It's been a month since I left, and not a single picture. You can blame the Developing World's developing Internet connections for that.

Here are just a few to hold the A.D.D. generation at bay.

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Market Day in Usa River

We're the yellow piece just below the lake in East Africa

Patandi neighborhood kids playing the 3rd World version of Pow-Pow-Power Wheels

Nkoaranga Orphanage kids

(Wema, with the pink beanie, is my favorite because she used to shrug her shoulders every time you said her name. Wema Wema Wema! (shrug shrug shrug) Also, she asked me who I was the other day in Swahili; I said 'Bayless'; she said, 'No, you're baba,' which means 'dad'; I said 'Whose dad?'; She said 'Wewe ni Baba Wema' -- 'You're my daddy.' I thought it was cute, especially when she remembered me the next day and informed the other three-year-olds that I was her dad in Swahili. Hunter says it's "not good." He's just jealous.)

Watoto Waafrika opening our gate uninvited

Uhhh, let me just guess what they were saying here: "Mzunguuuuuuuuuu!"

Fact of Life No. 1 that you have to deal with as a mzungu in a mwafrika world: Everyone and their mother is going to try to rip you off.

It's not personal; it's just the system. White skin = sucka.

I can't say that I blame the African man who is simply trying to get his. I read an old West African axiom last month in my book, The Ends of the Earth, that summed it up perfectly -- and though I can't remember it exactly, it went something like this: Who would ever spit a sweet morsel out of his mouth?

Not me man.

If stupid is as stupid does, then we can't really get that mad at the waafrika for taking a swing a ball we've personally teed up for them.

But I still do get mad, because I'm not a tourist, and I'm not teeing up anything. I'm actually trying to level the playing fields, which is why I'm taking my Swahili progress so seriously.

The 20L bucket of cream paint Hunter and I bought last week is a good example of how it's starting to pay off.

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I still don't know what was in the bucket exactly. It was gray. It was viscous. The chunks looked like rocks, and the liquid streaks looked like the Milky Way. From first glance, I thought it was a packaged form of the mud that forms in pools on construction sites: the product of dirt, cauk, dust and acid rain.

But above all, it smelled.

It smelled like dead person.

I've never even smelled a decomposing body, but I know that's what it is like. There is no other explanation for the wafts that entered my nostrils the afternoon we unsealed the plastic with Hunter's knife and lifted the top off. For once, I wished that I had actually listened to The Bob's advice and carried a handkerchief in my back pocket.

"GEEEWWWWWW!!!"

All of the Belks were starting to catch whiffs of it, and there were lots of ugly faces being made.

"What is that??"

"I don't know, but it is NOT paint."

It was revolting.

"Stir it, maybe it is."

We tried. Definitely not paint.

Rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole, which would have left the inside walls of the Nkoaranga Orphanage gleaming with a fresh coat of Jimmy Hoffa, Hunter took the bucket outside and poured it out on the ground. I followed him out there.

"Dude, how much did we pay for this?"

He did not look happy.

"Twenty thousand."

That's about $18. Eighteen bucks for viscous dead person.

"Motherf........"

I'll let your imagination fill in the dots.

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The weirdest thing about it was that the seal was airtight when we bought it. The paint store had been pretty sketchy to begin with -- (I would say this is an example of "Third World style," though I have been informed repeatedly that I am to say "Developing World." My only question is, how is this a sign of a country that is developing??) -- but we never expected this. It's one thing to spend ten years trying to fill our order because you don't organize paint by color (unbelievable), or to "accidentally" sell us yellow in a red can, or blue in a green can, but it's another thing entirely to pull the 20L bucket of poop trick.

Regardless of who those people at the hardware store thought they were dealing with, the truth was this: After Nkoaranga, Hunter and I were some angry wazungu.

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Sterling and Thomas, two of our visitors, wanted to come along to the hardware store for the spectacle of watching me and Hunter try to get either our money back or a real 20L bucket of cream.

I lugged in the evidence; Hunter had the receipt. Walking up to the counter, I saw familiar faces.

"Do you remember me?"

They smiled. They remembered me.

"Yes."

"Good." I heaved the bucket up and just plopped it down on the counter. "Open this up. Tell me what it is."

