The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 8) (July 1999 - July 2000)

Flip-Flops and Chapatis

  Nancy and I are going into town to buy a few necessities. We catch our usual daladala but the main road into town is closed so our daladala takes a side road. “Road” is a generous description for what more closely resembles a dirt path pitted with large rocks, concrete blocks and potholes large enough to be explored by spelunkers.  Four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicles, hummers or better yet army tanks should be the only vehicles allowed to navigate them, but daladalas are tough. We zigzag directly into the path of oncoming traffic to avoid potholes, but there is no danger of a head-on collision since the top speed is about five miles per hour.  But sometimes the van plunges into holes so deep that many times I am sure we’ll tip over.

           Even under the best of circumstances there is no such thing as a “quick trip” into town. First, you have to outfit yourself as if preparing for a long difficult journey, such as crossing the Saharan desert on foot. You need to slather yourself with sun protection. Next, you need to bring boiled tap water or be prepared to buy water in town. At nearly a dollar a bottle, it gets expensive. Proper clothing is essential; legs must be covered with pants or preferably long skirts so the largely Muslim population is not offended. Then of course there’s money. If you don’t bring enough you’re out of luck because you can’t just pop your ATM card into the cash machine since they don’t exist here.

I bring a lot of cash with me because you never know what you’re going to see that you need. “Big money” here is 5,000 Tanzanian Shillings, about $7. Passing a 10,000 note, the largest currency note, at places like the market or anywhere in our neighborhood is impossible. It’d be like trying to buy a gumball with a $100 bill.

           Like food and water flip-flops are essential. Everyone wears them from little children to mzee's ambling gingerly with their canes around the neighborhood. It's the only thing we wear at home and most of the people in our neighborhood wear them all the time, even in the winter. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the President of Tanzania wears them in the privacy of the Presidential Palace.

           When I first started wearing flip-flops I was indifferent to them. I appreciated the simplicity of flipping them on and off and they kept my feet clean but that was as far as it went. As time went on, their innate charms called out to me. I found myself walking by carts bursting with different styled pairs and longing for the ones I thought were "cute" like I used to do with $300 designer Italian shoes on Michigan Avenue when I lived in Chicago. I'm worried that I may become the Imelda Marcos of the flip-flop world. But, at roughly $1 a pair, at least it won’t require an enormous capital outlay.

     I approach the flip-flop salesman with his cart overflowing with flops of all sizes, colors and shapes. After searching through the piles for a right and a left that match, I find a lovely pair of pink and red, leopard print flops, and the bargaining begins.

                             “How much?” I ask.

                             “2,000” says the flip-flop vendor.     

“No, 700.” 

           Haggling over prices in the market is mandatory. As a foreigner, I’m usually 

treated to the very special welcome to Tanzania price, which is two to five times 

what an item “should” cost. I know that Nancy paid 700 shillings for a pair of flip-flops last week.  

                            “1,500.”

                            “No, 700” I reply in a firmer tone of voice.

                            “1,000.”

                             “No, 700.”

No response from the salesman. My response is to walk away. This is a sure-fire method of getting a favorable reply.

  “Sister, what you pay?” he says as I turn away. I’m not sure if all women are referred to as “sister” or if just foreign women are called that. Or maybe it’s just me and I suddenly have lots of brothers I didn’t know about living right here in Arusha.

    We finally settle on 800, but that isn’t the end. I hand him my 1,000-shilling note and he hands me 100 shillings in change. I hold out my hand and give him a look like “Nice try.” He grudgingly hands over another 100 shillings.

          I end up spending 6,800 shillings and feel like Donald Trump: 2,500 for a long-sleeved sweater ($3.25); 2,400 for 2 big Nestle Crunch bars (a 4-day chocolate supply); 1,000 for lunch (a falafel sandwich and cappuccino) and 800 for flip-flops.

