Chapter 40: Giving Directions While Bleeding: A Guide to My Medical Emergencies Across the Globe

Posted on March 21, 2020 by 2seetheglobe

At this very moment, Jamey and I were supposed to be sunning on the same beach in

Screen shot from the movie “Y Tu Mamá También”

Huatulco, Mexico where Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna frolicked in the movie “Y Tu Mamá También.” I was pretty sure that pristine environment would cause us to be just like them–young, tanned, and carefree (minus the shenanigans with an older woman).

I’ll admit that when we booked the trip a month or so earlier, the only health concern on our mind was how Montezuma’s Revenge might impact our beach time. Little did we know that a somewhat larger health concern would lead to a trip cancellation and, well, a cancellation of everything else except sitting on our couch watching marathons of Storage Wars or Beachfront Bargain Hunt (seriously, 3,000 channels and this is the best we can find??)

Global pandemics have a way of making you think about your health. Like every two seconds. As in, when I coughed a minute ago, was that just my iced tea going down the wrong pipe or was that a dry cough and should I start looking for the other two symptoms? Or, as in, don’t touch that letter in the mailbox—let me get the Lysol Wipe and rub it down first!

Me in very remote Kulusuk, Greenland, trying not to break my leg or get an appendicitis.

To be honest, having lived and worked and traveled in so many places around the globe, I always did have a worry in the very, very back of my mind about falling ill or getting injured far away from home. When we hiked a day into the remote hills of Thailand to stay with a tribe, or stayed in a tiny village on the desolate east coast of Greenland, or spent time on Easter Island–the most remote inhabited island on earth–what if we broke a leg or had an appendicitis? Fortunately, we escaped major medical emergencies abroad, even in our time living in Mali when there was an Ebola outbreak.

Pre-emergency, enjoying Ghent without bloodshed.

But there have been minor health-related incidents abroad, and they were harrowing enough. A few summers ago Jamey and I decided to take a breather and spend a month in the lovely medieval city of Ghent, Belgium. Just prior to the trip my U.S. doctor found a bit of skin cancer on the upper part of my left arm. Another doctor removed it and stitched me up. After two days at our Airbnb in Ghent, it was time to have the stitches removed. Since everything looked fine, Jamey snipped them away with a special pair of scissors. Easy peasy.

At bedtime I clicked off the light and reached down to put my iPad on the bedside table. That was when I heard a strange snapping sound. Since it was dark and Jamey was asleep, I made my way to the bathroom and flicked on the light. That’s when I saw that the surgery site had completely opened up, giving me a great view of the inner part of my upper arm. That’s a view I won’t forget.

Of course, here we were in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar town after midnight. I could only find paper towel to slap over my arm, while Jamey frantically combed through the binder of helpful information the apartment owner had left. Amazingly, he found a number for hospital with an emergency room that was open and where they spoke perfect English. The he found a number for a taxi service and ordered a cab. We dashed to the street in the shorts we were wearing earlier that day and awaited our driver.

But 30 minutes later the taxi hadn’t arrived, and we were shivering in the now really chilly night. It was past midnight and the only people on the street were drunk college students and tourists who thought I’d been shot. “That’s gangster!” one of them said to me as he passed by.

“Hey, do you know where the street is with all the prostitutes in the window?” another guy

Here’s the place you’re looking for, drunk tourists. Source: WikiCommons

asked me, apparently not put off by the blood running down my arm. At least not enough to keep him from asking a sex tourism-related question.

“Next block down, then turn left.” I answered. Bleeding wound or not, I am always great with directions.

Jamey ran back into the apartment (through a gate requiring a code, then a dark hallway, slow elevator to third floor, another dark hallway, and a door that was tricky to unlock) to find another taxi. At which time, of course, our original taxi pulls up as I stand bleeding and ask him to wait just a minute.

Soon we were off on our ride to the ER in our unmarked taxi that smelled like cigarette smoke with a young driver who most certainly was stoned or very tired (it was past 2:00 AM now). He didn’t say a word the whole time, and of course my mind raced with thoughts of him driving us to a construction site where he’d rob us and dump us in a vat of concrete, or delivering us to an underground clinic where they took our internal organs (I already had some of their work done for them).