Curious and a little confused, they pried open the lid. The smell hit them in the face like a jackhammer.

"That's not paint," I said in as stern a voice as I can muster.

The manager -- let's just call him that -- did exactly the opposite of what I expected him to do: he immediately conceded that they had sold us damaged goods and promised to get us a brand new bucket.

"This is what Coral Paints sent us," he explained. That made sense, since the seal had not been broken when we bought it. "I do not know what happened."

He immediately sent someone to go fetch a new bucket, averting a crisis-level showdown.

I was half relieved we had won without a fight, half disappointed that there couldn't be a funnier story to come out of it. But then some of the old Swahili speaking men in the store made the best out of an already pretty good situation.

"It is paint," they said in their language. "It is paint. You have to stir it." I understood only through some familiar words and the international language of hand movements.

"Fine," I said. "Stir it. Have fun."

They laughed and made fun of me, thinking they'd soon prove me to be a typical mzungu sucka.

So stir, stir, stir they did, all the while the room being filled with the smell. And waddya know?

Not paint. Definitely not paint.

I covered my nose with my t-shirt; I really thought I was about to get sick if I kept breathing that air.

"Hii," I said in Swahili, "ni kama kita wa matako!"

Not knowing how to say "dead person" or "shit," I just said in a broken, literal translation, "This is like something from the butt!"

About seven people in the hardware store starting to die laughing. It'd be like an Asian tourist coming into an Alabama hardware store, miffed at having been sold a defective product that smelled like a rotting carcass, and angrily exclaimed that it was "like something from the butt" in a foreign accent. I'm gonna say that maybe, just maybe, people would be a little amused.

I even took advantage of the moment to learn the slang word for that something from the matako, which is very similar to jambo, the word for "hello."

"Like this?" I asked as I wrote it down on my hand.

JAMBA.

"Ndiyo, ndiyo," the spot Swahili teacher said, smiling.

The next customer that walked in was my crash test dummy in my new vocabulary word.

"Eh, wanauza jamba hapa, bei rahisi!" I said, pointing to the lady behind the desk who remembered me from our first visit there. They're selling shit here, very cheap price!

Not only did I not have to fight with them to get a new bucket of paint, as Sterling later remarked, but I was able to insult them and still have them all laughing when we left. Now that is talent.

I'd say the playing fields are starting to be leveled ... but I'm still just a mzungu living in a mwafrika world.

Bob Marley was 50 percent black, 50 percent white. So his words speak for struggles on both ends of the racial spectrum. That's why I won't give up the fight .... I will never give up the fight.

Why Every Currency Should Be Pegged to the Dollar.

We never had to deal with math issues in college. Hunter and I were both history majors at UVa – I don’t think either of us have touched a pencil sharpener since Saddam was still in power. Figuring out who owed who what, calculating tip, divvying up monthly utility bills – that’s why we were friends with E-schoolers like Tom and Boo Boo Drew. History majors got a free pass on practicality. We got to chill.

The portions of our brains earmarked for long division and times tables have turned to mush as a result.

Why I think that: the other day’s gasoline fiasco.

USD 1 is worth about 1,230 Tanzanian shillings. Think about how many zero's that is when you’re buying gas. It’s just as expensive here as it is at home. Why else would about half of all five minute taxi rides in this area involve a brief stop at a “petrol” station? Even if you’re only filling up your tank with ten bucks worth, you’re paying about 12 g’s in Tanzanian currency. Twenty bucks? – about 25 g’s.

You can see how it could get confusing.

So there we were, Hunter and I, sitting in the front of our newly rented car that we’re driving around for the week while entertaining a potential donor family for the Foundation. They only do full service in Tanzania (from what I’ve seen so far), and the attendant is pumping while we’re watching. Five thousand, 10,000, 15,000…

“Dude,” Hunter said, shuffling through the mad amount of cash we’d just withdrawn from the ATM for the week of taking this family around. “I’m not sure we have enough money for this. Tell him to stop.”

Twenty thousand…

“Acha, acha,” I said from the passenger seat, which, in this former British colony, is on the left.

By the time Joe Tanzanian Gas Worker actually got around to letting up on the handle, the meter was resting on 32,000 shillings.

