Last Sunday, for the first time in my life, I woke up and cooked breakfast on Mother's Day.

Too bad it wasn't my own mother.

Too bad indeed, for her. While my mom was ten time zones behind me, visiting friends in the Bay Area with The Bob, Sarah was drinking a fresh cup of French pressed coffee in bed, with some sugar and a little powdered Nido, just like her kids know she likes it. When she came downstairs, it was to platters of French toast, real bacon (not the Canadian bacon you find everywhere else in the world except America) fresh bananas and even the homemade syrup her seven-year-old daughter Nell whipped up (quite possibly the grossest, sweetest thing I've ever put in my mouth: water, powdered sugar and butter, basi). The power went out before we could finish cooking everything, but there was enough for all of us to get a little something in our stomachs.

It was a great Mother's Day. Sarah and her two kids, and then the three of us whose mom's were thousands of miles and an ocean away, me, Hunter and Sam (as in Samantha, a girl). I promise, Mom. Next time.

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Sam's original plan was to spend the weekend in Moshi, hiking around the foothills of Kilimanjaro, chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool, shootin' some bball outside of school and staying at a convent she won't shut up about for two nights. The nuns had nipped that plan in the bud, though: "It is impossible," one of them told Sam when she called to inquire about rooms. That is a favorite sentence of the ESL world; Serbs used to say that to Stewy all the time when he tried to get vegetarian "bez mesa" pljeskavica's in Belgrade: "It is impossible." Some people just don't realize how rude that sounds in our language. It is impossible that they could know.

I'm glad, though, that it was impossible to go to that convent. Who wants to hang out with a bunch of sisters on Mother's Day? Plan B was way better.

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It's called making the best out of an unfortunate situation: being a divorced mother of two young girls and moving shop to East Africa for a year. While I don't think northern Tanzania would be where I'd want to raise teenagers -- slash, I couldn't be away from Major League Baseball for that long -- it is a little kid's paradise. And for Sarah's situation, there could not be a better place in the world for her to be right now than Moshi. She's got Nell, she's got Pearl, and they've all got each other.

And that is all they really need right now.

Both of those girls, one of them seven, the other just five, will benefit from this glimpse into another world in ways that they won't fully understand until years down the road.

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Nell and Pearl are scary smart. Maybe not Will Hunting brilliant, but definitely wicked smaht all the same. On more than one occasion, they left me wide-eyed and shaking my head in amazement.

Pearl, for example, spelled "Parsley" right when I told her my last name. She's five. My friend Tom, who's from Philly, had to ask me for confirmation on how to spell P-E-N-N-S-Y-L-V-A-N-I-A when he was 19. But Pearl can spell obscure herbs without hesitation or doubt.

"How did you know that??" I asked when she produced the sheet of paper that I was totally expecting to say "Parslee" or "Parsely" in her childlike scrawl.

"It just sounds like it," she said, so matter of factly.

The only explanation is a love for reading. Sarah used to own a bookstore in Chicago -- that is how she met Sam, who worked for her while a student at Loyola (that's why I like Sam so much, because of our Jesuit connection). And a passion for books is something mother definitely passed down to daughters. Sarah uses books on her kids like a pacifier is used on an infant, or a silencer on a gun. Whenever they're going crazy, whether out of boredom or too much sugar, she just hands them each a book, and it's like someone cut the power and lit a candle. They go into Windows standby mode. Utter concentration. No need for Adderall.

Read, Nell. Just read.

Sarah is lucky, too, because her kids embrace the idea of reading. It's not a chore, like it was for me when I was their age. They almost brag about it.

"I've read so many books," Nell said, "that last night my mom gave me one that I'd already read! And I said, 'Mom, I've already READ this book!'"

"You know I read chapter books now," Pearl chimed in, so as not to be outdone.

"Do you?"

"Uh huh."

Musicians, poets, voracious readers ... and artists as well, as it turns out.

"Bayless Crazy Head in the morning," by Nell Woodprince. (I am quoted as saying, "What smells?" The answer, given by a bystander, is my socks.)

After they saw me without my hair pulled back one morning, when they stormed into my room (usually their room) wearing only whitey tighties on their heads, they nicknamed me "Fluffy."

Ah, to be young and devoid of inhibitions.

I even let them put hair care products in my lion's mane, though I wasn't aware of that until a few minutes in, at which point I immediately stopped them. I'm not a hair care products kind of guy. Had I known Nell was not simply playing with my mane, but actually drenching it in BedHead, which smells like chewing gum and feels like Elmer's Glue, I would've stopped her. But it did feel good, I will admit. Who doesn't like a good old scalp massage? It's not often I can get Hunter to play with my hair, probably because he's jealous that mine isn't going to fall out any time soon. So it was nice to get to know Nell.

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And the same could be said for her little sister Pearl.

A future album cover.

"What is Your Favorite Thing to Do?"

You must never be so kind to me
Please never dooooo this again
You must nooooot. Yeah
Come on jump a little higher my friend
Oh yeah you want to follow me everywhere I go
Go on for yourself
What do you feel like doing today yeaah
Come on it, don't be scared
Go see the wide open world
Get out of the city, oh get out of the ceitey yay
Come on out, go to wild doors*

*This part was added on in Pearl's own handwriting after Hunter had copied the original song all down on looseleaf


That is a song written by Sarah's baby girl, the five-year-old. Hunter watched her do it; he swears he didn't help her at all. "Pearl Woodprince." She may be just five years old, but she's already got the name for fame. And the smarts, and a sense of adventure that is only going to be perpetuated by a year in a small town in Tanzania. If you met her, you would understand. This kid is going to be big time one day.

"Are you gonna play the guitar?" she asked me one afternoon out on the balcony, the one that on a clear day stares right out onto the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro. It was sitting right next to me on the ground; Hunter was taking a break.

"No, I don't know how," I said. And even if I did know how, I don't have a voice like Hunter. It would be anticlimactic for young Pearl to have heard me try to follow up an act like that.

It's not hard to see why girls fall in love with Mwindaji

"So?" For a five-year-old kid with a world view that could be described as one of endless possibilities, that answer just didn't make sense. "I didn't even know how when I started, either." She picked the guitar up off the floor and started picking at the strings.

Honestly, Pearl still doesn't know how to play guitar. At least not on Hunter's -- her hands are much too small. But that is why I love kids so much. They haven't lived long enough to know that it's possible for something to be "impossible." What do you mean you can't get vegetarian pljeskavica's? Just put all the toppings except for the meat, silly. What do you mean you can't play guitar? Just learn. No doyyyy.

So what if Pearl's hands can't wrap around the neck of the guitar?

"It is impossible."

That is only a minor inconvenience. She gets around it by just laying it down flat on its back, like a slide guitar at a George Strait concert, and strumming away. In her mind, she is a master, a regular 21st century Mozart. I always wonder when exactly that "sense of childlike wonder," as Michael Scott describes it, begins to dissipate. Is it once they begin to hear that things are "impossible?"

If so, then Sarah's seven-year-old, Nell, still has time left to be a kid.

Before you can be the Crocodile Hunter, you've got to start with chameleons

Nell is a born writer as well, as I learned when I saw the poem she had written on her pillowcase:

The midnight stars will twinkle and the midnight moon will shine but, while I am sleeping, time is all mine.
"Did she write that herself??" I asked Sarah, when Nell was busy setting up her new pet chameleon on the plastic bareback of her toy horse.

"Yup," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"I was skeptical at first, but honestly, this one," she pointed to her oldest, "never lies."

Pearl may be the modern day Mozart, but Nell, who is just as much a poet as her little sister, is the new Dr. Doolittle. So I can speak Swahili, big deal. She can speak to animals, and they can speak to her, which is pretty impressive, seeing as they're from Tanzania and yet still know English.

