"Jina lako nani?"

It's a question I never know how to answer here in Tanzania.

"What's your name?"

"Uhhh...."

There are just too many options. Bayless, Billy, Hatari, Hakuna Pwani, Teacher BP (pronounced "Teecha BP"), and the classic, Mzungu. I often just say "Nina majina mengi" when I'm asked that question, because it's true -- I have many names with the Waswahili.




The total may be equal in number to the amount of Tanzanian friends I have who are under the age of 12.

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

"Hi, my name is Without a Beach."

First up: Hakuna Pwani has gotta go.




Pretty much the only one who still calls me that is Brian, the kid sitting on the hood. And even Brian uses it less and less frequently, which is good, because it means he won't be able to teach little Derriki, the one in red, to say it when he begins to increase his vocabulary beyond the word "car" (which, in Kiswahili, is simply kaa).

As of now, Derriki -- who I always assumed was Brian's little brother, when in fact they share not a mother but a roof -- just calls me "Ugghhhh."

Hakuna Pwani was cool at first, back when I thought pwani actually meant "bay," like my Lonely Planet Swahili phrasebook said it did. I should have remembered to never believe anything produced by Lonely Planet, a lesson I learned while traveling in the Balkans. Nine weeks in the field has taught me that pwani really means "beach" or "coast," not "bay."

And to think, all that time, I had actually been saying, "Hi, my name is Without a Beach." Tell me about it; after falling in love a thousand times over in the former Yugoslavia, I've found quite a different girl situation awaiting me here in East Africa.

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

"Mzunguuuuuu! Nibebe! Nibebe!"

Moving on to the name I really dislike being called: Mzungu. It's what every single child who doesn't know us yells when we walk by. Used to be cute. Not anymore.

"Mzunguuuuu! Mzunguuuuu!"

Yeah, kid, why don't you alert the media? We HEAR YOU. The entire village hears you. We live here now, and this is the only path we can walk down. So you'd better save your vocal chords, because there will be many Wazungu sightings in the months to come.

It'd be like if all the neighborhood children from Southside Place, USA yelled "Mexicaaaaaaan!" every time a truck full of yard workers drove by. That's because Mzungu doesn't even mean "white person." It means "European." I'm not any more European than a tan skinned Nicaraguan who cuts grass for a living in Texas and speaks Spanish as a first language is Mexican.

Habiba, the little girl on the right, actually knows us, and yet still refuses to recognize that all the other loke dog children are calling us by our names by this point. Habiba, though, gets a free pass because of the contagiously euphoric state she reaches after a Mzungu sighting. It is incredible.




"MZUNGUUU!" she screams, every single time. "Nibebe! Nibebe!"

I just wonder if it's customary for a little African child to say to an African, "carry me," or if for some reason Habiba thinks it is part of an unspoken contract that all white people are expected to pick her up whenever they see her. That being said, it's hard to say no when she runs full speed towards me, yelling my "name" and leaping into my arms at the end just for flare.

For the simple reason that it is impossible not to smile when I see her, Habiba is one of the few who doesn't irritate me by calling me a Euro.

"Wazungu wanatoka Ulaya!" I sometimes yell at the ones who do bother me, though. "Mimi ninatoka Marekani! Msiseme Mzungu!"

That's me explaining the difference between white people from Europe and white people from America, and why it's technically incorrect to call me a Mzungu. It's in one ear and out the other, though, with children of all creeds and colors. As sure as the air in Patandi smells like burning trash and dust, that word's de facto definition will continue to be "white guy" till Kingdom come.

Our next door neighbor Baba Juma (pictured below), who runs the Meru Peak Day Care School from the confines of his own home, has come up with the perfect solution to this problem.




"Huyu sio Mzungu," he sternly informs whichever child he has singled out, who in turn stares up at this figure of ultimate authority, mouth agape with awe. "Anakaa hapa hapa sasa. Ni Mwafrika mweupe."

Since I live here now, Baba Juma wants me to be known as a "white African." I like that, Baba J. Good call.

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

"William is a good worker."

Why is your name Billy?

I can't count the number of times I've heard that query since the alias first stuck back in the summer of 2000, when I was a 16-year-old construction worker battling the sweltering Houston summer heat out on East Airtex Rd.