“Dude...” Hunter was panicked. “Three hundred thousand?!?!?!" We had just withdrawn the daily limit of 400,000 and had already had to pay in advance for a week of renting the car. That was all we had. Hunter's eyes were ... open. "We are screwed man.”

I started counting the little money I had in my pocket to see what we were going to be able to piece together. Hunter was shuffling a wad of 10,000 notes like a Vegas blackjack dealer.

“Chakula, chakula,” came a voice from just outside Hunter’s window. A hungry Arusha street kid – though whether he was hungry for actual chakula (food) or glue I can’t say for sure – was looking very cracked out and very pathetic as he asked Hunter to spare just a little bit of the roughly $280 he was watching him flip through.

“Hapana, hapana,” Hunter said, the consummate nice guy, even when telling glue sniffers to leave him alone.

“Toka!” I added in. Scram! I’m not nearly as sympathetic to those little hustlas.

The dude’s lip was so swollen it looked like he had elephantitis, not that I’ve ever actually known anyone to have that.

Our focus returned to the predicament.

“Man, how much do you have??” Hunter asked again. I can't remember the exact amount, but the answer was "not enough."

The saddest part about this whole story is that at no point did either of the two UVa-educated, fully grown men stop and think to themselves, “Wait a minute. I know gas is expensive, but when was the last time gas cost over THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS?”

I take that back. One of the UVa-educated, fully grown men did stop and think about that… after about a minute.

And it wasn’t Hunter.

“Wait a minute dude.” I was double-checking the meter. It did not say 320,000. “That says only thirty two thousand.”

What followed was one of those silent pauses in which, though no words were actually said, telepathically we both knew what the other was thinking: Thank God our lives are not being documented on reality TV.

I took four of those 10,000 bills that had been part of the Vegas-size deck of Tanzanian shillings and handed them to the confused attendant. Another homeless glue sniffer was staring at us through the drivers side window now, equally confused as to how we could possibly have that much liquid cash and yet still say with straight faces that we didn’t have any spare change.

“Man,” Hunter said. “Are we like perma-stoned or something after four years of college?”

It was like the opening scene from “Super Troopers.”

“I can’t pull over anymore! I’m already pulled over!”

“Yeah, he can’t pull over anymore! He can’t pull over anymore! He’s already pulled over!”

But instead of that, it was, “Three hundred thousand?? I don’t have that much money! We can’t pay 300,000! We’re already pulled over! We can’t pull over anymore!”

Tom, Drew, someone from the E-school: please, come and save us.

Sleeping head-to-toe for the time being with Hunter isn't so bad really. Last night, I had a dream that I was sitting on a couch next to this really hot girl with a great body, and I don't know, when I woke up, still in a haze, I saw evidence of that great body right in front of my eyes. I was mired in that strange transitional reality when your visuals are here on earth, but your mind is off in La La Land (by the way, did you know that lala means "sleeping" in Swahili?? Connection? Connection?).

Anyway, almost instinctively I made a move to touch the two mounds directly in front of me ... and realized that I was reaching for Hunter's knees.

"Touch my knees all you want," Hunter said this morning, still half asleep himself as I hazily recounted the chain of events. "Just don't ....."

I can't even repeat his words. His mother obviously did not raise him well.

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Another sleep story. My malaria pills being just out of reach in my still-MIA bag, the only defenses I have against the harbingers of death that fly in the night are deet and a mosquito net.

Since I'm fresh out of sheep's blood to coat on the door post, I try to coat on the deet every night before I go to bed. You can't ever really count on the net to do the job 100 percent, especially when you're an active sleeper like myself.

Have y'all ever seen those OFF! wipies? They're awesome. I've gone through two containers already, so I guess my mind is used to the routine at this point of rubbing down my body before going to bed. This is good in that I don't forget to do it, bad in that I ...

... sometimes confuse the mosquito net for an OFF! wipie when asleep.

Two times in the last two nights I've woken myself up to the feeling of rough fabric on my face. Sure enough, both times, I've grabbed a hold of the net and starting rubbing down my cheeks, protecting myself from dream mosquitoes.

The only problem is that I totally open the door to real live mosquitoes when I do that.

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It's like the scene from "Can't Hardly Wait" with the European exchange student sitting out by the pool.

