an injection!"

(Me):"What kind of injection?"

(High-pitched chorus):"A meat injection!"

(Me):"That's right... Where are we going, boys?"

And so on until we reached the rabbit pens where the action would take place.

***

Let me repeat:I never had sex with animals while I was in Loma.I did do some strange things to them, though.Probably the most intimate encounter I had with an animal was with a very large rat.

One night I went to check on the rabbits long after dark.Hearing a noise over my head, I shone the flashlight on the large wooden beam above me.Staring down at me was a very sinister-looking rat.Quickly grabbing a nearby rake, I attempted to kill the brute with a strong blow.Unfortunately, I did not manage to kill the rat, and my blow only served to knock it off the beam.Even more unfortunately, it landed on top of a rabbit cage, about six inches from my face.

Instinctively, I whipped the rake around and tried to mash the filthy beast before it could bite me.My aim was perfect.The rake came down on the rat's body.The lousy rat must have been surprised to find itself under a rake.Surprised, but not injured.The tongs of the blasted rake were curved, so instead of killing the rat, the rake was merely holding it in place.I tried to kill it by smashing its head with my flashlight, but could not because the tines shielded the head and most of the body from my blows.The only exposed part of the rat's body was its haunches.I gave it a couple of whacks with the flashlight, but it soon became clear that I was not causing any real damage, so I stopped.Besides, I felt silly standing there giving a rat what was essentially a spanking.Yes, it had been a naughty rat, but I did not feel like spanking it.

By this time I was sweating profusely from both stress and exertion.I realized that I had a real dilemma on my hands.The rake was doing no harm to the rat, so there was no reason to continue pressing it over its body.On the other hand, lifting up the rake would leave my face exposed to a very angry rat.Then I remembered my pocket knife.

Slowly and carefully, without moving the rake, I used my left hand to reach into my right front pocket and take the knife.Getting the knife out with my left hand turned out to be very difficult.It took so long that I began to suspect that the rat would die of old age before it felt the sharp edge of my Swiss army knife.When I finally got the knife out and the blade open, I was drenched with sweat and exhausted.But I was also appropriately armed!

Slowly, slowly I prepared to slide the cold steel into the quivering body.As soon as the tip of the knife made contact with the rat's skin it squealed, and I pulled the blade back.

I could not do it.

This manner of killing seemed just a bit too intimate.Cursing the rat and myself, I raised the rake up and simultaneously leapt back.The rat hurried off into the darkness.I took a half-hearted swing at it and missed.Then I disappeared into the darkness.

My Little House

For me, one of the pleasures of travel abroad is learning to understand and adjust to new situations.It sometimes requires a bit of detective work in order to work things out.How do you get from point A to point B?How do you find a place to stay? etc.I used to flatter myself, imagining that I was a kind of Sherlock Holmes figure, ever alert to my surroundings and able to appraise and react to situations.

As the years have passed, though, things have happened which make me think that maybe I am more of a Dr. Watson character.Nowadays I find it hard not to feel a vague sense of insecurity as the words of an old joke come to mind.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a camping trip.After a good meal and bottle of wine they lay down and went to sleep.Some hours later Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend."Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

Watson replied, "I see millions of stars."

" _What does that tell you?"_

Watson pondered for a moment."Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo.Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant.Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.What does it tell you?"

Holmes was silent for a minute and then spoke."Watson, you idiot – someone has stolen our tent."

The following two discussions illustrate why this Holmes/Watson dichotomy sometimes haunts me.

When I first moved into my house in Loma, it never occurred to me to wonder why that house happened to be vacant.It was a question which was begging to be asked.After all, it was one of only two houses in the whole community which were vacant, and the other one was unfinished and unroofed.

I guess I am just a pampered softy, but I like the house that I live in to have a roof on it.It gives it more of a homey feeling.

Like most houses in town, the two unoccupied ones were small.This, in spite of the fact that most families had several children.It was rumoured, only half-jokingly, that one local family –twelve kids, two rooms – had to sleep in shifts.The house I moved into had three rooms, and I lived alone.Even though it was small by Western standards, I was living in spacious conditions by local standards.

It was strange that nobody else wanted to live there.Not only did my house have three rooms, it was on the main street and was in relatively good shape.It even had a tin roof, which everyone in town seemed to think was a desirable feature.The tin roof did not impress me, though, as the thatched roofs of my neighbors seemed to be more practical.The thatch kept the houses cool while my tin roof served to heat the place up like a solar oven.Nevertheless, my neighbors seemed to covet my tin roof, if not my house.

It was only after I had lived in the house for several months that I began to question people as to why they wished that they, too, had a tin roof.The main reason given was that rats liked to build their nests in thatch.Castanuelas was overrun by rats, and the critters did not need much encouragement to move in with people.People assured me that homes with tin roofs have far fewer rats than homes with thatched roofs.I accepted their word on that, even though my tin roof did not seem much of a deterrent to the rats which entered my house on a nightly basis.

So... why **was** a three-roomed, tin-roofed house in a central location unoccupied?Remember, this was a community with a dire shortage of housing.It seems like a logical question to ask, but it was one which never occurred to me.Call me Dr. Watson!

After I had lived in the place for over a year, some neighbors indirectly answered the question which I had never thought of asking.They asked me whether or not I believed in ghosts and, if so, had I noticed any in my house?Several people asked me this, so I was beginning to wonder if there was a reason for these recurring questions.

Eventually, someone informed me that the previous occupant had been an unhappily married woman who had gotten pregnant against her wishes.In an attempt to abort the fetus, she took a handful of undetermined pills.The good news is that she was successful in killing the fetus.The bad news is that she also managed to kill herself.She died in "my" house.The good residents of Loma were deeply disturbed by what had happened and were convinced that her unhappy ghost would hang around to haunt the house.They wanted nothing to do with it, so the house sat empty until a tall white foreigner, me, arrived and moved in without asking any questions.

Incidentally, I never had any nocturnal visits from the ghost of the unfortunate woman who lived and died in that house.Sadly, I must admit that I had precious few nocturnal visits from the flesh-and-blood type of women either.It is fairly safe to say that during the three years I lived there, no further unwanted pregnancies occurred on the premises.The only heat generated in that house came from the tin roof.

What disturbs me most about my house is not actually the fact that it took me a year to realize why it was vacant.The thing that **really** disturbs me, even now, was my inability to solve the mystery of some people who moved into the adjacent house.Less than twenty-four hours after a large family moved out of the small house a new family moved in.The new family only had girls, and there was no father.Watching them move in, it struck me that there was something odd about them, but I could not put my finger on exactly what it was that made them seem odd.There was no shortage of clues to help me figure things out, but I remained oblivious.

Right from the beginning I was surprised by the gender and age composition of the new residents.Instead of housing grandparents, parents and ten kids like most houses, that house only had six residents: five young women and a middle-aged woman.Although it was not unusual to see single parents in Castanuelas, it was odd that the five young women all seemed to be about the same age.Quintuplets?

Furthermore, the complexions of the five "daughters" were very different, ranging from light brown to black.Yes, there was definitely something odd about my new neighbors, but I did not give the matter a lot of thought.

What I did give a lot of thought to was the amount of noise that emanated from their house every night.They kept much later hours than I did, and I did not appreciate all the music and the loud conversations keeping me awake.I knew that the women were very popular with men, because there was a constant parade of male visitors.Had Castanuelas been a university town, I would have sworn that I was living next to a sorority.

The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place, though, as I slowly got to know the women.One afternoon two of them came over for a friendly chat.They immediately introduced themselves as my neighbors.

"Probably want to borrow a cup of sugar!" I thought as I let them in.

There was no mention of sugar during their visit.Rather, once the formalities of introductions had been taken care of, they wanted to discuss a variety of topics, starting with a history of my sexual experiences. Disappointingly for them, that turned out to be more of a short story than a novel.Then, to my surprise, they were curious about the size of my genitals.Another short story.

When they discovered that I had had a girlfriend in the past, they were eager to know details about our relationship:frequency of sex, favored positions, etc.All in all, it seemed to me that by the time the two women had left, the ice had been broken in our relationship.

In the weeks following that initial visit, the same two women came to visit me every now and then.They were always on their best behaviour, and always interested in the same topics.I enjoyed their visits, but must admit that there was something unnerving about the intensity in their eyes as they discussed genitalia and the like.I began to think that they had an exceptional interest in sexual matters.I would have almost ventured to guess that they were sexually active themselves.

One evening, though, the penny finally dropped.It only took one short question for everything to become crystal clear.I was sitting in my living room, keenly re-reading a two-month-old _Time_ magazine when one of the neighbour girls walked by.She shouted through my wooden Venetian blind, "Hey, Wendell, ya wanna fuck?"

Somehow that short utterance suddenly cleared up the whole confusing situation."Goodness!"I thought."Those girls next door are whores, and their house is a whorehouse!"

Having figured out what the girls were, I struggled to find an appropriate answer to the young woman's query.The woman was standing right outside my window, waiting for a reply to her neighbourly offer.Almost involuntarily, these words came from my lips, "Not tonight, thanks, I have a headache."

Yes, I really said that.

Strangely enough, from that evening on I never received another visit from the women.It seemed as if my awareness of their occupation had somehow broken the innocent bond which had previously existed between us.Our long and intense discussions about every conceivable aspect of human sexual relations came to an abrupt halt.I later decided that the middle-aged woman living with them probably was not even their mother.

Some people might have figured all this out more quickly than I did.

***

Night after night I lay in monastic solitude in my oven-like little residence, dreaming of hot sexual encounters.Meanwhile, on both sides of my little monastery-of-a-shack, orgies took place on a nightly basis.On one side of the house was the goat pen where the teenage boys were satisfying their animalistic desires.On the other side of the house was the whorehouse where the older guys were satisfying their equally animalistic desires.

Adding insult to injury, there was even one evening when two young lovers, thinking I was asleep, sneaked onto my front porch.They spent about an hour panting and grunting only inches from my right ear, which was plastered to the wooden Venetian blind between us.Hey, I am not proud.

Brown Sugar

So far I have established that neither the water nor the she-goats are pure in the Dominican Republic.What about the sugar?Along with the illegal Dominican immigrants in New York City, it is one of the main exports of the country.

As an American, I have always felt that it is my responsibility to know something about sugar.After all, like so many of my compatriots, I have consumed vast quantities of the stuff.It is sugar, after all, that keeps adding the X's to the labels or our XXXL clothing.

Like most other Americans, I enjoy an evening spent in front of a TV with a coke in one hand and chips in the other.This combination of grease and sugar just cannot be beat.But have you ever stopped to wonder why sugar, which forms half of this dream combo, is so cheap?During my three years in the Dominican Republic I began to understand why we are able to guzzle so much Coca-Cola at such reasonable rates.

***

While I was living there in the late 70's and early 80's, the sugar in the Dominican Republic was harvested by hand.Men with machetes spent long days in the burning sun chopping down the stalks of sugar.Curiously, it was not usually Dominicans who harvested their own sugar cane.In spite of their own poverty and high unemployment rate, local men were not willing to put up with the misery of the work and the low wages offered by the sugar companies.Laborers from Haiti did the dirty work for them.The going rate for a day spent cutting sugar cane in the blazing heat was approximately two US dollars at that time.The Dominicans, though they were poor themselves, were not willing to do so much for so little.

Fortunately for them, as well as for enthusiastic consumers of sugar, there were masses of hungry Haitians just across the border who willingly came to harvest the cane.Their (struggle for) existence was one of the factors which helped keep the price of sugar down.Another factor keeping prices down was the treatment of the Dominicans who loaded the sugar onto ships for export.One very good friend of mine, Papo, had worked in a large port when he was a young man, shovelling sugar onto these ships.Listening to Papo's stories about his working conditions in the port, I realized that simple amenities which workers in rich countries take for granted are not always present in developing countries.For example, one might assume that people working in hot storage buildings on a tropical island would have water fountains nearby.Wrong assumption.Likewise, it seems natural to assume that the company would have provided toilets for the men who spent their days shovelling the huge snow piles of sugar.Wrong again.

Without any toilets nearby, the men did what seemed logical; they designated an area among the mountains of sugar as a "toilet" and went to that area to relieve themselves.Remember, though, that those were ever-shifting sugar dunes.The designated toilet of today is tomorrow's shovelful of sugar being loaded onto the ship.It is also next week's sugar cube at your favourite restaurant.

***

Nowadays, so many years later, when I take my dog out for a walk in the winter, I sometimes think of Papo and his co-workers.Fluffy, like the port employees in the sugar warehouses, has certain favourite areas where she likes to piss and shit in the snow.I find it comforting to know that no one is going to come along and shovel up the snow targeted by Fluffy, especially on those days when I forget to bring along a bag to collect her droppings.

The snow she dirties is unlikely to ever end up on anybody's dining table.I cannot be so certain, though, that sugar dirtied in the warehouses will not be placed on my table.

This probably goes a long way in explaining why I usually take white sugar rather than brown.

Outdoor Toilets

Loma, because of its remote location and lack of economic or strategic importance, was neglected in many ways by the central government.In this town of some three or four thousand residents there was a very irregular supply of electricity and no running water or sewage system.For drinking and bathing purposes, people could either buy water from tanker trucks which frequented the town or use polluted water from the river and irrigation canals.Toilets were outhouses in the backyards.

There are a few drawbacks to having outdoor toilets on an island in the Caribbean.One of them has to do with mosquitoes.The pits under the outhouses nearly always seem to have a little water in them and thus serve as wonderful breeding grounds for mosquitoes.Many was the time that, after relieving myself, I returned to my home vigorously scratching my butt.I suspect that my gluteous maximus offered up the first meal to many a young skeeter who was just trying out her wings on her maiden voyage.Life must have seemed easy to those fledglings; they had just learned how to fly and suddenly, like manna from heaven, my white butt appeared overhead.

The local homes were frequently dark at night because the electricity supply was so irregular; the outhouses were _always_ dark after the sun went down.No outhouse that I knew of in Castanuelas had lights in it.Mine certainly did not.As a consequence, it was necessary to take along a flashlight on nocturnal trips to the toilet.This might not seem to be a major problem to a person who has never had to live in such conditions, but in practice it presented several complications.

For example, if the person using the toilet happened to be a foreigner, one could assume that this person had diarrhea.This, in turn, meant that it was necessary to move quickly when performing the necessary tasks:opening and closing the door, pulling down one's pants, setting the flashlight on the bench and then positioning oneself in the correct mosquito-feeding position.In the required haste, it was very easy for the flashlight to become a casualty of the process.Although it never happened to me, I knew a couple of people whose flashlights fell into the toilet.

Yes, flashlights are cheap, so it was no great monetary loss to drop one down a toilet pit.However, the people who knew from first-hand experience told me that there is a loss of dignity when all the neighbors observe a flashlight beam shining all night directly up from the toilet seat in your outhouse.There is something absurd in sight of it which invites ridicule, especially when the only "lighted" outhouse in the town belongs to the only foreigner in town.

Another drawback to having a backyard toilet is the resultant loss of privacy.People fortunate enough to have their toilet located inside their homes have probably never considered how much privacy this affords them.When they return home, their neighbors can only observe them up to the point when they enter their front door.Once that door is closed, nobody knows whether they are taking a rest, taking a shower or taking a shit.This is not the case when the toilet is in the back yard.If you emerge from the back door of your house soon after entering the front door, the whole neighbourhood will know that you are not taking a rest or a shower.

Although I personally did not care whether or not my neighbors knew when I defecated, the fact that my toilet was outdoors certainly caused me problems on one occasion.

A lack of cultural sensitivity on my part also contributed to the incident.

It all started with an argument.One afternoon I made the mistake of laughing at some of the high school lads when they claimed there were several "galipotes" in town.My first reaction was curiosity.

"What,"I asked, "is a galipote?"

A "galipote", they explained, is "a person who can change into an animal at night."

I laughed scornfully at this, and the boys were so incensed by my lack of belief (and my subsequent nasty comments) that they felt obliged to teach me a lesson.

The lesson came only a few hours later when I returned to my home after dark.

Although I am not a very observant person, on that evening I could not help noticing that there were several people lurking behind the trees near my home.If I had had an indoor toilet, I could have gone in the house and forgotten all about the young men hiding among the trees.As things were, however, I did not have that luxury.I needed to use the toilet, and the toilet was near the trees where they boys were hiding.Wanting to get it over with quickly, I went straight to the outhouse.Hardly had I closed the door when a host of strange "animal" voices were raised to the heavens from all around the toilet.A rock or two bounced off the walls of the outhouse.

Intifada galipotes, perhaps.

My only response was to rip off a couple of wall-shaking farts, which, if truth be told, were louder and more frightening than the howling and growling going on outside.

When the boys felt that I had received enough of their treatment, they disappeared into the night and I retreated into my house.All parties left the scene satisfied, each one certain that he had given out more abuse than he had received.

***

Just as an afterthought to my comments above about outdoor toilets, I should add that the ones I experienced in Loma were far superior to the outdoor toilet which I had the misfortune of using in the slums of the capital.Along with a Dominican friend, I once went to the capital to purchase some goods for an upcoming social event.In order to economize, we stayed with his sister.My enthusiasm for the money-saving accommodation waned when I saw where she lived.

I had never seen a neighbourhood like the one we passed through to get to her house.It was, simply put, a shantytown.Every square foot of land in the slum was covered with tiny plywood and tin shacks, the walls of which were shared with adjacent hovels.Never mind that the shacks had no lawns, there were no streets in this vast neighbourhood.Only the narrowest of dirt corridors wound past the houses piled on houses.This was definitely not a place for the claustrophobic.

We arrived late in the evening, and fortunately I had used a toilet just before arriving at the house.I say "fortunately" because it was obvious that she had no toilet.The tiny interior of his house measured about fifteen square meters, with a sheet of plywood dividing the living space into two cubicles.

After socializing for a few minutes, my friend and I lay on the concrete floor to sleep.Thus began the worst night of my life.Besides the constant bothersome sounds of humanity drifting through the flimsy walls, the hot, humid, still air was suffocating.Worse still, vast clouds of mosquitoes droned incessantly in my ears and attacked any exposed areas.In the middle of the night, in desperation, I took a towel out of my backpack and draped it over my head in search of relief from the mosquitoes.The heat was so unbearable, however, that my face was soon covered in sweat, and I had to remove it.Later, as my face began to swell from countless new mosquito bites, I had to cover my face again.And so it went the whole night.By the time morning arrived, I was nauseous from the nightmarish circumstances.But the worst was yet to come.

As usual, I had loose bowels, so I woke up at about 5 AM, needing to find a toilet.There was no toilet in the shanty I had slept in, and there was obviously no backyard outhouse since there was no back yard.It was wall-to-wall shanty.Mercifully, my hostess awoke, and I asked her where to go.She pointed me down a narrow muddy path and said that there was a "public service" there.Off I went, naively expecting to find some kind of recognizable building which I could stink up.

Moments later I walked right by the public service without recognizing it for what it was.When a man came walking my way down the corridor, I asked him for directions.He pointed me right back where I had come from.Since he was heading that way, he accompanied me.When we arrived, he indicated where the public service was.I simply could not believe my eyes!

The public service bore no resemblance to any toilet I had ever seen.Even though I had seen the place as I had walked by moments earlier, I had not realized it was a toilet.This "public service", which must have serviced hundreds of people, was a three meter by three meter slab of cement positioned alongside the narrow, winding walkway.There was no roof of any kind.At each corner of the concrete slab there was a waist-high metal pole.Strung between the poles, encircling the slab was a metal line from which hung goat skins.Presumably, the goat skins were there to grant a measure of privacy to those seeking relief.In the middle of the slab there was one lonely-looking open-ended pipe sticking up about two feet high.At first I was confused.Then, noticing some tell-tale signs at the base of the pipe, I approached it to see if my bizarre hunch could possibly be right.Sure enough.This pipe with a diameter of about two inches was the sole toilet.

Being male, I was able to piss into the pipe fairly accurately.I am not bragging about my accuracy; it is just that a normal guy can piss in a reasonably straight line when necessary.Like most men, though, I seldom put this precision into practice.

Pissing was easy, but my real problem was that I needed to do a "number two", and do it quickly.I had never before actually had to aim where I was going to dump.Toilet bowls are, after all, pretty big, and I had always sat on the toilet seat directly above the bowl in the past.Accuracy had never even been a factor.This being the case, I was not prepared for a slum toilet with such a tiny hole.

Hopefully, the poor bastard who came after me, whoever that was, has forgiven me by now, but I do not blame him if he has not.

I only spent a few minutes in that public service, but it made a deep impression on me for several reasons.First, it is hard to imagine how it can possibly be adequate to meet the needs of the hundreds of people living around it.As a child I grew up in a house which only one bathroom.We were a family of eight, and we were constantly fighting for our turn in the bathroom.How on earth could that lonely pipe possibly begin to meet the needs of all the people in the slum?I thank my lucky stars that my intestines woke me up so early that morning.A bit later and I might have had to queue up to use the pipe.

The image of the goat skins on the wires around the pipe has also stuck with me.If they were there to grant privacy, then why were they only waist high?Unless you were a child or a midget they would not afford much privacy.Speaking of children, I do not understand how they could use the pipe unless someone held them up.

One final mystery – what were people supposed to do when it rained?There was no roof.Get wet, I guess.

How glad I was to get back to the little wooden outhouse in my own backyard with all its creature discomforts!

Lightening Rocks

Although the people in Loma firmly believed in galipotes, I was never convinced about their existence.When I questioned the boys about the identity of the local galipotes, they surprised me by telling me immediately who the local ones were.Strangely enough, they were the wealthiest and best educated men of the community.They were also the owners of the farms lying around the town.It is probably just a coincidence or the product of a cynical mind, but I could not help thinking how convenient it was for the landowners to have the poor people think that they could convert into dangerous animals during the night.What better way to keep hungry poor people out of their banana plantations and fields of vegetables?But who knows?Maybe there really are galipotes out there.

There might also be lightening rocks.No Dominican ever talked to me about lightning rocks, but a fellow Peace Corps volunteer named Billy, who lived in a much smaller and more isolated village than mine, did.Lightning rocks were fairly common in that village, and several of the villagers had them.They were smooth rocks which had supposedly been implanted in trees when the trees were struck by lightning.

Once when a young man showed a lightning rock to Billy, he asked the obvious question, "How do you know that the rock really came from lightning?" The young man had the answer.The proof, he explained, was that when you breathed on them, condensation formed.

Billy took off his glasses, breathed on them and held them up, "Lightning glasses."

Lumpy Trousers

An elderly gentleman by the name of Pablo worked as the gatekeeper at the school where I taught.Like many townsmen of his age, Pablo was uneducated.Unlike most of the men in Loma, however, Pablo often thought about things other than sex and food.One of the things Pablo often pondered was death and the possibility of an afterlife.He frequently drew me into discussions about these issues, and we spent hours probing virtually every imaginable aspect of dying.Most of my comments on the subject struck him as amusing, and he seldom accepted anything I said on the matter.This did not stop him from asking, or me from opining.Only on one occasion did I actually manage to completely bring him around to my way of thinking, and that was when he brought up the topic of cremation.

"Wendell," (long pause), "I want you to tell me if this is true," he said to me one day, with a smirk all over his face."People have told me that in America they burn the corpses of the people who have died."Snicker, snicker.The look on his face was precious.He was just daring me to admit that we Gringos could do something so stupid.

"Yes, in some cases that is right." I replied defiantly.

When he managed to recover his composure, Pablo proceeded to ridicule the idea of cremation in the most offensive terms he could come up with.He let me know that cremation was wrong from any perspective.