It was my first day on the job, and I knew no one. My superintendent, Red -- who later alternated between "Jew Boy" and "Jerry Seinfeld" as better names for his bushy eye browed helper bee -- was introducing me to Victor, a Mexican who was to become my mentor of sorts. Victor did not then, nor does he now, speak very good English. He could understand almost everything, but it was pronunciation that loomed largest of all the roadblocks to fluency.

"Bayyyeely?"

"No," I said, not understanding why he couldn't get it right after three tries. "Me llamo BAYLESSSS."

I over-pronounced the last two letters so much, it was like a classroom full of eight-year-olds had just found out they were getting two recesses that day. Still, Victor's face remained blank, except for his eyes, which were speaking in a language of their own: "No entiendo-no entiendo-no entiendo," they said. I kind of felt bad for the man, because you could tell he was trying.

And he tried again.

"Baaayylii..." Oh my God .... "...eely?"

No.

I sighed.

"Bílly," I said, capitulating. "Bílly is fine."

And thus, Bílly (pronounced Bee-lee) was born.

From that day forth at work, I was known as Jew Boy/Jerry Seinfeld by the white super's in the air conditioned trailer, and as Bílly by everyone else under the sun.

The Mexicans honestly thought it was my name. Augustine soon started to tell Red what a good worker "William" was. The black dudes, though, only said it because they were making fun of the Mexicans. Robert Murphy -- a.k.a. Samuel L. Jackson -- used to lay it on way thick whenever one of my amigo's was in earshot: "Billy! (glances to see if Victor or Augustine is listening) Hey Billy! Hooh haha! Billy!"

It was only a matter of time before the name was to catch on with my friends at school, albeit in a slightly more Anglicized version. Bílly thus became Billy, and the first nickname I ever actually liked began to grow into its own.

It's not just a Hispanic thing, or even just an inside joke thing for my friends in Texas and Virginia. People the world over call me that by mistake, both strangers and friends. There are lots of Serbs that I count as my boys, for example, who don't know my real name, and I don't have the heart to tell them. I guess I don't do much to help matters by giving them my email address: billyparsley@gmail.com.

Baba Juma has continued on with the tradition laid down by Victor. He sometimes tells little kids to call me Mwafrika mweupe, true, but he and his entire family definitely call me Billy all the time, and his 17-year-old daughter Biti sometimes even shortens it to Bill on occasion.

I'll never forget the time a guy here really did get "Bayless" down pat, only to be corrected by Baba Juma. His name was John, and he was giving us a ride home from a meeting in Usa River. When Baba Juma heard John call me by my real name, he cut in.

"Hapana," he said. "Huyu anaitwa Billy." He then shot a quick glance over in my direction, as if to say, "I gotcho back. Don't worry." I nodded in appreciation. You tell 'em, Baba Juma.

"Ahhhh," John replied, no doubt making a mental note as he sized me up and down in his rear view. "I see. I am sorry, Beelly." It's ironic that John looked just like the older black cop from "Homicide: Life on the Streets," an old NBC show that actually had a character named Detective Bayless.

Billy, it seems, is a nickname that has a lot in common with the Roman Catholic Church -- it's long lasting, and it's universal.

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

She must have been breast fed longer than the other children

Mwajuma is not only the cutest little kid neighbor we've got, she is also a genius. Of the hundreds of people we give daily greetings to in our village, she is the only one that can say "Bayless" -- and I doubt she's even reached her third birthday yet (not that she'd even know if she had, as kids here tend to not even know their own ages, let alone a D.O.B.).

I love Mwajuma. If you saw her in real life, you'd understand.

She looks peaceful, doesn't she? Calm, serene, contemplative, almost like an African Buddha baby. She just looks good. A good kid.

Well, I'm not saying she's bad ... it's just that she is crazy. Mwajuma is kichaa kabisa. And she has found a permanent place in my heart ... 90 percent of the reason being her phonetic skills.

"Bayless!"

She yells it loud, clear and with confidence, making her voice stand out that much more from the herds of other youngsters screaming out my various pseudonyms. When I heard her say it for the first time, the first thing that popped into my mind was, "Which Swahili word sounds like me?"

If only more of these Patandi youths were just like Mwajuma, rather than Habiba.

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

(blank)

Abdulli (pictured on the left below), one of my favorite kids in the entire village, doesn't call me much at all. He's been deaf for three years now.