          Nancy and I return home to a Chapti-making lesson given by Fatima in our kitchen. If you need to gain weight quickly eat chaptis. Ingredients:  a bag of white flour, 3 1/2 cups of water and salt. Mix together and roll out with flour. Add one teaspoon of oil to the top and spread it with a spoon. Roll into a ball and then into a croissant shape and add more oil. Roll out again until flat like a pancake and fry with lots of oil. Despite the fact that Fatima uses something called “Chicken Fry” oil that congeals to the consistency of dried Elmer’s glue, they’re sinfully delicious when eaten warm from the frying pan and impossible to resist. If I continue to eat these I'll be rolling home myself in a year, looking like a big doughy white chapati.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 6) (July 1999 - July 2000)

 We live in a duplex, next to our landlords who live on one side and rent the other side to Visions in Action volunteers. Just outside our house is the public bathroom and neighborhood garbage pit. Garbage pickup is non-existent in this part of town so trash is burned and then dumped into the big hole in the ground, excavated for that purpose. Barefoot children run and play in the garbage pit alongside a pack of hungry dogs scavenging for scraps.

Just down the way from the rusted skeletal remains of two cars, which children climb on like jungle gyms, is the baridi duka. We named it the "cold shop" because once, early in the year, we were able to buy cold beer there. The name stuck despite the fact that cold beer is rarely available and usually, the only brand we can find that is cold is Safari, a weak watered-down brew with a strange aftertaste. We preferred Castle, Kilimanjaro or Tusker. The baridi duka always has customers waiting at the screened window for the serious woman who runs it. In the mornings, it's crowded with school children in golf course green uniforms buying pencils, notepads and mandazi, deep-fried donuts. I'm usually there for fresh eggs and I often see customers come up to the window to buy one or two cigarettes at a time or bring an empty Coca-Cola glass bottle to be filled with kerosene.

            Theresa and I duck our heads as we walk through the red gate into the dirt yard of our home. The electricity is out. I know this when I see Fatima outside the house bent over a boiling pot above a wood fire. She straightens and her small mouth turns upward into the vaguest of smiles.

"Hello JoAnn and Teresa," she greets us.

She’s one of the most solemn eighteen-year-olds I’ve ever met. Her sand-toned skin and straight nose are from her Indian father. Fatima’s dainty features bear no resemblance to her Tanzanian mother, a large boisterous woman who is frankly intimidating, at times. The neighborhood children call her "mama mchafu" or rough woman. Diane, a volunteer from California, respectfully calls her Mama Abbas, which sounds a little like “Mama Bossy” if said quickly. Abbas is the first name of her oldest son, which is the customary way to address mothers in Tanzania.

Mixed marriages of any kind are rare, but a marriage between an Indian and Tanzanian is extraordinary. Typically, these groups don't associate other than by necessity. Indians own most of the businesses in town, the grocery and liquor stores, video and electronics stores, and restaurants. Tanzanians and tourists are their customers.

This is not only a mixed race family, but a mixed religion family. Mama Abbas is Catholic but Fatima chooses to follow Islam, her father’s religion. I often see Fatima sitting in her Muslim robes below crucifixes and pictures of Jesus hanging on the living room walls.

The oldest son, Abbas, is here for the winter school break but will be leaving soon to start his second year as an Engineering student at the University of Dar es Salaam. Fatima has just finished high school. She must take a year off and will spend it working in a bakery in town. She hopes to go to medical school next year to become a gynecologist. Azim is the sulky sixteen-year-old bad boy of the family, the kind who mouths off and gets into trouble all the time. Azim is periodically assigned the labor-intensive task of milking their five cows at five a.m. every morning and every evening at dusk. Sameer, the baby at twelve, is first in his class in school getting all A's, except for a C in Swahili, a subject he refuses to study.