Argue as I might, it seemed that there was no way to convince him of any useful or logical reason to cremate bodies.Then, one afternoon, after debating the subject at length, he told me with a note of finality in his voice, "Well, you Yankees can do whatever you want with your deceased, but I assure you that **nobody** is going toburn my body after I die."

"That is fine with me," I retorted, "If you prefer to have worms eat your body, then that is just fine!"

Pablo looked as if he had been struck by lightning.Somehow, it had never occurred to him that his own unburned body might face a more unpleasant fate than that of cadavers headed for the crematorium.

"Do you think that could really happen?" he asked shakily.

"Of course," I snorted."You seem to think that your dead body is going to lie in the ground peacefully, but it will actually just be a buffet table for worms."

It was an awful realization for Pablo.

Not long after this he engaged me in a troubled conversation.

"Wendell," he said, "I do not want worms to eat my body."

Although I was surprised by his abrupt opening, I quickly agreed with him that it was not a pleasant prospect.I noted, however, that it was a real possibility if he were buried in the cemetery.I could tell by the look on his face that the idea of cremation was becoming a bit less horrific.

I was the only person with whom Pablo had ever discussed the issue of cremation.Not only was his family unaware of our conversations, they were oblivious to the fact that such a thing as cremation even existed.It was one of many peculiar features of the outside world about which they had no knowledge.Therefore, it caused considerable apprehension when Pablo suddenly and solemnly called all of his family members together behind his hovel that same evening.He gravely informed them that he had a very important announcement to make.Nervously, they waited to hear his message.With a long, mournful face, and no introduction to the topic whatsoever, he spoke.

"When I die," he said earnestly, "I want you to drag my body out here behind this house, and I want you to pour gasoline over it, and I want you to take a match and light it."

That was his speech in its entirety.When he had completed it, his family, understandably, was shocked.They immediately began shouting and asking frightened questions."What is it, Pablo?""Are you sick?""What is the matter?"

"No," he replied, "I am not sick.I just wanted you all to know that."

With those words, the subject was closed.At least in his mind.The startled family still had a few things to say about this unexpected speech, but Pablo did not feel the need to expound on the subject.

***

As this example illustrates, Pablo was a straight-talking man who did not waste words.It was precisely this straight-talking nature which helped him get out of what was probably, quite literally, the shittiest situation of his life.

Pablo was born in an isolated village far from any city.Until he was thirty years old, he had never seen a town larger than Loma, with its three thousand residents.Then one day he simply decided that after thirty years out in the sticks it was time to see the big city.So, very early one morning Pablo boarded a bus which was headed for the capital, Santo Domingo.He travelled alone, and had no family or friends there to meet him.It was quite a bold move for a peasant from the countryside.

When he arrived in the capital five hours later, Pablo felt like he had landed on a different planet.Instead of the tiny thatch-roofed hovels which he was used to, he saw an overpopulated world of cement.Lost in every sense, he began to walk... and walk and walk.He had no idea where he was walking to; he just felt so overwhelmed by the crowds and massive buildings that he needed to keep moving to stifle the panic rising in his chest.After a couple of hours, this poor man's intestines began to rumble.Desperately he continued to walk, hoping to find a toilet or, in a worst-case scenario, a deserted lot or even a bush where he could discreetly take care of business.It was not his lucky day.As the afternoon wore on, he found himself still searching for a place to dump.At some stage in the late afternoon his sphincter gave way, and Pablo had a load in his pants as well as on his mind.Feeling much more uncomfortable, he continued to walk.

Finally, looking through a first-floor window of a building he passed, he saw a woman with a kindly-looking face.Marching up to her door, he knocked softly.When this saint of a woman appeared at the door, Pablo looked her in the eye and said, "Lady, I am a country bumpkin who just came to the city for the first time in my life, and I have just shit in my pants."

This is probably not a good pick-up line to use in a singles bar, but it served the purpose on that occasion.The lady's nature was as kind as her face; she let him in and was soon busy washing his pants.As evening fell, Pablo put on his wet trousers, thanked the lady and marched outside to continue his big adventure in the capital.

It was a strange day for a country bumpkin on his first visit to the big city.The kind woman must have thought it was strange day, too.One moment she was puttering around the house, minding her own business.The next minute an unsophisticated stranger knocks on her door to announce that he has shit in his trousers.

As far as I am concerned, that woman has earned a place in heaven even if she never does another kind deed in her life.I would not blame her, though, for closing her shutters and turning off all the lights the next time she saw a country bumpkin marching up her street.Especially if he looked a little bulky below the belt.

Taking the Boy out of the Country

People say that travel broadens the mind.They might be right.Lots of people who have never travelled feel that the way they do things is the _only_ way to do things.Travelling might help such people realize that there are many possible approaches to life's challenges.Maybe they will even become more tolerant of differences in others.

That said, world travel does not guarantee a broadening of the mind.The world has plenty of well-travelled folks with narrow minds.Furthermore, the traveller should not expect that his/her personality will undergo an exciting change once on foreign soil.If you are a nerd or an asshole in Indianapolis, you will probably also be a nerd or an asshole in India.Sorry, but it is true.

When I left Indiana to go abroad, I knew that I was a country hick.Having been surrounded by hillbillies and farmers in my youth, I identified with them.I imagine that other people identified me with them as well.Who knows, maybe it was an awareness of my own intellectual and social limitations that inspired me to leave and seek greater experiences than those on offer in my home town.Or maybe I just wanted to get the hell out of southern Indiana.Anyway, I left.

In my efforts to expand my horizons, the Peace Corps seemed like a wonderful option.Not only could I see the world and become more worldly, I thought I might even help someone in the process.Once in the "Corps", I sometimes came across other characters like myself – farm boys who suddenly found themselves far from the farm.One hayseed soul mate of mine was a young man from Nebraska named Mark.

Mark, like me, realized that he was a country bumpkin and hoped to do something about it.I suppose we both really wanted to help others while improving ourselves.And, I suspect, we both realized that sophisticated guys fared better with women, a weak area for both of us.So the erstwhile country bumpkins set off to become sophisticated world travellers.

One day while we two would-be sophisticates were walking down a sidewalk in Santo Domingo chatting away, we noticed that there were two very lovely young Dominican maidens directly ahead of us.Immediately our conversation died.We proceeded in total silence toward the young women.Meanwhile, there were lots of nervous movements as we checked that our hair was combed, our shirts were tucked in and our flies closed.We both tried to look casual and seemingly oblivious to the presence of anyone other than ourselves.(It is always good to play hard to get.)

Then fate stepped in.

We were so focused on appearing casual that we failed to notice the uneven surface of the sidewalk.The roots of a nearby tree had caused one section of the cement to protrude upwards.In unison Mark and I smashed our right feet into the protruding cement.This caused us to hurtle rapidly forward past the women, who watched bemusedly as the two blurs whizzed by them.The two blurs, meanwhile, were doing everything in their power to stay on their feet.We somehow managed to avoid falling and after a few meters of high-speed stumbling, we straightened ourselves back up.With as much dignity as we could muster, and without so much as a glance back at the women, we resumed our conversation.

They say that, "You can take the boy out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy."It just might be true.

Language Problems

With my bachelor's degree in Spanish, I was very self-confident about my language ability when I first went to Loma.This confidence soon began to fade as I found myself getting lost in conversations.My background was so alien to that of the locals that I often found myself understanding the _words_ they said without understanding the intended _message_.A good example of this occurred one afternoon as I was chatting with some students.

As we talked, two young men came towards us, laughing raucously.When they reached us, we naturally asked what was so funny.Gabriel, the more eloquent of the two, quickly filled us in.

Moments earlier they had passed by the house of a single lady and heard her shouting wildly, "Bring me up sand!"

No sooner had the words left his mouth than everyone started laughing hysterically.Well, everybody except me, that is.I was familiar with the woman they referred to, but that did not help me understand the humor.There was nothing exceptional about her as far as I could see.She had no physical defects, the usual source of humor in town, so that eliminated one possible explanation for the laughter.Nor could I see what was so funny about the words, "Bring me up some sand!" Only later, when one of the men explained Gabriel's story to me did it make some sense.

The protagonist of the story, the woman who shouted out the words, was a middle-aged single woman who seemed to lead quite an ordinary life.She lived in a wooden split-palmboard house/shack like most other people in town.And, like every other house in town, hers had absolutely no insulation of any kind.There were large cracks here and there in the walls, and the windows were a kind of wooden Venetian blind with no glass panes.In short, passersby and neighbors could hear and see what was going on in the house.

So ... what was going on when Gabriel and his friend walked by?She was in bed, entertaining a male visitor.The two young men had had the good fortune of walking by just as the two lovers were reaching a climax.It was just at that moment that she shouted, "Bring me up some sand!"

I slowly began to appreciate the story.I should have understood it immediately, because I had heard those words shouted out on an earlier occasion by some of the girls from my school while on a class trip.The school had taken a group of youngsters to spend a day out in nature, and the kids had begun to swim in a pool in the forest.Naturally, the boys started showing off to impress the girls, and one of the ways they did so was by proving how well they could swim and how deeply they could dive.The young girls encouraged the boys to dive to the very bottom of the deepest pool, and the boys would bring up a handful of sand as proof that they had gone all the way to the bottom.Before they attempted the dive, the girls would shout encouragingly, "Bring me up some sand!"In other words, their message to the boys was that they wanted them to go really deep.

This is also what the woman was shouting to her lover.And, of course, within twenty-four hours of the incident, it is what Gabriel had repeated to any person who would listen to him.

The Final Trip

I left Loma in 1980 after spending three eventful and entertaining years there.Since my departure I have returned three times, most recently in 1996.My final trip, which lasted for two weeks, was a kind of encapsulation of all the time that I had spent there.The only difference was that I was healthy most of the time.Diarrhea only struck on my final day.

I woke up feeling miserable on that morning.My intestines were aching terribly.Nobody had to tell me what that meant.Between 8 AM and 11 AM I made about ten hasty trips to the outdoor toilet located in my host's backyard.Each time, I left the outhouse certain that I had flushed my bowels empty.This was my desperate hope since I had a five-hour bus ride to the capital of Santo Domingo at 2 PM.In between my trips to the toilet I returned to the kitchen and attempted to socialize with my hosts and other friends who dropped in to bid me farewell.The main topic of conversation, naturally, was my intestinal problem and, in true Dominican style, everybody in the room had a different theory as to why I had become sick.

My meek suggestion that I must have drunk some contaminated water was quickly brushed aside as other possibilities were loudly discussed in great detail.In the end, the general consensus was that I was suffering from a "clash of seasonings."This conclusion was reached because I had eaten in three different homes the preceding day.The assumption was that each cook had used different types of seasoning, and the combination was just too much for my system to handle.

How could I have been so rash as to expose myself to this clash?

As the debate on the causes of my diarrhea was going on, I was being given a variety of medicines and vile drinks.I was too weak to protest.One lady whose daughter worked as a nurse's aid gave me some pills she had stolen from the polyclinic.I had no idea what they were.Nor did she, but she assured me that she had once taken them for diarrhea.My hostess gave me a concoction of water, baking soda and "just a bit of lemon."It was so thick that I could have eaten it with a spoon.I managed to choke it down, but momentarily feared that my shitting regime might be interrupted by some heart-felt puking.

Fortunately, that did not happen.

My host gave me an unidentified antibiotic which I dutifully choked down.Then, at 12 o'clock, my hostess cheerfully announced that lunch was ready.With a big smile on her face, she set a plate piled high with deep-fried chicken in front of me and told me that it was all for me.I looked dully at her and then at the mountain of glistening deep-fried chicken.Somehow, in spite of her generosity, I could not help asking myself the question, "How f***ing stupid can one person be?"This was, after all, the person with whom I had been discussing my illness for three hours.She had seen me rush to the toilet ten times, and she knew that I was about to begin a five-hour bus ride.

At this point I finally drew the line in the sand.I told her that there was no way I could eat that chicken.

_Yes, ma'am, I will choke down your potions and take various types of unknown prescription drugs and antibiotics without seeing a doctor, but I will_ _not_ _eat this garlic-soaked, deep-fried chicken._

She was surprised and disappointed by unwillingness to eat, but I refused to budge.With this refusal, my bowels were denied any additional fodder with which to play.They were relatively subdued on the five-hour trip to Santo Domingo.

***

I went to Santo Domingo with empty bowels but not with empty hands.During the final painful hours at my hosts' home, a number of visitors dropped by with parting gifts.I had hoped to travel light, but as one gift after another arrived it soon became apparent that I would not be doing so.Without commenting on the gifts, and without appearing to be an ingrate, for I was genuinely touched by the hospitality shown, here are the things I reluctantly packed into my bag that morning:two quart-sized jars of homemade tomato candy (leaking from unsealed lids), four (!) one-kilo balls of cheese, one large blob of homemade peanut butter wrapped in an old newspaper, a huge piece of dry cassava wrapped in old newspaper, a one-pound plastic container of table salt (!?!), a large black porcelain elephant, a bottle of wine, two large plastic bags full of cheap sugary candy, a large wooden object with the words "Republica Dominicana" painted on it, a calendar, and two pairs of frilly yellow underwear for my baby daughter.The load was heavy, unwanted and bulky, but still much appreciated – for I was aware of the sentiment behind the gifts.

The next morning, having arrived safely in the capital, I sat on a bench in a park and waited for some street urchins to appear.It did not take long before two little shoeshine boys came along and sat next to me.I explained to them that I had a big problem; I had to get rid of lots of things because I was about to fly out of the country, and I was afraid that they would not let me take the things on the plane.I showed the boys all the goodies (except the wine and cheese – hey, I am a greedy capitalistic pig after all.I was not going to give away the good stuff.)Then, wine and cheese safely tucked away in my bag, I asked them if they thought they could do me the big favour of relieving me of the rest of the things.With a serious look on their faces, they assured me that, yes, they could do me that favour.

They must have thought that they had won the lottery, and I was as relieved to get rid of the stuff as they were happy to receive it.

Soon thereafter, bearing a much lighter load, I negotiated with a taxi driver for the final trip to the airport.He wanted me to pay 250 pesos (19 dollars), but I bargained him down to 200 pesos.Needless to say, I felt pretty darn good about my negotiating ability.

Two blocks into the journey, the old driver pulled into a gas station and put a grand total of one gallon of gas into his tank – just enough to allow his decrepit vehicle to limp to the airport where he could collect the fare for the trip.As I sat there on the crusty and cracked back seat of the taxi, looking out the broken window of the rusted vehicle, it occurred to me that the driver probably needed those fifty pesos I had bargained him out of a lot more than I did.

All the way to the airport the driver acted as a tourist guide, pointing out and explaining things that we passed.I was touched by the fact that this man was so friendly and willing to please even though he was working for such a small amount of money.Clearly the old driver was a man of few resources.Believe me, there is something sad about seeing an elderly man wearing ragged clothes put one gallon of gas into a battered car just to keep it running until he collects the next fare.I was really moved by the man's situation.

When we got to the airport, however, instead of paying him the agreed-upon 200 pesos, I only gave him 100 and told him to report me to the police if he did not like it.I then kicked the side of his battered car and told him to get that piece of junk out of my sight.That _is_ the way to deal with impoverished third-worlders, isn't it?(Only joking!In fact, I gave him a substantial tip and did not kick the side of his car.)

A couple of hours later I was in an airplane flying north, once more leaving behind the country in which I had spent the three most enjoyable years of my adult life.

***

As I mentioned earlier, until the very end of my visit I was healthy throughout my final visit to Loma.I was thus able to see lots of friends and catch up on all the gossip.In nearly every home I visited I heard about the scandal of "the millionaires."There were some minor variations and embellishments in the versions of the tale, but the gist of the story was as consistent as it was fascinating.

The "millionaires" were three brothers who had gone to New York several years earlier.They had all managed to get factory jobs there, and were probably just getting by until one of them "hit the jackpot."There was a fire in the factory, and he was badly burned.The insurance company awarded him what must have been a massive amount of money in compensation, and the brothers decided to return to Loma.

They did so in style.Heads had surely turned when they drove into town, the owners of private cars.Most people there could not even afford a small motorcycle, or even a decent meal for that matter.There was only one paved street in town.And here they were, with their new cars.

The brothers built a large new house for themselves where they proceeded to hold court like royalty.They soon had a boat which they kept in the nearby coastal town of Monte Cristy.Unfortunately, they also brought drugs into town, and quite a few people began to get involved with drugs at their place.

Every night was a party night at the millionaire's house.Their mansion was the beginning and end of all social life in the small community.Young people were grateful for invitations to the all-night parties.The men showed their gratitude by treating the millionaires deferentially.Young women, I was told, also found ways to show their gratitude.

The scandal of the millionaires and their extravagant life style were pretty well winding down by the time I arrived for my visit.It ended less triumphantly than it began.Never having had money before, the brothers eventually managed to squander all of their fortune.The boat was the first casualty.As time went by, the brothers sold off the cars one by one.After the last car and the house had been sold, the burnt brother bought a small motorcycle and the two others bought tickets back to New York.

The burnt one later had to sell the motorcycle.He no longer has his choice of women.

### Chapter 3: Ecuador

"You expect me to shit in **THAT**?" I shouted incredulously at the Peace Corps nurse.Well, I did not actually _shout_ those words at her.I did not even say them to her, but I would have if I had just been a bit more assertive.Anyway, that was what I **thought** to myself as she handed me the small tin container.A quick glance at the receptacle was enough to know that it could never handle the load that was bound to come flying in its direction.That little pillbox could not even hold enough aspirins to cure a headache.How could it possibly be up to the heavy-duty task for which it was intended?

Sarcastic quips shot through my mind as the nurse handed the container to me, but I said nothing.I simply accepted her small offering, meekly thanking her as she placed it in my hand.

"When you have a bowel movement, you catch a sample in this container and bring it to my office in the morning," she said.

I nodded grimly.

There were so many things I wanted to tell her, but did not.For starters, I could have pointed out that a large bucket would have been a more appropriate receptacle.Did she really think that I could control the coming explosion?I longed to give her a detailed description of the high-velocity splatters I had been producing for the past couple of weeks so that she would realize what she was asking of me.

Instead of saying these things, though, I just nodded my head.

"Oh, and please do not drink any alcohol until you have taken the sample," she added as I was departing.

"Right."For the first time since I had entered her office, the word leaving my mouth actually corresponded to my thoughts.I figured that it would be no sacrifice to avoid alcohol until my next bowel movement.Especially since my next bowel movement was likely to occur soon.Very soon.In fact, I figured that if the nurse did not shut up fairly quickly, we might be scraping the sample off the floor of her office.

Almost immediately after bidding farewell to the kind but misguided nurse it became clear that not only my bowels were conspiring against me.Stepping out onto the sidewalk, fate intervened in the guise of an old friend.A beer-drinking friend.

"How about a drink, Wendell?"

"Sure," I replied enthusiastically, if not intelligently.

It could be argued that "No" would have been a better response to his question given the state of my intestines.However, to have refused the invitation, a guy would have to:a) have a spine and/or, b) employ logic in his decisions.Since neither of these applied in my case, I answered affirmatively without a moment's hesitation.

So off we went to the bar for some animated conversation.We had not seen each other for quite a while, so there was plenty to talk about.As we sat there, two conversations were taking place simultaneously.

While our words travelled horizontally back and forth across the table, there was a vertical, non-verbalized conversation taking place within my body.Unseen under the table, my intestines were sending frantic distress signals to my brain.My brain, occupied with the horizontal conversation, tried to ignore the messages from below.Eventually, however, it became clear that if I did not listen to my gut, I was going to shit in my pants.

"I think I had better go," I said abruptly and stood up.Rushing out the door, I headed for the cheap pension where I was staying.

Economical traveller that I was, I always ended up in overcrowded pensions filled with backpackers and other undesirables.The price of Ecuadorean pensions suited my budget very well, but they did have drawbacks.One of these drawbacks was the absence of en suite toilets.My preferred pension only had one toilet per floor.

With eight double rooms on each floor, that meant that sixteen people were sharing the same toilet.Lots of demand for a limited supply.For that reason I was not surprised when I got "home" to find a queue of people waiting their turn in the bathroom.Desperate, yes; surprised, no.

Impatiently awaiting my turn, I silently cursed those waiting in front of me.Bastards!What did they know about intestinal anguish?If they had possessed even a shred of decency, they would surely have let me go first.

Making matters worse, I could not help noticing that the bathroom had really bad acoustic insulation.I heard every sound produced in that toilet, and I knew that the people behind me were going to be treated to every sound effect that I produced.Even worse, I knew with depressing certainty that my blasts would likely be several decibels louder than those of the healthy individuals in front of me.

For that matter, given my abdominal bloating, I was probably going to shake the windows and rattle the walls of people two city blocks away

When my turn finally came, I lost no time in rushing into the bathroom.As my left hand was unfastening and pushing down my pants, my right hand was grasping for the small container in my shirt pocket.In the midst of my frenetic efforts, I recalled the nurse's words,"

" _When you have a bowel movement, you catch a sample in this container and bring it to my office in the morning_."

"Right!Catch a sample!" I reminded myself as my ass hovered over the tiny target.The diameter of the container, incidentally, could not have been greater than one inch.Maybe even smaller.

In the midst of my distress, time slowed down perceptibly; quite bizarrely I suddenly recalled an article I had read years earlier.It was written by an Air Force pilot who had been stationed on an aircraft carrier early in his career.In that article he described his first attempt at landing his warplane on the deck of the ship.As he approached the waiting carrier at high speed, his target seemed impossibly small.In his words, "As small as a postage stamp."It was with a sense of fear and futility that he approached the bobbing "postage stamp."

**I knew just how he felt!** As I cocked my ass into position, the likelihood of capturing a sample in that "postage stamp" of a container seemed remote.So remote, in fact, that I would have backed out of the attempt had I been able to do so.

Like the pilot in rapid descent, though, I was past the point of no return.Whatever decisions my brain might make were totally irrelevant.Yes, there were still nerves connecting my bowels to my brain, but the bowels were operating on auto pilot, fully in charge.

When Mount Vesuvius finally blew, I was pleasantly surprised to see that in spite of my earlier doubts I had indeed managed to capture a bit of the flying mess in the little tin container.Actually, it is an understatement to say that I had captured "a bit" of the mess.The truth is that I had absolutely filled the container.If the **whole** truth is to be told, it is even an understatement to say that I had filled the container.I would not have been exaggerating if, in the triumph of the moment I had exclaimed, "My cup runneth over!"

After that fateful explosion, it took a couple of minutes to regain my composure.In a daze, I looked slowly around the room, assessing the situation.Regarding the objective of capturing a sample, I had clearly gone above and beyond the call of duty.Unfortunately, there had been some collateral damage.Not only was my container overflowing, but my right hand and forearm – all the way up to the elbow – had managed to capture a large measure of stool sample.I felt like marching straight back to the nurse's office to show her what a good job I had done.She would surely have patted me on the head.

I also noticed that the back of the toilet had been hit by some friendly fire.It, too, had participated in the gathering of the stool sample.Surveying the mess, I was keenly aware that there was a line of people on the other side of the door, waiting impatiently for their turn in the bathroom.My hunch was that they would not appreciate the mess on the back of the toilet as much as I did.Not everybody has a keen sense of humor when it comes to excrement.

Leaving the room to find cleaning materials was not an option, since the people outside would never accept me coming and going while they waited.I had been in the toilet for quite a while already.What to do?What to do?