For as big of an animal lover as Nell is, I cannot believe that there is not a dog or a cat in their home. She makes up for it in other ways, I guess.

Who says poultry don't make good house pets?

I was with her when she found it. Err, found her.

Isn't she beautiful?

"What's his name?" I asked as soon as she picked it up.

"It's a she," she said, looking up at me like I was stupid. Clearly a girl, Bayless. Duh. "Her name is Cam." Cam the Female Chameleon.

Cam found herself* a beneficiary -- victim? -- of Nell's good intentions throughout the weekend. (*We aren't really sure as to the sex of this particular reptile, but remember all that stuff about childlike wonder? That makes Cam a girl in the eyes of a seven-year-old girl). From Saturday morning until we left Sunday afternoon, she was a guest -- prisoner? -- at the Villa Serena, the name of the spot Sarah is renting. And at every restaurant we went to in that span, too, Cam was also a guest -- hostage? -- of Nell's.

We had a lot of fun with Cam, though, even as we tried to intentionally free her into the wild without alerting Nell.

Talk about a true "Racial Chameleon" (this guy)

He enjoyed our company, too.

Not quite the degree of difficulty as "Where's Waldo?"

"Shh, Cam, be still," she said, whispering in reassuring tones. Nell gently stroked Cam's forehead as she tried to get her ready for a photo without a flash; I needed her to be still. "It's okay, Cam, it's okay."

From my vantage point, Cam didn't seem to respond with anything indicating that she had understood. But in Nell's mind, her seven-year-old mind that makes me wish I could go back 17 years and be a kid again, her skills as a homo-repto translator was essential in getting her little green friend to comply with my requests that she stop moving so I could get a clear shot.

Cam going horseback riding.

Escape was futile.

"Childlike wonder" at its finest.

Oh, we almost lost Cam -- she almost escaped? -- a few times. Once at dinner Saturday, another time Sunday morning after Sarah came down for her Mother's Day breakfast. But Nell is too sharp. You can't get anything past her.

Or Pearl, for that matter. Those kids hear everything; I swear they've got Go Go Gadget Hearing Aids installed in their ears. Especially when you're throwing out potty words in the midst of a PG-13 rated conversation intended for the ears of only those who remember the days of the Clinton administration:

"When I was a little kid, my parents were trying to raise me half-Catholic, half-Presbyterian or something, I don't know. We would go to Catholic mass one week and Presbyterian service the next, until I was about four."

Little Bayless, the Protestant who was not to be

I was speaking from the passenger's seat; Hunter was driving; Sam and Sarah were in the backseat. Nell and Pearl, both in the way back, were fully engaged in some conversation that only little kids get engaged in. There was no need to say "earmuffs." They were in their own world back there.

"The reason they stopped taking me to my mom's church -- why I became a full time Catholic, I guess -- was because of something that happened one day in the Presbyterian service. I was like three or four, important to remember, okay? Also important to remember is that with Presbyterians, it's not cool like it was at St. Vincent's to bring your kid to mass. Catholics build like special cry rooms for all the people who bring their little children; Presbyterians just send them to Sunday school until they're old enough to behave themselves. It's a much more staid environment in Presbyterian church than in Catholic mass. Dudes show up in coat and tie style, not Polo's and khakis.

"Anyway, so I'm sitting there -- and I don't know, I don't really remember, I'm just going by what my mom has told me -- but I was fiddling with the front of my pants." I started reenacting the bunch up from shotgun. Nell and Pearl were still going on about whatever it was that had them so enraptured. "And out of nowhere, in the middle of this really serious part of the service, I just scream out, 'MY PENIS HURTS!!'

"I never went back to that church."

"Your PENIS??" You'll never guess who screamed that out. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

"Oh God," I said as quietly as possible, which wasn't a problem, seeing as even a bugle would have been drowned out by the sound of the girls giggling in the way back. I turned to Sarah. "They heard me?"

They most definitely had, and Nell had been the one to call me out on it. Apparently, the two little girls had not been as engaged in conversation as I had thought. Their mother looked about as concerned as MJ waiting for the inbounds with Bryon Russell guarding him.

No words needed.

Which is another way of saying she wasn't stressed about it. She's used to it, folks.

You've heard of GayDar? Michael and Dwight tried to buy one online to see who else at Dunder Mifflin besides Oscar might be a homosexual. Well, Sarah's girls have PeePoopAnythingElseInThatGenreDar. They sense when stuff like that is being discussed. Particularly popular was the one-track recording Hunter made back in January at Noizemekah, when our boy from Soweto, Ice Pee, had laid down a Swahili rap in the middle of Hunter's vocals.

LongTyme Emcee

"That guy rapping right now is our Tanzanian friend, Ice Pee," I told the girls during his cameo, which he lied about writing himself. "But the greatest thing about his name is that he actually spells it, P-E-E. Like cold urine, not like a hip hop American rap name."

When I'm talking to Nell and Pearl, because of how sharp their minds are, I don't change the way I speak. I try to omit any words that you wouldn't be allowed to say on network television, but even on that, sometimes I forget. It sounds crazy, because they're just little kids, but most of the time, it honestly feels like I'm talking to adults in little kids' bodies.

"Ice PEE??" Nell asked, less interested in his name's temperature than in something she had let loose in her pants earlier that afternoon. I can only imagine how amused she had been when, upon arriving in TZ, she learned that the word for candy in Kiswahili is pipi, pronounced pee pee. ("Actually," Sarah told me when I asked about that, "they were more laughing because they could call bugs 'wadudu.'")

"Ice Pee. Isn't that a great rap name?"

At this point, having known Ice Pee for so long, I have to remind myself just how funny his nomme de guerre is. When I first met him in the lay up line at basketball last August, it was an automatic reflex, laughing, because he had written it with Sharpie on the back of his Kili Basketball jersey, his prize for the three-on-three competition his brother Bariki Mkubwa had helped him win at Soweto a few months earlier. I tried to tell him early on that he should really go with "Ice P" -- (I translated it literally into Swahili for effect) -- but he didn't listen. Not only did he not listen, he had t-shirts made. The other day he showed up to mazoezi with one on for the first time: black with white font, the words ICE PEE, LONGTYME EMCEE, A-TOWN PRODUCTIONS running across the chest. He promised to make more so I could buy some for me and my machizi back home.

The girls were more than enthusiastic in their collective "Yes!" when I asked if they'd be interested in getting a couple of Ice Pee Longtyme Emcee shirts.

"Ice Pee!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" It was like a broken record; two broken records. "Ice PEE! HAHAHAHAHAHAH!"

The giggle fest was on. And you know how contagious giggling is.

"I know, I tried to tell him to spell it differently, but he wouldn't listen!"

"Ice PEE!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

It doesn't take much to please Nell and Pearl. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the "My penis hurts" story came back up in conversation later that night.

Nell had heard it with her own ears, but Pearl hadn't. She'd just heard Nell's reaction to it, and obviously wanted to be let in on the secret. But I desperately wanted to prevent this five-year-old kid from forever associating that guy "Fluffy" with ... inappropriate.

"Tell her I said 'peanut,'" I pleaded with Nell as soon as we had a moment alone.

Once again, it was as if I was dealing with a fully grown woman. Nell, loving the acknowledgment of her seniority, was all about the top secret mission. She nodded her head furiously to show that she understood her mission.

It was "peanut" this and "peanut" that from there on out. "Bayless hurt his peanut!" Whatever that was supposed to mean. Nell was laying it on thick, sacrificing subtlety for frequency. At least for an hour or two, until we got back to the Villa Serena.