After another 30 minutes or so the high/sleepy driver grunted and pointed. We were in a very dark residential area, but way off in the distance I could see an illuminated sign, and as we got closer I could see it was in fact the emergency room of a hospital. Once inside the man at reception spoke perfect English and checked me in, then led me to a nurse who also spoke perfect English and checked my vitals. He then led us to an exam room to await the doctor. Along the way we noticed a large group of police officers surrounding a young guy. As the nurse put us into the exam room, he said, “Just remember that what you see inside a hospital is private.” Had we just seen Justin Bieber in a Belgian hospital crisis? Or one of the Belgian king’s kids? We would never learn the truth….

ER waiting room selfie, looking surprisingly calm.

After a long wait, a young doctor came into our room, again speaking perfect English. I liked her—she was confident and to-the-point. She took a look at my arm and told me that the U.S. doctor should have used internal stitches as well as the external ones. She explained that she would staple the wound closed, that there would be an “ugly scar,” and that I should wait until we were back in Shanghai before having a doctor remove the staples. Fine, fine. I promised I would comply.

As I awaited the sharp sting of a needle to numb the area, I heard a loud CLICK, and saw that she was already stapling my wound closed. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK. Six staples, no numbing first. I guess my shocked surprised acted as an anesthesia. She said she’d be right back and returned in a few minutes with directions for wound care written in both French and English.

While we checked out, I noticed the sky was getting light and the next day was almost here. The bill for an emergency room visit in the middle of the night with staples: a whopping $95 U.S. The receptionist said I didn’t need to pay right then—they would email a bill. (Note to self: Should have just paid then and there, as my bank’s transfer fee for sending the $95 was another $100). I followed the doctor’s instructions and had the staples removed by a doctor back in Shanghai. Which means my ordeal spanned three continents: original operation in North America, staples applied in Europe, staples removed in Asia. And FYI, I don’t think my scar is ugly at all.

I’ve had other non-hospital-related health situations while abroad. And though none of them spanned three continents, they were eventful.

Location: Belgrade, Serbia

Affliction: food poisoning

Likely cause: eating undercooked fish at a riverside cafe

Our Sarajevo B&B…haunted, or was it just the flu talking?

Note: Happened at 8:00 PM, then had to take a five-hour bus ride at 5:00 AM the next day on winding roads to Sarajevo as part of the tour we were on.

Note 2: It was there in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I may or may not have encountered a phantom child while in the midst of a feverish flu-based delirium. You can read more about this in my blog post “Chapter 23: Scary Monks, Food Poisoning Hallucinations, & Man-eating Alligators: My Inspirational Summer Vacation.”

The giant beers/medicine. Jamey drank them as a precautionary measure.

Location: Barcelona, Spain, New Year’s Eve

Affliction: flu

Likely cause: who knows

Note: This is where I learned that guzzling giant, dark beers works just like Tylenol.

Location: Thailand

Affliction: bacterial infection/diarrhea

Likely cause: swimming in the River Kwai (should have used the damn bridge)

The River Kwai is really just for looking at, not swimming in.

Note: This illness almost led to a car-poo for me and my similarly afflicted travel mate Ilean when our driver’s vehicle stalled in the middle of a busy six-lane highway while we were in the midst of this “stomach evacuation emergency.”

Note 2: A few hours later, after a bumpy speedboat ride to an island resort, I was sitting on the beach with my friends when the urgent need to visit a toilet became readily apparent (I’ll not share these details). As I dashed to my room through the lawn, I ran smack dab through a colony of fire ants. They were still clinging to my feet and legs, biting away with their painful stings, as I made it to the toilet just in time. The resulting bite blisters lasted longer than the diarrhea.

Location: Mali, West Africa

Affliction: malaria (twice)

Likely cause: An evil female Anopheles mosquito who somehow found a way around the bed netting

Note: Thank goodness a few pills cured this in three days, but only because I caught it in time.

Location: Peru

Affliction: food poisoning

Likely cause: Chicken foot soup? Guinea pig intestines? Fish head soup? Horse meat?

Note: I was an exchange student living in a host family’s home. In the middle of the night I awoke with horrible stomach pains and wandered downstairs to get a drink of water. I ended up sprawling on the tile floor of the office where it was cool and pitch black. Some time later my host parents entered the office, turned on the light, and screamed when they saw me, apparently thinking I was dead.

Location: North Korea

Affliction: flu

Likely cause: student in my class who was sick and should have stayed home

Note: Our tour guide allowed me to stay in the hotel room and skip an afternoon tour to

I can even smile when I have the flu and am standing on the North Korean side of the DMZ.

recover, but warned me, “DO NOT LEAVE THAT ROOM.” The hotel called my room three times in two hours to make sure I was there. The phone was in the bathroom, next to the toilet, so I had to get out of bed to answer each time.

