Friday December 19th, 2003
Today I did some food shopping. I really spent like a madman. I bought a couple of bottles of wine, some smoked ham, good cheese, chocolate, dried fruit, spices and other totally indulgant food stuff. I probably spent a months salary on the food.. well, that and two magazines. A 3d magazine, and a mac magazine. This was my birthday and christmas all rolled into one.
Pete, George’s friend, is still in the hospital here. He is waiting to get sent home. He spent 4 or 5 days in intensive care,but he is out, and stable. He is waiting for the european doctor and tank of air to come from Europe before he can leave.
I had dinner with Matthew. Anne and her sister (mariacah) and her boyfriend (Ludowig) joined me. We all had a great time. Kara (from the John’s Hopkins project) stopped by before she was heading back to the US for the holidays. We had a fantastic dinner spread, and I brought one of the bottles of wine, and we had a Cameroonian feast, with Chocolate for desert. Yum.
On the way to his house, which was somewhat hard to find… with some very unhelpful watchmen giving bad directions…we got stopped by the military. We were a bit lost looking, and a car stops ahead of us, and out come two gun toting army men. “Papers” came the order. As I am digging around my pocket for my ID card, Anne tells me that she and her sister both forgot their papers. Oh shit. This is an offense that can earn anyone jail time, but most likely a fat bribe.. escpecially at christmas. At least Ludo had his passport. Anne told them that she and her sister didn’t have their papers. Bingo. These guys knew they were in for some serious pre-holiday white man bribery, or jail. I started talking my head off. It was my fault, I dragged them last minute out for dinner… they could take us back to the hotel and we would be glad to show them the missing papers. If they really wanted, we would go to the station with them, while we went and got the papers. Guns got menacingly tilted in my direction. Fierce good cop bad cop stuff (well, really just bad and not so bad).You name it.. it came out. So then it came: OK. Finissons. Bribe time. I went into overdrive. I have no money, I am a volunteer, would be walking around in this neighborhood if we had money? Its Christmas, you can let us off… and on and on. This went on for a few minutes. They kept saying, well our boss is watching us, if we can’t show the ID cards or money, we will get in trouble…finally, one of them broke. “We’re wasting our time”. I knew we were good. A few minutes of them debating, they let us go. Thank you, merry christmas, deep contrition for the lack of respect for the laws of a country we were guests in… but.. no bribe, no jail. Whew.