That was when Pearl blurted out, "Did you say that your penis hurt when we were in the car?"

Sarah had warned me about Pearl's "blurting out" issues. Once in an elevator with an overweight man: "Mom, that guy is so fat! Look how fat he is!" Another with a classmate back in Chicago, the son of Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, while Mrs. Jeff Tweedy was standing right there: "My mommy loves your daddy." She's a blurter, that Pearl. It was just the three of us upstairs when she dropped the P bomb. Nell, on top of things, didn't bat an eye. She immediately motioned for me to go into her mother's bathroom with her, alone. She shut the door behind me, leaving Pearl alone in Sarah's bedroom.

"What is it?" I asked, thinking about how I'd describe the scene in a story: me in the bathroom, alone, with a seven-year-old girl, talking about my penis.

"I think that Pearl might have heard what you really said," she whispered with an air of absolute seriousness. The peanut ploy had failed. "What should I do?"

I was fresh out of options. You really cannot get anything past these Woodprince girls. The clock was ticking. Pearl was only going to grow more suspicious with every passing second.

"Just try to keep convincing her I said 'peanut,'" I said, knowing that it would fail, but trying to prolong the illusion that it was of utmost importance that we keep Pearl in the dark. If I was gonna go down, I might as well go down with a bang.

"Okay," she said, no frills about it, "I will."

And then, we walked out, back into Sarah's bedroom, where Pearl stood waiting.

"You said penis!" she screamed, before the door even closed shut.

It felt like a Steve Martin movie. You can't get anything by Pearl, I thought, as I envisioned the days ahead, and how grateful Sarah was bound to be towards me.

Because as it turns out, the peanut story isn't the only one that her kids might remember about me and Hunter.

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There is a silo that juts out over the edge of the Villa Serena's hedge fence from the corn field next door. Running around the property is a well worn dirt trail, leading you through the maize stalks that slap against your skin as you jog behind Pearl or Nell to the base of this Ultimate Fort Central.

Pearl climbing up to the Ultimate Fort Central

And once you climb the ladder to get up, the view is incredible. We weren't lucky enough to have a clear day while we were there, but when the clouds dissipate, the sight of Kili, in all its snow-capped glory, right there, the highest free standing mountain in the world, in your backyard, must just charge your battery on life. The silo is a big part of why Moshi is such a dope spot for Sarah to have moved her family to for the year.

Pearl and Sam, and home sweet home

There's even a hideout up there. But this time, you've got to go down a ladder.

Into The Heart of Darkness...

... where you can spend some quality time with the leeches

Because of me, Nell and Pearl now know all about the former medical application of leeches during colonial times. Those little bloodsuckers are all over the place in the puddles of water that sit permanently undisturbed in the damp, shady interior of the silo. I didn't need to explain who George Washington was; they're wicked smaht; they clearly already knew that. But I did offer to demonstrate on their skin how the leeches could have been used on him in his sick bed, and they were not having it.

On Saturday afternoon, Sam, Sarah and I went off to look for some kanga's and vitenge in the Moshi market. I really think I could make some money selling these Tanzanian domestic fabrics in the States, and am always on the lookout for a good tailor and a fair deal.

Sarah's next door neighbor and part time tailor, Mama Witness (and her daughter, Witness)

Hunter got to babysit while we were gone.

Baba Nell

He took his guitar and the girls up to the silo, and while he was down looking at the leeches with Nell, he decided to mess with the little Steve Irwin.

"What if what we really thought were leeches right there were actually BABY CHAMELEONS??" he said in his best "What if?" little kid voice. He knew the thought of a Cam plantation would send her through the roof, way more exciting than a bunch of George Washington era syringes.

But you can't get anything by Nell.

"Those aren't baby chameleons," she said, probably rolling her eyes at Hunter when she said it. "They don't even look like chameleons."

"So? Baby frogs don't look like frogs."

"I know," she said, "tadpoles look like sperm."

Hunter, who grew up in a house where the seven-year-olds didn't know that tadpoles looked like sperm -- or if they did, didn't mention it to adults -- had no rebuttal.

It was the second Nell story of the day from the silo.

Before we left to go to the market, the six of us had all been having a picnic up there; it was a perfect day. We had sandwiches, cupcakes and juice. Remember the juice.

I was over to the side by myself, admiring the view, when Nell walked by me to peek over the edge.

The Villa Serena

She was wearing black pants. But it wasn't the color of the pants that caught my attention; it was the dark circle on the back of those black pants that raised the alarm. It was a huge wet spot, obviously from water, or so I thought. That's the only reason I made such a big fuss about it; I wouldn't have done so if I'd known.

"Gross!" I yelled. "Nell peed her pants!"

Clearly I knew Nell hadn't really peed her pants. It is impossible.

Right?

Wrong.

What I thought would happen next was not what happened next. She didn't deny it; she didn't get embarrassed, either. She just turned her head, grabbed a hold of her pants, looked down, and began walking to the ladder, an admission without words. It was almost as if she really had been unaware that she'd wet herself until I pointed it out to everyone present. Once she got down to the ground, she began to jog back through the corn stalks, headed for her clean undie drawer and a new pair of pants.

I was dumbfounded. Did she REALLY pee her pants?? She's like seven! What a jerk I was, coming into Sarah's home and making fun of her sweet young daughter for something that was clearly a recurrent problem, judging by Nell's reaction. I hadn't shoved my foot that far up my mouth since I told my friend Will's new girlfriend last December how trashy I thought girls with lower back tattoos are, only to quickly discover the she herself has a lower back tattoo.

"Wait a minute," I said, still trying to get a grasp on what had just transpired. "She really did?"

You could tell Sam and Hunter were as blown away as me.

"I mean, I never would have said that if I had thought there was even a remote possibility of it being true!" I yelled.

"Yeah," Sarah said, "I always try to tell her to get that under control before we go back to the States." She was not upset at all with me, much to my relief. "'Nell, you do not want to be that girl who smells like pee, okay? Because once you are, you are forever that girl.'"

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Sarah reminds me of that quintessential "cool aunt" who would give kids from my generation alternative rock CD's for their 13th birthday. If there is a cooler mom out there, I haven't met her.

"So anyway, then Michael Jordan touched my belly, and yeah, I'm kind of a big deal."

Like I told Sam, if I was her age, I probably would have asked her to marry me by Sunday morning. Can you believe that I had never heard a Wilco song until she let me rip "Sky Blue Sky" off her computer? And that Michael Jordan came into her bookstore when she was pregnant with Nell, and even put his hand on her big belly? When it comes my turn to have my own Nell, my own Pearl, I'm definitely calling Sarah to ask for a copy of her handbook on raising kids to be both cool and well-behaved at the same time. So far, I've learned that you need chameleons and children's books to occupy their minds. And juice to teach them not to pee in their pants. And guitars to let them know that nothing is impossible. And a silo to help them escape from time to time.

But the number one thing I learned from watching her interact with her little girls is that it isn't things you need to raise children right. It's a state of mind, a way of explaining the world that lets them know, with 100 percent certainty, that Bob Marley was right when he sang "everything's gonna be all right."

The moment; the moment. I heard Sarah talk about that so many times last weekend. Live in the moment. That's something I didn't even really start to think about until the end of college. Before that, I was always so obsessed with the future that I would almost forget the only thing that really matters is what is happening right now. That the future is abstract in comparison to the breath you are drawing in as you read this line. I don't blame my own parents for not focusing on that concept as much as Sarah does; everything they did for me, and continue to do for me to this day, is based out of unconditional love and a desire to see that my future is secure. It would be irresponsible to raise your kids to not concern themselves with what lies ahead. But I think that one of the biggest problems with the paradigm of youth in American society today is that the future takes precedence over all else. No Child Left Behind, summer internships, SAT prep courses, extracurriculars for the sake of a college application. Those words don't even have Swahili translations. Kerosene, rice, clean water, a pair of wearable shoes; those are the things Tanzanian parents stress over.