Each side of the house has four large bedrooms and three bathrooms. We are living in luxury compared to the average Tanzanian, but our house reminds me of an above-ground bomb shelter.  The inside is floor-to-ceiling concrete. There is no carpet, tile, rugs or linoleum; everything is gunmetal gray except for the walls, which are painted white. There are no shower stalls in the bathrooms, just shower heads and an area next to the toilet with a drain in the floor. There is a water heater so we can take hot showers, provided the electricity doesn't go out. But since the electricity goes out all the time, anywhere from a couple minutes to days at a time, cold showers are common. All of the windows have burglar bars but no screens, which I can’t understand since malaria is an enormous problem. 

We have a refrigerator, a small stove with two burners and a microwave-sized oven. When the electricity is out we use kerosene stoves. A twelve-foot high fence surrounds the house to prevent burglary. The yard is dirt surrounded by bougainvillea bushes.  Chickens and stray cats are running everywhere. The upstairs balcony where I spend many hours reading and offers a view of Mount Meru, Africa’s fifth tallest mountain at just under 15,000 feet.

Theresa and I walk into the kitchen and tell everyone about trying cassava.

“Watch out for that stuff, its poison,” said Tom.

“Poison, what do you mean?” asked Theresa.

“It’s loaded with cyanide,” said Tom. “It builds up in your system and the next thing you know you’re paralyzed.  Konzo disease. Usually hits women and kids. Saw it in Mozambique. One minute they’re fine, the next, they can’t stand. Have to hobble around on sticks with their legs dragging behind them, poor useless cripples for the rest of their lives.”

Cassava is a root vegetable and staple for 500 million people. Called yucca or manioc in other parts of the world, it can be dangerous if not properly processed through boiling, grating, pounding into mash, fermenting and sun-drying, which removes the toxic cyanide. Konzo disease, which does tend to strike women and children more than men, usually is found only in rural, famine or drought-stricken parts of Tanzania, Zaire and Mozambique where the processing time is reduced so the cyanide isn’t properly removed. But, in the town of Arusha, there is little threat that the cassava hasn’t been processed correctly. Unfortunately, I didn’t know any of this standing in the kitchen listening to our resident doomsday expert.  I didn’t have cassava again for the rest of the year.   

Mombasa or Bust (Part I)

 “Whatever you do, don’t arrive in Mombasa after dark!”

We had every intention of heeding this warning, made repeatedly by Kenyan friends in the know.  But bus travel in East Africa is infamous for its unreliability, so it was almost assured that we’d arrive in Mombasa at the worst possible hour.

My housemate Katie and I were halfway through a one-year volunteer program in Arusha, Tanzania. We’d planned to meet some Kenyan friends on the beach in Mombasa for the New Year holiday, but our travel options from Arusha were limited. Air travel, given our budgets, was out of the question.  Because we’d waited until the last moment to make travel arrangements our first choice, taking the shuttle to Nairobi and then the overnight Nairobi – Mombasa train, was no longer available as the first and second-class compartments had been booked for weeks. We were left with only one grim alternative, the Simba Express Luxury Coach.

My first clue that the coach would be neither express nor luxury was of course the name.  In Tanzania, the “express” buses are usually the slowest. The “luxury” buses are typically rusting hulks, teeming with masses of humanity that pitch to and fro across Africa, like toddlers learning to walk.

As a veteran of six months of excruciating bus trips within Tanzania, I’d learned that all is fair in love and bus ticket sales.  Exaggeration, if not outright lying, is a standard business practice.  So when the ticket salesman at the central bus station in Arusha assured us that we'd have ample leg room in our reserved front seats, that the bus was direct to Mombasa, it was scheduled to arrive no later than six in the evening, and it was “non-stop,”I knew enough not to believe him. I faced our journey with the forbidding resignation of one confronted with months of painful dental procedures.

My seat was a single at the very front of the bus. Katie was directly behind me. Every square inch of the bus, including what would have been my “ample leg room,” was packed with people, luggage and provisions from the market: bunches of bananas, bags of oranges and plums, baskets piled with carrots and tomatoes and plastic totes containing half-suffocated chickens.