Though I must say, it doesn't cut down on the amount he tries to communicate. I try to play the sign language game sometimes, but I'm pretty sure he has the same reaction that Denny has when Gaylord Focker tells him Lil' Kim is "phat."

"Riiiight. Cool man."

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

"WATCH YASELF!"

It was one of the best shots I've ever made in my life, and I had made it look easy.

Behind the legs to the left, back through the legs to the right, pull up fade away jumper from the corner. As I fell out of bounds into the slick grass, I saw the rim form a halo around the ball for just a short moment in time, and I knew it was alllllll (imaginary) net. The rain was falling down pretty hard by that point, only making my shot wet on multiple levels.

"DANE-JUHHHHHH!" I yelled as I strutted back down court. (That's how you pronounce the word "danger" if you're a motherf***in P-I-M-P.)

I wasn't asking anyone to translate, but someone offered up his services anyway. And that, my friends, was a big time move, because what he said was to become my favorite name of all.



"HATARIIII!"

With a name like that, I could out-intimidate John Wayne himself.

So you've heard about Hakuna Pwani, Billy, Bayless, Mzungu and my favorite, Hatari. Hunter's story is a lot easier to tell. He maintains a singularity of purpose that I lack as the man with majina mengi. Keeping very much in line with his personality, my friend Mr. Flint keeps it simple. He's got one Swahili name, and that's all he needs. Mwindaji. All it is is a straight up translation of the word "hunter."

The only thing worth noting is that when Tanzanians hear him say "Mwindaji," they're not thinking, "Oh, that's a pretty fratty name." They're thinking, "This guy knows how to use a gun, and he kills mammals for a living."

But as you can see, they're not nearly as scared of Mwindaji as they are of Hatari.



Mwindaji na Hatari. It's like a Tanzanian WWE tag team duo. We go almost everywhere together, and so neither of those two names are often uttered without the other following suit. I would love to know what some old dude who hears the ruckus caused by our wake must think when we pass by. Every single little kid in Patandi excitedly yelling "Mwindaji! Hatari! Hatari! Mwindaji!" and running after these two random Wazungu.

"Hunter! Danger! Danger! Hunter!"

It never stops being funny.

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

"And ah me! And ah me ah BP!"

As much as I wish I could discard all non-badass names for the year -- bye bye, Mzungu, Hakuna Pwani, Billy and Bayless -- I don't think it would be very professional for a teacher to introduce himself to his Swahili-speaking students as Hatari.

"Hello kids, my name is Mr. Danger. You better not talk in class, or else you're gonna be in for a world of hurt when Mwindaji brings the pain train to a station near you."

That might not work out. But neither would telling them my real name, because just as my tongue was incapable of pronouncing "Ljubljana" like a true Slav, Tanzanian tongues are for the most part incapable of saying "Bayless" correctly. I could just go as Billy when at work ....

... but it's way more fun to go by BP. Let me explain why.



See how Monica wrote my initials on her hand? I could just lie and say it's hero worship, but I won't do that to you.

At the school where I teach, the kids play this weird game called "BP." I don't really understand the origin, nor do I truly understand the point of it, but the rules are straightforward enough:

"BP kiko wapi??"

That's basically it. One kid asks another where his "BP" is. You've got about two seconds to produce one, whether it's written on your body or your clothes. If you say "Sina," having forgotten to come to school prepared, you lose. If you say "hapa," and point to where you remembered to write it, you ... win? Like I said, I don't really get it.

Allegedly, a BP "loser" has to pay the "winner," though I'm unsure about both the amount and whether or not any money ever actually changes hands.

Ballpoint pens are like gold here. I always carry one with my reporter's notebook in the side pocket of my Carhartt's, and when a little kid spots me with it, all hell breaks loose.

"WRITE AH BP! WRITE AH BP!!!"

I write it.

"AND UH ME! AND UH ME!! WRITE AH BP! AND UH ME!!!!"

I write it again.

"AND UH MEEEEEEE!" (x 20)

Five minutes later, I've got Carpal Tunnel.

Whenever I make the mistake of writing it on that first kid's hand, nearly the entire school demands that they, too, receive a "BP." Otherwise, it's not a level playing field -- it's not fair for just a handful of kids to get BP immunity, while the rest are denied. So as to not give away the existence of a pen in m pocket when I enter school grounds, I even wrote my initials on the waist of my shorts.