And Sarah is trying to straddle the beam. She's trying to raise her kids in a way that utilizes the positive aspects of both of those world views. Preparing her kids for the future -- the school they go to, the International School of Moshi, draws rave reviews from Sarah -- while trying to allow them to enjoy their childhood. Forcing them to "go see the wide open world," like Pearl wrote in "What is Your Favorite Thing to Do?", while not forgetting where they came from. In moving them all to Moshi, Sarah has stripped away everything but the bare essentials.

Maybe that's why it was such a great Mother's Day.

Even though Nell and Pearl do engage in that inevitable sibling rivalry that begins to really pick up steam around their ages, the love that all three of them show for one another touched me at little moments throughout the weekend, but none more so than when we were all sitting around that table eating French toast and enjoying, what else, the moment.

Maybe it was related to the fact that I was thinking about the love I feel for my own mother, the one I've never cooked breakfast for, who has missed me for two years in silence, allowing me the freedom to pursue my own dreams and live my own life as she waits for me to come home to her. But as I watched the interaction of mother and daughters, sister and sister during that breakfast, I felt the dull burn of tears that I definitely wasn't going to allow to fall -- I didn't want Pearl asking if it was because my penis hurt, after all. It just all seemed so clear to me for those two days: this is love; this is why people live; this is what it's all about.

Even if Sarah didn't plan it this way -- no one plans for their marriage to end the way hers did -- it is what it is. A mother and her two baby girls, trying to get by, trying to have a little fun while they're at it.

"I watch Sarah with those kids man, and I..." and I what? Words were escaping me as I tried to describe to Hunter what I felt when I watched Sarah in the midst of her girls, cracking jokes, painting rocks, running through the cornfield and speaking Swahili. But it was so simple. I knew what I felt. "...it's just the purpose of life, man. That is the purpose of life."

I'm only 24, probably closer in maturity to Pearl than to Sarah, and not even close to being ready to make the transition to being a dad. I still haven't fully lost my own "sense of childlike wonder." After all, I still giggle when I hear the name Ice Pee. But when that day comes, I hope Sarah will be waiting by her phone with some advice, and with two very special little girls nearby, just so I can say hi.

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I decided to save the best for last in this story, because I can't think of anything that better elucidates my description of Pearl being wicked smaht than her impersonation of George W. Bush speaking Swahili.

Sarah swears that this was all Pearl, that she had exerted no outside influence on her, that it wasn't even a possibility that Pearl might have overheard a PG-13 conversation in which Dubya's name was brought up. She must have seen it on the news, or heard it on the radio, because the girl has got the Commander in Chief down pat.

For the first time since that initial five-minute feeling out period that she put me and Hunter through when we first arrived Friday night, Pearl became shy when we pressed her on doing a demonstration of her Bush act for us on Sunday afternoon. Sarah had predicted that would happen, which was why we came up with a plan to "trick" the five-year-old on Saturday night. Reverse psychology, my friends. I thought it was a fool proof plan: we bring up Bush's name in front of Pearl, then dismiss her as being "too young" to know who he is. Which of course would cause her to stand up for herself, and tell us that yes, she does know who George Bush is, the President of the United States. From there I figured it would be easy to get her to do it: "Yeah right, I don't believe you. What does he sound like when he talks?" Something like that; we were just gonna wing it.

Well, it failed.

The initial baiting worked like a charm: "I know who George Bush is. He's the President of the United States. I hate him."

Dubya on his visit to Arusha in February

But as soon as I got to the "Yeah right, I don't believe you" part, she wised up.

"I'm not doing my impression for you," she said, not amused that Hunter, Sam and I thought we could somehow come together with our collective 75 years and try to trick her, a child of five.

Like I said, you can't get anything past Pearl.

But you can sure bribe her.

Every man has his price

This orange ball thingy is the definition of Western consumerism. It brings no benefit to mankind and is completely superfluous to our existence, and yet, it is so cool. Someone donated it along with a bunch of other toys to our NGO, and it had been sitting in the back of our car for some weeks, until it was discovered by Nell and Pearl.

Sure, we had promised that they could keep it the day before. But Hunter, the clever boy that he is, realized that he could leverage this gift with Pearl in an effort to force the Bush impersonation out of her.

And by George, that little orange ball thingy did the trick.

"Hold on," she announced, "I have to go into my room and practice." And with that, she disappeared into the guest bedroom downstairs. Sam, Hunter and I were all packed and ready to roll back to Arusha; this was the last chance she was going to have to earn that orange ball thingy, and she wanted to do it right.

When she came back out, she sat down on the living room couch facing us all, and proceeded to spit out the most rudimentary tourist Swahili words you could think of.

"Habari gani? Jambo means hello! Asante sana! Sijui! Kwa heri!"

("What's the news? Jambo means hello! Thanks a lot! [that one was in uber Southern accent mode, butchering the proper pronunciation beyond recognition] I don't know! Bye!")

All delivered in a thick Southern accent, by a five-year-old girl from Chicago, whose mom swears was not influenced by her own political leanings, with a goofy ass look on her face. Not quite the Bush Face, but an A+ for effort. I laughed a lot last weekend -- the four adults stayed up late into the night swapping stories that were pretty incredible -- but nothing set me off like that Bush impersonation. It was perfect.

You can't get anything past those kids.

Europe or the Isle of Srbija?

We'll see in 90 days.

Zoran Rikic, 40, owner of Serbia’s largest flag manufacturer, said he had supported Mr. Tadic, even though the upsurge of nationalism in Serbia stirred up by the far right had helped generate a 20 percent increase in sales of Serbian flags in recent months.

Rather than embrace the new nationalist fervor, Mr. Rikic said he wanted Serbia to align itself irreversibly with the European Union so that the economy would improve and then every Serb could afford his flags.

-The New York Times, today.

"TWENDE YANGAAAAAA!!!"

It’s way overdue that I write about the soccer game Hunter and I saw two weeks ago in “capital city!” Dar es Salaam, the city where Borat would go to watch a ladies make a toilet if he were Tanzanian.

Simba-Yanga was the biggest game of the year in Tanzania’s domestic soccer league, the Ligi Kuu. Think Yankees-Red Sox, if there were no National League, no LA at Anaheim, no Detroit, no Oakland, Minnesota or ChiSox. In the Ligi Kuu, Simba and Yanga are the only teams that count. And they are both located in Dar.

It’s called a derby. I had never heard that term until I studied abroad in Europe in 2004. It means a game played between two teams from the same city. Instead of having to come up with something catchy to describe each rivalry – the Subway Series, the Bay Series, the … Deep Dish Duel? – most sports fans in the world would just use the word “derby” to describe Yankees-Mets, A’s-Giants or Black Sox-Cubs. I have a lot of pride in America…n sports. Treason, in my definition, is preferring soccer* over baseball, or basketball, or football, ironically. But even I, a founding member of Team Halloween, have to admit that the fans at international soccer derbies stand alone in their intensity. If you read things that I write, you know that a lot of things are “the best thing ever” in my mind. But please believe me when I tell you that derbies are the best thing ever.