"I ... am a sex ... machine!"

It's always fun, no matter what language you speak, to teach people not as familiar with your mother tongue to say funny stuff.

Last summer in Norway, for example, I thought I was learning how to say "Let's go fishing," but what my 15-year-old temporary sister was really saying was "My penis hurts."

I didn't get quite that inappropriate with my Swahili tutor yesterday, but it still makes me happy to know that I'm spreading "Seinfeld" vocabulary across the globe.

"Dish dish dish..." That is what our tutor, Mr. Shao, uses for "et cetera" or "blah blah blah." Dish dish dish? What the hell is that? It's almost as strange as his alternative to "dish dish dish," which is a really loud sequence of tongue clicks. He honestly sounds like the main character from "The Gods Must Be Crazy" when he busts that out.

From now on, though, he'll sound like Elaine Benes.

"Mr. Shao, this 'dish dish dish' stuff is all wrong. Everyone in America says 'yada yada yada.'"

"Yada yada yada?" He obviously had never heard the term.

"Yeah, Y-A-D-A," he started to write it down on his notes, "Y-A-D-A, Y-A-D-A."

"Thankyouuu verymuch!" Mr. Shao says "thankyou very much" like a runner who gets out of the blocks slow but finishes strong, and he says it in situations that do not require a "thankyou very much" alllll thefreakingtime!

(I typically answer with "You're welcome," while Hunter tries to hold his laughter).

So with "yada yada yada" successfully transferred to East Africa, I think I'm going to make a list of "Seinfeld" terms that I want to implant as well. Here is a rough sketch:

• "shrinkage"
• "close talker"
• "double dipping"
• "soup Nazi"
• "The Summer of George"
• "Independent George/Relationship George"
• "Assistant to the Traveling Secretary"

Can't you picture it now? Mr. Shao, teaching his regular class of kids at the Catholic school in Arusha, and having them practice saying, "You're killing Independent Yusufu!" Or, "What's the deal with wazungu tourists?"

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Most of you probably haven't heard about this, but there have been a series of earthquakes in the Kilimanjaro region in the past few days. One of them reached a 6.0 on the Richter Scale, which I think is pretty bad. Our house shook a little, but the brunt of the shock was felt near Karatu, about two hours from here.

Our worst case scenario fear: That Mount Meru, of which we have an oh-so-picturesque view from our village, is about to erase the title "dormant" from its name.

"If that happens," our neighbor Abel was shaking his head and smiling when Hunter brought it up, "we are all done."

What a local newspapear said: The government has allayed the general population's fears by assuring them that the recent tremors are a result of heavy rainfall.

Right. Heavy rainfall = a SIX ON THE RICHTER SCALE.

At least I don't have to make any tough decisions on what I want to be done with my remains. If Meru really does go off, I'll get a free cremation out of it.

British Airways, this doesn't mean I like you.

When I first realized that my bag had not made it to Nairobi, the 4^th of July was still two days away.

“Don’t worry,” Meghann had said. “BA lost Walker’s bag when he came to visit me a few years ago and they were able to deliver it to him on this tiny little island off the coast of Zanzibar. They’ll find your bag.”

Meghann is really good at packaging uncertainty as dogma.

“How long was it before he got it?” I asked, nervously.

“Ten days.”

Ten days?! This was still back in the days when I thought U.S. doctors knew what they were talking about in writing me a prescription for a year’s dose of daily malaria pills. Going without those babies for an extended period of time wasn’t what I was trying to do, especially with the newest cover of National Geographic – which I eerily had put in my carry on – doing its best to scary the crap out of me.

Wearing a Technicolor Dreamcoat, and looking particularly menacing as a result, was a giant mosquito with a seven-inch dagger for a mouth and the words, MALARIA, Stopping a Global Killer printed underneath.

STOPPING A GLOBAL KILLER. Sweeeeet.

Two things were on my mind at that point:

1) A specific scene from the Al Gore movie about how global warming was putting cities historically out of reach of malarial mosquitoes into the danger zone. The specific example he used, replete with graphics showing cartoon mosquitoes being elevated by increases in temperatures, was Nairobi.