That may be why kids started referring to me in my absence as Teecha BP -- a transliterated version of "Teacher BP."

"So what does 'BP' stand for?" I asked one day. Mwindaji had refused to believe me when I told him the game was created in honor of their favorite English teacher, but I wanted to know the real answer for myself.

"Black people," one kid said.

All right then. I guess me writing my initials on my shorts would be like trying to wear FUBU back home. "Teacher BP" is out as a cool name, too, by default.

If anyone needs me, just ask for Hatari.

I've probably lost about 70 percent of my regular readers because of the recent drought in stories I've been providing. So that leaves about three of you. I will try to describe as much as I can in these 18 minutes of remaining Internet time I've got (the connection at our house has been dunskies for a while now).

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

1. First rule of living in the Arusha region of Tanzania: Until proven otherwise with hard evidence, you just have to assume that everyone here is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

I hesitate to say that this is a rule of thumb for "living in Tanzania," because I know Peace Corps volunteers who have spent a lot of time in the south of the country that have nothing but positive things to say about the Tanzanian people -- it's only when they come to Arusha, a hotbed of tourism due to its proximity to Kilimanjaro and the Serenghetti, that they complain about dirty pool. I also hesitate to call it a rule of thumb for "living in Africa," because it's a pretty big place, and I don't even pretend to have it all figured out.

Wolves in sheeps' clothing. That's a term that everyone can understand. What I prefer, though, comes from a Black Uhuru song called "Plastic Smile." I sing it all the time here; it's been stuck in my head for weeks because of the abundance of fake smiles that only seek to hide ulterior motives. As I walk the streets of Arusha; as I traverse the dirt roads of our village, Patandi; and as I sit crammed between a woman carrying a basket full of avocadoes and an old man with less teeth than eyeballs in the back of a dala dala, the Hiace van taxis that serve as pretty much the only mode of public transportation in East Africa, I sing...

Ya can't show all your teeth, plastic smile cyan't work.....

Buh, buh-buh-BUH, buh, buh-buh-buh-BUH-buh....

The bassline and the words hit me just as hard.

A plastic smile is what can't work with me anymore. I've already fallen for enough of them, and I'm tired. Not yet jaded, but certainly mentally drained. Anyone that says "My friend, my friend!" to me as I walk by them automatically disqualifies himself from friend potential. The same goes for "Where are you from?" That line is about as effective on me as the "Come here often?" line is on a hot chick.

If they're lucky, I tell them "Sihitaji bwana, toka." (I don't need it man, scram). I don't even bother to glance at what they're selling, because I don't want any part of it. Sometimes they hear me speak Swahili without a stutter, and they back off. But then there are the ones who only keep trying; those are the really hungry wolves in sheep's clothing. They get a second dose of Swahili from me, but it's not polite this time: "Mimi si mtalii! TOKA!" (I'm not a tourist! Get outta here!)

Your plastic smile cyan't work.

It is ironic that "Uhuru" is the Swahili word for "freedom," isn't it?

I promise that these feelings of mine are with merit, and that they aren't held solely by myself. Hunter feels the same way, if not more strongly about it. That says a lot, because if any of you have ever met Hunter, you'd know that "Trusting" is his middle name.

I don't have time to go into depth right now on the issue we've had to deal with in our personal lives since arriving on the 4th of July. It involves an 11-year-old former friend, who just happens to be our next door neighbor. It involves a 40-year-old man who looks like a cross between It and Kevin Willis. And it involves Musa, who I wrote about previously.

Together, they worked to steal over $500 worth of stuff from our house. Tanzanian shillings, U.S. dollars, an iPod, a cell phone and a pocket knife. Most of it was mine. We recovered far less than half of the total booty. And we received not a single genuine apology.

The worst part? They stole from us when they were guests in our own home. Not one, twice, or even thrice -- in fact, no one could even count the number of times it happened. The most honest answer I got out of the whole debacle was from Musa: "Mara nyingi." (Many times).

Wolves in sheeps' clothing. Their plastic smiles did work. But never again, I swear on all that's holy. Kwa sababu mimi sio mtalii, and I'm not gonna take any more of this business from anybody.