(*The World Cup is different)

I am a storyteller. I view every moment in terms of how it fits into a larger narrative, how I could write about it. So when stories overlap, it adds a sense of order to life, like things are really meant to happen, that everything truly is connected. East Africa is a world away from the former Yugoslavia; in fact, I’d say it is its polar opposite in almost every category. But despite this gulf, I was able to find a bridge, connecting my first two derby experiences, in Sarajevo and Belgrade, with the most recent, in Dar. He is a middle aged man from a place I know very well. His name is Dušan Kondić (Dew-shawn Cone-deetch).

Kondić is the head coach of Yanga, a shortened version of the club’s real name, the Young Africans, who we came to become big fans of within a span of 48 hours.

I ran into him just above the beach at Bagamoyo two days before the game, as Hunter and I were cutting up from the water through the Millenium Resort to get to the main road. He was stern looking, harsh sounding, and with a facial structure like that, unmistakably Eastern European. Wearing a yellow collared shirt with green warm up pants, he looked like a St. Vincent's P.E. coach. A P.E. coach that was a lit cigarette away from placing us on the Adriatic coast.

He was talking to another man, also decked out in a yellow collared shirt with green warm ups. An assistant P.E. coach? No. I'd heard the intonation in his words, the texture of his voice. And I knew. I may not always be able to tell you which country, but I can pick out the sound of a Slav from a mile away. And these guys were Slavs.

"Odakle ste?"

The man, clearly caught off guard to hear a word like that coming from someone not on his staff, didn't respond. He stopped dead in his tracks, turned towards me, looked me right in the eyes and stared. Glared; that’s more like it. For three solid seconds, an eternity in that context. The silence gave way to momentary anxiety. Had I asked it correctly? My Serbian may have deteriorated to the brink of nonexistence in the year since I left the Balkans, but had I really forgotten how to ask "Where are you from?"

"Where are you from?" I asked again, this time in English.

He did a sort of final look down, and finally came out with it: "I am from Serbia."

For months I had known that the head coach for Yanga -- or was it Simba? -- was from Serbia. I couldn't remember his name, but it always stood out among the Baraka's, Elisante's, Juma's and other Bantu names I'd read in the papers, or heard on the radio, like an ić that needs scratching. Plus, it was always funny to hear or read the word Mserbia in the middle of a sea of Swahili.

Found on the ground a week before the game

Now it appeared as if I was in this celebrity Mserbia's presence. Ironic, isn't it? The origin of the word "slave" dates from the days when Slavs on the Danube were in the position later to be filled by black Africans. And I was meeting him just a stone's throw from the old slave forts in Bagamoyo, a town whose name means "Bury your heart," a testimony to the legacy of Omani Arab rule, when it served as the point of departure from the African mainland for all the Bantu slaves brought from the interior by the Arab caravans, bound for the live auctions on the island of Zanzibar, just a few hours by dhow from Bagamoyo.

"I lived in Serbia for about three months last year," I said.

He seemed surprised. Serbs are usually trying to get out of Serbia. "Tell me, where are you from?"

"America."

"America," he said.

"Uh huh."

"And why were you so long in Serbia?" Now he just seemed suspicious. Like he was in the presence of a spy.

"I don't know, I just liked it. The people, the food, the history ..." Pause for honesty. "Serbian girls."

"Ah yes," he said, smiling, as if he was remembering a time in his life when he, too, was young. "Serbian women are the most beautiful in the world." This coming from a man who moments later told me his wife was African.

"I agree."

"You like Serbia?" he asked after I had already told him that yes, I do like Serbia. The corners of his mouth turned up, just a bit, giving him the appearance of a man who knows something you don't know. "So tell me, what do you think of Serbian people?" It almost sounded as if he was testing me.

I briefly considered trying to explain the nuances of my relationship with the people I met during my three months there -- the Chetniks and the cool people, the three-fingered thugs and those who yearn to be a part of the European community -- but I could tell my thoughts would not be well received. So I just said that I loved them all, with enthusiasm, without reservation. I was trying to get him to open up to me; people are always more prepared to talk to you when they think you're on their side.

"So you see, when you turn on TV, the news say one thing, but truth is another," the man said, as if he was lecturing to a crowded classroom. Truth is one of the first words I think of when I think of the Balkans. Everyone is interested in obtaining the rights to it; no one feels that any sort of search is necessary. "Your government wants Kosovo to be independent because it is a major crossing point for weapons, drugs..."

I'll spare you from the rest.

It had been almost a year since I was in Kosovo, and I couldn't seem to escape from it. In the news, in the speeches George W. Bush was making from Tanzania, in my thoughts, in emails from O.G. Zoka, even on the streets of Iringa, where we'd been just a couple of nights before.

A bar in Iringa, TZ, seen a few days before the game.

The assistant P.E. coach took the baton of Serbian propaganda when the first man, whose name I still hadn't gotten at that point, walked off to deal with something inside the hotel.

"FIFTEEN CHILDREN!" he screamed. "The Albanians, they are having FIFTEEN CHILDREN!" His eyes were just as loud as his voice. "And we Serbs, we are making one or two. Tell me. How can we keep up with that?"

I thought about giving him the answer, but kept my mouth shut.

"You know, we never, attacked, a country, outside of our OWN." He enunciated almost every word to make sure I understood. Bosnia, Croatia, and especially Kosovo, šta je to? The ancient kingdom of Serbia. "We only fought for what was OURS," he slammed home, beating both fists against his chest. "One hundred years ago, we helped Albanian people. We give them house, we give them money, we give them..." he looked at the ground, clearly trying to remember the word for what we were standing on.

"Land? For farming?"

"Yes, we give Albanian people land to farm," he continued. "And now, what? We should give Kosovo to them? Why? Because they have 15 children?" He shook his head. "It is ours. First Serbian king come from there. We will never give Kosovo."

Images of Texas -- or should I say Tejas? – 50 years down the line danced across my mind. Fifteen children. It’s on the horizon in the southwestern United States, but it is part of the reality today in Kosovo. Demographics are much more tangible than history books. And the assistant P.E. coach was trying to deny this fact. The only problem with his defiance, as I once again decided to keep to myself, was that the heart of the Serbian nation was no longer beating in a Slavic body. It had already been removed, transplanted to a nation with even more tenure in the Balkan Peninsula than the Slavs, the ancient Illyrians, known today as Albanians. After nearly nine years of international administration under UN and NATO auspices, Pristina produced a unilateral declaration of independence on February 17 of this year, recognized by almost everyone but Moscow, Belgrade, and a handful of European states with problems of minority populations within their borders.

"I only have one more question for you," I said, trying to change the topic from the K-word to something a little more pertinent. "You're a Serb, but you're also a soccer coach.“ Do you smoke cigarettes?"

This is not an official figure, but I once heard that 78 percent of Serbians are regular smokers. I thought the number too low. Not just for Serbia, but for the entire region. Of all the people I met in the former Yugoslavia, I think I can count on both hands the total number who didn’t smoke. And they were almost all girls.

"No, no." He shook his head and took a step back, smiling, as if he was used to getting shit for it back home.

"OH MY GOODNESS!" I yelled, reeling backwards. "OH! MY GOODNESS!"

As I took my fifth backpedal, done for dramatic effect, I nearly ran right into Kondić, whose name I still did not know at that point. He had skipped politeness and gone right into K-word propaganda when I approached him on the boardwalk.

“Do you smoke cigarettes?” I asked. If anyone was going to be the Jim Leyland of the group, it was Kondić.

“No,” he said, trying to keep up the Serious Serb act, but clearly amused at my theatrics.

“OH MY GOODNESS!”

Both of the staid old men were laughing when the young assistant, probably in his 20’s and tall like a Montenegrin, walked up.

“What about you? Do you smoke cigarettes?”

He shot a glance at both of his superiors and then looked back at me. He shook his head. Another no. Three in a row.