Note 2: I took my temperature with a thermometer Jamey had bought in Shanghai that only measured in Celsius. Not being an expert in converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit, I mistakenly thought my temperature was 112 degrees so I got into a tub of cold water thinking I was going to experience spontaneous human combustion.

Note 3: Our tour guide’s “minder,” a former military guy whose job was to make sure she only said positive things about North Korea or he would send her to prison, bought me some medicine. See, even scary guys have a heart.

Note 4: To read more about the whole North Korean adventure, check out my blog post “Chapter 33: Flu Time in a Totalitarian Dictatorship, or Why I Came Home with Three Toblerone Chocolate Bars.”

Location: Belize, Central America

Affliction: poisonwood rash from head to toe which lasted for almost 2 weeks

Likely cause: hiking through the jungle in Belize in board shorts, on our way to inner tube down a river

Note: “Don’t wear long pants on this hike; you’ll get too hot” our eco resort owner told us.

So, as we shelter in place for the next how-many-ever-days in our cozy Mid-Century house in my little midwestern hometown, I’ll be thankful. It could be worse. I could be in a foreign country, standing on the street with blood running down my arm, giving directions to brothels to drunk college kids who think I was shot in a bank heist. Instead, I’m going to be eating Cheetos and catching a marathon of “Dr. Oakley: Yukon Vet.” Now how gangsta is that?

Chapter 37: When Fries Attack – Around the World with a Garlic Allergy

Posted on October 5, 2018 by 2seetheglobe

Seasoned fries were the culprit.

Would you like stomach cramps with that?

I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and at 130 pounds soaking wet, wasn’t exactly counting calories. So when I ate lunch at J.J. Muggs, a burger place conveniently located across the street from the design firm where I worked, I always ordered crispy, golden, fried potatoes with my meal, because, well, who wouldn’t?

But minutes after returning back to the office, I would break out in a sweat, turn pale, experience stabbing abdominal cramps, then run like hell to the bathroom. That was when I learned that the term “explosive diarrhea” was a thing.

After a few doctor visits and some cuisine-based detective work, I discovered that the fries at J.J. Muggs were in fact “seasoned” fries, sprinkled liberally with garlic powder and garlic salt and bits of chopped garlic and probably fried in pans made of garlic bulbs.

And I discovered that I was allergic to garlic.

Technically, according to my doctor, I didn’t have a garlic “allergy.” I had a garlic “intolerance,” meaning I didn’t have an immune system response but experienced, in his words, “unpleasant symptoms.” I felt the aforementioned “explosive diarrhea” fell into this category fairly well.

bulbs of horror

I wasn’t devastated at the thought of never eating garlic again. Growing up, garlic was not a staple of my Midwestern diet of hearty casseroles, pork chops, potatoes, fried chicken, and sweet corn. Oh, and Maid-Rites! This is a loose meat sandwich type of thing, and it is heaven on a bun. Seriously, I would choose this as my last meal if I ever was going before a firing squad. And Maid-Rites definitely do not include garlic.

Also, the smell of garlic is horrifying to me, especially when it emanates from someone’s mouth or pores the day after they ate it. Some mornings I get on the bus to go to school, and the entire interior reeks because someone ate garlic shrimp the night before. Might as well drape the rotting carcass of a dead cat around your neck or bathe in spoiled milk mixed with rotten eggs, because it’s all just horribly stinky to me.

And is it really worth it to smell like the kitchen vent of an Italian restaurant just so you can eat one stupid herb? The Gardening Channel lists 94 other herbs one can cook with. Why use garlic when you can use herbs with names such as Dittany of Crete, epazote, horehound, or Johnny Jump Up? Those would make you a much more interesting person in the long run, and infinitely less smelly.

To me, garlic is aggressive and negatively overwhelms anything it comes in contact with, sort of like the Donald Trump of cuisine. I bet you could coat a kitchen sponge with tomato sauce and garlic and tell someone it was lasagna, and they wouldn’t even notice the difference. Some chefs say garlic desensitizes your tongue to more delicate flavors. Probably true, because I’ve notice that it’s used heavily in low calorie dishes because all the actual good tasting stuff (e.g. butter) is absent and garlic masks the blandness. It’s also used a lot in vegetarian dishes because, well, a carrot or quinoa is never going to knock your socks off on its own.

When I tell someone of my garlic intolerance, inevitably I get the reaction, “Oh, I love garlic!” Well that makes me feel just dandy. It’s like if someone tells you they’re blind, and you respond, “Oh, I love seeing!”