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

2. The Kiswahili language. Oh man do I love speaking it.

It is painfully simple, except for a few causes for confusion when dealing with what prefix to use for which type of noun. That will come with time and repetition, though. The main thing is that after one year, I will be solid at Swahili. Which will only help that much more in scaring off those wolves.

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

3. Anyone who's been to Arusha remembers the newspaper hawkers. They sell The Herald Tribune, USA Today, The Guardian, and some random German papers. They're almost as annoying as the dudes who sell the Maasai daggers, but not quite.

My question is this: WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PAPERS? Second question: HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SELL THEM WHEN EVERY SINGLE ONE HAS A DIFFERENT HEADLINE?

USA Today needs to be renamed USA Yesterday, or USA Last Wednesday. I glanced at one of them as I was walking down the streets this morning, and I was thrilled to see that President Bush had been reelected for a second four-year term. Also, did anyone else hear the news??? Alex Rodriguez signed a ten-year, $252 million deal with the Rangers. What is Tom Hicks THINKING?

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

4. The reason we're here: Putting orphans in English medium boarding schools.

This month, we did so for 20 kids, though not all of them are technically orphans. Nineteen of them are boarding at the school where Hunter and I are also assistant English teachers. They range from watoto wadogo to vijana -- little kids to young adults. Some are able to speak a little English already, while some -- a little Maasai girl and her older brother -- know almost zero Kiswahili.

It warms my heart to see the smiles on their faces at school. Maybe that is enough to justify coming here for a year with next to no pay. Are we going to save the world? Not a chance. Are we singlehandedly going to change the course of Tanzania's future? No way; it takes a village to reach the Tipping Point of a nation's development. But are we going to impact just a few lives during this year in East Africa?

Mungu akipenda, as they say around these parts. The Christians say that at least. Muslims here say Inshaallah. We'd just say "God Willing" back home. Time will tell if He's down.

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

5. I have a surrogate father in Switzerland that is a Texan, born and raised. He moved to the Lake Geneva region when he got married to a Swiss-born Spanish girl years ago, and getting accepted into the culture was difficult. He was a novice to the French language at first, which didn't make it any easier.

The thing that did it was sports.

I'm not a swimmer like Breck, nor am I too into wearing Speedo's like he is. Besides, when was the last time you saw an African medal in an Olympic swimming event anyway? So I had to find a different sport to help me mingle with the people in a setting where plastic smiles aren't even attempted.

Hunter and I found it at Soweto.

Soweto is a suburb of Arusha Town that just happens to have one of the rare basketball courts with two functioning, ten-foot rims. There are chain nets, too, which only makes it all the more badass.

We've only been playing there for two weeks, but I am already starting to feel accepted. And I mean truly accepted, not because they want my money. Abdallah, Mohammed, Bariki Mkubwa (Big Bariki), Bariki Mdogo (Little Bariki), Saidi, Elia, and all the other regulars who play at Soweto don't give a damn if I'm a mzungu or not. They don't care why I'm in their country, or how much money I have, or even if I'm interested in taking a safari. All those dudes care about is whether I can ball or not.

The sad truth is, I suck. Defense is no problem because defense is purely about desire anyway. And dribbling/passing never really leaves you. It's my shooting that embarrasses not only me, but the American people as a whole, because I do the sign of the cross when I hit the rim, it's gotten that bad.

More on all these topics later, when there isn't a countdown on my Internet time. Hopefully this will keep The Bob, Elise, Beth, Mr. Jenner, and whoever else actually reads this thing at bay, if not for a few days.

AMANI, UPENDO, NA TULIVO. I am out.

We technically live in a small village called Patandi, which is part of larger village named Tengeru, which is about 15 minutes from the larger city of Arusha, Tanzania.

New horizons, indeed.

But I'll take the photo-op, thank you very much.

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

Meet Musa.

Elmer's is to glue for Musa as O'Douls is to beer for me

Musa is the neighborhood glue sniffer.

Our joke of a Kiswahili tutor, Bwana Shao, needs to stop teaching us how to say things like "Nipe sindano" ("Give me an injection"), which I will never use in Africa, and start teaching us how to say relevant stuff, like "Musa likes to sniff glue."

Musa anapenda kuvuta gundi. Who needs Shao, on second thought?