Peace Corps volunteer that I was, I decided to solve the problem using locally available resources.The trouble was that there were not many resources available locally.There were no cleaning materials in the room, and the only roll of toilet paper was nearly empty.Not much help there.There were no towels or washcloths to press into service either.As we say in southern Indiana, "I was up shit creek without a paddle."

This expression had never before seemed so appropriate.

In spite of the apparent hopelessness of the situation, I did manage to clean up most of the mess.When I departed from the bathroom, I did so knowing that there was precious little evidence of the drama which had played out there.Without going into detail, I will simply mention that when I entered the room the most prominent stains on my T-shirt were yellow under-arm perspiration stains.This was no longer the case when I marched out.

I was pleased with my cleanup operation, but I imagine that when I left the bathroom my face bore a resemblance to that of a puppy which has just been caught chewing on its master's new shoes.The "please do not hurt me" expression on my face must have touched the hearts of the people waiting behind the door.Even though they must have heard the explosion and wondered why I had remained in the bathroom so long, nobody ever said a word about it.

At least not in my presence.

***

I was in Ecuador because my experience in the Dominican Republic had been so entertaining and rewarding that I hoped to keep the good times rolling.I extended my Peace Corps contract and transferred to Ecuador.Many aspects of my life were different in Ecuador, but the turbulent nature of my bowels remained constant.As in Dominican Republic, my comings and goings were largely limited by what my intestines allowed me to do.

Be that as it may, Ecuador had a lot more to offer than just a bad case of diarrhea.In fact, fascinating and unexpected things seemed to happen there on a daily basis.One wonderful memory I have of the country is that of the unexpected arrival of a travelling carnival in my home city of Santo Domingo de los Colorados.

The carnival was, overall, a pathetic collection of worn-out rides and booths, but it contained one attraction which will remain with me to my dying day.This unforgettable attraction was a wax-museum-in-a-tent.The tent, small and weathered, had a crude, hand-painted sign above the entrance which proudly stated that the museum's collection had come "straight from Paris." Surprised that a French collection would be housed in such modest surroundings, I could not resist paying the minimal entrance fee and stepping inside.Once inside, I was amazed to discover that almost the entire "French" collection consisted of wax body parts which had quite obviously been discarded by a medical school.How amazing to think that someone had transported all those wax body parts directly from Paris to this out-of-the-way tent in Latin America!

Hanging on one wall were nine wax abdomens of a pregnant woman.Each abdomen held a progressively bigger wax fetus.Across from the wax abdomens, the visitor was treated to a collection of wax faces, each illustrating a different kind of medical abnormality.Posted under each disfigured face a file card, yellow with age, explained the affliction portrayed in wax.One of the most heart-rending (yet endearing) faces was that of a boy with a cleft palate.

The affliction on the most memorable face was also the most difficult to comprehend.Had it not been for the helpful explanation provided below, I suspect that most visitors would never have figured out the affliction depicted in wax.The right side of this face seemed perfectly normal, but it looked as if someone had taken an ice-cream scoop and removed a scoopful of wax from the left cheek.The indentation was painted bright red.The yellow card under the face read, "Terrorist injured by hand grenade."

Viewing the collection of wax abdomens and faces only took a couple minutes, but this fascinating French collection still had so much more to offer the visitor!Across the middle of the tent the owners had placed upright sheets of plywood, thus forming two interior compartments.The first compartment, with the wax fetuses and deformed faces, was intended for the general public.

Cut into one of the plywood sheets, though, was a narrow opening which led to the other compartment.Above this door hung a small cardboard sign which read, "Must be over 18 to enter."A bed sheet had been draped over the opening to the Forbidden Section.I imagine that this sheet had been white at some point, but by the time I encountered it the color had turned to an intriguing yellowish gray.It also sported a collection of suspicious-looking stains here and there.

"Should I indulge in the secret delights on the other side of that disgusting sheet?"I wondered.Not surprisingly, I gave myself the green light.I was over eighteen and I figured that a little more French culture could not hurt me.Thus determined, I gingerly moved the stained sheet to one side and entered the adults-only area.As I did this, I made a mental note to either sterilize or amputate the hand that had touched the stained sheet.

Immediately upon entering the forbidden zone, I was delighted to find myself facing a whole wall of pink waxen buttocks.Just as in the general public area of the exhibition, there was a yellowing handwritten file card under each figure, labelling the affliction of that particular set of buttocks.

The very first butt I viewed was the most memorable of all.However, I initially had some difficulty determining exactly what it was that I was viewing.The buttocks in question hung from the wall almost exactly at eye level, and were the first thing my eye fell upon after entering the room.Only inches from my face were the two pink cheeks with a swollen, angry-looking red blob right in the middle.The file card below read, "Hemorrhoids."Aha! I thought, disappointed that I had not figured it out myself.As a frequent sufferer, I should have recognized those hemorrhoids for what they were.

After spending several quiet moments reverently observing the hemorrhoids, I slowly worked my way past a whole variety of other afflictions, most of which have faded from my memory.I do remember one other pair of cheeks quite clearly, though, for they were unique in the collection.Instead of having an inflamed anus, like so many of the others, this set of buttocks had long red scratches running from the top of each bun to the bottom.

Inflamed anuses were a dime a dozen in that tent, but those parallel red lines intrigued me.Always eager for a challenge, I covered the file card with the hand that I had contaminated by touching the sheet.

Try as I might, I could not determine the affliction and eventually had to concede defeat.The file card below the striped buttocks read, "Motorcyclist who fell off back of motorcycle."So obvious!Why had I not guessed it?!?

Reluctantly turning the corner at the end of the buttocks wall, I found myself staring at the "penis wall."The penis wall was not as exhaustive as the buttocks wall, but it still housed an impressive and educational collection.I must admit that before turning that corner to begin my walk along the penis wall I had never imagined that so much penile misery and many venereal diseases existed.By the time I reached the far wall, though, I had been enlightened.And frightened.

Midway along the penis wall, my right hand involuntarily found its way into my pocket and gently reassured my own modest but healthy member.It purred in response to the gentle attention it was receiving.

I left the penis wall behind with a sense of relief and vowed to myself that I would never have sex again.This might seem like a bold and unrealistic resolution to some, but given my success rate with women I knew I had a fairly good chance of sticking to it.

The final exhibition in the adults-only section was a step-by-step illustration of a sex-change operation.Four wax torsos on display illustrated the steps involved.Protruding from the first wax torso was a robust male member.Attached to the second torso was a mere shadow of the once-proud cock.All that was left was a withered little stub, hardly worthy of a place even on the penis wall.The third figure had no penis at all.The yellow card propped up against the base of the figure explained that the penis had been surgically removed and a vagina had been created in its place.Curiously, though, the fourth figure sprouted a cock once more.This cock was more vigorous-looking than the withered one on the second figure.

I assume that the person arranging the figures was not paying close attention and had placed them in the wrong order.However, this seemed like small mistake given the high quality of the exhibition – and one which in no way detracted from the overall effect.

I departed from the worn-out tent feeling troubled about a number of things, but confident that I had gotten excellent value for the money invested.

***

The carnival only stayed in town for a few days, but there was a longer-term local phenomenon which could qualify as a "side show" of sorts.Members of a tribe of indigenous people called the Colorado Indians lived nearby, and their visits to town provided a diversion each weekend for culturally insensitive clowns like me.

In the past, long before I moved to Ecuador, the women of the Colorado tribe had worn a small colourful striped skirt wrapped around their waists.Nothing else.Unfortunately for me, things had changed by the time I got there, and only the very old women still walked around topless, their withered ancient breasts dangling unceremoniously.The younger women, either because of contact with missionaries or merely contact with the encroaching modern society, had changed their style of dress.They still wore the small skirt over their lower half, but above they wore brilliantly white well-starched bras over their breasts.No blouses, just the white bras.The sight of these women marching along in their white bras amongst the stream of more conventionally dressed "regular people" added a whole new dimension to the pleasurable pastime of people-watching in Santo Domingo.That said, I could not help wishing that those young women had adhered more closely to tradition.Especially the good-looking ones.

The older men of the Colorado tribe, like the women, also wore little striped skirts wrapped around their waists.The younger males, however, tended to opt for trousers.Somehow I was less disappointed in the young men's lack of adherence to tradition.

My female co-workers who, on public busses, had sat across from the traditionally dressed older men assured me that the little skirt was the **only** garment they had on.I never peered up their skirts, so I cannot confirm this.In fact, I made it a point never to even sit across from the Colorado men for the simple reason that I did not trust myself.After years of honing the ability to discreetly look up every skirt in my vicinity, I feared that my eyes would automatically zero in on the men's skirts.And I really did not want to see what was hidden there.

As interesting as their clothing was, however, this was not the most notable feature of the men in the Colorado tribe.Rather, it was their hair.They shaved the sides of their head, leaving only a Mohican-style row of hair running up the middle of their head.Unlike any self-respecting Mohican, however, their hair did not stick straight up.The Colorado men slathered a bright red

substance into their hair, so that it was plastered down rather than sticking up.As a result, instead of a Mohican ridge on their heads a thick and shiny red plastic visor seemed to perch atop their otherwise bald heads.

It created quite an unusual effect.In the words of one of my colleagues, the men were "just about the strangest looking critters you could ever hope to see."Coming from a Peace Corps Volunteer who had undergone three months of cultural sensitivity training, this was quite a mouthful.

Of course, I was there thirty years ago.Nowadays, given the body piercing, tattooing and head-shaving habits of Western youth, the Colorado Indians I marvelled at would probably seem quite conventional.

***

With its itinerant carnivals and colourful indigenous people, Santo Domingo was an interesting place to live.If ever one did get bored with life in the big city, however, there were several interesting villages to visit nearby.I managed to catch the occasional glimpse of rural life thanks to acquaintances that lived in these villages.

Based on my brief exposure to these villages, I concluded that Ecuadorian rural life generally consisted of long periods of boredom punctuated by the occasional scandal.The most exciting scandal that I was aware of involved an itinerant "dentist" who served several villages in the area.He had a one-size-fits-all type of dentistry; any tooth with a problem was extracted.No tooth, no problem.

One unfortunate boy went to him for treatment (i.e. removal) of a front tooth.Sadly it was one of his permanent teeth.Even more sadly, the dentist accidentally extracted the wrong front tooth.Realizing his error, the conscientious health care provider then extracted the decayed tooth as well.

The fair-minded professional only charged for the extraction of the decayed tooth, but the parents of the now-toothless one were up in arms about the affair.In a community where few interesting events occur, this incident provided plenty of fodder for indignant conversations long after the fact.

In another nearby village I had the good fortune of meeting a set of identical twin brothers.They were typical young Latin American boys in most respects, but their names were definitely not typical Latin American names.Their parents apparently were not satisfied with ordinary Spanish names like "Carlos" or "Jose", so they gave the English name of "George" to one of the boys.The less fortunate twin got the name "Washington".Maybe giving such names to kids cannot be considered scandalous, but this might be a case of a scandal-in-the-making because I figure that young Washington will realize one day what a stupid name his parents stuck him with.At that point he might feel honor-bound to slaughter them.

Even though it will be justified homicide, it will still create a scandal.

Back in Santo Domingo

While it is true that I occasionally visited nearby villages, ninety percent of my time in Ecuador was spent in the city of Santo Domingo.Not all of that time, of course, was spent in Parisian wax museums.Nor were the Colorado Indians in town every day for my gawking pleasure.When distractions such as these were not available, I lived a rather sedate existence.

The highlight of most days was a meal in a restaurant in the company of other underemployed volunteers.We ate most of our meals in the cheapest restaurants in town, so any comments I make about the dining experience in Santo Domingo only apply to the greasy-spoon sector of the industry.The pleasure derived from our meals together had far more to do with the conversation and beer than the food.

For me, the napkins were the restaurants' most fascinating feature.Things have surely changed since I was there, but at that time the napkins were thin pieces of brown paper which seemed to be waxed on both sides.It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that wax paper is not the best choice for a napkin.No absorbency whatsoever.You try to wipe the abundant grease from your mouth, and then you discover you have greasy cheeks.

Thank God the toilet paper was not similar.

My most memorable meal in Ecuador was a simple bowl of egg-drop soup in a Chinese restaurant.(Yes, Chinese restaurants are as common in Ecuador as they are everywhere else in the world.)Several bites into my meal I noticed that one of the so-called "egg drops" looked suspiciously like a grub.A big juicy one at that!Looking more closely, I realized that the suspicious-looking egg drop was, indeed, a grub.Disgusting!

Indignantly, I called the waiter over to investigate.Peering down into the hot liquid, the waiter concurred that it was a grub floating in my soup.Apologizing profusely, he borrowed my spoon and fished the grub out of the soup.Then he marched off, spoon in hand, to the kitchen.Moments later he returned and ceremoniously presented me with a new spoon.Not a new bowl of soup, but a new spoon with which to continue consuming my grub-infested soup!

It was not bad, by the way.Grubs seem to add a certain je ne sais quoi to a bowl of egg-drop soup.

***

I am diverging here, but since I am on the subject of food I want to mention a surprise visitor that I received while in Santo Domingo.The woman, who was named Ingrid, had just completed her two-year contract with the Peace Corps in Guatemala.Ingrid had spent her time there working as a nutritionist for indigenous women.Before returning to the United States she wanted to travel around Latin America for a while, and looked me up in Ecuador at the suggestion of a mutual friend.

To Ingrid, I represented free lodging.

To me, she represented an almost unbelievable opportunity.Ingrid was a slim and very attractive blonde.When she introduced herself and mentioned that she would like to stay with me, I simply could not believe my luck.It seemed that ripe fruit had fallen right into my lap.Even though I had sworn that I would never have sex again after observing the penis wall at the museum, I was perfectly willing to break that vow in the case of Ingrid.OK, she might have a venereal disease and my cock might end up more withered than the one on the wax sex-change torso, but so what?Looking at Ingrid, that seemed like a small price to pay.

Even though she was unaware of my solemn vow of celibacy, it soon became clear that Ingrid had no intention of causing me to break that vow.If my cock is small and withered now, it is because of genetics and old age.Not because of anything I did to Ingrid.Unfortunately.

Anyway, while Ingrid and I were busy not having sex, she told me about some of her experiences in Guatemala.She mentioned that the women she worked with tended to become stocky as they matured.Part of her job was to encourage them to eat healthier diets so that they could control their weight more effectively.During one of her lectures on diet and wise food choices, a fat woman asked Ingrid how she managed to stay so thin.

In her faulty Spanish she tried to tell them, "When I get hungry, I eat a cucumber." (as opposed to something more fattening.)A direct translation of this sentence from Spanish to English, would be:"When I have hunger, I eat a cucumber."Unfortunately for her, when she told this to the women gathered there she confused the word for hunger (hambre) with the word for man (hombre), so that what she actually said to the stocky women standing round her was, "When I have a man, I eat a cucumber." A hearty round of giggling followed that explanation.

Looking at Ingrid as she told me this story, I could not help wishing that I could fatten her up a bit.I swear that I would have been willing to hand feed that woman just to see if she would follow the diet plan she explained to the Guatemalan women.

Drinking Habits

Like people virtually everywhere, Ecuadorians both derive pleasure and create problems for themselves with alcohol.In the communities where I worked, the most common alcoholic drink was a powerful clear liquid.It was produced commercially, but there was also a lot of home brewing going on.Based on my observations, it seemed that proper etiquette required one to drink it straight, at room temperature, from small glasses.It seemed to me that the men did nearly all the drinking, and I sometimes found myself obliged to drink along with the guys.

I could not stand the stuff, but I did not want to appear stand-offish to the people I associated with.On several occasions I noticed that the guys I was drinking with were quite sociable as they drank the first three or four glasses.After that, conversation did not seem to be required, expected or even possible.

In the cantinas of the small villages scattered across coastal Ecuador it was not hard to find men in near-catatonic states at any time of day or night.A friend of mine, Lenny, once described the scene when he went into a small cantina for an afternoon drink.He seated himself at an unoccupied table in the small cantina and was soon joined by two local men who migrated unsteadily from a nearby table.They did not speak to Lenny, but they did enjoy several drinks in his company.Heaven only knows how long they had been drinking before Lenny entered the cantina.After about an hour of drinking in silence, one of the gentlemen turned his head and vomited on to the concrete floor.When he finished vomiting, he turned around and finished his drink.Then he ordered another.

The third man at the table seemed to take no notice of his vomiting.He was apparently too wrapped up in his thoughts, assuming that he had any.A few minutes later number three leaned back precariously in his wooden chair, lost his balance and fell to the floor where he lay in an unconscious stupor.The man who had vomited moments earlier nudged Lenny with his elbow and slurred the joyful observation, "Heh, heh.Look at him."After this insightful comment, he fell asleep.

When Lenny left the bar a few moments later, one man was lying unconscious on the floor and the other was sound asleep, with his head on the table.It was about six in the evening.

***

Santo Domingo de los Colorados lies at the foot of the Andes mountains, so I had the opportunity to drive up the mountains now and then.Based on what I observed, I would say that the impoverished set in the mountains had very similar drinking habits to their counterparts on the plains below.With an Ecuadorian friend, I once travelled through a small mountain village where a local festival was in full swing.It amazed me to see the quantity of alcohol being consumed by the indigenous men.

Ever the perceptive visitor, I commented on this to my friend, "Wow, Nestor, those Indians sure can hold their liquor!"

"You might not be so convinced of that by the time we go home."Nestor confidently predicted.

He was not wrong.

That evening as we slowly drove along the dirt road leading away from the village, the side of the road was regularly punctuated by the sitting figures of stoical-looking old Indian women.Lying in the ditch behind each of these women was the reclining and unconscious figure of the good-timin' guy she was married to.

I wonder if these women look forward to village celebrations with as much enthusiasm as their husbands.Unlikely, I would guess.

***

After spending three years in the Dominican Republic, I only spent one year in Ecuador.There were many reasons for the brief duration of my stay there, and most of the reasons were dead animals.As part of my Peace Corps assignment I worked with rural youth clubs, which were very similar to 4H clubs in the USA.My base was a cattle breeding ranch which had been founded many years earlier by the Peace Corps and later transferred to the Ecuadorean ministry of agriculture.

Soon after my arrival at the ranch, we established a breeding center for rabbits and guinea pigs, both of which appear on Ecuadorian tables.The idea for establishing this center was that we would distribute the animals produced there to the members of the youth clubs so that they could provide meat for their families.We quickly encountered a major problem, though.Really major.

The problem was that our breeding center proved far more effective at killing animals than breeding them.

Our guinea pigs seemed willing to cooperate.They produced lots of cute little guinea pig babies very soon after we purchased them; unfortunately the babies all seemed to die within a day of their birth.Some of them simply disappeared.We eventually came to the conclusion that the mothers were killing their own offspring and, in some cases, eating them.That did not seem right to me.After all, **we** were the ones who were supposed to eat them.

We probably should have found some way to punish/torture the mother guinea pigs for their misbehavior, but there was no time for retribution; the mothers also started dying.No time to teach them a lesson!

The rabbit project, on the other hand, started out wonderfully.The bunnies did just as they were supposed to do; unlike the guinea pigs, they bred like rabbits.Then, just when it seemed that the project was going to be a whopping success, the rabbit center became infected with the deadly infection myxomatosis.One by one and then two by two the rabbits became infected and died.Pretty soon the rabbit cages were as empty as the guinea pig enclosures.No breeding was taking place in my breeding station.

It looked like the members of the youth clubs were going to have to get puppies.

After the deaths of all the guinea pigs and then the rabbits, my credibility with the administrator of the ranch was not very high.Superstitious person that I am, it occurred to me that pretty soon the cattle might start dying if I did not get the hell out of there fast.So I did.

Anyway, Ronald Reagan had just been elected president of the United States.As long as he was in charge, I did not want to be associated with any branch of the US government.

The decision to leave was not too difficult, but once I had made that decision I had a more difficult decision to make – what was I going to do with the rest of my life?I had a very clear idea of what I did **not** want to do (stay in Ecuador and continue to kill innocent small animals) but a much hazier vision of what to do after the killing stopped.

Fortunately, the day before my departure I bumped into a volunteer who had only recently arrived in the Santo Domingo area, and we decided to have lunch together.Knowing that I was leaving, she asked the obvious question, "So, what are your plans when you get back home?"

"No plan yet."

"Really?You're leaving tomorrow and you don't have any idea about what you're going to do?!?"

"Yea, that's about right."

"Do you like living abroad?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever thought about going back to college and getting a degree in linguistics?"

"No.Why would I do that?"

"Because then you could teach English just about anywhere in the world."

"Wow!That sounds like a good idea!"

A week later I was enrolled in the linguistics department at Indiana University.Just as the young volunteer had predicted, I found that once I had the degree I was able to get English language teaching jobs just about anywhere in the world.I owe a great debt to that woman for her suggestion; it definitely shaped my future in a positive way.

Unfortunately, her future did not turn out so positively.I heard through mutual acquaintances that not long after our lunch meeting she was taken out of her home in a straightjacket and flown back to the USA for psychological treatment.

### Chapter 4: Saudi Arabia

A year and a half later, armed with my M.A. in linguistics, I decided that my volunteering days were over.It was time to become a capitalistic language missionary, spreading the gospel of the English language.The plan was to go forth and teach all nations.Well, at least the nations that were willing to pay me a big salary.

One problem with this plan was the fact that I really had no idea how to go about looking for a job in the ESL world, and by the time my last day at university rolled around, I had no job.

I had not even applied for one.

Then, as I was walking out of the linguistics office for literally the last time, I spotted a paper notice on the bulletin board.It turned out to be an advertisement from Lockheed Aircraft seeking ESL teachers for their training program in Saudi Arabia.That night I sent them my resume before going to bed.

The next morning I went home, withdrew my last nine hundred dollars from the bank, and headed west.I planned to travel until my money ran out and then seek refuge in my parents' home.They were unaware of my plan.

The first stop on my big trip out west was my sister's house in Denver.Upon arrival, she informed me that mother had called and I was to call home.I called home to discover that Lockheed had left a number to call.I called.Two days later I was in Ontario, California attending a three-day orientation session and one week later I was in Saudi Arabia.Sometimes things happen quickly.

Getting There

Single and impoverished at the age of 28, I jumped at this unexpected opportunity to teach English in Saudi Arabia.Lockheed Aircraft's contract was to train Warrant Officers in the Royal Saudi Air Force, and they needed English teachers.I fulfilled all three of their requirements:a warm body, male genitalia and an M.A. in linguistics.So off I went in search of adventure and petrol dollars!

Oh, yeah, and also to teach English.

This was my first flight from West to East.Prior to this opportunity, all my flights had been in a North-South direction.Since there are no direct flights to Saudi Arabia from Indiana, I had to change planes at JFK airport in New York.That brief visit to JFK turned out to be a bittersweet experience.

I had hardly had time to sit down and begin gawking at my fellow travelers when an attractive young lady sat next to me.To my delight, she soon dropped her boarding pass and bent over to pick it up.This gave me the opportunity to peer down her blouse, which I did.To my greater delight, I discovered that she was not wearing a bra.

I was just as pleased as punch to see her breasts, but the pleasant viewing moment was marred by a sudden realization.Even as I was in the challenging process of twisting my head to get a better view, it struck me that her firm young breasts might be the last of their kind that I would see for the next 24 months.This realization made the thought of a two-year contract in the Saudi Arabian desert far less appealing.

Fortunately, as things turned out, the two-year no-breast drought forecast was inaccurate.I could not have guessed this, though, as I eagerly peered down the young woman's blouse.