The odds of asking three Serbs in a row if they smoke, and getting three no’s, is on par with Don’t-Call-Me-President Putin ordering an invasion of Kosovo to restore it into Belgrade’s authority.

The young assistant, who reminded me of the cool kids I met in his hometown, Belgrade, never even thought to bring up Kosovo when he found out he was talking to an American. He just wanted to talk about soccer. No cigarettes, no nationalism. I guess that means there's hope for change in Serbia.

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What I didn't mention from my conversation with Kondić was the part about soccer. Yes, he'd admitted, he was the coach of Yanga -- that explained the pack of athletic, Tanzanian 20-something's, also dressed mostly in green and yellow, that were milling around the beach when Hunter and I had first cut up through the Millenium boardwalk. And yes, there was a game coming up, the last one of the season, a mere formality, seeing as in the four months since he'd taken the job as head man, Kondić had led Yanga from ninth place to league champions. Win, lose or draw, they would be hoisting the Ligi Kuu Vodacom Cup over their heads come the final whistle on Sunday in Dar.

"Who are y'all playing?"

"We are playing Simba."

A Serb, a soccer derby, and not shit to do.

"Hunter," I said, as we were walking back to our guest house, "we need to go to this game."

Two days later, we were up before dawn, trying to catch the first vehicle out of town, bound for Dar es Salaam.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If Kondić was the bridge that connected a sense of Balkan brate-hood to the trio of derbies, than another man, a Tanzanian in the age range right in between ours and the Serb’s, emerged as the character in this story that continued the theme of local hospitality. His name is Innocent. That's what he told us, at least.

"Innocent! My name is Innocent! That is my name!”

As we soon realized, though, there was good reason for him to be so demonstrative in telling us his “real” name: everyone else and their mother calls him Osama.

Innocent until proven guilty

And he was clearly a Muslim, or at least half Muslim, talking to a couple of Americans in a city that had an Al Qaeda bomb bring down the U.S. Embassy in 1998.

The fact that we were all milling around across the street from the stadium in the same pre-game watering hole, creatively named Stadium Bar, getting drunk and watching the seedy display of Tanzanian cultural contradiction, brought to you by Tusker Lager!, proved his innocence just fine in my book.

Gross.

Grosser.

Brought to you byyyyyyyy TUSKAHHHHHH!

It was Osama’s fresh style that got my attention initially. I had never seen anything like it before. People who have the balls to walk out of their house looking like that are the kind of folks that I like. He would have been amazing at Assassins, I thought, as I watched him back-slapping, holding court and guzzling Castles like the gas tank inside my mom’s new SUV.

Everyone seemed to know this dude. Only that kind of guy could pull off the half beard. I stared right at his eyes for about 20 seconds, waiting for him to see me, so I could beckon him to come over to where Hunter and I were standing. He was greeting all around, kissing cheeks, giving long distance points to his homies at far ends of the bar, getting ready for the game. I noticed the color of his shirt almost immediately; the whole Stadium Bar was divided into yellow and green, red and white. I remembered Yanga’s colors from the players on the beach.

Finally, Osama looked my way.

“Njoo!” I mimed, using the Tanzanian hand motion for the word “come,” too: instead of pulling the air towards you with your fingers, Wabongo point their palm in your direction and clasp their hand into a fist in rapid succession. “Njoo!”

His yellow t-shirt with the word Yanga printed in green, front and back, made me happy – after all, Hunter and I were big Yanga fans by this point. Even though we didn’t know the name of a single player as of yet. I asked him about the beard. From what I could gather – Osama was speaking pretty fast, with a lot of slang – the reason for it was “because our job is half done.” Osama is as big a Yanga fan as I am Astros. “We already won the championship, and once we beat Simba, it will be complete, and I will shave the rest.”

The Tanzanian version of a Playoff Beard, I guess.

The scene at this place before the game was something that would have been extremely overwhelming for me had it gone down before I became comfortable in an ocean of black Tanzanians. Sure, there was Where’s Waldo? guy.

See him?

But that wasn’t making us any less conspicuous. It was a film negative equivalent to an analogy once given by my mother’s childhood housekeeper, an old, Southern black man named Frank, who was explaining why he hadn’t chosen the cream colored model when buying a new car: “Because in that cream colored car, I looked like a fly in a pint’a sweet milk.” Hunter and I were albino flies in a pint of sweet milk at midnight.

“Mzungu!”

“Eh, Mzungu!”

“Oya, Mzungu!”

“Jambo, Mzungu!”

At what point do you just stop acknowledging this?

The Safari’s helped me to just stop caring. Hunter and I have gone through different stages of go-to beers in our ten months in Tanzania. They’re all mostly the same price, but improvements in taste come at the expense of the alcohol content. Safari’s, if you get a fresh one, aren’t bad; but if you get a bad one, they suck. They’re called nondo, steel, in slang. TK drank upwards of 13 of them on the First Annual Nairobi-Moshi Rd. Pub Crawl. We drank quite a few ourselves that afternoon, before, during and after the game.

Hunter was even wearing a Safari t-shirt, which he’d gotten for free from a brewery representative looking for highly visible, human billboards. I’d gotten a green Ndovu Lager shirt, which was better looking objectively, but nowhere near as cool as Mwindaji’s Safari threads.

Somehow, we found ourselves walking in step with Osama up the road and towards the stadium gates once we’d finished off our last semi-cold nondo. It was just like Skila had done in Sarajevo, or Vlada in Belgrade. I’ve never been to a derby without a local friend taking me to the best spot in the house and introducing me to all his friends in the bleachers as well.

Just getting into the gates was more chaotic than anything I’ve ever seen at an American sporting event. The cops in Tanzania don’t give a shit about Rodney King type considerations. They beat first, ask questions later. One police officer I actually ran into at the bar before and after the game; he was drinking the whole time, maybe inspired by the guy from the field party in “Dazed and Confused,” who was only there to do two things: drink some beers and kick some ass.

They were in full riot gear. Again, a thread that connects these three stories.

Whack! Whack! WHACK-WHACK! Jesus CHRIST that must hurt to get hit on the legs like that. Or, since most people on the East African coast are actually Muslims, MashaaLAH that must kill.

Not the calf, not the shin, but that muscle in the front, the one that is so difficult to stretch – that’s where they aim. Vlada, the common-law brother-in-law of O.G. Zoka who took me to Red Star-Partizan in Belgrade, told me stories of the days before Milošević was forced out of power, how the cowboy cops would go to town with surgical like precision on non-violent protesters clamoring for his removal. O.G., too, told me stories: “Those guys know what they are doing. They know where to hit you so they do not break your bones, but you are hurt really bad.”

Whack!

A group of five or six cops with those Plexiglass shields, helmets and batons were doing just fine at keeping at bay a crowd of over 100, maskini who couldn’t afford the TSh 5,ooo ticket to get in. Our tickets had been 8,000, a little less than $8. The cops manning the gate ushered us in with urgency, protecting the sheep surrounded by a pack of wolves, panting at the sight of two rich Wazungu who might give them the money to buy a ticket of their own. “Oya Mzungu! Naomba pesa?” Whack! Don’t bother the Wazungu, says the riot cop’s baton. I tried to get my ticket back after handing it to one of the cops – yes, they use polisi to tear tickets and whoop ass – but he tore it to shreds, preventing any possibility of a pass back through the chain link fence.

Sentimentality is not a feature of life in the Third World.

As we entered the compound, I noticed that the cops, too, seemed to be boys with Osama.