Do you know anyone who has ever actually sniffed glue? It can't be good for you.

Baba Juma gave away the answer the first time he ever saw me associating with this kid, but if I'd never heard the truth, and I had to guess someone for neighborhood glue sniffer, Musa would have been my first choice. He just looks so ... glued out. I don't know. You have to see his eyes: they stare into absolutely nothing. It's obvious there are no thoughts going on in his head; he's just staring, mouth agape as usual. He is slow mentally, too -- at least it seems like it to me. And Jesus Lord does he like to come over uninvited. KILA WAKATI! Those visits always include the tongue-bathing of Mwindaji's harmonica, a request to play on the computer or with the guitar, and an attempt to speak to me in Swahili so fast that even an East African Hot Wheels guy wouldn't understand. And the best is how Musa gets pissed when we ask him to leave at 9 at night.

This little punk is only 12, but he doesn't go to school. Nor can he read. Nor does he care. He's got nothing to do, basically, and no D.A.R.E. program in sight. Is anyone else surprised that he would want to takes dala dala trips into town every now and then to pick up some glue?

From what I deciphered from my 13-year-old neighbor Ally, who is Musa's friend, Ally's dad Baba Juma ran into Musa buying glue in Arusha the other day, got really mad and put him in the car with him to drive back to Patandi. Ally told this story with plenty of hand signals to indicate someone who "anavuta gundi," which was funny. Hunter get confirmation on the story -- (Ally is known to lie every now and then) -- when he overheard Baba Juma telling Musa, who's not even his own son, that he was going to "beat him" if it happened again.

I'm not a betting man, but I'll take Baba Juma in that fight.

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

"Anakula jamba!"

Last Wednesday (8/8/07), Baba Juma packed Hunter and me into "his" Land Cruiser with the members of his Sub Saharan Cleaver family and took us to Nane Nane (Eight Eight), a festival for agriculture or something .... to tell you the truth I'm still not quite sure.

It was boring overall, but there was one exception: my first third world zoo experience. "Zoo" may be a stretch; it was more like a traveling circus of poorly treated animals that cost 200 shillings (about 15 cents) to enter.

The hyena they had caged up looked leprous. He laid in the corner of a dusty living space, sullen eyes staring at you like an old dog, a series of festering sores making the entire area smell like roadkill. Directly across the way, in a cage the same size, were two huge birds -- I have no idea which kind -- staring into the distance with similarly vacant expressions. The raw skin and open sores dotting their necks, added to the sight of so many feathers either plucked or thinning out because of some vitamin deficiency, only furthered the depressing vibe these birds gave off.

In smaller cages were pythons, poisonous snakes, giant lizard/iguana types, and even a strange animal called a "spring hare," which looked more like a "Yo Quiero Taco Bell"/wallaby hybrid. Hordes of kids -- and a few uneducated adults, too -- swarmed those cages, which were set upon raised platforms that still kept them well from rising even four feet into the air. Kids smashed their hands down on the wire mesh, they kicked at the sides, they jeered and yelled ... kids here basically do not have the lovey-dovey thing going on with animals like we in the West sometimes do. You should see how they treat dogs. That's another story.

All of those scenes left me feeling depressed about my surroundings. Then I made my way over to this guy.

Chillin with an unidentified object in his hands.

I had finally curried up enough bravery to pull my camera out in public -- a bad move sometimes in Tanzania -- and was taking super heady black-and-white photos, not really paying attention to what my subject was eating exactly. People had started to laugh almost as soon as I got my camera out, so I figured it was directed at me somehow.

Until I looked up, that is, and saw why people were laughing.

Smell Test

The monkey/baboon/cho chote was eating his own poo.

Remember that time I was in the hardware store returning a 20L bucket of something that smelled like death? I learned the word for "shit" that day in that dukani (jamba), and it came in handy a few weeks later.

"Anakula jamba!" I yelled as soon as I made the realization. He's eating shit!

Picture over ten Tanzanians, already laughing about the monkey guy eating poop, hearing some mzungu tourist who clearly doesn't speak fluent Kiswahili scream "Anakula jamba!" then procee dto take about eight pictures.

I mean, look at the little guy.

"Is that a hair in my shit? Gross!"

Talk about monkey business! Bahahahaha!!