Children were made to stand in the aisles while their mothers and fathers perched on the luggage rack, to my right. A certain numbing rhythm developed as a child swayed, every few seconds, into my right shoulder. The ageless woman seated opposite me periodically gummed an orange. Her mouth puckered like a fish as she spat the seeds around the child, across my lap, and through the open window to my left. Most, but not quite all of the seeds escaped out of the window. Whenever a seed landed on me, the woman simply smiled, exposing her few remaining slanted yellowing teeth rooted in her brown gums.

I turned to the scenery. Mount Kilimanjaro was hidden that day, but as we traveled east from Moshi, I saw the southern Pare Mountains appear suddenly from the arid plains like a sleeping giant blanketed in green. This made me think of sleeping, which I’d desperately tried, but it proved impossible.

Along the way, we stopped at every village, mud hut, cattle dip, baobab tree, termite mound and watering hole. At every stop, streams of passengers boarded and a few got off. The reason for the number of stops is simple. Our “luxury coach” was the only local transportation available for the thousands of rural residents who used it to visit relatives and to go to the market.

It took eight hours to cover the two hundred sixty miles between Arusha and Tanga, a port city on Tanzania’s coast, where Katie and I learned that our direct-non-stop-to-Mombasa luxury bus, had terminated its journey. The bus driver informed us that a second "express, non-stop" bus was scheduled to depart in just two hours and arrive in Mombasa at 8 p.m. With over one hundred miles to go, arriving before dark was now impossible.

Ode to Tanzanian Transportation

If you've ever had the unique pleasure of taking public transportation in Africa, you will appreciate this first (and so far only) attempt at poetry, based upon the most horrific 10-hour bus ride I ever experienced.

For journeys to places remote and afar

            Lushoto, Iringa, Dodoma and Dar

It's a motor coach or passenger bus you will need

But there's anguish and suffering ahead so take heed

If you see "express" or "luxury" as part of the name

Beware for it's just part of an elaborate game

They doth protest too much, here's a word to the wise

Be prepared in advance know their tricks and their lies

If the coach is "express" it means a stop every minute

If the bus is a "luxury" there’re three hundred passengers in it

There is no timetable, the prices they refuse to relate

Your ability to haggle will settle the rate

If they tell you the bus will leave straightaway

You'll sit there for hours they don't mind the delay

If they promise the bus will arrive at seven

You have just as much chance you'll turn up in heaven

If the bench will fit two they'll squeeze in some more

And suddenly your seat is now perfect for four 

It's the typical journey I've described thus far

But the trip I took yesterday was pure misery from Dar

I sat next to a man in business attire 

I had no notion, no clue my situation was dire

It struck without warning like a nighttime criminal

This was nothing imagined, not close to subliminal

My senses assaulted I needed to heave

Oh my God this man reeks, I just want to leave

With unwashed body, his whiff steadily wafted

Against my will and my wishes my lungs continually quaffed it

For relief my head hung out the window for hours

My body contorted, my mind filled with sorrows

I stewed and simmered in the man's sickening smell

Light a candle for me for I'm surely in hell

The Pare Mountains like a blanket folded over the land

The green sisal spiked out o’ the red sand

Snow-capped Kili in the distance behind billowing cloud

Obscured almost hidden as if covered by shroud

But the beautiful scenery graced not my eye

For the only thought in my head was “I hope that I die”

The trip went on and on and into the night

The blackness outside was a mind-numbing sight

They could strap me to the roof, it'd be better up there

At least there'd be stars and the moon and fresh air

The man left at Moshi an hour before my trip ended 

But his presence prolonged, the aroma suspended

And then it was over I had somehow come through

I looked at the world as if it were new

And if I should expire with a blemish on my soul

Whether it's now in my youth or when I'm quite old

I'll go to my death without trepidation or fear

Because I know Dante's hell, it's called luxury here   

Air Maybe or Is It Normal To Experience Frequent Brushes of Death While in Africa?