Sixteen hours and thousands of miles later I arrived in Riyadh, where a man in a company van met me and whisked me to the Lockheed compound.It was the middle of the night, so I went straight to bed.I did not sleep much, though.All through the night I fitfully tossed back and forth, wondering what I had got myself into.

The following morning the same man and van whisked me to Lockheed's main office in Riyadh, where I met the company's human relations representative, a Welshman named Neil.Neil muttered a few pleasantries and then began briefing me on my teaching assignment in the Kingdom.Eventually, he took a document out of a large manila envelope which he was holding.He silently began to read the document before looking up and announcing joyfully that I had been assigned to teach in the city of Dhahran.

"Oh, is that good?"I asked innocently.One site seemed as good as the next to me.I was equally uninformed about all of them, but the fact that he seemed so tickled made me think it must be a good assignment.

"Very good!" was his enthusiastic response."Dhahran has a lot going for it.You should be VERY happy with this assignment."Then, leaning over the table and giving me a conspiratorial wink, he added, "You could have been stuck in some god-forsaken place like Tabuk, out in the absolute fucking middle of nowhere.Some poor bugger is going to get sent up there this week.They also have an opening for an English teacher."

As God is my witness, those words were not even out of his mouth before a tall British gentleman walked into the office carrying a different manila envelope.

"There's been a mix-up, Neil.This is the envelope for Mr. Blubaum."

Neil opened the second envelope and read the enclosed document.Then he smiled weakly at me."I'll tell you what," he said, "In spite of what I said a minute ago about Tabuk, it is not such a bad place.In fact, a lot of the fellows up there wouldn't change sites even if they were given the opportunity."

Right.Thanks, Neil.

One day later I was in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, living on a compound with seventy other men, most of whom were old enough to be my father.

Two days later a company van hauled me to the language center on the air base, where I joined my six male colleagues, most of whom were old enough to be my father.

Three days later I met my students.All men.Not old enough to be my father.

Only half a week in Tabuk, and I already felt like there was something missing from my life.Like the female half of the world's population.

With no women in sight, things looked pretty bleak.I tried to adjust and find ways to compensate for the lack of female companionship.For example, when one of my students bent over to pick up a dropped pencil in class, I instinctively tried to peer down his uniform, but somehow the thrill was gone.

Call me demanding, but looking down a young soldier's uniform simply does not compare with looking down a bra-less woman's blouse in JFK airport.

***

As it turned out, Neil was right about Tabuk.It was not such a bad place.Yes, it was, as he noted, "in the absolute fucking middle of nowhere."However, as far as god-forsaken places in the middle of the desert go, it turned out to be OK.

Not far from the Lockheed compound stood a military hospital which represented a sort of oasis for the good men at Lockheed.The hospital was staffed by Western nurses, and the hospital administrators generously provided a bus service for the women to visit the compounds of Lockheed and British Aerospace.Both of these compounds were populated by scores of lonely men, so this service was greatly appreciated.The sophisticated gentlemen on the Lockheed compound showed their appreciation by referring to the bus which transported the women as "the fuck truck."

Each evening the truck, er, I mean, the bus would make the rounds, stopping first at the Lockheed compound which was closer to the hospital.A handful of women would get off, but most women stayed on the bus, however, preferring to continue on to the British Aerospace compound.This was not surprising since the men at British Aerospace were younger and somewhat less prone to alcoholism.

The women who opted for Lockheed generally had some kind of physical or mental problem, such as morbid obesity, schizophrenia or six fingers on each hand.The words "walking wounded" often sprang to mind as these women trudged through our compound gates.Anything is better than nothing, though, and the desperados living at Lockheed tried to see things in a positive light.For example, at the sight of an old woman hobbling through the gate of the compound, admiring observations could be heard all around, "I'll bet she was a real looker 20 years ago!""She's got a bit of a limp, but I've seen a lot worse!""She can limp straight into my bed if wants!"To a desperate man, I guess, the glass is always half full.

Nevertheless, the occasional needle in the haystack, i.e. a good-looking woman, would accidentally wander onto our compound.My wife of thirty-one years stepped off that bus one evening.

Liisa knew the reputation of the men on the Lockheed compound and had spent her first year in Tabuk avoiding the place.Luckily for me, however, she had a coworker named Tonya who frequented Lockheed on a daily basis.Tonya, like Liisa, was a Finn.Unlike Liisa, though, Tonya weighed about a hundred kilos and consumed vast amounts of alcohol every evening.Somehow Tonya managed to drag Liisa along with her one evening, and I had the good fortune to meet her.It was lust at first sight.

Several other men on the compound felt the same way about her, and to this day I do not understand why she chose me.I did not do anything special; in fact, I was so shy that I hardly spoke to her that first night.

Sometimes I think she chose me over the other fellows because of the things I did **not** do.For example, unlike the others, I did not swear loudly in her presence.Nor did I paw her while dancing, vomit in her presence or indecently expose myself.Whatever the reason, we immediately hit it off and have been together ever since.

Even now, over thirty years later, Liisa is still my most treasured souvenir from Tabuk.To this day, I remain fonder of her than I am of the mosque-shaped alarm clock which I bought there.Each morning the alarm clock rings out the prayer call to wake this sleeping infidel, and I offer up a small prayer of thanks that I am no longer in Saudi Arabia.

The Beach

The Red Sea, only a two-hour drive from Tabuk, is a marvel of nature.The long sand beaches along the sea are beautiful and tourist-free.The coral reefs along the Saudi coast are brilliant and in pristine condition.Small wonder, then, that Lockheed employees and their families spent as much time as possible at the beach.

Three Western companies, Lockheed among them, had small cabins on a private beach near the Jordanian border.The Lockheed cabin was situated between the two other cabins, one of which was occupied by a British company and the other by a French company.

The French guys, true to stereotype, were a very active and fun-loving group.Their behavior on the beach contrasted notably with that of the employees of the two Anglo companies.The British and Americans spent their time eating and lying on the beach, with an occasional brief swim before eating more.The Frenchmen spent their time riding powerboats, flirting with their girlfriends, snorkeling, windsurfing and so forth.

Even at mealtime, the Frenchmen were different from their Anglo counterparts.While the English-speaking beach boys were grimly eating baked beans straight from the can, the Frenchmen were chatting and singing as they barbecued the octopus and grouper that they had caught during their afternoon dives.Then, as we Anglo/Americans washed our cold beans down with cups of slightly salty, lukewarm tea, we could hear the sound of corks popping off the illegal bottles of wine in the French cabin.

It is hard to explain why, but there is something about the sound of wine bottles being opened next door that makes a big paper-cupful of salty lukewarm tea surprisingly unappealing.No matter how much sugar you put in it, there is a lingering bitterness which defies explanation.

A midnight stroll along the beach revealed another contrast between the Francophones and the Anglophones.Starting at the south end of the beach and heading north, one first passed the British cabin, then the Lockheed cabin and finally the French cabin.The walls of the first two cabins virtually shook with all the snoring, grunting and power farting that was going on inside.It was enough to make an English speaker feel disgusted... and yet rather proud.

From the French cabin a different sort of sound passed through the walls.Female moans of pleasure pierced the walls as the Frenchmen continued their diving.Nocturnal passersby could not help but be excited.Especially passersby like me who had their ears plastered to the exterior wall of the cabin.

In spite of all these unfavorable comparisons between the situation of the Frenchmen and that which I found myself in, I did not harbor any anti-Frog sentiments.Our relations were cordial.So what if those bastards got all the booze, women and good food while we lived a Spartan existence next door.Why should that make me or anybody else resentful, right?

Besides, this cordiality occasionally paid dividends.No, they did not let me get down on all fours and lick up the scraps from under their table as I would have enjoyed doing.Nor did they let me touch their girlfriends.However, other small privileges did come my way.For example, they once let me water ski behind their power boat.

I had never skied before and wasn't sure that I even wanted to, but the presence of several young women in the boat compelled me to try.My male ego would not allow me to appear a coward when they made the offer.Besides, I figured, water skiing looked fun.

In spite of my initial reservations, I agreed to go with them, and the Frenchmen kindly loaded me into their boat.Their girlfriends were in the boat, too, and I soon found myself squeezed in among the young women.This was a wonderful dividend from the cordial relations.We all pressed ourselves tightly together in the small boat, and away from the beach it speeded.A couple hundred meters offshore, they cut the engine and the boat came to a gentle halt.

"Here is where you get off zee boat," Pierre informed me.

I would have preferred to remain there stuffed between the women, copping the occasional sneak feel, but I dutifully leaped into the water.And then, for the first time in my life, I found myself bobbing in the water behind a powerful speedboat.A person who has never tried to ski cannot imagine how exciting and frightening such a situation can be.Prior to placing me in this precarious position, the only advice the Frenchmen had given me was, "Hang on to zee rope and crouch until zee skis have lifted you to zee surface of zee water.Zen you stand up."

"Doesn't sound too hard," I thought.Then, with a roar and a whoosh, the boat and I were shooting forward.Almost miraculously, I noticed zat zee skis had lifted me onto zee surface of zee water.I skimmed across the water in my crouching position, my butt rhythmically slapping against the surface of the water.

"Now, stand up!" I reminded myself.

However, when I made the attempt to do so, I lost my balance and had to resume the crouching position.Once again my butt was slapping rhythmically against the surface of the water.My knuckles turned white from exertion and fear.Again and again I tried to will myself into a standing position.Each attempt failed and I would return to the crouching position, with my butt playing the same old tune on the water's surface.

In the boat ahead I could see the Frenchmen gesticulating wildly, frustration written all over their pointy faces.In my growing misery I also noted a small group of spectators on the beach.Their amusement seemed to grow in proportion to the Frenchmen's frustration.After one final attempt to stand, I decided that I had had enough humiliation for the day.I let go of the rope, wishing that I could sink to the bottom of the sea.I did not sink, though.Instead I began to bob gently in the cool pristine waters of the Red Sea.

As I gently bobbed up and down with the waves, I had what might qualify as the most uncomfortable feeling I have ever experienced in my life.Without understanding why, I knew with depressing certainty that I was about to shit into my swimming shorts.Try as I might, I could not hold back the load that rushed forward.Shocked and disgusted, I felt my bowels unload abundantly into my swimwear.That is, I thought they were unloading into my swimwear.Reality turned out to be even more distressing.

My swimming short were oversized and they had no lining, so actually my bowels unleashed their fateful load directly into the previously pristine water of the Red Sea.Making matters worse, the turds turned out to be "floaters."Under normal circumstances I would not have cared whether the turds floated or sank.These were not normal circumstances, however, and those turds were incriminating evidence of the unspeakable event which had just taken place.

Far ahead of me, seemingly in slow motion, the Frenchmen circled the boat to come back and pluck me out of the water.Meanwhile, floating all around me was a flock of sea turds.

"Please, oh please, drive slowly!" I thought as the Frenchmen pointed their boat in my direction."God, if you're really up there, smite those European heathens and their bloody boat!"

In spite of my pleas for divine intervention, the boat just got closer and closer.As they approached, I tried to hold my head above water in such a way that I appeared to be relaxed and stationary to those in the boat.Under the surface, though, my arms were flailing wildly in a vain attempt to scatter my faithful brown flock.

When the boat pulled up alongside me, I quickly tossed the skis up and shouted, "Thanks a lot!You can go now!I'll just swim back to the shore from here!"To my immense relief, they seemed as eager to get rid of me as I was to get rid of them.Without out a word they zoomed off.

Alone again with my offspring, I tried to make sense of things.On the boat, the Frenchmen were surrounded by beautiful young women.In the water, I was surrounded by a circle of floating turds.

Now, you tell me, is life fair?

I generally try not to think of myself as a victim, but I must admit that at that moment I felt like I had received the short end of life's stick.This feeling was magnified a few minutes later when I made it back to shore.After dragging my humiliated self out of the water to join my girlfriend and future wife, we walked in silence back towards the cabin.

"Things could be worse," I thought."At least she doesn't know what happened out there."

Knowing how fickle women can be, I reasoned that she might not respect me as much if she knew that I was prone to shitting in my pants.

Suddenly, I felt another painful wave in my intestines.Panicking, I let go of Liisa's hand and jumped off a low cliff back into the sea, where I unleashed another shitload under her astonished eyes

Fortunately for me, she turned out to be very understanding after I explained the whole situation.That is not to say, though, that she was impressed by my performance.

Impressed no, insightful yes.Liisa was the one who figured out what had caused all the shit to happen.In my attempt to ski, my butt was doing more than beating out a catchy tune as it slapped against the water.It was also receiving a supersized seawater enema.I do not recommend this to others as there are gentler ways to irrigate one's colon.

Those weekends at the beach sure were fun.

The Classroom

Of course, most of my time was not spent at the beach.Since I was a teacher, I was obliged to spend a lot of time in the classroom with my Saudi students.They were generally amiable guys, but they found it very difficult to stay awake during their English lessons.There were probably many reasons for this, not least of which were my monotonous voice and uninspired teaching techniques.

Early on in my career I discovered that by carefully limiting the inflection range of my voice I could put half of my students to sleep within the first ten minutes of any class.This was a technique which I frequently utilized in Tabuk, nearly always successfully.No brag, just fact.

Another reason for the students' drowsiness was the fact that they often stayed up all night visiting with their buddies.Exhausted from the previous night's socializing, they had every good intention of making up for this sleep deficit in their language classes.I tried to be understanding, especially since they were always understanding and helpful with me.

***

One good example of their willingness to help occurred the morning after the Saudi king made a televised proclamation on the matter of male/female relationships among foreigners residing in the kingdom.Unaware of the previous night's proclamation, I walked into the classroom as cheerfully as ever, only to find a row of solemn faces looking up at me.

"What's up, gentlemen?" I enquired.

"We have very bad news for you, sir," one of them responded.

"What is it?"

"You had better sit down before we tell you," came the reply.

(Sitting down) "OK, what is it?"

"Did you watch the news on TV last night?"

"No."

"So, you don't know.(Long pregnant pause)I am sorry to tell you this but the king hasannounced that foreigners in the kingdom will no longer be allowed to visit members of the opposite sex unless they are married.You will have to stop seeing your girlfriend.We are very sorry."

"I see," I replied, trying to look concerned.

This had always been the policy in the kingdom.However, it was not well enforced with regard to infidels like me.On occasion an overzealous religious policeman might harass a couple to ensure that their life was as miserable as his, but generally this rule was ignored.Therefore, I was not as concerned by this pronouncement as were my students.

There were a few moments of prudent silence as the students allowed the impact of the message to settle into my brain.Then a young man named Abdullah spoke up.He wanted to alleviate the suffering that he imagined I was feeling.

"Don't worry, sir," he squeaked, "You can do what I did before I got married!"

"And what would that be, Abdullah?" I asked with a mild touch of curiosity.

"I cut a hole in one of the cushions in my father's sofa," he recalled with a certain pride as he revealed how he had dealt with celibacy.

"Oh," I mumbled, at a loss for words and desperately trying not to visualize the scene he was describing."Did your father ever get wise to you?"

"He only caught me once," was Abdullah's proud reply.

I stared at Abdullah for a few seconds, waiting for him to expand on this statement.After all, it must have been quite an experience to get caught by one's father while hunching a sofa cushion.Amazingly, if the look on Abdullah's face was any indication, he had not felt any embarrassment.There did not seem to be any further explanation coming, so on behalf of myself and all the other students in the room who were listening intently I asked, "What did your father say when he caught you with the cushion?"

"He said, 'My son, what are you doing to my pillow?'"

I looked deeply into Abdullah's eyes as he beamed at me.Did I want to continue this conversation?A part of me wanted to delve more deeply into this young man's affair with the cushion.It was intriguing, in a bizarre sort of way.And I had never before seen such attentive looks on my students' faces.On the other hand, I was not fully certain that this was the kind of discussion that the Saudi authorities really wanted me to have with my students.

In the end I decided to resist the temptation to pursue the matter.Instead of replying to Abdullah, I turned to the class and said, "Thank you for this information about the new policy.I really appreciate it.Now, open your textbooks to page 28."

Eyes that had burned brightly during the discussion of the father's cushion quickly dimmed.Heads began to droop and pencils dropped to the floor as the hands of slumbering students went limp.I droned on at the front of the classroom, and the students began using their American Defense Language Course textbooks as pillows.For resting their heads, that is.Not as sexual objects.

It was with a touch of pride and patriotism that I saw those textbooks produced by the US military being put to such good use.

***

The expression "pillow talk" took on a whole new meaning for me after my discussion with Abdullah.

Strangely enough, the subject of sex, even weird sex which did not involve pillows, seemed to arise quite frequently in the classroom at the language training center.This was surprising since sex is not mentioned on a single page of the 26-volume American Defense Language Course.As far as I was concerned, that course was so boring that it could not only lower one's libido, but also take away the will to live.

Probably the only thing in the world which was even drier and more monotonous than the American Defense Language Course was the daily life endured by my students.Their culture and their government teamed up with our language course to extract any hint of joy from their lives.As a result, the students longed to discuss anything other than what we presented them with.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Saudi students wanted to talk about sex since it was one of the key pleasures they were deprived of.They might have longed for other forbidden fruits, but sex was the deprivation which hurt the most.The lack of cinemas, discos and pubs must have been more tolerable since these topics were never mentioned in my classroom.Nor did the lack of access to pork products seem to trouble them.No mention of baked hams or pork chops.

Sex was a different matter.On countless occasions as I tried to charm them with technical English, the poor students had to fight the good battle to keep their heavy eyelids open.Then, just as they were about to nod off, one of the students who still had a bit of life in him would suddenly make an outrageous claim about a past sexual encounter.These claims were totally unrelated to the topic I was covering, but that did not seem to matter to anyone in the room, least of all to me.These contributions were volunteered in the desperate hope that I would talk about something (anything!) more exciting than English grammar.And in a society where all the women are covered from head to toe with a black garment that looks remarkably similar to a garbage bag, what better topic to talk about than sex?

My all-time favorite class session occurred one afternoon when I had a small class of only four students, all of whom were talkative and pleasant.One of them, Mohammad, had earlier been on a training course at Lackland Air Base in Texas. Mohammad spoke up immediately upon entering the classroom, pre-empting my usual monotone monologue.Just as I was about to reveal the English terms for two different types of engine components, Mohammad boldly stated, "Sir, on the very first day that I was in Texas I met a woman named Rosa.She was very beautiful."

"Well, well," I replied, ignoring the obvious fact that this had nothing to do with our studies, "and how did you get on with this Rosa?"

"Very well, sir.I had that woman twelve times that same night."

"Twelve times!" I blurted out in an incredulous but respectful voice.

"Yes," came the smug reply, "Twelve times."

"Oh, now, wait a minute, Mohammad," I persisted, "You surely didn't have sex with her twelve times in one night.Neither you nor she would have been able to walk the next day."

"Believe me, I had her twelve times that night," he stated with a note of finality in his voice.

At this stage the three other students who had been listening to our conversation with keen interest joined in the fray.All of them were in agreement with me that Mohammad's memory had inflated the figures.Round and round they went, heatedly arguing and negotiating on the number of times that Mohammad had actually had sex with the lovely Rosa.

In the face of such widespread and vigorous opposition, Mohammad slowly began to give ground.In his first concession he allowed that maybe, on second thought, it had only been nine times that first night.I probably would have accepted this revised version, but it was not enough to satisfy his dubious classmates.Noting that his bargaining position was becoming more flexible, they bore in on him with even greater intensity.

Language professional that I am, I am gratified to be able to report that this lively bargaining session continued throughout the whole 50-minute class period, with Mohammad gradually diminishing his astonishing claim as the minutes ticked by.When the bell rang to end the class, the three students had bargained Mohammad down to a more modest claim of four times that first night with Rosa.At that point one of his classmates, the oldest and most serious of the lot, declared solemnly, "Four times in one night.This is possible."

With those words the argument and the class period ended.We all left there emotionally drained but satisfied with the compromise we had reached.Mohammad left with his head held high, knowing that he was respected by all for his sexual feats in Texas.I left with the warm glow of the professional who recognizes a job well done.

The Teachers' Office

While the conversation in the classroom revolved around technical English and sex, there was a wider variety of topics on offer in the teachers' office.Six English-language teachers occupied one large office:four from British Aerospace and two of us from Lockheed aircraft.These two companies shared the training contract on the air base.

Politics was a frequent topic of discussion.One day Tom, a British colleague, initiated a conversation concerning a comment made by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.After Tom had expressed his opinion on Mrs. Thatcher's comments, another British colleague, Ted, mentioned that two friends of his worked in a hotel where Mrs. Thatcher had once stayed while on an official visit.At this point I was expecting Ted to say that his friends had managed to see or even speak to Mrs. Thatcher.I was wrong.These two friends had had a brush with celebrity, but not in the usual way.

Before she arrived in the hotel the two characters in question went to her room and placed a metal mesh into the toilet.It was placed far enough back in the drainpipe that it was not visible to anyone looking down into the toilet bowl.The next morning, after Mrs. Thatcher had left, they went to check their trap to see if they had snagged anything.Sure enough, to their great delight, they found that the trap had snared a big Thatcherian turd.One might wonder about the value of such an object, but Ted assured me that his friends treasured their catch.I guess it had sentimental, if not economic, value.

Having snared this prize, the two then baked it in an oven to remove the moisture.When their chef's instincts informed them that the treat in the oven had been baked to perfection, they removed it and applied a couple coatings of lacquer to the desiccated dung.Dry and polished, Margaret's manure was then lovingly mounted and hung on the wall of the workshop where the two worked.

Listening to Ted tell the story, I could not help admiring the ingenuity and daring of the two men who had carried out such a mission.At the same time, I found the story somehow troubling.Why would anyone want a turd mounted and placed over his desk? (Incidentally, the use of the masculine possessive adjective "his" in the previous sentence is intentional but not sexist.I feel certain that only the male mind would conceive of a plan to capture a turd and mount it on an office wall.)

Even now, two decades later, I am not sure that I would want a turd mounted on my wall.All things considered, I think I would still go with a picture of my daughter.

***

Not all discussions in the teachers' office were dedicated to discussions of politics.Some were a bit more frivolous.And, yes, there were even times when the subject of sex arose.These discussions were nearly always initiated by my Lockheed colleague, Dean.

Dean, to my chagrin, was an American, albeit a naturalized one originally from Germany.He was over fifty years old, divorced and obsessed with sex and pornography.Every vacation he headed to the Philippines to frolic with teenage prostitutes who, in addition to serving as sex toys for Dean, also served as models for his photographs.His thousands of photographs.

Returning to Saudi Arabia after his holidays, Dean would spend countless hours in the dark room developing these photos of his teenage lovers.Then, in the following months, he spent day after day lovingly poring over the photos.He sometimes did this in the teachers' office, which was highly risky since all forms of pornography are strictly forbidden in the kingdom.

This habit of viewing pornographic photos in the language center nearly cost Dean his job one day.

The Saudi colonel in charge of the training center had a grotesquely fat 13-year-old son who occasionally visited the center, waddling around from room to room and generally making a pest of himself.One day when Dean went to the photocopying room to copy some teaching materials, he discovered that the machine was occupied by the colonel's son.As Dean waited his turn, he noticed that the boy began to grow nervous and agitated.The boy was using his massive arms to conceal the material he was photocopying, which made Dean curious.He approached and was dismayed to see that the boy was photocopying photos which could only have come from Dean's desk.With a sinking heart and sense of doom, Dean watched the machine spit out one copy after another of his naked young Filipina lovers.

In spite of his panic, Dean maintained a calm exterior and informed the youth that he should not have such photos.They were bad for the boy's eternal soul, and furthermore, Dean noted, "Your father is going to beat the shit out of you if he catches you with that kind of material."