Breaking news: I don’t actually care at all that you enjoy eating the bulb that causes my colon

Thar she blows!

to explode like Mount Vesuvius. Wouldn’t it be super if, after I explain my predicament to someone, they simply gave me an understanding nod and realized that their herbal preference turns my insides into a war zone? I mean, if someone tells me they go into anaphylactic shock when they eat nuts I just say, “I’m sorry” and don’t share that I love peanut butter so much that I want to rub it all over my face.

Sometimes people will react with, “But garlic is good for you! They sell garlic tablets at the health food store!” Aside from the fact that it’s not certain whether garlic is effective in treating any medical condition, and the medicinal use of garlic has not been approved by the FDA, just remember that health food stores also sell $9 bottles of Coconut Charcoal SuperAde juice. Yep, that’s right, a juice full of black, activated charcoal. It’s good for you, really. No matter how black your teeth turn.

A cauldron of Uzbek food, and not a clove of garlic in sight.

On the down side, a garlic intolerance can make the whole restaurant experience a tad frustrating. First I scan the menu to make my first choice, but I also have four to six other options on standby in case garlic is used in anything. Then I carefully explain to the server my situation. Because I’ve traveled around the world and lived on five continents, I’ve learned to recite “I’m allergic to garlic” in many languages, including last year when I learned to say it in Uzbek for our trip to Uzbekistan (“Men sarimsoqqa allergiyam!”).

It definitely sounds the best in French: Je suis allergique à l’ail (juh-swee al-ur-zheek uh-LIE). It’s almost like I’m reciting a poem or saying the name of a new Givenchy perfume. Sometimes I just go to a French restaurant so I can say that over and over.

And now we live in China where 80% of the world’s garlic is produced (I know, I know, the irony of it all). “I am allergic to garlic” in Chinese looks like this: 我对大蒜过敏. Disturbingly enough, that middle character looks a little like me in the bathroom after eating garlic.

Pronouncing that Chinese phrase sounds something like this: whoa dway dhas-sue-on gwoe-mean, except no matter how many times I try to say it JUST like the woman’s voice on Google translate, the servers just stare at me blankly. I’m sure I don’t say the tones correctly, which can completely alter the meaning. Maybe I’ve turned a simple dietary restriction statement into an insult about their hair style or mother or something. That’s why I have it written in Chinese in my phone, and I just show them after a few speaking attempts.

After I explain to the server my garlic predicament—in whatever language–I usually encounter one of four responses:

(1) “Is that a real thing? I’ve never even heard of that.” I want to reply that there are probably many things they’ve never heard of, such as how the size of their tip is diminishing with each stupid thing they say. To get them to understand the significance of this, I always describe my affliction as an “allergy” since that sounds more serious. I also tell them that I will die if I eat it, right after my head explodes. That usually gets them to take me more seriously as well.

(2) “Can you have just a little bit of garlic?” To which I want to answer, “Sure, then I’ll only have a little bit of explosive diarrhea in your bathroom later.” Seriously, it’s like asking me, “Can you drink just a little bit of antifreeze?” or “Is swallowing just half a razorblade okay?” An expat server in Shanghai explained that it’s possible there could be just a bit of garlic in the pan from a previous entrée. Did I really have to explain that dish washing detergents had been invented in Germany during WWI?

(3) “Well, you can always order off of the dessert menu, that’s safe! Ha ha!” And if this was true, maybe I would eat only desserts for the rest of my life and turn into Jabba the Hutt’s twin with scurvy. Unfortunately, some evil wizards devised a way to incorporate garlic into desserts too! Introducing Black Garlic Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Sauce with 3 teaspoons (15 mL) of black garlic. Or Roasted Garlic Ice Cream with 1 entire head of garlic. Or Garlic Brittle Cookies with eight to ten garlic cloves. The introduction to that recipe says, “Garlic is a mysterious flavor, and its sweet bite is a perfect complement to chocolate. We bet no one will be able to guess the secret flavor in these cookies!” Garlic is mysterious? You can’t be mysterious when your odor can be detected from deep space. It’s like pouring gas or Chanel No. 5 into a Fiji water bottle and betting no one will detect the “secret” flavor.

(4) “Why would you come to a __________ (Italian, Middle Eastern, Korean, etc.) restaurant? There’s garlic in everything.” First, it’s always delightful to have a server question your dining choices—it really sets the mood for the night. Second, with few exceptions I don’t have a problem finding something safe on the menu at any restaurant, from Chicago to Shanghai. Of course this didn’t hold true at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant I visited last summer, where the manager informed me that literally EVERYTHING on their menu had garlic in it, including the burgers, wraps, and the damn salads!