Not only did I have to run for my life from a herd of 50 elephants (please see my last post), I had a near brush with death on Air Tanzania. 

Normally, the simple act of boarding an airplane would not be considered adventure travel. But flying, like all forms of transportation in the developing world, is notoriously dangerous for the simple reason that there are no rules to follow. If airplane maintenance schedules do exist, there is no guarantee that they’re adhered to with any sort of regularity, or at all for that matter. So there is little comfort in taking a flight with Air Tanzania, an airline so unreliable and precarious that Tanzanians themselves refer to it as "Air Labda," Swahilit for "Air Maybe."

I was on my way to Dar es Salaam via Kilimanjaro International Airport with Moyo and Eunice, co-workers from the African Wildlife Foundation in Arusha, where I was working as a volunteer. The three of us were securely seat-belted in a row near the rear of the plane as it rumbled down the runway, gaining speed for take-off.

Suddenly, I heard a loud pop! The pilot quickly slammed on the brakes triggering an earsplitting noise of grinding gears and metal parts that sounded as though a pack of rabid hyenas had attacked the engine and was gnawing it to shreds.

But we kept going; the plane refused to stop.

I clutched onto my arm rests in a white-knuckled death-grip preparing for our certain demise when we barreled through the barbed wire barrier at the end of the runway, took a nosedive into the bottomless trench beyond and burst into flames.

After what seemed like an impossible amount of time and a miraculously generous length of runway, we did stop. All of the passengers looked around at each other in the absolute silence that usually follows near disaster, where seconds seem like minutes. “Whew, we made it!” I remember thinking.

But then the cabin filled with the acrid smell of smoke and I saw flames shooting out from underneath one of the wings. The engine was on fire! Everyone on board was no doubt gripped by the same terrifying thought—our plane was nanoseconds away from exploding.

The steward seized the intercom and began shrieking as if his testicles had unexpectedly been clamped in a vice, "Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!"

Utter pandemonium erupted.

People crammed into the aisles, pushing and shoving and climbing over each other to get out. The strap of my purse was caught on something under the seat. I yanked at it for what seemed like an eternity until it broke free. But then, as I turned to the aisle, I was faced with a solid mass of African men and women, who proved more difficult to push past than wall of granite.

After finally squeezing my way into the aisle, my near hysteria increased when I saw that I was going to have to slide down the chute to escape.

Like a disembodied voice in a dream that sounds very far away, I heard someone shouting, "Shoes! Shoes!” What about my shoes? Only later did I find out that we were supposed to take off our shoes before going down the chute. I hopped down. My skirt slid up beyond my waist and the friction between the rubber and my bare skin scraped my legs and behind raw. I hit the tarmac and ran like the wind, trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and the ticking time bomb behind me.

Moyo, Eunice and I met up far out in the field. The three of us stood there breathing heavily, too stunned to speak. As I turned back toward the plane, I saw hundreds of papers floating in the breeze along with shoes, books, purses, briefcases, and hats scattered everywhere on the runway.

There's nothing like a brush with death to pull people together. When we arrived back in the waiting room of the airport, it was a celebration. Families and friends were huddled together wearing relieved smiles. Sworn enemies were hugging and kissing one other. Well, I’m not positive about that, but my supervisor Eunice and I, not exactly on warm and friendly terms before this, were now clasped arm and arm recounting our getaway down the chute.

“Can you believe, our skirts slid up to our waists?” said Eunice in a voice all giggly and girlish, a woman normally about as giggly and girlish as a sumo wrestler.

The passengers who were seated in the middle of the plane were the ones that had really gotten the raw end of the deal. They had been forced to de-plane via the wings, by jumping twenty feet onto the tarmac. Several were injured, including one man who suffered a broken leg and sprained spine.

One family with a tiny infant and toddler was having a joyous reunion, extraordinary under the circumstances since the wife had grabbed the toddler, but the husband had jumped off the plane alone, leaving the baby behind to die in the explosion or be rescued by a passing good Samaritan. If I were his wife, I would've been searching for the nearest lawyer to initiate divorce proceedings, but I suppose some people are more forgiving than others.