The young man followed Dean's logic on both points and surrendered the pictures to their rightful owner without a squeak of protest.

Dean was lucky.After all, what recourse would he have had if the boy had refused?What more could he have said?

"Look here, kid, if you don't hand over those photos immediately, I'm going to march into your father's office and tell him you have my illegal photos of naked underage girls!"

Talk about a weak bargaining position!

Back to the classroom

Saudis are generally a talkative bunch.They are delighted to have conversations about any topic.This feature serves them well in the language classroom, as their willingness to speak allows them to become fluent quite quickly.They might not use correct grammar, but they are fluent.

Not all of them are garrulous, though.One student of mine, a short and stocky student named Ali had a high-pitched voice which he seldom used.When he did speak, he could express his opinions on virtually any subject with a minimum of words.For example, when the subject of Adolf Hitler somehow came up in a technical English course, Ali informed me that, "Hitler a good man.Stick the Israelis in the cooker."

Neither the information nor the grammar was perfect, but his opinion was clear.With those few words he managed to give the listener an insight into his thoughts on a variety of matters.I, for example, did not need to ask him if he planned any special Hanukkah celebrations.Nor was it necessary to ask if he hoped his son would work on a kibbutz someday.Furthermore, if Ali should ever visit Amsterdam, I probably would not need to ask him if he planned to take the wife and kids to the Anne Frank museum.All this information (and so much more!) could be surmised from that one short utterance.

***

I was not Ali's only teacher.My British colleague, Tom, also had classes with him.One morning I noticed that Tom seemed anxious before entering the classroom, so I asked him what the problem was.He informed me that Ali's brother had been killed in a traffic accident the previous day.Tom dreaded entering the class because he was not sure what he should say to Ali."What does one say to a Saudi in such circumstances?" he wondered.Eventually he decided to keep it simple and just say, "Ali, I was terribly sorry to hear about your brother."

Fifty minutes later Tom returned to the office shaking his head and smiling.

"Wasn't Ali there?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, he was there."

"What's so funny, then?"

"You know," Tom said with a silly grin on his face, "I don't think I'll ever understand these guys."

"What do you mean?Why not?"

"Well, I expressed my condolences to Ali, and he replied in his cheerful squeaky voice, 'We all gotta go sometime!'"

Tom said that at that point he decided to stop the commiseration and begin the daily torture of technical English lessons.

***

And then there was the day, near the end of my contract in Tabuk, when a new group of students asked about my wife (I was married by this time.)

"Your wife, sir, is she American, too?"

"No," I replied, "She is Finnish."

After an uncomfortable silence, one of them respectfully spoke up, "Oh, very sorry to hear that."

Others also offered their condolences.I then felt obliged to explain that:

1) "Finnish" and "finished" are not the same word, and

2) even if they were the same word, it would not matter because we do not say in English that a dead person is "finished."

We all had a good laugh about this misunderstanding.I then began to teach English, and the students all began to compensate for the sleep that they had missed out on the previous night.

Romance in Saudi Arabia

You might have heard the joke about the Legionnaire who was crossing the desert with only his camel for company.After a couple of weeks the camel started to look pretty attractive to him, and eventually he got so horny that he tried to mount her.When he tried to do so, however, she walked away.This went on for days and days.Every time he tried to mount her she walked away, so he could never satisfy his desire.After several weeks of this, the man was crazy with passion.Then, miraculously, he arrived at an oasis where there was a scantily dressed and willing young maiden.Desperately, the young man ran up to her and asked, "Would you please hold my camel still?"

There are plenty more jokes involving camels and sex circulating among expatriate workers in Saudi Arabia.One might begin to wonder if camel/human relationships are the only signs that romance is alive and well there.This is not the case, however.Romance is alive and well even in the desert, even when that desert is located in a highly repressive society.

***

If you ask most people to name a few romantic spots, they are likely to mention places like Hawaii, Tahiti, or, in the case of teenagers, the back seat of their car.Most people probably would not mention Saudi Arabia.

They should.

During the two years that I lived in Tabuk I knew nearly twenty couples, all expatriates, who got married.Some of these newlyweds, unbeknownst to Saudi authorities, were still married to other people back home in their countries of origin.Such small details were not allowed to get in the way of love.

There was occasionally evidence of romance among locals as well.One evening just before sunset my wife and I chanced upon a lovely scene which had indications of an earlier romantic tryst.

In the hills overlooking the Red Sea there were several lovely vantage points where one could take in the natural beauty of the area.We often ascended to one particularly charming spot to watch the sun slowly set behind the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula.Behind us the rolling red sand hills of Saudi Arabia stretched out as far as the eye could see.To the north the narrow Gulf of Aqaba reached all the way up to Jordan.Not surprisingly, there were sometimes signs that other couples had spent time in the same spot.On this evening we walked to our favorite vantage point and found that "our" little love nest had been occupied earlier by a couple of Saudi gentlemen.

We reached this conclusion because of what we found there:two small tea cups made of clear glass, one on each side of a very large empty perfume bottle.To the untrained eye this might not provide any clues as to the identities of the young romantics who had sat there, but to us the evidence spoke volumes.We realized that two male Saudis had been there and had watched a sunset through drunken eyes.

Why males?Because females cannot go out alone in Saudi Arabia, and the genders do not mix socially.

Why drunken eyes?Because the perfume bottle was empty.

The empty perfume bottle would have been an enigma had I not had an earlier discussion with an American chemist named Walter.Walter worked in the customs station on the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia.Curious about exactly what he did, I had once asked Walter to explain just what his function was at the border.One thing he mentioned really caught my attention; he said that he checked the chemical composition of the perfumes that came into the kingdom to ensure that they did not contain methyl alcohol.In other words, he verified that the alcohol the perfumes contained could be drunk without harmful consequences to human bodies.

"Why on earth would you do that?" I asked innocently.

"So the locals won't poison themselves if they try to get drunk on perfume," Walter replied in his usual calm manner.

"What?!? You're shitting me!" I exclaimed eloquently."Do you mean to tell me that these people get drunk on perfume?"

As I considered this possibility, my mind was spinning with speculation about what these people's farts and belches must smell like.I had heard people joke about "French farts" which smelled like perfume, but this was really mind-boggling.

"Man, that's really sick!" I spluttered."They don't really drink that stuff, do they?Say it ain't true, Walter."

"Yes, they do.And, yes, it is sick," Walter replied in his ever-boring voice.

Walter would have made a great English teacher.

***

And so it was, using this information provided by Walter, that I was able to look at the empty tea cups and perfume bottle and understand what had gone on there.One can just imagine the floral accents emanating from the toilet when those two romantic sunset-admiring lovers had their next bowel movement.Expensive but aromatic.

A Glance at Life in the Kingdom from a Female Perspective

Since I am not a woman, I rely on my wife to inform me what life is like for Western women in Saudi Arabia.If she is to be believed, it can be summed up in one word – "bizarre."As a nurse in the emergency room of a military hospital in Tabuk, she was exposed to Saudi culture in quite a unique way.Many of her attitudes towards the country and culture are colored by the fact that most of her contact with locals took place in the emergency room.

To a Westerner the image that springs to mind of an emergency room is one of hustle and bustle as doctors and nurses rush from one seriously injured person to another in their attempts to save lives.At least that is the image of emergency rooms depicted on American television.So it must be accurate.

Sometimes such activity actually did occur in her hospital when there were bad traffic accidents, which were frequent in Tabuk.Most of the nurses' attention, however, was devoted to less demanding matters.Two of the most common complaints of the patients who appeared in my wife's emergency room were dry lips and dizziness.

Do dry lips and dizziness really warrant a visit to an emergency room? Some people might answer that question negatively.In fact, the very idea of adult males going to an emergency room for treatment of dry lips seemed ludicrous to my wife, who was forever complaining about the overload of dry-lipped patients she had to deal with.It is not that she did not feel compassion for the genuine sufferers of dry lips; it is just that she suspected that in most cases the men were not really suffering as much as they let on.Some of these questionable patients even appeared to have quite moist lips.

This leads to the question of why so many apparently healthy and moist-lipped young soldiers showed up in the emergency room with a bogus complaint.In order to understand, one must be aware of what life was like for these young men.Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that, apart from chats with their military buddies and prayer sessions in the mosque, they had no social life.They were bored stiff, and so horny that female goats and camels gave them wide berth.

In these men's lives there were no cinemas, no theatres, no concerts, no pubs, no dating, no dancing, no women, no nothing.In light of this situation, a visit to the hospital to gawk at the Western nurses with their uncovered faces and arms was quite a treat.However, they could not simply show up and enjoy the show.They had to think of some pretext to justify their presence there.Otherwise the security guards would send them back to their sterile barracks and their empty lives.Thus it was important for these onlookers to have a complaint – and how could the sisters of mercy turn away a young man afflicted with dry lips?

Incidentally, it was not only the young soldiers who were bored stiff.The military men in charge of the hospital did their very best to ensure that Westerners lived an existence which was just as stultifying as that of the young soldiers.In a memo sent out by the Brigadier General/Doctor Abdul-Hamid Al-F------, the Project Director of the hospital while my worked there, he presented four points which all employees should keep in mind.All four points were intended to restrict the lives of employees and just generally to extract any hint of pleasure remaining in their barren existence.Among other things, the good Brigadier General wanted to ensure that males and females would have no contact of any kind.Another point in his memo was that nobody should watch any television transmissions other than those of the Saudi Government.Even those who have never visited the country can imagine how dull the programs must be in an Islamic theocracy.But it was the first of the four points which encapsulated the spirit of both the memo and of life in Saudi Arabia:

1) _– All movies and dancing parties and any other recreational activities should be prohibited._

That pretty well says it all about life in the Kingdom.

A Nice Hot Cuppa

Just as the young soldiers found ways to gawk at the nurses, so did the nurses and doctors find ways to retaliate against the dizzy and dry-lipped masses.Once, when a healthy-looking young man arrived and complained of dizziness, he was told that the problem was most likely in his bowels.The nurse sent him off with a small cup in his hand to produce a stool sample.Instead of sending him to an adjacent toilet, the nurse sent the dizzy one to a toilet on the far side of the waiting room with the warning that a small sample simply would not do.Rather, he had to fill the cup so full that the desired sample protruded over the top like ice cream from a cone.

The opportunity to watch unveiled Western women, entertaining though it was, could not overcome the embarrassment of walking through a crowded waiting room carrying an overflowing cup of fresh warm shit.The dizziness disappeared.It seemed like a miracle.

Luckily for the dry-lipped patients, the nurses felt that it was a bit too far-fetched to suggest a stool sample for them.Since there was no cuppa-shit-through-the-waiting-room treatment, the dry-lip epidemic lasted for a long time.

***

It was not only Saudis who appeared in the emergency room with strange problems.One evening two young Pakistani military officers arrived looking very uncomfortable.When asked about their problem, they claimed that they had been sodomized while spending a day at the beach.As a result, they wanted the doctors to check their anuses to verify that no lasting damage had been done.The doctors, of course, were sympathetic and wanted to help the unfortunate, violated pair.

The situation soon took a strange and unexpected turn.When the young officers were asked to give a detailed account of what had happened, they claimed that a lone man on the beach had raped both of them.These two tall, muscular young military men were frolicking on the beach and an unknown man came strolling along.He then interrupted their fun by raping them.Hmmm...

Doctor:"Was he armed?"

Pakistani officer:"No."

Doctor:"How did he manage to rape both of you?"

Pakistani officer:"First he raped him (pointing to his companion) and then he raped me."

I have never studied criminology, but this seems like an unlikely scenario to me.If their account is true, I would really like to know what the second man was doing while the first one was being raped.Pulling down his own pants in protest?Discreetly looking away?Hunting for a lubricant?Having a quick pre-sex swim in the sea?Shivering in nervous anticipation?All of the above?

It could be just my cynical nature, but I do not believe that the soldier told the whole truth.My hunch is that the two "victims" took turns riding up and down each other's Hershey highway.Furthermore, I suspect that it was guilty consciences which drove them to the hospital rather than fear of lasting physical damage.Of course, if they had maintained their anal virginity up to that point, they probably really were feeling a bit stiff and painful.

***

Whatever the truth of the incident with the Pakistani soldiers on the beach, they were not the only ones in the hospital who had inappropriate objects inserted up their bums.Some of the nurses at the hospital were young American and European men who also had objects entering the "exit-only" orifice.

It is wrong to stereotype people based on their profession, but experience has taught me that many male hairdressers and male nurses are gay.That is fine with me.I am not homophobic.In fact, as an English teacher, I have found that most of my colleagues and friends over the years have been gay.No problem.

Having said that, I must admit that, God forbid, if I ever need to have a catheter inserted into my penis, I hope it is a female nurse who does it.Preferably a beautiful young blond nurse.

Based on the pornographic films I have watched, this is a likely, even probable scenario.

Several of the male nurses at the hospital were friends of my wife, and they sometimes invited her to their parties.The photos I saw of these parties, and the scenes they portrayed were fascinating.Those nice young men who always looked so dapper and formal at the hospital in their stiff white uniforms were hardly recognizable!They showed up at parties in some of the most gorgeous wigs and hosiery I have ever seen.And the dresses they were wearing!Tight-fitting mini-skirts showing off and accentuating every curve of their bodies.My poor wife looked frumpy by comparison.

Lovely though their costumes were, what really intrigued me was the alcohol consumption of the guys at the parties.

Not the amount, but the manner of consumption.

All alcohol is illegal in Saudi Arabia, but this does not deter foreigners living there.The booze they drink is nearly all homemade, and the quality varies.Most of the wine consumed is of the rotgut variety, but it is drunk with gusto amidst bold affirmations of its exquisite quality.It must be said, though, that the drinkers seldom start praising the wine until late in the evening when they are already drunk.Early in the evening, they grimace after taking a drink; it is not uncommon to hear remarks about the flavor of piss.Once they get to the stage where they are praising the wine, it is best to forcibly haul them off to their homes.

The male nurses, like most other foreigners in Tabuk, consumed large amounts of bad homemade wine.They were not always able to comment on the flavor of the wine they ingested, however, for it did not always enter their mouths, their throats or their stomachs.They found that, for them, a wine enema was more rewarding.

In most circumstances, I would have found the idea of a wine enema revolting.Having tasted the wine in Saudi Arabia, though, I think that the nurses might have found the perfect solution to meet their needs.Not only did they get untold pleasure out of inserting the enema into each other's bums, they also managed to get drunk while bypassing the taste buds.What could be more appropriate than a direct infusion of rotgut wine into the gut it was going to rot?

Nevertheless, there is something about the idea of wine enemas which makes me queasy.The whole idea seems abnormal to me, which is why I have limited my experimentation with wine enemas to the family dog.

***

Before leaving the topic of the hospital, I want to mention two genuine emergency cases which my wife witnessed.Both of these cases revolved around painful and badly bruised penises.

The first patient arrived in excruciating pain after getting his penis caught in a vacuum cleaner.One can only guess how this happened.Was it a case of a liberated male who did not mind doing "women's work"?Had he become careless while doing his domestic duties?

Was it a case of a vacuum cleaner that had somehow "gone bad" and bitten its owner in the crotch?

Or, far-fetched as this may seem, could that man have intentionally placed his cock in harm's way, hoping for an automated blow job?As a male, I hate to think that someone of the same gender would be stupid or depraved enough to stick his dick in a vacuum cleaner and hope for a favorable result.Unfortunately, as an aging male, I have to admit that over the years I have known several males who have been stupid and depraved enough to stick their dicks into any hole they could find, including vacuum cleaners.OK, OK, I admit it, I have tried it a couple of times.

The second emergency case involving a bruised penis is even more perplexing.The idiot attached to this penis showed up in the emergency room and claimed that he had accidentally got it caught when he shut his car door.Like the nurses who first heard the story, I was incredulous when I heard about the incident.

Come on!Did the guy not have any clothes on when he got out of the car?How long does a cock have to be to get caught in a car door?I did not ask my wife about the length of the guy's cock, but to get caught in a car door I imagine it would have to hang somewhere around the man's knees.She would surely have mentioned such a detail as that.Well, at least I _think_ she would have.

Just for the record, my attempts to re-enact the event have failed.Regardless of the type of car I have used in my re-enactment attempts, my penis has remained unharmed.I guess there are some advantages to having a one-inch cock.Consult my wife to see if she agrees.

I sometimes wonder if this second case wasn't another "penis-meets-vacuum-cleaner type of incident.Maybe it was shame which prevented the gentleman from admitting that he had tried to get intimate with an appliance.On the other hand, it is surely just as embarrassing to tell foreign medical staff that you closed a car door on your penis.That is not something to be proud of either.

Romance on the Air Base

Before I left Tabuk a seemingly miraculous event occurred.Blessings from heaven landed squarely on the Lockheed compound.A ruling came down unexpectedly from the local authorities that the hospital bus transporting nurses could no longer go to the British Aerospace compound because it was located on the air base.They no longer wanted so many non-military, especially female non-military, people going in and out of the base.

This ruling had a tremendous effect.For the men at British Aerospace it was an unmitigated disaster.For the Lockheed men it was an unbelievably good stroke of luck.With the new restriction in place, women who wanted to socialize with Western men now only had one option.And that option was us!Never mind that the men at Lockheed were generally old, overweight, smelly, uncouth, uneducated and/or alcoholic.We were the only game in town.

All the good-looking women who had previously gone to British Aerospace now could either come to us or they could stay home.We no longer had to scrape the bottom of the barrel.Suddenly women who were not mental or physical wrecks started appearing at our parties.It was a wonderful thing to behold.

The devastated men from British Aerospace suddenly began to reach out to the Lockheed Neanderthals.I have never seen so many proud men become so ingratiating and obsequious so quickly.This, too, was a wonderful thing to behold.

Not all the Brits were willing to stoop so low, though, and the more ingenious ones found ways to get around the ban on women.One young man named Eddie had a daring strategy to keep his relationship going.He would drive to the hospital to meet his girlfriend and then pack her into his car's trunk ("boot" in British English.)She would reappear when he was safely past the air base gates and inside the compound walls.Unfortunately for Eddie, a Saudi at the hospital one day happened to see the woman climbing into the trunk.He alerted the guards at the entrance to the air base, and they stopped Eddie.Poor Eddie had to open the trunk for inspection, and his girlfriend then stepped shyly out.Twenty-four hours later both she and Eddie were out of the kingdom.

In the weeks and months that followed, this episode was discussed ad nauseum among the bored Westerners residing in Tabuk.It came to be known as the "Puss-in-Boot" incident.

Farewell Tabuk

Months later I left rather suddenly myself.Lockheed's contract with the Saudi military expired, and another company was given the contract.The authorities gave us ninety days to either clear out or sign a contract with the new company.I cleared out.

I left with a lot of good memories, no regrets and a new wife.

We had enjoyed our time there but were not really disappointed to leave the place.In fact, as we looked back at the lights of Tabuk disappearing into the darkness, my wife seemed to be having a wild and uncontrollable orgasm.She was so happy to get out of the place.Even though I did not have an orgasm, I felt delighted for her as this was her first orgasm in my presence.

This departure, happily, did not signal the end of our Saudi experience.A couple of years later we once again boarded Saudia Airlines and headed east once more.This time we actually did go to Dhahran, the city which the Welshman Neil had spoken of so approvingly to me on my first day in Saudi Arabia.

Dhahran

There have been many times in my life when I have been certain that God really does exist, and that his greatest pleasure in life comes from tormenting me.One only needs to remember my attempt at skiing to understand that I might be justified in my suspicions.Bloody floating turds!

On the other hand, there have also been times when I have felt that God was looking out for me.When we moved to Dhahran, for example, the university I worked for provided us with wonderful housing.It was the first time in our lives when my wife and I had lived in a place with two toilets.What a thrill this was for two people who had grown up with many siblings all competing for one toilet!

We lived in that apartment for four years, and the toilets worked beautifully the whole time.One week after we moved out, a new university family who had just arrived in the country moved in.Almost as soon as they moved into "our" apartment both toilets began to erupt.Vast amounts of untreated sewage spewed into the apartment.Out the bathroom doors, down the hallway and into the living room it went.It flowed until the repulsive mess was ankle deep everywhere.Poor family.

Thank you, God, for making it happen to them and not to us.Amen.

***

People have told me that Dhahran has a large modern airport nowadays, which is a big change from when we were there.At that time the airport was a filthy overcrowded dump.It looked like it belonged in an impoverished underdeveloped country rather than in an oil-rich Gulf state.When my wife and I arrived in 1987, rumor had it that a new airport which was already under construction was about to open.We left four years later, and the rumor that the new airport was about to open was still floating around.

In spite of its dilapidated state, the old Dhahran airport was dear to the hearts of all the expatriates who had passed through its crumbling walls.And this was not only due to the fact that it represented an escape from the kingdom.It was also an excellent place to have a cup of tea and do some people watching.

People from all over the world passed through that airport every day, carrying all sorts of things.It was not unusual, for example, to see Pakistanis or Sri Lankans show up lugging large appliances for their return trip home.Everything from radios to VCRs to massive cardboard boxes containing who-knows-what flew home with their new owners.In other words, as we used to say, "They take everything but the kitchen sink."

We quit saying that after two colleagues reported what they had seen one afternoon.As waves of impoverished humanity flowed by them, their attention was drawn to an approaching Pakistani man.Assisted by a friend, he was carrying a large object which looked like a kitchen sink.It was a kitchen sink.

After that we just said, "They take everything."

***

While it is true that the Gulf States provide employment to hundreds of thousands of people from developing countries who would otherwise be unemployed, it is sometimes sad to see the conditions these people have to put up with.They work long hours in stifling heat, often earn pitiful salaries and are not allowed to bring their families along with them.Their living conditions are awful and, worst of all, they are treated with arrogance and disdain by their host country nationals.

Every now and then there is a payback, though.One of my colleagues witnessed such a "payback" in the Dhahran airport.A small Sri Lankan man was in front of him in the queue waiting to go through customs.The man had only a small carry-on sized bag with him.The bag could not have contained more than one change of clothes even though he was probably going there for at least a one-year contract.When this small man reached the customs desk, the officer spoke rudely to him, telling him in a loud and unpleasant voice to open his bag.The jet-lagged, shell-shocked young man did as he was told.The customs officer then dumped the contents of the bag onto the customs counter.

Sifting through the contents, his eye fell on an object which he held up triumphantly in the Sri Lankan's face.It was a small plastic bag containing powder.The customs official clearly thought that he had found an illegal substance.The young man tried to explain that the bag contained spices, but the official was not to be denied his drug bust.He tore a corner off the bag, held it up to his nose and... inhaled deeply.

Unfortunately for him, it was not some off-color cocaine in the bag.It was chili powder.Quite powerful chili powder, apparently.Tears streamed down and his cheeks, and he wheezed and snorted for several minutes.When he finally regained his composure, he shouted at the Sri Lankan and then sent him on his way.

Just as an aside, I must say that I am generally opposed to euthanasia.In cases of people as stupid and arrogant as that customs official, however, my moral opposition begins to waver.I have sometimes thought that perhaps the United Nations should pass an international law which empowers mothers with a new kind of decision-making authority.This would involve holding their newborn babies up right in front of their faces and taking a good look at them.Looking deeply into the baby's eyes, the mothers should ask themselves if the baby looks so hopelessly stupid that it might become a Saudi customs official.If they get an affirmative answer, then they should be allowed to contact the nearest baby-shredding agency, thereby saving the next generation from the imbeciles that my generation has had to endure.