Osama was clearly stoked to be able to show off his new Wazungu friends to the rest of the Yanga faithful up high in the bleachers to the right of the entrance. You got the feeling after just a few moments in our seats that we had met the right dude. He just has that charisma that you’re either born with or not. People were drawn to him; they listened to him, respected him. And showing up to the Simba game in tow with two white boys, the flies in the pint of sweet milk reversed, was only adding to his street cred. And they speak Swahili?! Osama was scratching our backs; our presence was scratching his.

“Simama, simama,” he motioned. Standing is actually more comfortable than sitting in those bleachers, which like all other things in Tanzania, show an utter disregard for trifling matters like fire codes. It was more packed in those seats than in the back seat of a daladala at rush hour. I was glad to stand up, like Osama asked.

He pointed to all the Yanga fans to my right, to my left, behind me, and motioned for me to get them riled up. I felt like one of those Spanish conquistadores viewed as a deity by the indigenous population; when I spoke, they responded in thunderous tones.

“TWENDE YANGAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” I roared to the sea of yellow speckled with green to my right. “AHHHHH!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!” they boomed in reply.

Almost every single person in my scope stood up and began pumping his arms. Every hair on my body stood at attention. I bet Hitler knows exactly the kind of adrenaline I’m talking about.

I turned to the eight rows of Yanga fans cramped into the rows above us: “TWENDE YANGAAAA!”

“AHHHHHHHH!!!”

To my left: “SIMAMENI! TUPIGE KILELE YANGAAAAA!!!!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

Osama’s mind at this moment: Nice, Mzungu!! He handed me a bottle of Konyagi, a cheap gin/vodka hybrid that really is, as is advertised across the country, “The Spirit of the Nation.” It was like a scene from a medieval war movie, and Osama was handing me some really symbolic sword to hold up for the troops right before leading them into battle. They saw this white kid with Osama holding up a bottle of Konyagi and exhorting them to get rowdy, and get rowdy they did.

The one twist on the ambience at an African soccer game, as opposed to the kind of revelry you find in Europe, is the drums. East Africa is not as musical as the stereotype of Africa would lead you to hope – that’s West Africa – but at Simba-Yanga, they were in full force. The rhythm formed the background hum to the symphony of sounds that overloaded the senses. Songs, cheers, insults (neither Hunter nor I could recall ever having heard the words msenge, a derogatory term for a gay dude, or kuma la mama yako, a phrase that has to do with your mother’s…

Anyway.

The game was anticlimactic.

Boooring part

It was bila-bila, a scoreless tie. Not that it mattered. Like I said, Yanga had already wrapped up the regular season title; this game was meaningless as far as affecting the standings. The Young Africans were going to be raising the big silver trophy over their heads come the 90^th minute whether Simba scored zero goals or 100. But that didn’t do anything to dampen the fire that exists between these two clubs.

There weren’t any flares during the game. I saw a few afterwards, but something tells me they had been saved for the championship celebration, like pioneer kids saving that one piece of candy their Pa gave them for a special occasion such as this. In Sarajevo, and especially in Belgrade, it was like the 4^th of July in the stands, a continuous flow of red and white smoke signals visible from Mars.

Sarajevo.

Why there is no snow on Kilimanjaro anymore; yet another thread

But in Dar, it was drums, Konyagi and kuma la mama yako! Tanzanians are even poorer than Bosniaks and Serbians; they just didn’t have the cash for pyrotechnics, is my guess.

The hospitality hadn’t been restricted to Osama. Within five minutes of squeezing our way into a spot just big enough for the two of us on the concrete bleacher steps, other Yanga fans had sought to help us blend in a little more. Our promotional Safari and Ndovu beer t-shirts, colored dark blue/electric blue and dark green respectively, weren’t cuttin’ it. From out of nowhere, Hunter was handed a yellow knit cap by a person to his right, the word ‘YANGA’ woven in with green thread. And from just over my left shoulder, a weathered black hand placed a yellow CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the one and only Tanzanian political party to ever hold power) bandana into my own. Since I’m the one who looks Jewish, it would have been more fitting had I been the one wearing the Yangulke, but at least my deal kept my hair out of my eyes.

Shalom.

The Simba faithful were all gathered down below, which is fitting, since Simba is below us. I’m a huge Yanga fan, remember? Even though I still don’t know know the name of a single player.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

It’s always fun to pick a team for no particular reason and then be die hard. Stewy was the only person I ever saw walk around Belgrade wearing Partizan gear, and he never even went to a game! The two times he was bold enough to flash his black Partizan hoodie, a total of about three minutes between the incidents, he had Serbs talking shit to him in a language he understood as if he had grown up in the Balkans. It was all because of the Gypsy trinket exchange one late night in Novi Sad -- when a drunk stranger traded a Bic lighter for a cracked, plastic Partizan key chain – but Stewy was still the biggest Partizan fan in all of Belgrade.

And I was acting like the biggest Yanga fan in all of Dar es Salaam during halftime, when I went back across the street with Osama to grab a quick beer at Stadium Bar.

“Kwa nini umevaa rangi ya Yanga!” one fan yelled at me. He was wearing yellow and green himself, but for some reason he was taunting me about why I was wearing the colors of Yanga.

“MIMI? WE umevaa zile rangi!” I shouted back, asking why the pot would call the kettle yellow and green.

My dad has always told me that one day, I’m going to mouth off to the wrong person, and they’re gonna kick my ass. I was thinking about that while talking shit to all the Simba fans, risking my physical safety for a team I really didn’t care at all about. (I just liked them because of the Serbian connection, but then I found out that both teams are coached by a Serbian).

I mentioned the role the Safari’s played in relaxing my annoyance to being called Mzungu by the entire Stadium Bar clientele while we were pre-gaming. Well, they also made me a lot less worried about taking pictures in public. People get pick-pocketed in TZ all the time, in broad daylight, and I am constantly on guard whenever I’ve got my camera with me. But I was drunk at this point. And I had Osama with me.

It came in handy to have such an mkubwa with me when I ran into this kid.

I simply told Osama I wanted to take pictures of this kid; usually Tanzanians are not down with white boys snapping away without paying them something. But when I’m with Osama, I know I’m exempt from such taxation.He snapped something at the kid in Swahili that I didn’t understand, and I snapped away to my heart’s content.

And to think, I’ve now seen a kid with an old school jersey from my high school in Houston, Texas, AND a dude wearing an old school jersey from my club soccer team in Houston, Texas.

WEST U JERSEY

Nice, Houston.

Osama had been great to us and all, but at the end of the day, he is a Tanzanian who was way nicer to us than he needed to be. That normally means one thing and one thing only: we’re going to be expected to pay him for his services. I’d bought him a beer during halftime, a Castle, 200 shillings more than the Safari I was drinking, as a sign of appreciation, but I hate – HATE – the fact that friendship so often comes with a price tag in Tanzania. That’s where there is no string connecting the Balkans to this country; hospitality there was real and unconditional. I didn’t pay for the last 60 nights I stayed at the Three Black Catz, for Christ’s sake! I met a German girl in Bagamoyo who had stayed at the Backpacker’s Hostel in Arusha for three months, and she recounted how one worker would always ask her in a panic whether or not she had paid yet for the day, every day. So Hunter and I were assuming that the axe was about to fall as the injury time wound down on the 2008 season. We discussed our exit strategy – fast, and without looking back – and prepared to make a dash for it through the dense forest of Yanga and then Simba fans that separated us from the Olympic sized track on the ground level.

We could hear Osama calling out for us as we left without saying goodbye. “Bili! Mwindaji! Subiri!” But we didn’t look back, as agreed. In our minds, a clean break with Osama, before he had the chance to spoil it by asking for money or even demanding it, was the best end to what had been a great day. “Don’t give ‘em a chance to break your heart”; that’s been our motto since early on in A-Town.