Of course all of this could have been avoided. Personally, I blame the steward. What happened to that calm, cool demeanor that airline employees are supposed to maintain under any and all circumstances? Where was that droning voice that normally puts everyone to sleep, who could’ve made an announcement like, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're experiencing a few mechanical problems, so if you would calmly proceed to the nearest exit …"?

Later that night, safely back in Arusha, I told my housemates Katie and Stacy about my harrowing experience. Apparently, I’d failed to adequately express the true terror I’d felt since Stacy's reaction was, "Wow! You got to slide down the chute! Cool! I've always wanted to do that."

"Was it fun?" Katie asked.

"Not really. It was actually very terrified…" I started to explain.

"Good old Air Labda," said Stacy.

Fifteen Minutes Can Last Forever

I originally published this essay in Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures:  Funny Women Write From the Road (Travelers' Tales Guides 2003).  It is a true story, although when it happened to me, it certainly wasn't very funny at the time.

The day that I nearly drowned after my raft flipped on rapid number one of twenty-six mostly Class V rapids, and I was sucked and held under the Zambezi River for what seemed like hours, I had assumed this was my one brush with death on my first trip to Africa. But just one week later, in pursuit of what a travel brochure had promised as the "complete safari experience," I found out how wrong my assumption had been.

I was on the final leg of a six-week tour that I'd taken with Sam, a friend from the States. We'd spent four days at Kayila Lodge, a private safari camp on the banks of the Lower Zambezi River in Zambia. We'd waited until our last day to take our first walking safari into the African bush with Rolf, our guide and host.

On the jetty over coffee that morning, Rolf, a Zimbabwean, lambasted the current political situation in his country of birth. He had no use for animal rights activists who threatened his part-time livelihood, big-game hunting. Nor did he care for those "damn liberals" who wanted to redistribute land by taking it from the white settlers and giving it back to the natives.

But I wasn't interested in Rolf's politics. Oozing testosterone, he gave the impression that a barehanded scuffle with a charging Cape buffalo or a thrashing crocodile was an everyday occurrence and just part of his job. Through his square-jawed, self-assured manner, he inspired complete confidence in everything he did from serving drinks to telling bush stories late into the starry evenings. Here was a man who could deliver me unharmed from the jaws of a carnivorous beast. In short, he was the quintessential man's man and safari guide.

But it wasn't just Rolf's masculine attributes that took away any trepidation I might have had about setting off into the African outback on foot. It was my ignorance. For some reason I had the whimsical notion that a walking safari would be similar to taking a stroll around the zoo, only the cages would be missing. The animals would certainly keep a respectful distance while I could admire them at my leisure. I couldn't possibly be in any real danger.

We set out early, driving a short distance into the bush in the Land Rover. Along the way, we met up with Warrix, a game scout for Kayila. Despite the fact that this grown man was the size of a young teenaged boy, he seemed formidable, armed with an AK-47 and two strings of ammunition strapped bandit-like across his narrow chest. He joined us for our trek.

We drove farther into the bush. Rolf stopped the jeep. He grabbed a .22 and a .50 caliber rifle from the trunk, tossing the .22 to Sam. We started walking.

I heard an elephant trumpet in the distance. We walked toward the sound to a small rise and saw fifty elephants in the clearing below us. It was exhilarating to be only several hundred feet away from these lumbering giants. I asked Rolf if the elephants knew we were there. He said they didn't know and that he'd hoped it would stay that way. Because of poaching, elephants have learned to associate the scent of humans with extreme danger.

But then the wind shifted.

One of the bull elephants caught our scent, panicked and trumpeted. Rolf whipped his head around and said only one word as we locked eyes, "Run!"