Of course, this is only my opinion.Some people might not be totally, one-hundred-percentedly convinced about the need for the baby-shredder option.But, hey, that is all right with me as long as somebody else can come up with an alternative solution that is better.

***

I once related this chili-up-the-nose incident to an older American man named Wally, who was employed by a private company in Dhahran.He smiled and assured me that such an incident would never happen to him.After years of being harassed by customs officials in the Dhahran airport, he had come up with the ideal solution to end the harassment.

Whenever he packed his luggage for the return trip to Dhahran, he would place a pair of white underwear on top of everything else in the bag.Then, after taking a deep drag on a cigarette, he would hold the underwear in front of his mouth and direct the smoke through a well-chosen spot on the underwear.This would leave a stain which looked remarkably like the "skid-marks" which children (and some adults) sometimes have in their underwear.

Customs officials who spotted the stained underpants were always so repulsed that they would give him a withering look and motion for him to get out of their sight.They were definitely not going to start probing around in his bag.Wally is not proud, but he gets through Saudi customs quickly.

Mysterious but Beloved

Thus far nearly all my comments about Dhahran have been related to the airport; there is a reason for that.Just knowing it was there was comforting to countless people, myself included.En route to work every day we saw the planes taking off and vicariously shared the thrill felt by those onboard.

People who have never experienced the joy of seeing Dhahran disappear out an airplane window can never understand what a satisfying experience it is.This is not to imply that Dhahran is a terrible place to live; it is not.But it is a great place to leave!

Just before the first Gulf War broke out, there were lots of foreigners who were experiencing this thrill of seeing Dhahran disappear out of the window.Like rats on a

sinking ship, foreign workers flowed through the airport in the days preceding the outbreak of hostilities.As bad fortune would have it, though, airlines began canceling flights out of Dhahran as the war approached.One airline after another cancelled out, and I began to fear that the airport was not going to be of any assistance to me on the only occasion when I really would have appreciated a quick getaway.

Luck was on my side, though.The airline on which I had booked my departure (KLM) just happened to fly the last commercial flight out of Dhahran before the war began.I was lucky enough to be on it.All day long there had been announcements on the radio and television stating that this was going to be the last flight out of Dhahran, so the airport was a mob scene.Thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, etc. were packed into the airport, desperately hoping to get on that flight.In the check-out queue ahead of me were British and American employees of the big oil company, ARAMCO, hastily beating a retreat with their pets, their money and their lives intact.

Yes, I did include pets in that list of intact things.While waiting for my boarding pass, I looked to the right and saw the conveyor belt slowly transporting the luggage to the plane.Every now and then, sandwiched between big expensive suitcases, a caged dog or cat would slowly go by.Then I looked to my left and saw thousands of impoverished and desperate humans hoping against hope that they could somehow escape the oncoming war.

On the right dogs and cats flying to safety.On the left people unwillingly staying in a war zone.This was a very good example of juxtaposition.

Looking right and left, I began to wonder, "Is it just me, or is something wrong here?"The dogs and cats from ARAMCO might disagree with me, but as I left Dhahran on that airborne Noah's ark I felt that something was wrong.I love my own dog, mind you, but shouldn't people have been given priority?

Exciting Destinations!

It was not only the sight of Dhahran disappearing on outbound flights that made foreigners love that airport; the place also represented adventure.Because of its convenient location, there were dozens of exotic destinations only a cheap air ticket away from the Dhahran airport.All the excitement and pleasures which were (officially, anyway) forbidden in the Islamic Kingdom were readily accessible, only a short flight away.The Seychelles, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Turkey, Brunei – they were just a few hours away, and we visited all of them.For a turdologist such as myself, the highlight of our travels occurred in Thailand.

Trekking in Thailand

As my wife and I planned our trip to Thailand, we read that trekking in northern Thailand was an exciting adventure which had become very popular among young tourists.We were not so young but we were at least tourists in search of an adventure.

Almost as soon as we landed in Bangkok we boarded an all-night train for the city of Chang Mai in the north of the country.We did not really know what to expect from a trek, but we were ready to find out.

Once in Chang Mai it was not hard to find what we were looking for.Signs and flyers advertising different types and lengths of treks were everywhere.Everything from two days to two months was on offer.Since neither one of us was in great shape, we decided that a five-day trek was about as ambitious as we should get.

Our adventure started early the next morning, so there was little time for preparation of any kind.At 6 AM we assembled outside the travel agency with five other tourists.The travel agent arrived and introduced us to our guide, an illegal immigrant from Burma who had slipped in Thailand to avoid the fighting in his home country.His name was Kaka.

The word "Kaka", although there are variations in spelling, refers to excrement in many languages, even in baby language, so I guess any tourist who travels around with a guide named Kaka has a right to feel dubious about the type of trek he is about to embark on.I certainly had some misgivings.

After meeting Kaka we piled into the back of a pickup truck which took us on a five-hour ride up winding road to our starting point.About three hours into our ride one of our traveling companions, an Irishman, began to vomit over the side of the truck.Those of us seated behind him were treated to the spray.By the time we arrived at the starting point of the trek, all seven would-be trekkers were a bit green around the gills.As we stood behind the truck, observing the Irishman cough up the final tidbits of his breakfast, Kaka got out of the cab of the truck and announced that we would have lunch before beginning the initial ascent.

Not wanting to offend our young host, we dutifully forced down the greasy sandwiches he offered us.To his credit, the Irishman also managed to eat his sandwich.Watching him eat, I made a mental note not to walk behind him as we trekked up the hillside.

Once started, the trek was painful but uneventful.We marched along a narrow path through some dense stretches of forest which were swelteringly hot and humid, but beautiful.Occasionally, we found ourselves in clearings where locals had planted patches of opium-producing poppies.Seeing how remote and inaccessible these patches were, it was easy to understand why it must be nearly impossible to eradicate their cultivation.

In the evening we arrived in a small village of odd-looking indigenous people.These people chewed betel nut for kicks, so their teeth and lips were stained black.On the rare occasions when they smiled, the viewer was treated to what looked like a black gaping hole where a mouth should be.There were no candidates for toothpaste commercials in that place.

The village consisted of some fifteen bamboo huts with thatched roofs.These huts stood on stilts with staircases leading up to the elevated living area for humans.Below the huts lived the villagers' pigs, chickens, horses and dogs.Kaka told us that we would spend the night in the headman's hut since it was the biggest in the village.

The headman was an unsavory-looking character with a perpetual scowl on his face.Kaka warned us that we should use our backpacks as pillows while sleeping.Otherwise, the headman would relieve us of our valuables.

Knowing that our host was a thief did not help me fall asleep.Nor did the noise generated by the menagerie below our hut, but I eventually succumbed to exhaustion and was able to doze off and on all night.Once when I awakened, I noticed that someone was moving among the sleeping figures of my fellow trekkers.Not surprisingly, it was the headman.

A person should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and maybe he was just sleepwalking, but my instincts tell me that the man was hoping to harvest some goodies from his guests.I don't believe that this nocturnal hunter and gatherer had any success during our visit since we had been warned.I guess the only benefit the headman received from our night's stay was the actual payment for the accommodation.

The headman was not the only person moving around in the night.After the first couple hours of fitful sleep, my wife and I both needed to slip outside to relieve ourselves.All the hiking plus the unusual food had shifted our bowels into high gear, so we headed quickly for the door after waking up in the darkness of the very early morning.Taking out our carefully packed rolls of toilet paper, we headed down the ladder.

There were no indoor toilets in the village, which was not surprising since there was no running water.What I found surprising, though, was the fact that there were no outdoor toilets either.I guess the locals just disappeared behind a bush when they needed to saw off a log.Determined to do as the locals and using only the light of the moon, we followed a narrow path away from the village.

As we hurried into the dark unknown, we noticed that we were being followed.Not by villagers, though.A large white dog and an even larger white pig were hot on our trail from the moment we started on the path.In spite of my best efforts to shoo them away, they stuck to us like flies on shit.

Seeing there was nothing to be done to discourage our unwanted companions, we continued our search for appropriate bushes behind which we could do our business.When we arrived at a fork in the path, we parted ways in order to have a measure of privacy.As I turned left and my wife turned right, a curious thing happened.As if by mutual agreement, the dog and pig also separated ways.The dog followed me and the pig took off in hot pursuit of my wife.

"Are these animals watching over us?"I wondered."Do they feel some instinctive protective urge to accompany us on our journey into the heart of darkness?" The answers to these questions came as soon as I found an appropriate place for my early morning al fresco shit.As I lowered my trousers and squatted, I noticed that the white dog had placed its face uncomfortably close to my ass.

Was my guardian angel a pervert?

Irritably, I cursed and ineffectually took a swing at it.To no avail.There was nothing more I could do in my compromised position.Giving up on the idea of chasing the mutt away, I just settled down and produced a good-sized log.To my horror and disgust, the turd barely hit the ground before the dog had scarfed it up.

Oh, God!Somebody please shoot me before that image gets fixed in my mind!And while you're at it, shoot that dog behind me.The white one, with the breath that smells like shit.

That experience was even more disgusting than being hit by the Irishman's vomit spray in the morning.The whole trekking experience was beginning to seem a bit distasteful.I thought dogs were genetically programmed to eat dog food out of a can!What kind of mutant was this creature?

Moments later, I rejoined my wife.She had been similarly traumatized by the pig.It, too, had had an early morning snack, courtesy of the Blubaums.In a troubled daze, we stumbled back to the headman's hut.Close at our heels trotted the dog and the pig, hoping, perhaps, for a little dessert.

***

After returning to Dhahran, I related this incident to a friend of mine.He was amused by it but not shocked.In fact, he had experienced something similar while he was staying in a cheap pension while on vacation in Goa, India.The pension had no indoor toilets, so the residents had to go out back to an outdoor toilet to relieve themselves.The outdoor toilet in question was not constructed over a hole in the ground like most outdoor toilets.Rather, it was built up on stilts and suspended out across a fence and over a pig pen.Guests had to climb up a small set of steps to get to the toilet seat.Their turds then dropped directly into the pigpen.The pigs, conditioned to these treats, would come running eagerly whenever a tourist emerged from the back door of the pension.

I remember reading about Pavlov's dogs that would salivate whenever they heard a bell ring, but this concept of pigs which salivate at the sight of tourists was completely new to me.That pension owner, incidentally, was making out like a bandit.First, the guests paid him for the privilege of staying in his place.Then they marched outside and fed his pigs for him, without getting any kind of discount on their accommodation.The owner should get some kind of "innovative entrepreneur" award both for his recycling plan as well as his "double-profit" scheme.

Remember these two tales next time you prepare to bite into a juicy pork chop.You just might feel more comfortable with a vegetarian choice.

What to Do in a Cultural Desert?

So, what do foreigners do on weekends when they find themselves in a cultural desert?They cannot go to the movies – no cinemas.They cannot go to the theater – no theaters.No concerts. No pubs. No discos.No dating.No tourist attractions. No nothing.

There is always the desert, however, and unlike booze it is not hard to find.Many Westerners, myself included, found themselves drawn to the desert on weekends.What was the charm of the Saudi desert?For starters, there was the night sky.Nobody who has only lived in cloudy or urban areas can imagine the clarity of the desert sky at night.An almost inconceivable number of stars are visible.Various constellations are crystal clear, as is the Milky Way.Witnessing such beauty, one can understand why ancient peoples were so fascinated by the night skies.

One can also begin to understand why so many philosophers and prophets spent time in the desert.The overwhelming emptiness and near-total silence has a profound effect on a person.Surrounded by such barrenness, it is no wonder that they looked inward.

And then there are the dung beetles.Less fascinating than the night sky and less overwhelming than the silence, the dung beetles were, nevertheless, interesting in their own right.On at least one occasion that I can remember, a diligent little dung beetle held a group of ten university lecturers spellbound as it went about its work.We watched as it formed a perfectly round ball from a chunk of camel dung.Then it painstakingly rolled the ball off towards its home.It was quite amazing to see the little beetle roll the ball, which was far larger than the beetle itself.

The sky, the silence and the dung beetles.Who would not be drawn to the desert?With so many attractions on offer, it is no wonder that my friends and I spent so many weekends sleeping on the sand when we could have been sleeping in our comfortable beds in Dhahran.

Beds were not the only amenity we had to do without on those weekends.Needless to say, there were no toilets out in the middle of a desert either.When nature called, it was customary for campers to simply walk a discreet distance from the campsite.

Without wanting to appear boastful, I have to state that the silence of the desert was thoroughly shattered when I when I would take those discreet walks away from the camp.While the solitude of the desert has inspired religious experiences for many prophets, for me the open-air shits in the desert were near-religious experiences.So much better than an indoor shits.Almost a different activity entirely.

There were certain hazards which sometimes detracted from the pleasure, though.

One night, for example, I had barely assumed my defecating position when I heard a loud buzzing sound moving in my direction.A second later an insect-sized Sherman tank slammed into my ass.I can only guess that it was a dung beetle, attracted by the rich and full-bodied aromas I was producing.I had not realized that dung beetles were nocturnal creatures, so it surprised me when it made contact with my bare skin.Who knows?Maybe they are not nocturnal, but the little guy just figured it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Even though it was shocking to have the little fellow crash into me, I felt a kind of kinship with him.It was almost like we were soul mates, both enjoying a very special moment.What made the experience even more poignant was the knowledge that we were probably the only two creatures on earth that could have derived so much pleasure from such a simple event.

I almost wanted to take the little guy home with me.

Back in the Cultural Desert

The actual desert was barren, but nowhere near as barren as the ESL classrooms at the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals.Aside from the obvious fact that there were no females in the classes, there were plenty of other factors which sucked out all the joy of life from any student or teacher who stepped inside.

Take the textbooks.All materials were produced in house, with the goal of making them culturally inoffensive to our students."Culturally inoffensive" meant no pictures or mention of females allowed.No mention of any cultural events or institutions, especially those of infidels.Instead, in semester one, the students were treated to page after page of crude drawings of laboratory equipment.Under the drawings were such stimulating texts as,

"What is this?It is a beaker."

"What is this?It is a test tube."

"What is this?It is a hose."

Pretty engrossing stuff, both for the teacher and the student!

It almost seemed that the material was produced with the intention of killing brain cells as well as interest in the language.Ironically, however, there was one lesson in the writing text which was actually pleasurable, for the teachers at least.

In an attempt to teach the students how to describe a process, the text showed a series of crudely drawn images of the steps involved in building a traditional Saudi mud-brick home.The students were supposed to write something along the lines of:

" _First you shape the mud into the shape of bricks.Then you lay the bricks out in the sun until they harden.After the bricks are hard, you..."_

Since Arabic speakers often have problems distinguishing between the sound of the letters "b" and "p", what the students often ended up writing –to the delight of their bored instructors – was the following:

" _First you shape the mud into the shape of pricks.Then you place the pricks out in the sun until they harden.After the pricks are hard, you..."_

It did not take much to amuse us in those days.

Another source of unexpected amusement had to do with the final oral examination which all students were required to pass at the end of the semester.The actual exam was not amusing."Tedious" or "torturous" are more accurate descriptions of the process, but the days leading up to the exam provided a punch line which all the ESL lecturers repeated merrily to each other.

Prior to the exam the students had the right to practice for the oral final with their teachers during the obligatory office hour.Invariably, the dreaded knock on office doors came with greater and greater frequency as the final approached.

Equally invariably, when the lecturers reluctantly opened their doors they found a berobed student wanting to practice his oral skills.These desperate students never said, "I would like to practice my English language oral skills in preparation for the final exam."Rather, they would bellow out, "Teacher, I want oral."

How does one respond to such a request?A number of responses come to mind:

"You've come to the right place, Abdullah."

"Would you prefer to give or receive?"

"I believe that you want Mr. Bruce.His office is down the hall."

But, of course, what we really said was something like, "Yes, Abdullah, come on in."

Fortunately, the students at the university were pleasant enough, and some were real characters who occasionally livened things up in the classroom.One of my students, a low achiever named Ali, had the capacity to cheer me up in one way or another nearly every day.For starters, he always said, "Thank!" when I gave him a handout.Not "Thanks" or "Thank you."Always just "Thank!"I know that I must have corrected him a thousand times, to no avail.After I got over my initial frustration at his inability to grasp this simple concept, I found that I enjoyed and looked forward to hearing his deep voice utter the predictable "Thank!"

Not everything Ali said pleased me, though.He had a very annoying habit of watching the clock very closely, and announcing "Time up!" the instant that the second hand hit the hour ending the class.After putting up with this irritating habit for weeks, I finally said to him one day, "Thank you, Ali, for informing me that the class is over.As a reward for your observation, you can now stay for five minutes after the other students have left."

Ali took it very well.After the other students left, he sat there and chatted with me for quite a long time, during which I was the one watching the clock closely.I knew that he had stayed for longer than the five minutes, but I did not want to cut him off since he was clearly enjoying our little conversation.Finally, he asked me in his faulty grammar, "What the time?"When I answered him, he responded with, "You stay me five minutes.I stay you twelve.I win."

His English was not very good, but he certainly was clever enough to outsmart me.

***

Across the hallway from my classroom taught my friend and colleague John.As with my students, his students were also capable of clever remarks and actions.One day as he was writing a sentence on the board, an extremely obese student came walking into the class several minutes late.After sternly informing the boy that he should take a seat and try to be on time for the next class, John continued to write on the board.

Seconds later a loud crash reverberated throughout the room.Whipping around, John noticed that the obese one was lying on the floor, feebly moving his limbs like a turtle that has been placed on the back of its shell.His fun-loving university classmates had pulled the chair out from under him as he sat down.

Irritated, John asked, "What happened?"

"Earthquake, sir," one student replied.

Hearing this clever response, the other young men laughed joyfully at their desks.On the floor the turtle's limbs continued to slowly wave.

Just a typical scene in a university classroom, right?

***

All the above is not meant to imply that the students did not take their lessons seriously.I remember one group of students who were unusually inquisitive, even about seemingly boring topics like English grammar.At one point they were struggling with the subtleties of the usage of the present perfect tense in English.

Given their genuine interest and desire to improve, I spent one whole lesson explaining and giving examples of why, how and when we use the present perfect.When I had finished, the blackboard was covered with my explanations and examples.Confident that I had presented the material in an understandable and even interesting fashion, I turned to the class asked, "Is this clear?Does anybody have a question before we go?"

One hand went up, so I called on the young man.With a thoughtful look on his face, he asked, "How many absences I have?"

The teaching profession doesn't always pay well, but it sure does provide some rewarding moments.

***

English grammar remained an insoluble mystery to many of our earnest young scholars at the university.Like my previous students in Tabuk, though, they often managed to become fluent quite quickly.Young men who could barely produce two-word utterances at the beginning of the semester were speaking complete sentence after only one semester.So I guess that not all the time spent in the classroom was in vain.

Farewell, Dhahran...See you in the next life, Inshallah!

The effects of the first Gulf War brought an end to our residence in Saudi Arabia.When we returned to our home in Dhahran after the dust had settled, it was not the same place.Instead of a cloudless sky and a merciless sun, we looked up to see nothing but the black smoke from burning oil wells in Kuwait, courtesy of Saddam Hussein.With every breath we inhaled, loads of carcinogens entered our lungs.

We could have accepted this if only we two adults were breathing in the carcinogens, but we returned to Dhahran with a new-born baby.The child immediately started having breathing problems and gagging during the night.We decided that it was time to move on.

(Twenty years later that same child now pays for the privilege of inhaling carcinogens.Hey, I guess somebody has to pay the tobacco farmers.)

Even more worrying than the fact that my child was having breathing problems was a rumor that was spreading among expatriate workers.The rumor concerned our pay.Since we were all inhaling the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes every day free of charge, people began to whisper that the university was going to dock our pay by an amount equivalent to the price of the two packs of cigarettes.

It was bad enough that my child could not breathe.How much worse the thought of a pay cut!Of course, that talk about a pay reduction because of all the free carcinogens we were breathing in **might** have been a joke.One never knows, though.

We were soon back at the Dhahran airport with one-way tickets out.

### Chapter 5: Brunei

Lying there, flat on my belly, it occurred to me that some of my gay colleagues might enjoy the situation I was in.Leaning over me was a tall dark man named Jagadish, whom I had met only ten minutes earlier.I was lying on a spare bed in his apartment with my trousers pulled down to my knees, and my new acquaintance was gently pulling the cheeks of my ass apart so that he could scrutinize my anus.

Looking back over my shoulder at the man, I could not help wishing that I were somewhere else.Anywhere else.

Had I been in a doctor's office, and had he been a doctor, I might have felt less uneasy about this anal inspection.He was not a doctor, though.At least not in the Western sense of a doctor.This man was an Indian who led a yoga group in the apartment building next to mine.Yoga was his passion, but by profession Jagadish was a mathematics teacher.

Neither mathematics nor yoga had ever interested me, but Jagadish also had a reputation as a very effective natural healer.And, with a fistula near my anus, I needed healing.A yoga-practicing Irish colleague, Jonathan, had somehow persuaded me to consult Jagadish about my fistula.

In retrospect, I am amazed that anyone could talk me into willingly exposing my ass to an unfamiliar Indian mathematics teacher.However, I had already been to a conventional British doctor and had received little satisfaction there.

My only consolation as I lay there, face down, cheeks spread wide, was that Jonathan felt just as uncomfortable at that moment as I did.He had tried to make a hasty escape as soon as Jagadish ordered me to drop my pants.Jagadish, however, had asked him to stay.Faithful yoga devotee that he was, Jonathan could not refuse this request.

To distract myself, I kept my eye on Jonathan as Jagadish spread my cheeks and stared down intently "where the sun don't shine."Jonathan, smiling weakly and looking intently and uncomfortably at the ceiling, avoided my stare.If I had not been feeling so sorry for myself, I might have felt sorry for him - even though it was his fault that I was in that position.Several moments of silence passed, broken only by Jonathan's occasional nervous clearing of his throat.

Then, suddenly and triumphantly, Jagadish shouted out, "Yes!Yes!It is so big!How could he not have noticed it?"Jonathan was startled by the shout, and I was confused and conflicted.

On the one hand, I felt pleased that the sight of my anus could fill a person with such obvious pleasure.On the other hand, I could not help wondering what he meant by those words.Who was **he?** And **what** was so big?Were my hemorrhoids acting up again?Was there a dingleberry back there obstructing the man's view?If so, why was he pleased about it?Or, was it possible that my penis had come into view?Did he actually think it was big?These questions and many others bounced around in my mind.Who knows what was going on in Jonathan's mind.

The reality turned out to be less exciting than my speculations.Jagadish merely meant that he had spotted my fistula, and that he was surprised that the British doctor I had seen earlier had failed to spot it.Surprised and pleased at this failure.

In the treasure hunt for the elusive anal fistula, the natural healer had proven more effective than the Western-trained doctor.

In the British doctor's defense, I should mention that he was eighty years old and wore very thick glasses.I do not blame him for not spotting the fistula; I'm surprised that he was even able to find my butt.

In fact, I admired the old Brit for having the courage to continue practicing medicine long after his mind and eyesight had given out on him.Who cares if he fails to spot a fistula every now and then?There are always plenty of Indian mathematics teachers to do anal inspections should our doctors fail us.

***

Unlike Jagadish, who worked in a secondary school, most of the expatriates I met in Brunei, worked at the national university.There were no healers among them as far as I knew, but there were certainly plenty of questionable characters.