"Eh, whatever. It's free."

"happy biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirthday bayless!"

There were 40 wall posts when it was all said and done, "it" being my Fake out Facebook Birthday, the inaugural event held in celebration of the day my life began, August 6, 1945. From the lead off batter -- a lone August 5 early bird -- to the hand full of August 7 belated's, it was a very successful joke. Almost everyone, whether from the sincere majority or the sarcastic few, showed their support for me by writing "Happy Birthday" in some shape or form. Of course, there were the radicals -- they tried to blow my spot with the truth: that my "real" birthday is February 28. But they were simply loose cannons, making little noise and largely ineffective.

The beginning came like the Christmas Eve present you get from your aunt right before she's leaving to go home -- you are stoked because you get to open something the night before. Late on August 5, before my Fake Out Facebook Birthday had even officially begun, Allison was that aunt. Hours before I turned 62, she led it off:

happy birthday. have a good one.

Nice, simple, non-offensive. A solid opening sample in the social experiment.

The girl who came next reminded me of a PETA activist, out to ruin a photo op with a bucket of red paint. Lauren, one of my oldest friends and someone who has somewhat of an actual clue of when my birthday is, wasn't holding punches:

first of all yer birthday isnt on august 6th- so stop beggin for attention..... -- and then, as if I had forgotten she was Jewish -- shalom chaver xxx.

Whatever that means. Would Lauren torpedo the whole operation with one strike? Hit No. 3, courtesy of Mikey Benji, didn't help matters much:

Happy Birthday Hiroshima. I'm guessing Allison is the first of many ... rookies.

Ben would be referring to the fact that August 6, 1945, my Fake Out Facebook Birthday, just happens to also be the day that Japan first got hit with an atomic bomb. I don't know why I chose that date out of all the random possibilities -- I was a history major, I guess -- but it is funny to see evidence of which events more fully captivate the attention spans of my generation: important historical anniversaries, or the daily, "One of your electronic friends was born today" alerts that come at you from the right side of the Facebook home page?

God, I just can't relate to people my own age. My peers are so immature.

One, put a hole in the box...

Especially this guy. What is he, a Justin Timberlake wannabe?

.... or is that me, at my "real" birthday party last winter in Belgrade, when three of my Black Catz brates and I co-hosted a shindig with a "Dick in a Box" theme at our home, where all of my friends from Belgrade converged for the first time? This, one of the greatest birthday parties of my life, was all a tribute to that YouTube SNL clip which got about 1,000,024 hits from the Three Black Catz Hostel's wireless connection alone. That thing (click here) forever transformed Timberlake from "that guy in N'SYNC" to "the man."

And the "Dick in a Box" party wasn't confined just to the small rooms of the Black Catz. In fact, the guy who wrote the fourth comment on my Fake Out Facebook Birthday wall, Stewy, generously donated the blue-and-black fleece I wore to play late night box football once he had passed out.

Two, putcha junk in that baahhhhhhhx!

There was no way the guy on the left in the Partizan hoodie had forgotten when my birthday was, even if he did get owned by Ana's homemade šlivovica that night.

Three, make New Zoka open the box, and that's how you know Stewy isn't forgetting this night in Belgrade last February!

When I saw on my email that Stewy had left a message so early into the big day, I knew he had tried to ruin things. He always called me "The Hero" when we were traveling around the Balkans, after all, because as he alleges, I always come out on top in the stories I write. A chance to make "Hero" look bad on his own turf would be sweet revenge for Stewy in more tangible way as well -- he never did fully forgive me for losing his sweet ass, Michael Jackson "Thriller" era shades in the snow in Kusek, Montenegro shortly before "Dick in a Box" party.

I was sure payback was coming. But when I checked, I discovered that instead, my brate had just played dumb. He even added a little Serbian into his gift:

happy birthday you lucky f***er
poochie coolotz

"Poochie coolotz" was how Stewy used to mispronounce Jovan Serbian's go-to phrase, "puši kurac" (pooh-shee koo-rots), which I am not going to translate on this blog. Very niiiiiiice. Avo my retard brother Stewy is gonna help me out.

No. 5 was a landmark because it signified the first member of my family to go down. My cousin Stephen:

happy birthday cuz. hope you're having a good time in Tanzania.