Run? What do you mean run? It took me several seconds to process the fact that I was in grave danger. The person I'd entrusted my life with, Mr. Oozing Testosterone, was clearly scared stiff. It took me another second or two to realize that three men armed with one weapon each couldn't do much against a herd of fifty stampeding elephants that can reach speeds of up to thirty miles an hour. But under the circumstances, with my options being severely limited, I ran.

As quickly as possible, we climbed over vines and roots, waded through thigh-level grass, skirted around bushes, and ducked under low-hanging branches. Rolf, in the lead, constantly ordered us to stay together but I kept falling behind. My heart was pounding and adrenaline coursed through my body. I heard them but couldn't see them. The sound of elephants trumpeting and charging through the bush is deafening.

One part of me knew they were coming after us, but another part of me refused to believe it. My mind played little games telling me that all I had to do was to run for a few minutes and then I would be perfectly safe. I ran as fast as I could, but like the classic nightmare where a monster is chasing you, I felt as though I was wading through quicksand.

We reached a clearing. Rolf screamed for us to drop to the ground. We dropped. Lying in the dirt, the ground reverberated, red dust swam through the air choking me. My heart beat against the earth. I could see the elephants just sixty feet away crashing through the underbrush.

We moved out again passing a tsetse fly trap. We were about twenty feet beyond the trap when Rolf screamed for us to run back to it. We stood next to the tattered cloth soaked in poison, suspended from two rods. Rolf was hoping that this flimsy piece of fabric would somehow mask the smell of four sweating, terrified human beings from fifty frenzied elephants with their acute sense of smell. I couldn't have felt more exposed had I appeared on the Larry King Live show naked.

When the thundering died down, we ran to a nearby cluster of trees. Rolf told us the herd had separated into three groups and that we were almost completely surrounded. This was information I definitely didn't need to hear at that moment since I was in a state of near-hypoxia. I did the only thing I could. I leaned my head against a tree and prayed with every fiber of my being, muttering over and over like a crazed lunatic, "Please God, don't let me die."

We had to move out again but I was frozen with fright. Rolf gripped my shoulders, pulled me towards him and held me close. It was a scene straight from a Hollywood action romance flick minus the obligatory passionate kiss and the fact that my hair was plastered to my face with sweat, my eyes bugged out with fear, and I looked like a zombie possessed.

"I know where to shoot an elephant to drop it. I've killed them before. Just stay close. But whatever you do, don't run if an elephant jumps out!" he said.

Elephants jumping out of bushes! I knew they were smart but I didn't know they were capable of hiding, lying in wait, and then launching a planned attack like a platoon of Marines.

We quietly sprinted, ducked, and tiptoed gingerly along the twenty-five-foot-high expanse of bushes, made it past, and continued on. We reached a ten-foot-tall termite mound and stopped there. Rolf said the jeep was nearby and he went off alone to get it. By this time, my emotions and the adrenaline had caught up with me and I started crying. Warrix told me I shouldn't cry because, "Madame did good."

Finally, fifteen minutes after Rolf had first ordered us to run, he drove up in the jeep. It was ten in the morning and we hadn't eaten a thing, but it seemed like the perfect time to start drinking. We each grabbed a forty-ounce Tusker from the cooler tucked under the back seat. I drank mine in about three minutes flat. It had no effect on me. I had another, not even a buzz.

At brunch an hour later, Rolf was back to his swaggering, you-call-that-a-brush-with-death self, although he'd confessed during our drinking binge that he'd had many close calls but none this close. On a scale from one to ten, with a ten described by Rolf as the four of us "looking like pieces of bacon after being gored and stomped to death," we were at nine. He'd almost shot an elephant during our ordeal so we could crawl up against the carcass to mask our smell from the rest of the herd. What a pleasant thought. Exactly how long were we supposed to stay in that position? Until the corpse began rotting and crawling with maggots? Until the vultures picked it clean? For the rest of our lives?

Many people hope for Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. But if this experience taught me anything, it's to heed the old adage, be careful what you wish for. Sometimes fifteen minutes can last far longer than you want it to.