I met one of them, Adam, almost as soon as I arrived in the country.As a welcoming gesture, my head of department kindly invited me to a dinner at his home.Unfortunately, Adam was also present.He seemed to take an immediate disliking to me, and I was willing to reciprocate.Judging by the way he looked down his nose and sneered at me when I spoke to him, I suspected that he might be a bit arrogant as well.

When he was not busy contradicting me or sneering at me, Adam spent most of the evening ignoring me.It quickly became clear that Adam and I were not going to become bosom buddies even though we lived in the same small country and worked at the same institution.What I did not realize, though, was that the man was in the process of going stark raving mad.

"There are many ways to skin a cat."That's what my grandfather, in his wisdom, often told me when I was a child.Although I didn't understand then what he meant, I now do.In addition to this wisdom passed down through the generations, my experience in Brunei taught me another truism:"There are many ways to know that a man is going crazy."In the case of Adam, one way to know that he was going crazy was to watch him enter his office.

I have to admit, though, that I never actually saw him enter his office since my department was at the other end of the campus.In fact, after my initial unpleasant encounter with Adam I had very little direct contact with the man, but I did hear lots of stories about him as the months passed.Based on what I was hearing about his bizarre behavior, I concluded that Adam was losing contact with reality as most people know it.Most of my updates on Adam's mental health came from my friend and neighbour Bob, whose office was adjacent to Adam's.From this convenient vantage point, Bob was able to monitor and report on a day-to-day basis the mental deterioration of the man.

The daily reports Bob gave quickly convinced me that arrogance was the least of Adam's problems.The first indication that something was amiss came when Adam decided he should enter and exit his office through the window rather than the door.The other professors, who were still using the more conventional method, i.e. the door, to get in and out of their offices, probably wondered why Adam had opted for the window.Something about the wild glare in his eye, though, convinced them to maintain silence on the matter.

As the weeks passed and Adam's behaviour became ever more erratic, the look in his eyes grew ever wackier and more crazed.To envision his appearance, think Charles Manson.

The more loosely connected to reality Adam became, the more convinced he was that Bruneians were conspiring against him.Bruneians, I might mention, are a gentle people not given to conspiracies.At least that is my impression.After months in the tropical sun, Adam came to a different conclusion about our host country nationals.

Among other delusions, he thought that his neighbors were bombarding his house with jungle noises at night as a way of harassing him.How did they do this?According to him, by placing large speakers close to his house and blasting the jungle noises in his direction.Why they would do such a thing is unfathomable, but, hey, how can a Western man understand the mind of a native?

Maybe Adam's jungle noise bombardment theory was right, but I doubt it.It is certainly true that his house was being bombarded with jungle noises every night.I will concede that, but I do **not** think his neighbours were responsible for these noises.Call me naïve, but my hunch is that the jungle noises were coming not from speakers, but from the dense tropical jungle which was located just a few meters behind his house.Just a hunch on my part, though.

Given his certainty that the locals were out to frighten and vex him, some people might consider Adam to be paranoid.While I am one of those people, I have to admit that there was one complaint he had about Bruneians which I understood and agreed with.He felt that the country's bureaucrats were trying to drive him to distraction.

He might have been right.The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly in Brunei.Very slowly. Bruneian bureaucrats really could vex the soul of anyone dealing with them.

However irritating and frustrating Bruneian bureaucrats might have been, though, they did not, as he believed, single him out for special treatment.They were very fair in the sense that they treated everybody in the same negligent and/or condescending manner.

The case which completely convinced Adam that they were out to get him had to do with an official form called the "life certificate."Foreign employees in the country were paid on a monthly basis – provided that they were in the country when the checks were issued.Those leaving for their summer vacation could either collect their three months' pay when they returned to Brunei or they could take the option of having their summer checks sent to them.However, the government would not send checks abroad to employees on holiday until they had received a life certificate.This "life certificate" was a form which simply stated that the employee was still alive.(No government money for cadavers.)The following is a copy of the form:

Life Certificate

(Signature of Applicant)________________________

I hereby certify that Mr/Miss____________ whose signature is affixed above, was living and signed his/her name before me on ___________19____.

Signed______________________

Address:___________________________

Qualification:_______________________

Date:_________________

Note:This certificate must be signed on the last day of each Month.

It may be signed by a Justice of the Peace, Notary Public, Commissioner for Oaths, Minister of Religion, Medical Practitioner or by a Bank Manager.

This certificate must be posted to the Registrar of University Brunei Darussalam, 3186 to reach him on or after the 1st. of the following month.

I.C. NO:______________________

University Brunei Darussalam

All employees hoping to receive a salary payment while travelling abroad had to submit this form.Only after receiving the completed life certificate would the government send out the check.I especially like the fact that the official verifying that the employee is alive must do so on the last day of the month.The university certainly did not want to pay a month's salary if the employee did not make it to the end of the month.Pity the poor person who dies on the 29th!

I don't normally approve of artificially prolonging the life of a dying person, but this is one case where I might support it just as a matter of principle.

This life certificate requirement was just one of many idiosyncratic features of Bruneian bureaucracy.It was an awkward system, but it worked as long as you followed all the rules.

One summer Adam chose not to follow the rules.Even though he had opted for summer payments with life certificates, once he arrived in England for his three-month holiday he decided to simply wait and collect his checks when he got back to Brunei rather than bothering with the required visits to doctors and notaries for signatures.To his surprise, though, when he returned and requested his salary for the months of June, July and August, the university refused to pay. He had, after all, opted for summer payments and had been out of the country.He had not sent in any life certificates to show that he had been alive during those three months.Adam tried to convince the officials that the fact that he was standing in their office, alive and breathing, meant that he had also been alive during his vacation.

It was useless.The official was adamant.No life certificate, no pay.

Storming out of the office, Adam went to a local doctor and had the life certificate completed and notarized.After obtaining the evidence that he was still alive, he presented the certificate to the bureaucrat, who smiled and informed him that he would receive the money shortly.Pacified, Adam went home.When he later checked his account, he saw that he had indeed been paid.But only for August.

Furious, he returned to the office.

"You owe me three months' pay, but I only received one month!"

"Yes, but your life certificate only shows that you were alive in August."

"But if I was alive in August, that means I was also alive in June and July!"

And so it went.In the end Adam had to go back to the doctor's office and get life certificates for June and July in order to be paid for those months.

Perhaps it was experiences such as this which helped convince him that Bruneians were out to get him.The truth is, though, that the same thing would have happened to anyone who neglected to get his life certificates.And I support the Bruneian position in this matter.Otherwise, you will get all kinds of employees walking around claiming that they had been alive the previous month.Think about it, Adam.Who was **really** the unreasonable one in this instance?

***

Yes, Adam was nutty.He had no right, however, to feel that he was being singled out for special treatment.Every foreigner working in the country had, at some time, been exasperated by the local bureaucrats.Most of the frustration occurred soon after arrival in the country or soon before departure as both occasions required visits to various government offices.

When Kelvin, my head of department, completed his contract, he had to jump through the usual set of hoops to get out of the country.In practice this meant that he had to visit a cluster of officials to have various documents stamped and signed.Basically, these forms indicated that he had paid all his bills, had no debts and had returned all materials borrowed.This process was complicated and time-consuming, but it was necessary in order to receive one's final salary and end-of-service gratuity.

In Kelvin's case the process became more difficult and complicated than usual as a result of a strange situation which arose.One of the required stamps could be obtained at an office on campus, which was convenient.Unfortunately for Kelvin, though, the office was locked when he went to get the required signature for his clearance form.After several fruitless visits to the office, he was delighted one day to see an elderly gentleman appear at the office and unlock the door.Kelvin enquired about the official whose signature he needed, and was told, "Sorry, but Mr. ___ will not be able to sign your form.He died two days ago."

"Oh, sorry to hear that."Pause. "Surely there is someone else who can sign the form," Kelvin implored.

"Well, I have been assigned as his replacement, but I cannot sign anything today.You will have to come back after the weekend."

Experience with bureaucrats had taught Kelvin not to even attempt to argue, so he left.When he returned on Monday morning, the office was closed.It was also closed on Tuesday, and so on.Finally, Kelvin went to a neighboring office and enquired as to when the elderly gentleman would next appear in his office.

"Oh, he does not work here any longer.He retired last Thursday."

Thursday was the day that Kelvin had spoken to him.

I saw Kelvin moments after the above conversation and was amazed by his equanimity as he related the events.

***

Sadly for me, Kelvin was not the only one who had trouble getting all the required signatures prior to departure.

In my case, though, the obstacle was a bloated government official who was neither dead nor retired.Although the official in question had a body the size of a whale, she turned out to be extremely nimble and elusive.

Her desk, easily visible from the hallway of the large government office building, was only meters from the counter which "served" the public. On several occasions I approached that counter in search of the desired signature.Each time I looked on longingly as she wallowed only meters away.Nevertheless, I was unable to speak with her because there was a glass wall behind the counter separating me from her.So close, but yet so far!Time after time I observed her sitting there, obviously unoccupied.Nevertheless, I could not approach her or even make her aware of my existence because the secretary, on my side of the wall, stopped me cold.

"Sorry, cannot enter.Very busy lady!"

It got to the point that I was almost relieved to see her desk sitting empty when I arrived.I still was unable to get her signature, but it seemed less insulting to be turned away when she was "out on important business."

Under normal circumstances I would have said something rude to the secretary and simply given up on the signature.In this case, though, there was a large amount of money at stake, so I bit my tongue.Over and over.

After several failed attempts to get past this secretary, I began to suspect that her only job was to keep the public on the wrong side of the glass partition.I also began to fantasize about wrapping my skinny fingers around the woman's neck, but an inner voice told me that would be wrong so I kept my skinny fingers to myself.

Imagine my surprise, then, when, on my fifth or sixth visit, the secretary inexplicably greeted me warmly and told me that I could step right in to see the official.I could not believe my luck.I sat myself down in a flimsy metal chair and gazed upon the woman who had the power to instantly authorize a twenty-five thousand dollar payment into my bank account.

If she had thrown a stick across the room, I would have fetched it in my mouth.

For that matter, I would probably have performed any number of humiliating or decadent acts if she had so much as winked at me.

She smiled and said hello.

"Hello," I panted.

Then she said, "I have to step out for a moment.Just wait here."

"No problem, madam. I will wait here." I whimpered.

Two hours later I was still waiting and whimpering.Other employees were getting ready to leave.Quitting time was approaching.Then, to my unspeakable relief, the dugong in a scarf reappeared.

In her hand she carried a small brown paper sack.I had no interest in the contents of the sack.

"Would you like to see what I bought?"

"Oh, yes!!!" I gushed.

She proceeded to show me several containers of facial powder and lipstick that she had purchased while I was sitting at her desk.

"What do you think of this lipstick?" she asked.

"Oh, I just _love_ that shade of red!!!" I squealed.(Incidentally, I am color blind.)

After we had both spent several minutes marvelling over her good taste in cosmetics, she glanced at her watch and realized that it was time to go home.

"Now, what did you need?" she asked gently.

"Well, I was just hoping that you could sign this form I have here."

Taking the form into her fleshy hand, she placed it on her desk and signed.

Five fruitless visits.A two-hour wait at her abandoned desk.A five-second signature.Twenty-five thousand dollars in my bank.Oh, happy day!

Pondans

Brunei is a strict Muslim country, so visitors might expect to find transvestite-free streets in the capital.An evening's stroll through the streets and parks will quickly disabuse them of that expectation, however.On my evening walks I noticed that every evening when the sun went down in Bandar Seri Begawan, the pondans came out.They were like bats in that sense."Pondan" was the local word for transvestite.Many an evening, on my after-dinner strolls, I came upon groups of pretty young gentlemen with long hair and beautiful evening gowns.

After greeting them with a hearty, "Good evening!" I was invariably rewarded with a chorus of cheerful falsetto voices, "Good evening, sir!"

The abundance of "pondans" was not an aspect of the culture which officials and religious figures were proud of.What is an official to do, though?Boy will be girls and girls will be boys; it's a mixed up world, Lola.

One evening, as I walked along the main city street, a car full of young women in brightly colored dresses passed by.I couldn't help noticing that the girls were all waving enthusiastically at me as the driver honked the horn.I smiled and waved back, assuming that they were my students.

Moments later, tires screeching, the car did an illegal U-turn and pulled up next to me.

Peering into the car, I realized that the young "ladies" were not my students.In fact, they were not even ladies, although they were heavily made up and were wearing simply gorgeous evening gowns.I did not recognize any of the people in the car, but I greeted them warmly since they had gone to the trouble of violating traffic laws to get close to me.Seeing my friendly reaction to their overture, the driver stuck his head out of the car window and sweetly told me, "I am the one who horned you."

Just for the record, I have never been "horned" by anyone.And, anyway, I do not think that tooting one's horn at somebody qualifies as "a horning."At least it does not correspond to the image I get in my mind of one person horning another.I will not go into the details of the image I have in my mind.

My only other close encounter of the pondan kind occurred in a food court.My three-year-old daughter, Anna, and I were quietly enjoying a meal when a pondan with heavy silver earrings and a deep blue full-length gown sat next to us.Anna, ever the fashion conscious child, was fascinated by the elegant "lady" next to her and stared intently at the pondan.

After a couple of minutes of this continuous staring, both the pondan and I were starting to feel uncomfortable.I tried to distract Anna with conversation but she would not take her eyes off him/her.Knowing that Anna was keenly interested in jewellery and fancy clothing, I assumed that this was the reason she continued to stare.

Soon, though, Anna turned to me and reported in a loud voice, "That lady has a face just like a man!"

"That, my child, is because the fucking weirdo next to you **is** a man," I explained gently to my daughter.

Those might not have been my exact words.Actually, I think I responded with a thoughtful, "Hmmm..." as I uncomfortably stared off into space.

Over twenty years have passed since I left Brunei, and in the meantime the Sultan has become more religious.Or at least he has subjected his subjects to a more restrictive brand of religion.Sharia law has now been implemented in the country, so I have to wonder if the pondans are still haunting the city streets and parks in the evenings.I suspect not, since they seemed to enjoy dressing up and getting out, and if there is one thing that some religions cannot tolerate it is enjoyment on the part of followers.

Extravagant Royals and Modest Citizens

Much has been written about the extravagance of the royal family in Brunei.Various books and newspapers have noted that the Sultan has a vast collection of Rolls Royce automobiles, and that his palace, with its 1788 rooms, is bigger than the Vatican.This, of course, is only the main palace where his first wife lives.During the time I lived in Brunei, the Sultan had another huge palace just down the road for his younger second wife.I guess wife number one had told wife number two, "This palace just ain't big enough for the two of us."How could the man afford two palaces?More importantly, how could he afford two wives? The explanation is simple.For a brief period of time the Sultan was the richest man in the world.That honor, along with much of the family's wealth has long since been squandered, mostly by his younger brother Jeffri, whom the Sultan unwisely placed in charge of the country's finances.

It was rumoured that Jeffri, who was known for his extravagances while he was the Minister of Finance, made all kinds of outrageous purchases with money from the national coffers.I cannot say to what extent these rumors are true.I do know, though, that not all of Jeffri's purchases were frivolous.In fact, some were absolutely essential.One such essential purchase was a jewel-studded watch with a price tag of many thousands of dollars.Besides telling the time, this watch had a very special feature.

Each hour on the hour the images of a man and a woman could be seen copulating on the face of the watch.Jeffri was so taken by the watch that he bought several more to give away as gifts.So ... in addition to having good taste, he was also generous.

It is surprising that Jeffri had the time to watch little figures copulating on his wrist, because the word on the street was that Jeffri himself was copulating most of the time.The position of Finance Minister in a wealthy family-run country has its perks.

I have every reason to believe that the stories of his sexual appetite were true.My wife worked in the royal family's clinic, and one of her duties was to give blood tests to the planeloads of prostitutes that Jeffri regularly flew into the country to satisfy his needs.And when Jeffri was tired of copulating on dry land, he could take the ladies onto his yacht, which he cleverly named "Tits." Once again, the man has good taste.

I had the pleasure of meeting Prince Jeffri once and even shook his hand.Pulling my hand away from his after our handshake, I thought of all the prostitutes he had flown into the country.And all the places that hand had been.

What should I do with my hand after it had touched his?Should I have it bronzed - or amputated?In the end, I compromised and just stuck it in the microwave for a couple of minutes to purify it.That explains why I have to write with my left hand nowadays.

Prince Jeffri never crossed my path again.I guess we moved in different circles.

But what about the average man-on-the-street in the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan?How does he feel about the extravagances of the royal family?While the royal family resides in vast, gaudy palaces, a large percentage of the capital's citizens live in the "water village."The water village consists of hundreds and hundreds of small wooden, tin-roofed houses built on stilts.These modest (not to say impoverished-looking) houses are suspended a couple of meters above the murky and smelly waters of the river which flows though the city.From the water village there is an excellent view of the Sultan's palace perched atop a hill just downriver.

During the years that I lived in Brunei I often wondered what went through the people's minds as they gazed upon the nearby palace.Did they ever ask why they and their ten children shared a small number of rooms while their leader had 1788?That seems like a reasonable question for a citizen to ask, but I don't think Bruneians thought in those terms.They seemed proud of the fact that their leader was known worldwide for his wealth.I heard no complaints about life in the water village.

In fact, when I asked my students to write an essay on the pros and cons of living in the water village, they seemed quite pleased.I had expected to get a barrage of complaints about cramped conditions and the indignity of living in poverty so close to the world's greatest monument to conspicuous consumption.Instead, what I got were glowing essays on the joys of living in the water village.The most interesting comment came from a young man who pointed out that one of the advantages of living in the water village was that residents didn't need to buy waste bins; rubbish could be thrown directly out the window into the river.There's always a silver lining.

Having seen and smelled the sludge which slowly passes below the houses, I am convinced that most of the residents are availing themselves of this advantage of life on the river.

***

My family and I arrived in Brunei just weeks before the "Silver Jubilee" celebration commemorating the Sultan's twenty-five years in power."Great!"I thought."Let the festivities begin!I'm ready to party in an Asian and Islamic sort of way!"

In the weeks leading up to the celebration a large wooden stage was erected over the canal which runs alongside the capital's outdoor market.This was to be the site where dance performances would be performed for the pleasure of the citizenry.It seemed like a good idea as Bruneians are fond of music.

Unfortunately, religious leaders caught wind of the upcoming public dancing and managed to do what they do best:squeeze all joy out of life.The dance performances were cancelled and the wooden structure over the canal stood empty and abandoned throughout the week of the Silver Jubilee, a ghost of the common people's hope for some relief from the tedium of their everyday existence.

Meanwhile, in the official newspaper, The Borneo Bulletin, I noticed that there was a long article about the joy of the Silver Jubilee.The writer pointed out that it would be perfectly appropriate for citizens and foreign residents to present the Sultan with gifts in honor of the anniversary.And what was suggested as a good gift idea?Gold.Excuse my incredulity, but I must admit that I was surprised to read that the richest man on the planet hoped to receive gold from people living in rickety wooden shacks suspended over a stinky river.

An even more frightening possibility was that foreigners (like me!) might be expected to contribute as well.I had barely received my first pay check!Did I really want to spend it on the Sultan?I empathised with his desire to receive gifts of gold, but my selfish human nature reared its ugly head and prevented me from contributing.

While the masses were being asked for contributions and having their tiny portion of the celebration restricted by the religious authorities, no expense was being spared to ensure that a good time was had by the royal family and visiting royal dignitaries.Lavish dinners were held every night in the palace and the visiting dignitaries received extravagant jewels as gifts.

The representative from Aspreys, a British jeweller, brought massive amounts of jewels with him to Brunei, but had to fly back mid-week to re-stock his supplies.Everything he had brought with him had gone in the first couple of days.(I know this because a friend of mine just happened to sit next to him on the flight back to London.)A fortune was spent on jewels that week.

One might assume that the royal family, as one of the richest in the world, would foot the bill for such extravagances.But, no, that was not the case.Instead, the government found a way for the locals to participate in the joy of the Silver Jubilee.After the celebrations ended, a special tax was imposed on state employees to help refill the coffers which had been depleted by all the lavish dinners and gift giving.Thus, even after the Silver Jubilee was long gone, state employees had the privilege of making monthly contributions in commemoration of the first twenty-five years under their beloved ruler.

Meanwhile, during the week of celebration, the common folk of Brunei were pretty much left to their own devices in finding ways to celebrate the Silver Jubilee.One evening I watched the state television's coverage of celebrations across the country.People in one small rural village had organized a rock-lifting competition.That's right, a rock-lifting competition.As I watched in disbelief, the camera focused on a large rock in the middle of a grassy area.A small group of middle-aged men with pot bellies gathered in a semi-circle around the rock.One man after another smilingly approached and attempted to lift it.After a few seconds of heaving and grunting, each man in turn gave up the exciting but fruitless effort.Finally, a younger, stockier man managed to lift the rock.I was nearly overcome with emotion at the sight of this rural celebration."Oh!" I thought, "Why can't the Silver Jubilee come every year!"

After the young man succeeded in lifting the rock, the camera cut from the rock-lifting contest back to the palace, where the celebration was considerably more extravagant.The contrast was shocking.Watching the goings-on in the palace, a little tear trickled down my cheek as I thought of those country fellows heaving away at the big rock.

Somewhere on this planet of ours there might be people who think that members of a wealthy royal family have an obligation to put the needs of their subjects first.Even before their own desire to have hundreds of Rolls Royce automobiles or jewel-studded pornographic watches.

Maybe. On the other hand, the workers at the Rolls Royce plant have families to feed just like everybody else.Likewise, the people who make watches need customers.And, after all, one must admit that it is an _awfully_ clever idea to put a copulating couple on the face of a wristwatch.

Before passing self-righteous judgment on Bruneian royals, consider how you might spend your money if you had a few million extra dollars lying around.Can you honestly say that **you** would not be tempted to buy one of those clever little watches?

***

About a year after the Silver Jubilee celebrations had ended I had a fascinating discussion at the university with a first-year English student.In the course of our conversation she mentioned that she should have graduated from secondary school a year earlier than she had.Because she had not done well on the school-leaving exams, she had to repeat the final year.This surprised me because she seemed like such a bright young girl, but she confessed that she had spent nearly all her time socializing during her final year of school.Shaken by her failure, she got serious and began to do well academically the following year.

What I found fascinating was how she rationalized the fact that one year of her life had been more or less wasted.She told me that while she had initially been shattered by her failure, her attitude changed once the Silver Jubilee celebrations began.

What brought about this change in attitude?

She realized that if she had not been in school, she would not have received the commemorative gifts that were distributed to all secondary students that year.Clearly, these items were precious to the girl since she considered them compensation for an otherwise lost year.

"And what," I asked, "were these items?"

"A pencil with the words 'Silver Jubilee' written on it and a coffee mug with a picture of the Sultan."

"Oh," I replied, at a total loss for words.

At moments such as this I realize that people from different cultures sometimes have values which are radically different from mine.I think it is great that there are still people on the planet who are humble, but this girl was pushing the limits of modesty in her aspirations.

I must confess that I also have a coffee mug with a picture of the Sultan on it.I saw it on sale for ten dollars and could not resist.While I treasure the mug as a curiosity item, I would not sacrifice a year of my life in order to keep it.The same goes for pencils with "Silver Jubilee" written on them.

This young lady was not the only student who amazed me with her willingness to settle for so little.While torturing my students, er, I mean, teaching my students the ever-fascinating topic of conditional sentences, I asked them to write an essay on the topic of "What would I do if I had an unlimited amount of money to spend for a weekend?"

I expected to read about some dramatic desires from these young people who had been freed, in this essay at least, from the real-world economic restrictions.Some of the papers did show quite a bit of admirable capitalistic greed, but not all.Many of the desires were surprisingly modest.