But Osama, tall like bin Laden, was faster than we expected. He caught up to us right as we were about to hang a 180 and head for the exits. Rather than sticking out his hand or asking why we had tried to leave without telling him, he led us first onto the track...

Where even the handicapped were gettin' their groove on

... and then onto the pitch. Osama wanted to take us onto the field for the trophy celebration.

I’ll never forget a particular phone conversation I had with my friend Ted last summer, during my two-month transition period at home, about what to expect in Tanzania. He had been there for six weeks as a high schooler on a Putney trip, and like me, is a rabid sports fan. The thing that stands out above all other pieces of advice that Ted gave me that day was his description of the national team soccer game he went to right after arriving in TZ: “It was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. They treated us like we were a bunch of VIPs. People were getting up and moving so that we could sit front and center, which were like the best seats in the house. We were the guests of honor, just because we were Mzungu’s."

Hey, being a Mzungu also comes with the perks of getting robbed and lied to, so I’ll take some preferential treatment when I can get it. Like walking onto the field to mingle with all the Yanga players and coaches, meet all the best players, who were friends with Osama to the last one, pose for photos with the league commissioner, and even go up and say what’s up to those three Serbian coaches who probably thought they’d never see me again after making a brief appearance in their lives two days before in Bagamoyo.

“Congratulations!” I yelled when I came face to face with Kondić. I couldn’t remember how to say it in Serbia; stupid! We shook hands, and he just looked at me like, “Who in the hell IS this kid?”

Osama was having a grand old time. But it had been a scoreless tie, not a win … would that mean he wasn’t going to shave the other half of his beard?

“We are champions!” I heard Kondić yell when the trophy was making its way out. And I was on the field with my camera, as if I had a press pass. I did have a press pass. It was called white skin.

The funniest thing about it was that I bet you every single one of those players has a day job, and is still poor. Tanzania has never made it to the World Cup, and isn’t looking like it’s about to contend any time soon. They have no players in Europe. They have no money to develop young talent. Ninety five percent of Tanzanians answer with the name of an English Premier League team when you ask which football club they support. In a way, the beauty of the Ligi Kuu is that it still has that amateur spirit that you find today only in college sports in America. The fans support the team; there is no bandwagon element. We weren’t the only ones on the field. Tons of other fans came down, too, though I never could tell exactly which criterion the riot cops were using to discern between those who were to get a front calf beating and those who were to be given a pass. It was a big party. Everyone was smiling, laughing, hugging, and posing for photos.

Brought to you by Vodacom! though. I guess it’s not that amateuristic. More like a Minor League Baseball game, I suppose.

But not really. I love baseball. But there is nothing quite like a good old fashioned derby.

For the second time since Hunter and I started playing basketball at Soweto, I was forced to make a trip to the Ithna Asheri Charitable Hospital due to a basketball-related injury yesterday. I got four stitches in my elbow. It cost TSh 3,000 a stitch, around three bucks a pop.

Back in the day, our third day at Soweto, as a matter of fact, I caught a vicious elbow from Elia right on the pua. Since it looked like something out of a trigonometry SAT review course textbook, I naturally assumed my nose was broken. But I was wrong. The x-ray proved it, though I fear it also left me sterile for life, seeing as the disgruntled technician who adminstered it didn't find it necessary to put one of those space blankets over my balls before jumping for cover himself. It took only two days of on-again, off-again puuuuuuuuuushes. Today, my nose is 98 percent healed. It's still a little crooked. I had no idea how much cartilage could bend.

Instead of being hurt by an elbow yesterday, I just hurt my elbow. TSh 12,000, plus 5,000 extra for service fees worth of hurt. A fallout from fighting Rahim for the ball.

Rahim is tall, the tallest regular player at Soweto. I'd put him at 6'5"; Hunter says 6'3". So we'll go with 6'4". I was playing D up top in the 2-1-2, and someone made a lazy, floating pass from the baseline to Rahim, the best shooter on the court. If he gets an uncontested look from inside three, he's like 60 percent. So I contested.

I knocked the ball out of his hands at the three-point line, and the chase was on. Again, I jumped, knocking it out of his hands for the second time, just past halfcourt. It was just me and Rahim at that point; everyone else was waiting to see who would come up with it, the tall guy, or the hustle guy. We ran side by side to the next three-point line, and again, for the third time, he grabbed onto the ball, only to have me jump up and knock it free.

"Billy!" I knew Bariki Mdogo was behind me. I knew I had to get it to him, because there was no way I was saving it and staying in bounds. At that point, I had the same attitude that propelled me to so much success in Assassins first year at Virginia: I have already put in this much work; I am getting this ball. So I dove.

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In case you're wondering, we still lost possession of the ball. I didn't see whether I made a bad pass, or if Bariki just dropped it, but it was all for naught.

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Whenever anyone else gets hurt at Soweto, everyone stops and makes sure they're okay. For some reason though, no one cares when I'm the one bleeding. I played three more series after that Rodman esque attempt to save the ball, and the blood would not stop coming, no matter how many times I tried to just wipe it off on my shorts. There was a straight up shimo in my elbow; it was deep. So for the second time ever, I subbed myself out of a game at Soweto, and went to go clean up the cut.

Ten minutes later, I was on my way back to Ithna Asheri.

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They say "Charitable" hospital. My ass. I even got a Mzungu price on stitches.

But the doctor was cool. He definitely made me feel better about what was going to happen -- an injection into my body, in Africa -- when he made the nurse take his ringing cell phone out of his shirt pocket and hold it up to his ear, since he had just put on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. Then he did a strange little dance. Weird.

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It had been a bad day for me at the court; I'd missed two wide open lay ups in a five minute span before injuring myself. And my shooting woes did not end there.

"Hapa." The nurse saw me looking for a place to throw away the blood soaked napkin I'd been holding in my hands since I went to the Soweto Bar to clean up my arm, and opened up the Biohazard bin for me to toss it into. It was maybe two feet away. And I hit the front rim. It bounced onto the floor, I got my own rebound, and laid it in for the bucket, with the nurses and doctor shaking their heads in disappointment. I was wearing a Dream Team Shawn Kemp jersey, but I couldn't buy a bucket.

I could only buy stitches, which came in without me feeling a damn thing. The numbing solution worked kabisa.

Hunter had a date last night with a lovely lady, so he didn't want to get sweaty before going to pick her up. He didn't come to mazoezi because of that, and so wasn't there to see me fall. He came to the hospital though, to pick me up, and arrived just in time to see the main event.

I have no problem with needles; I'd make a good junkie. What I do have a problem with is watching my skin get stretched like Jerry Jones' face by a doctor who reminds me just a little too much of the one from "Arrested Development." I had watched him numb me up, and I even watched the beginning of the stitches, but soon I had to turn away.

Hunter, though, was mesmerized. I watched his eyes, which were watching the doctor's hands, and from what I could gather, there was some gross shit going on. He looked like he'd seen a ghost ... four of them. Each puncture and pull seemed to touch a nerve in his own CNS, not mine. And since I couldn't feel a thing, I was having a grand old time, laughing it up and making jokes throughout with the nurses. Made me feel pretty tough indeed.

And seeing as I, too, was having dinner with a lovely lady -- albeit not a date, like Hunter -- I felt really tough when I walked into Big Bite and was able to casually say, "Sorry I'm late. I just had to run over to the hospital real quick and get some stitches."

I was back at practice this afternoon. Only two people even bothered to ask about my arm. But I'm sure they'll be asking about Ice Pee tomorrow, because he's sitting in the exact same hospital as we speak, courtesy of an elbow to the head by none other than Elia. I'd never seen blood shooting out of someone's head with such force. Rough couple of days at Soweto.