Another well wish after that for No. 6, and then bam! -- a second cousin, Jennifer, who raised the tally to seven:

happy birthday B!:) ... hope you get to celebrate some...

I tried to celebrate, but Hunter wouldn't throw a party for me. He just responded over and over with that annoying blank stare, the one he always gives me when I propose an idea that is a little outside of the box.

"It's not your birthday," Hunter says.

"Yes it is."

"No," -- pause -- "it's not," he reiterates.

Jennifer also claimed in her message to have been keeping up with my stories. If that means the blog, then she'll be pretty mad by the time she reaches this paragraph.

Eight and nine were great because it led off with the pitcher, Tener ...:

your birthday's no longer in february? nice posts though

.... who was batted in by Allison, who, if you remember, started the game in the lead off spot:

just realized it's not your bday. i take that back...

The de-happy birthday debo. That stings. It's like Tabasco on a paper cut.

A big smile came to my face shortly thereafter, though, when my former roommate in Patandi, Mandy, dropped me a line:

I'm wishing you a happy birthday only to humor you

Mandy lived with Hunter and I for our first month in this village. She had to digest a lot of my theories and ideas for jokes, obviously -- we don't have a TV, and there's not much else to do. So not only is she now aware of www.NewCollegeIdentities.com, Team Halloween, boxer briefs being the best, and how words like "rafts" and "shifts" should be restructured to "raftes," "shiftes," etc., she's also known alllllllll about my Fake Out Facebook birthday for quite some time now. Her words have definitely brought me humor.

Next was another cousin, the third, bringing the tally to 11. Anna K., No. 12, tried to push my buttons with "hey what's up!" -- didn't work. Five genuine's popped up in a row after Anna's entry, and then another from the "I know that you know that I know you're full of s**t, and we'll leave it at that" category. From Emily, the neighbor I used to dominate in one-on-one:

you are a sad, strange little man. HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAYLESS! :0)

I really did appreciate the all caps effort.

As far as adults are concerned, I ended up with not one but two messages on my wall from Strake Jesuit administrators, including the president. I would have gotten some interesting posts from my parents, who surely know my real birthday, had I not rejected all four of their recent, and creepy, requests to become one of their 23-year-old son's Facebook friends.

Then you add in your assorted trail mix of friends. From my summer in Austin, from Garland's St. Agnes class, from St. Vincent's days/Strake glory days/UVa double glory days, or to Southside Ringaleevio games, studying abroad, traveling last year, whatever. These are the core of what I earlier referred to as the "sincere majority." Meat and potatoes. Individually, none are as funny as outbursts like "poochie coolotz," but when read back-to-back-to-back, it is a time to sit back, smile, and slowly pump my fist in the air.

Even funnier, though, were the continuous attempts by those late-arriving, PETA activist types trying to mess with my chi. Scattered throughout The Wall, like a couple of stray curly fries that have found their way into your paper sack of regular style, were the would be spoilers.

From Gundy:

It's not your birthday...

And Kelly:

you should be ashamed of yourself for all this birthday business :)

Then, from the little sister of a former girlfriend of mine ... who I haven't seen since I was 16:

You are lying its not your birthday Bay Bay. But we miss you at the Vaughan household.

Comments like those had the potential to ruin the whole prank. But instead, pretty much all of the statements from this category fell upon deaf ears. Their attempts to blow my spot, smothered into irrelevance -- usually, there were two big pieces of "Happy Birthday!!" bread to sandwich those statements into mundaneness.

And therein lies the entire humor of the Fake Out Facebook Birthday joke: you can see my generation, the A.D.D. Generation, in all its glory, and you can use the symbol of that generation, Facebook, as the instrument to highlight this absurd humor: that the most shared trait of the A.D.D. Generation is that we just don't notice a lot of stuff.

Except, of course, when it's someone's birthday on Facebook.

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

p.s. (Note: This will only be funny for people who know Jamaar, my friend from Humphreys First Left, who is the actual nephew of Uncle Phil, a.k.a. James Avery, from "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.")

I thought your birthday was in February. it is funny seeing people wishing you a happy birthday on your wall though. all the best.

Jamaar can't look people in the eyes when he talks, and he's even shy on Facebook. Big ups to Humphreys 1L, 730, where you at from Never BP

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?"

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.