One girl wrote, "If I had an unlimited amount of money, I would fly to Kota Kinabalu and spend the weekend with my friend."

Kota Kinabalu is the capital of the neighboring Malaysian state of Sabah.The flight to Kota Kinabalu takes about twenty minutes and costs less than a hundred dollars.

Once she had completed the twenty-minute journey, she wrote that she would go to a movie on the first night – and she would treat her friend.Two movie tickets in Kota Kinabalu cost around five dollars, so she's still on a budget of less than a hundred dollars at this point.

The following day my hypothetically hyper-rich student would take her friend to MacDonald's and treat her to "a hamburger and such."Add another ten dollars to the total tab so far.On the third and final day, my economically unimaginative student wrote that she would fly home to Bandar Seri Begawan.Before flying home, though, she would call her mother long distance (another dollar recklessly spent) and tell her to wait at the airport.In one final extravagant gesture, she would pay for both the taxi which took her mother to the airport AND the taxi which took them home.

I hope this girl's parents are appreciative of the way their daughter knows how to have a great time while still keeping a little change in the pocket.

The royal family, it should be noted, have been a bit less frugal in working their way through the country's petroleum earnings.

As fate would have it, I ended up teaching a member of the royal family one summer.

Quite out of the blue, the Sultan of Brunei announced one day that his son, Crown Prince Billah, would be coming to our department for private English lessons.The Sultan felt that Billah should brush up his English skills before attending Oxford University in the United Kingdom.Now, it might seem surprising that a mediocre-to-poor student would be accepted at Oxford University, but of course this was not your average mediocre student.This was a filthy rich mediocre student who would one day be leading a country with which the UK had long had relations.

For the university this presented an opportunity and a challenge.An opportunity because the father, as the richest man in the world at the time, was certain to cough up a large amount of money.A challenge because Billah had only passed one of his A-level courses.He could not write English very well, and he could not use a word processor.In short, Billah did not really seem like Oxford material.His father's very generous gift to the university library made Billah look a lot more like Oxford material, however.

And so it was that Billah began to attend two hours of classes in our department at the national university daily.Because it was summer and nearly every other lecturer was out of the country, my head of department gave me the task of teaching one of these hours each day.The other hour was given on a rotating basis to other lecturers who happened to be in country at the time they were needed.

In preparation for Billah's attendance, two offices in the administrative block were cleared out and refurbished.One room was prepared as his classroom and the other for the 15-minute break which he took between the two classes.On one side of his "classroom" sat a massive mahogany desk complete with desktop computer.Behind this desk Billah could sit comfortably on a plush and expensive-looking leather chair.

Looking lonely and forlorn on the other side of the room, a small metal chair had been placed for the teacher.To say that it seemed flimsy would be to give too much credit to that chair."Rickety" probably is a better descriptor of the chair which the university had decided to offer the teachers.The contrast was quite striking.One side of the room glowed with opulence while only one meter away the other side of the room screamed abject poverty.

I realize that the crown prince is more important than I am.With the possible exception of my mother, everybody in the world would agree that he is more important.Nevertheless, I couldn't help wondering if it was really necessary to make the disparity between our positions so blatantly obvious.Did the teacher's chair really have to be small and metallic?Couldn't they have given me a chair which was merely flimsy and not rickety?

The room designated as his break room was directly across the hall.After our lesson had ended, Billah and I would walk across the hall to be joined by the teacher who would give the second lesson.What happened in the break room initially seemed extremely bizarre to me.After Billah had sat down on the luxurious sofa placed at the end of the room, the other teacher and I would sit on our modest sofa along one side of the room.Then, to my amazement, a local peon would bring in tea and a tray of sweet treats to offer to Billah first, then to us.The fact of having treats brought to us was not so bizarre in and of itself; it was the way that they treats were brought in which was mind boggling.

Because the royal family is so exalted in the country, the custom is that no subjects should ever be physically higher than royals.This creates a problem when the royal person is seated.In this case, since Billah was seated on the sofa, the peon had to enter and cross the room on his knees, laboriously making his way across the room while holding the tray.It was quite a struggle and balancing act.After offering the goodies to Billah, he would then crawl over to the teachers so that we could help ourselves while he knelt before us.The whole spectacle seemed so degrading to me that I could hardly enjoy the fine treats which were being offered to me.

As the weeks passed, though, I found myself accepting this situation as quite normal.In fact, it was surprising how quickly I became comfortable with the crawling-peon scenario. That which had seemed so bizarre earlier simply became a fact of life and I no longer felt great pity for the servant on his knees.The moment when I first realized just how comfortable I was with this situation was probably when I caught myself stubbing out my cigarette on the peon's forehead.That was improper, I suppose.

I didn't really do that.I don't smoke.And even if I did, I'm not sure that I would have put out my cigarette on the young man's forehead.

Strangely enough the class sessions were far more enjoyable than the breaks, where we tried unsuccessfully to make small talk with the prince.He was a pleasant enough fellow, but we really had nothing in common.He was young, Asian, fairly uneducated and filthy rich.We were old, Western, fairly educated and not filthy rich.The only subject which seemed to really spark an interest in the young man was football, and since I know next to nothing about football that did not lead to any lively conversations.

In the classroom sessions at least we could focus on academic materials and not have to endure forced pleasantries.I have to say that Billah was a very charming young man to teach.Even though he had been given every advantage in life, he had a modest and respectful demeanour.He was willing to do whatever the teacher asked of him and was always courteous to his teachers.

His respectful nature once got me in trouble.

University administrators were always hovering around the area when Billah was on campus, and one of them happened to notice one day that Billah opened the door for me to enter the classroom first, which I did.He had hardly left campus before I was called before university officials to be told that I was NEVER to enter a room before the crown prince.

That was fine with me.I was in no hurry to start balancing myself on the creaky metal chair which they had so graciously provided me with.

The Naïve, the Entitled and the Oblivious

In much the same way that Billah treated his teachers with respect, so did all of my students at Brunei University.They were a pleasant group who seemed satisfied with their lot in life.This surprised me, because as an outsider looking in I could see lots of reasons for them to be resentful of the way their society was run and all the restrictions which they had placed on their lives.I cannot imagine Western students putting up with the kind of life they led.

College life without booze and sex?You've got to be kidding!There was even a strictly enforced dress code for university students.If they were resentful, though, it did not show.

One irony of academic life at Brunei University was that all students, regardless of major, were required to take two courses.One of them was a kind of philosophy course which taught them to question everything in their search for knowledge and truth.The other course, the "Malay Muslim Monarchy" course, taught them that they must NEVER question their religion or their leaders.

I'm not sure how the students managed to reconcile these two courses in their young minds.

Nevertheless, with one exception, a young man belonging to the Chinese ethnic minority who spoke to me angrily after class one day, none of my students seemed overly concerned with the way things were organized at the university.They came to class, participated willingly and were a pleasure to teach.

Although I lived there nearly four years and had very pleasant relations with my students, I never felt that I really understood them or their culture in the same way that I had understood the cultures of other countries in which I had lived.There seemed to be a limited and prescribed set of topics which the students were allowed or willing to talk about with their Western teachers.For this reason I found that much of my understanding of the students came from what they wrote in their English essays.The earlier-mentioned essay the student wrote about her "wild weekend" with her friend in Kota Kinabalu, along with other observations and student essays, taught me that many Bruneians had very modest aspirations.

Reading other students' essay, I decided that they can be very naïve.Far more naïve than a student in a Western university.As an example of this, one of my students, an unusually pretty girl, wrote an essay on a person who had had a great impact on her life.The title of this essay was "A Concern (sic) Teacher".The "concern" teacher in question was her (male) religious teacher in secondary school.

After explaining that he had taught her for three years and noting that he was in his mid-thirties, she then described his physical appearance.According to her, he was short and plump with a small mouth and a double chin.

She was fond of this teacher because he was very kind and concerned about her.She wrote that every time he entered the classroom he would greet her and then chat with her "for three to five minutes" before starting to teach.She noted that this made some of her classmates jealous, who for some reason, thought she was getting preferential treatment.During break time he treated her in the canteen and sometimes took her to a restaurant at lunch time.A very "concern" teacher indeed!

This kind of special treatment carried on right up till the time she was due to take her final exam. He even began giving her free tuition at her home in preparation for the finals.Did I mention that this was an unusually pretty girl?

As a result of all the individual attention from this dedicated professional, the young lady got a top mark in her religion class.This teacher had really had a profound effect on her life, and she felt that she had benefitted greatly from his help.Unfortunately for the teacher, the story did not have a happy ending.He was very sad when she was leaving and she "saw tears falling through his eyes."He even confessed that he loved her (shock!).She wrote that she could not accept that, though, because he already had a family.

Aside from the great admiration one must feel for this dedicated educator, it is hard not to be surprised by the naivety of the young girl.Good Lord, the man had practically stalked her for three years:before class, at breaks and lunch, and finally at her home.Meanwhile, she had had no inkling that the man had anything other than a professional interest in her.

Needless to say, after I read her essay I began to give her individual attention before and after class as well as in the evenings.I was not short and plump, and did not have a double chin.I figured that if I played my cards right she would never find out that I had a family.

I give this girl's essay merely as an illustration of how naïve some of these students could be.There were plenty of similar examples which crossed my desk.Not all of the essays were as intriguing as this one, but they convinced me that my students were less worldly than Western university students.

Modest and naïve as many of the students were, there were also times when I noticed in student essays a sense of entitlement.Even though the royal family was doing an excellent job of soaking up much of the country's wealth, the bit that was left over for ordinary citizens was still quite high when compared to average incomes in some other countries in the region.Because of the neighbouring countries' relative poverty, many Bruneian families were able to afford a maid from places like Indonesia and the Philippines.The going monthly rate for maids was amazingly low – it was not unusual for monthly wages to be below three hundred dollars - and maids often had to work seven days a week.Many of my students came from families who had live-in maids, and they seemed to accept this as a normal feature of life.

Few things surprise me anymore, but when I asked my students to write an essay on the topic of "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Having a Maid", I have to admit that I was taken aback by the extent of maids' responsibilities.The advantages of maids were that they:wash dishes, wash clothes, prepare meals, sweep floors, iron clothes, make beds, and wash cars, among other things.I'm not sure how the maids found time to sleep.These advantages then allow for other advantages on the part of the students, who were able to study, go shopping, watch television and play video games.

The students had more difficulty finding disadvantages to having a maid, but one frequently mentioned problem was that older Bruneians had trouble communicating with the maids since they did not always speak Malay or, in some cases, English.One girl did note that having a maid might make her lazy.To illustrate this potential laziness, she noted that sometimes she felt lazy when she got home and asked the maid to take her shoes off.

Wrong!This does not show that you _might_ become lazy.When you make your maid take your shoes off after a day of sitting in the classroom, this shows that you _are_ lazy.

I wonder what the maids would have written on the topic of "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Maid." The ratio of advantages to disadvantages might have been different.

Besides demonstrating naivety and a sense of entitlement, sometimes students wrote things that were so far off the wall that they took my breath away. The best example of this was in an essay about Brunei written by Crown Prince Billah.Since he will one day be the ruler of this country, it seems fair to assume that he has a good understanding of the place.Not necessarily.I was surprised to read in his essay that the country has lions and tigers.Really?I was even more surprised to read that rivers were the main means of transport in the country.That might have been true a century ago, but at the time he wrote it there was a very well developed system of streets and highways, all of which were badly overcrowded since there was very little public transportation in the country and every Bruneian family seemed to want multiple vehicles.I had to fight traffic jams every morning and evening as I travelled to and from the university.If the rivers are really the main means of transport, then they much be chock-a-block with boats.

I assume that he had got his information from an old encyclopedia and had merely copied it without really thinking, but surely the trip to and from the university each day on clogged highways might have given him pause while writing that rivers were the main means of transport.It is possible to gain knowledge from sources other than books.Through your eyes, for example.

The most charming example of a student being completely oblivious came not in an essay but in an excuse for an absence. According to university policy, a student must provide an excuse after an absence.This excuse should be from a doctor in case of an illness or from a parent in case of family emergency.One student who had been absent did not bring me an excuse, so I approached him to inquire about this:

"Bahrin, you were absent yesterday, and you haven't brought me an excuse."

"That's right, but I had a problem at home."

"You'll still need to bring me an excuse."

"But I had a problem back home."

"Yes, I believe you, but I need a written excuse.It is university policy."

"OK, I will bring you the excuse."

I assumed that he knew what I expected when I asked for a written excuse, but he obviously did not.The next day he gave me a handwritten note on lined paper which read as follows:

Letter of Absent

I am writing this letter to inform you that I was absent from your class yesterday.I was due to the unforeseen problems far back home in Belait.

Sincerely yours,

Bahrin H

He had been in the university long enough that he should have known the policy regarding absences and excuses, but obviously he did not.Something about the fact that a young man could still be so innocent and oblivious pleased me, so I happily accepted his "Letter of Absent".

Just as a footnote, I found it amusing that he wrote "far back home in Belait" when referring to his home town.It is true that Belait was about as far away from the university as you could get in the country, but Brunei is tiny.Belait was only about 65 miles away.For a person raised virtually anywhere else in the world this does not qualify as "far back home."

Essential Medical Information

Not long before our final departure from Brunei my wife attended an international nursing conference which was held in the capital.Naturally enough, nearly all of the speakers were from the field of medicine, many of them from abroad.Surprisingly, though, one speaker was a religious leader who gave a talk entitled "Implications of Health and Hygiene in Islamic Injunctions and Prohibitions."I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of the text of his talk.

Among many other things, this man pointed out that "cleansing after a call of nature is compulsory" and that when a man urinates "he cannot urinate against the wind to avoid being hit by the spray."

I'm sure he's right about this, and I find it reassuring to know that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being looking out for me in matters of hygiene.Somehow, though, even without divine guidance I realized long ago that I should not piss into the wind.
Chapter 6: Finland

The preceding chapters have been presented in a more or less chronological order.It is impossible to correctly place Finland in such an order because I have had multiple stints in this country and these have occurred before, between and after my time in other countries.

My first job-seeking appearance in Finland occurred immediately after I lost my job in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.Finding myself suddenly unemployed in the middle of the academic year, I moved to Finland with my wife, hoping against hope that I could employment.

To my surprise there happened to be an unexpected and sudden opening for an English lecturer at Tampere University, which I applied for.As part of the hiring process, all candidates for the position were required to present a 20-minute lecture on the fascinating topic of "Metaphors in the Business World."Oh, I could have spoken all night, probing the delights of metaphors in the business world!

In fact, however, I only spoke for the required twenty minutes.After a week of worry and preparation I showed up at the university and presented my lecture to a room full of lecturers and administrators.I thought it had gone pretty well since several members of the audience had smiled at me as I presented.Surely they wouldn't have smiled if I hadn't impressed them, right?

Almost as soon as I had finished one of the lecturers in the department, a Finn, came up to me and asked, "Do you even know what a metaphor is?"

I took this to be a form of negative feedback.Sure enough, I did not get the lectureship.

It turned out, though, that the lectureship for which I was applying did not begin until the following September and the university also needed a person to fill in for the second semester.They offered me the temporary position even though it seemed to some that I did not know what a metaphor was, and I gratefully accepted.Nobody told me why the position had suddenly become available in the middle of the year, and it didn't occur to me to ask.I was just happy to have a job.

A couple of months later, in a conversation with another lecturer, I discovered the reason for the unexpected opening.The previous lecturer, a young British man, had been admitted into a mental health institution and had promptly jumped out of a fifth-floor window to his death.At the risk of being overly dramatic, by the time I found this out I was able to empathize with and understand the man completely.It was probably a good thing that we lived in a second-floor apartment or I might have been residing in "the great unknown" with this unknown man.

Trying to teach English conversation to young adults in Tampere turned out to be painful enough to make anybody consider jumping out of a window.Suffice it to say that it is very difficult to teach conversation classes to a group of silent and stoic Nordic types.While I had had trouble keeping my Saudi students from all talking at once, I had even greater trouble getting my Finnish students to even open their mouths.I found myself tap dancing in front of a silent and unappreciative audience most days.

And those rare moments when one of them did speak were not always occasions for joy.Stepping into my very first classroom in Finland, I immediately felt unnerved by the silence and emotionless stares being directed my way.In an attempt to establish a little camaraderie with the students, and perhaps evoke a little pity, I squeaked in a pitiful voice, "Gee, this is the first time that I have ever taught a class in Finland."

"That's your problem," said a cruel and robotic-sounding voice from a student in the first row.

"Yes, I guess it is.It is my problem."

What else could I say?So much for the camaraderie.

I later found out that the owner of the cruel and robotic voice was a boy named Antti.One look in Antti's glazed eyes immediately told me that I was dealing with a psycho.The rest of that class session went downhill.When I returned to my office, physically and emotionally shattered, I related the details of the disaster to my office mate, Ray.His response was not what I had expected.

"Hmm..., what section number were you teaching, Wendell?"

"Section 24."

"Oh, I'm afraid there has been a mix-up here.Section 24 is my group.The group I've just come from, Section 20 is actually your group."

The class I had just taught, the one with Antti, was actually **his** class, not mine.

It would be hard to express the joy I felt as Ray and I exchanged student rosters.Antti was now Ray's.

I still had the problem of trying to teach conversation skills to a group of non-conversationalists, but Ray had Antti and for a brief moment my dark thoughts of suicide dissipated.

After that joyous exchange my only contact with Antti was through the stories Ray told me about the young man's contributions in class.As he related each new escapade, I offered up a silent prayer of thanks for the change of classes.I did my best to feel sorry for Ray, but somehow it was always gratitude rather than empathy that I felt.

One week Ray offered the students the opportunity to bring movies to class which they could watch together and discuss.Antti brought "The Texas Chain Saw Massacres".That pretty well sums up everything that was so special and wonderful about the young man.All these years later, looking back at that first experience I can only hope that Antti has matured into a more amenable individual.I also hope that he has been neutered.Or, perhaps, had his head cut off and sent to a veterinarian to check for rabies.

***

Four years after my experience in Tampere history repeated itself.After resigning from my position in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, I traveled once more to Finland in search of a job.Once again there was a lectureship available, this time at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki.I applied for the position, and once again I had to present a practice lecture in front of university lecturers and administrators.As with my first trial lecture, I felt reassured by a couple of smiling faces in the crowd, although by now I should have been able to recognize a sympathy smile when I saw one.

I did not get the job, but to my surprise a lecturer named Jane from the Finnish School of Economics, located just across the street, later approached me and told me how much she had enjoyed my lecture.That should have set off warning bells in my mind about her sanity, but I was still young and inexperienced at the time so I accepted what she said at face value.Jane then informed me that there was a temporary, one-year, position available in her department, and she urged me to apply.

I got the job and along with it I also acquired a stalker in the person of Jane.I initially felt some pity for her since she seemed to be lonely, and she had, after all, helped me get a job.The pity I felt gradually disappeared once she started calling me at all hours of the day and night.She was not only lonely; she was persistent.She was also, in my opinion, a nut.

As if it weren't bad enough that she was calling and talking incessantly at me, she spoke so softly that I could hardly hear what she was saying.Not that I wanted to, but there were the rare occasions when I was supposed to respond and I couldn't do so very well if I hadn't heard what she said.

Jane also managed to keep pretty close tabs on me while I was on campus.As if by magic, she always appeared in the cafeteria for lunch at the same time I did.Believe me, it's hard to enjoy lunch when a person on the other side of the table is moving her lips inaudibly while staring intently into your eyes.

One tidbit which I did miraculously manage to hear one day was her response when I asked her she how long she had been in Finland.I saw her lips moving and then heard the faintest of whispers,

"I've been Finland for seventeen years."

(long pause)

"The worst seventeen years of my life!"

I don't want to sound critical here, but it does seem to me that if a person is miserable in a foreign country he or she should leave after a certain amount of time, say fifteen or sixteen years.Surely seventeen years is too long to stay in a place where you are miserable.When I hear someone say that the years spent in a country have been "the worst seventeen years in my life", it tells me a lot more about the person speaking than it does the country she is speaking about.

Jane eventually committed suicide.She should have left the country, I guess.

***

Amazingly, history repeated itself once more four years later.After leaving my position in Brunei, I returned to Finland yet again in search of a job.I soon discovered that there was a position for a lecturer in the language department at the Technical University of Helsinki.Once again, a trial lecture was required.Do I need to mention that as I presented my lecture I felt reassured by the smiling faces in front of me?And do I need to mention that once more I did not get the job?

By this stage in my life, I was starting to get paranoid whenever somebody smiled at me.It seemed to be an omen of failure.Well, not complete failure because just as in the previous cases I was offered a temporary position rather than the permanent position for which I was applying.Gratefully, I once again accepted the temporary position.

My students at the Technical University were nearly all male and nearly all engineering students.They were very likeable and smart but, as mentioned, they were nearly all male and nearly all engineering students.These two facts were significant because in Finland males tend to be far less talkative than females, and I suspect that engineering students throughout the world are not the most sociable members of the human species.

As with my previous experiences in Finnish classrooms there were lots of awkward silent moments in my English "conversation" classes.Luckily for me, the course also included grammar lessons and writing instruction.Grammar and writing skills might be boring to teach, but at least one does not have to endure the deafening silence of a Finnish conversation class.Besides, it is always interesting to watch the development of students' writing.

As a means of making the students' development in writing readily apparent to both myself and to them, I had them write an essay on a given topic at the beginning of the semester and then write an essay on the exact same topic at the end of the semester.In between those two essays, I gave them lots of instruction on structure, vocabulary and grammar.Regarding my grammar instruction, I focused quite heavily on the use of the definite and indefinite articles (a, an, the).I did this because the Finnish language does not have articles, and Finnish students tend to struggle with their usage.

By the time the end of the semester rolled around I felt confident that the students had better writing skills and a much better grasp of article usage.

How successful was my teaching?You be the judge.Sentence "A" is one student's opening sentence on the first essay at the beginning of the semester.Sentence "B" is the first sentence from the same student's essay at the end of the semester.

A.There is high unemployment in Finland at the moment.

B.There is **a** high unemployment in **the** Finland at the moment.

I have highlighted the articles in the second sentence to illustrate that by the end of the semester this student was much more aware of the existence of articles in the English language.I guess the next step, for the teacher who followed me, would be to teach him how to use these articles which he is now aware of.

This was my final university teaching position in Finland.I figure that I've done enough damage here.I am now retired.

### Epilogue

Somebody once told me that you know you are getting old when a bowel movement provides more pleasure than an orgasm.If that is true, then I guess I was a precocious child.I also guess that this explains why the preceding pages have the unusual "scatological motif."

There is at least one other likely reason.

When I was a very young boy, my grandfather gave me the nickname of "Screws".He, along with all my uncles called me this until their dying day.I would like to think that they called me this because of some precocious sexual propensities on my part, but that is not the case.Rather, I acquired the nickname at the age of about two because my parents suspected that I had swallowed a number of screws which had disappeared from a small plastic bag.Nobody else was in the room at the time of the disappearance, and the screws were never found so I was the natural suspect.In the days following the disappearance my mother would check in the toilet every time I had a bowel movement.I don't think she ever spotted those elusive screws, but the sight of my mother bending over the toilet is one of my earliest memories.

Some people have memories of their mothers cuddling them and others, like me, have memories of their mothers peering into toilets.But, hey, they are all equally precious memories, and it's surely these types of memories which help us develop into well-adjusted adults.

To protect the guilty, names of people and places have been changed throughout this memoir.