2) The note from my little sister that I’d put in my wallet when I left Houston the day before had one line that had stuck out my head: “I’d be lying if I said I am not nervous and scared for you to go to Africa. I’m praying that you can get through this adventure without any never-seen-before-bayless-typical disease.” At least malaria didn’t fall into that category.

When I walked outside into the warm night African air, I’d be lying if I said I was not nervous and scared. My bug spray was in my checked luggage, too.

The early premonitions of finding my bag were good, though. My first night at the Brainch’s house in Nairobi, I had a dream: Meghann, alone at the Nairobi airport and beside an ocean of unclaimed bags lying on the ground unlocked, before she suddenly spots mine.

Well, it turns out that the dream was true. After uttering “Man, I wish I had _____. That’s in my checked luggage, too” three times per day since arriving on the continent, I’ve received confirmation that the bag is in Kenya. Meghann, flying home to America through Nairobi, spotted my black-and-green baby of eight years last night, lying on the ground amidst an ocean of other bags. Just like the dream. It only took 17 days.

Regis, if you’re out there, I hope you have similar luck. Walker, don’t even try to front.

I’m crossing my fingers as I write this – which really makes it harder to type, in case you’ve never tried – because the bag is still en route to Tanzania. I’m not ruling out something crazy, like a plane crash or a bus spontaneously combusting on the road. Or something really insane, like having a clean pair of underwear sometime this month.

"MZUNGUUUUUUUU!"

Not enough time to really express what life is like here in East Africa except to say that a) it's my guess that my bag ain't coming at all at this point, and b) Tanzania is the shizit.

Since Internet is hard to come by and even slower than The Bob's 40 time, I'll be brief.

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My whiteness is very apparent here. The Swahili word for white boy is "mzungu." Plural, "wazungu." Here is a typical sequence for when Hunter, Meghann and I walk down the "road" (a dirt path that cars sometimes traverse) in our home village of Tengeru:

"Mzungu! Mzungu!"

(we wave) "Mambo zenu?"

(children giggle) "Wazungu! Wazungu!"

(we laugh and volley it right back) "Waafrikani! Waafrikani!"

Mzungu isn't derogatory -- it's just what I am. I am white. So we refer to ourselves as wazungu with pride. In fact, I'm trying to convince Meghann, the coolest boss I've ever had (probably because she's only 24 and shares dish washing duty with her employees), to let me paint "NYUMBA WA WAZUNGU WAZUKA" on the gate of our house:

HOUSE OF THE CRAZY WHITE DUDES.

"No," is her quick reply, every time.

"Why not?? We ARE wazungu!"

"Because I'm not letting you put that next to our official logo, Bayless! 'CRAZY WHITE PEOPLE HERE.' No."

Other than the fact that I'm still not 100 percent sure the grammar is correct, what's wrong with that?? If these neighborhood kids feel like it's cool to yell "Hey white guy!" at me every second of the day, can I not embrace it? It'd be like me yelling "Black guy! Hey black guy!" at someone walking down the sidewalk in Leave it to Beaver Land, Texas, which is where I grew up, and then that same guy rocking one of those 'X' hats that were so popular during the era when Will Smith was still the Fresh Prince.

Would I tell him he couldn't throw props to Malcolm X? Of course not.

(Quick note: I can't get over the humor of my current situation simply because of how vastly opposite it is from my time in the Balkans. In the former Yugoslavia, I felt like I needed to grab my camera if I ever saw a black guy. Other than random African diplomats, it just didn't happen. Ever. Except for one time when a few Marines on leave from Germany rolled through the Black Catz -- I could see the excitement and bewilderment on people's faces when they saw the dark skinned boy from Mississippi approaching. Being a mzungu in Tanzania is the negative film version Cool Keith experience that weekend in Belgrade).

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The other day a guy got murdered on the road by our house. His crime? Stealing. The way he went out? Some dudes who don't take kindly to thievery beat him, placed a tire full of kerosene around his neck, and lit a match.

It's called a "necklacing" -- I had read about this in my African history class my last semester at UVa, but I thought that only happened in revolutionary South Africa, not peaceful Tanzania.

That being said, it is really safe where we live and the people are more than friendly.

But I'm definitely not about to steal anything.

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The Swahili language is awesome.

The word for dizzy is kizunguzungu. Doesn't that make you dizzy?

All the words that were introduced by colonialism/American style colonialism (the New World Order/globalization jazz) are very straightforward: It's simply the phonetic pronunciation written on paper, more often than not with the "eee" sound attached to the end.

It's the Swahili version of the stereotype that all Spanish words can be formed by saying the English equivalent (+) "oh."

Examples:

komputa
bia
demokrasi
printa
shirti
pencili
And my favorite, bumpastika

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Our neighbor, who is basically the village elder that no one messes with, is named Baba Juma.

Incredible name. The way it works in this society is when you have a kid, you become either "Baba" (father) or "Mama" (+) the first born's name.

The Bob = Baba Elizabeth from now on.

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Baba Elizabeth would not have been happy last night had he been visiting. We were taking a cab from Tengeru into Arusha to get some dinner, and lo and behold, the cab runs out of gas.

We pushed it up the hill, 400 meters, easy. And we got a discount of a few pennies. Such is life in Africa.

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Hunter's name, literally translated: "Mwindiji." (mween die gee)

My name, literally translated: "Hakuna Pwani." (Without Bay)

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More later.

The theme of my short time spent in Africa so far is very clear cut: British Airways sucks.

I hope the entire company dies a slow, painful death and burns in the hottest corner of hell. The way they handle losing someone's baggage is bloody ridiculous.

Meghann, Hunter and I checked a total of, I don't know, about eight bags. Roughly. And a guitar. Only one of those eight was for me. Naturally, that was the one that is probably being used as an extremely heavy paper weight in some London BA warehouse at the moment, the sticker informing its handlers to route it to Nairobi being duly ignored for the fourth day in a row.

I've tried filing a report; I've tried calling hotlines. Asking for managers and asking for the people who fill in for managers when the manager "isn't in town" and mysteriously has no set return date. In 8,936,224 total phone calls -- only 4,223,899 of which have actually rang, and 2,388,121 have been answered -- I've fluctuated from pleasant to stern to complete asshole in my approach. And none of it has gotten me one iota closer to getting my bag back to me.

The good thing is that my laptop and my camera were in my carry on. And my toothbrush. And the book that I happened to be reading on the plane. That's where the good things end.

The bad things are plentiful. I lost -- err, threw away with the thought that "I never actually need this" -- my baggage serial number, so there is no way of tracking it. I had to leave Nairobi last night, making it ten times more expensive to call the worst airport of all time for help in locating it -- and way harder for BA to get it to me now that I'm in Tanzania. My malaria medicine was checked, so I've got a target drawn on my back for mosquitoes of death. About a billion dollars worth of other stuff was in there. I've been wearing the same pair of underwear since June 30. I've been wearing the same everything since June 30, actually. And I am getting less and less optimistic about the prospect of ever seeing the greatest bag I've ever had and ever will have ever again.

The optimist in me listens to Meghann, whose boyfriend had his bag lost by BA a few years back, only to be returned to him 10 days later on an island off of Zanzibar. The pessimist in me listens to the pessimist in me.

Time will tell the fate of my bag, and it will tell the fate of British Airways, as well.

From now until the end of my year in Tanzania, I'm going to refer to Hunter Flint as "The Committed Champion of the Underprivileged."

Anybody got a zoom action to see what kind of map that is? Look closely.

That's how his name appears in his bio on our foundation's website. He's also listed the "face of The Foundation For Tomorrow on the continent." Well I'll tell you one thing: Hunter may be the pretty boy, chiseled-jawed model type TFFT needs for marketing purposes, and Mr. Managing Director may be boss of me on e-paper, but Hunter's not telling me, a lowly Program Director, what to do!

"It begins," he said tonight in Charlotte when he found out I was already posting a blog about the start of my next adventure, one that will last twice as long as my Balkan career, when Hunter and I leave for Nairobi tomorrow. "This is gonna last all year." He was speaking with his eyes closed, his head on his pillow. He sounded annoyed-amused (that really is a completely separate human emotion that needs its own term -- should we call it "annoysed"?). Okay, so he sounded annoysed. "Just stories about Hunter. Ha, ha, ha. Hunter is providing the humor for Bayless."

I was just amused. And he's right, it begins.