Garlic hatred aside, I am not eating at a restaurant where some numbskull chef doesn’t have enough culinary creativity to come up with at least two herb options. Geez, go back to 7^th grade home economics class. To accommodate me, they pan fried a plain chicken breast and plopped it on a bun with a single lettuce leaf and a not-so-ripe tomato slice. Corrugated cardboard never tasted so good.

I’ll have the pasta. Hold the bad breath.
Image: Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

Fortunately, most restaurants aren’t so garlic forward, even Italian restaurants. Contrary to popular belief, garlic is not a staple of every single Italian region, as a server in Florida once tried to tell me. I’m sure the closest he had been to Italy was the Italian Pavilion at EPCOT Center.

For the uninformed, garlic is a staple in the SOUTH of Italy (Google it). Many classic Italian dishes like fettuccine Alfredo, invented in 1892 by Alfredo di Lelio in Rome, never included garlic. Did you hear that, Olive Garden? Just because you chuck a clove or three into your fettuccine Alfredo (and every other defrosted dish you serve) doesn’t make it right. In fact, many northern Italians (like our Italian exchange student many years ago) view those who eat and smell of garlic as second class or unsophisticated.

So there you have it. I may not be able to dive into a bowl of roasted garlic soup with garlic croutons served in tiny hollowed out garlic bulbs. But I’ll never be mistaken as second class or unsophisticated. Not even at the Olive Garden.

Chapter 35: Hear No Evil, Smell No Evil

Posted on September 13, 2018 by 2seetheglobe

When my family added HBO to our cable line-up, I was one satisfied kid. I liked nothing more than sitting in our shag-carpeted rec room in the basement, watching movie after movie after movie, until my eyes were glossed over. I was a premium cable channel zombie, and proud of it.

But there was one thing that brought me out of that TV stupor, and that’s when one of my sisters came down to the basement, plopped on the couch, opened a bag of Fritos, and started crunching away. One, that crunching sound—like someone chewing river gravel—penetrated my brain like a dentist drill. And two, that aroma that came from eating Fritos was horrifying to me–a mixture of dirty socks crossed with bad breath and burnt popcorn. Even if I was watching Boy in the Plastic Bubble, right at the part where Tod is about to risk death by leaving his bubble for the girl next door, I’d run from the rec room to escape that smell.

I’ve always been acutely aware of scents and sounds, which as a kid concerned me. None of my friends ever seemed to be bothered by these things. Was I part beagle? Alien? Cyborg? Why was I the only one so affected by these two senses? I mean, I can hardly follow the story line of a movie in a theatre because of the open-mouth-crunching popcorn eaters (who seemingly go unnoticed by everyone else). If I’m a half block downwind of a person with body odor or halitosis, I’ll hold my breath until I pass out. If someone within a mile radius of me is doing that thing where they pop 80 bubbles in rapid machine-gun-succession every time they chew down on a piece of Juicy Fruit, I pray for a piano to fall on them from above. I don’t think I’d mind the sound of the piano crashing even one tiny bit.

It’s something I’ve dealt with for as long as I can remember. When I was a high school

At 7972.4 feet up in the Andes at Machu Picchu, I finally discovered fresh air in Peru.

exchange student, I was overwhelmed with the general stinkiness of my host country, Peru—so much so that I applied cologne under my nose every time I went outside. It was a tough decision every day: Do I reek of Hai Karate or Aqua Velva, or do I allow the scent of human urine and poo and diesel fumes and rotting garbage to enter my nostrils freely? Now granted, I’m sure New York and Chicago have similar odors, but I was a Midwestern boy from a small town who was used to smelling fresh cut grass, Herbal Essence shampoo, and ham and cheese casseroles in the oven. Aside from the cabbage field by our house that smelled like farts near harvest time, my town smelled pretty good. Even the boy’s bathroom at my school didn’t smell bad, although I did have an aversion to the scent of that sawdust-looking stuff the janitor sprinkled when a kid vomited in the classroom. And that sound of vomiting would make me want to…well, you know.

This sensory affliction does make traveling and living abroad a tricky proposition. When I

Italy…I can’t smell any B.O. up here.

backpacked through Europe during a college summer, I remember a 10-hour overnight train ride down the length of Italy in which I shared a small unairconditioned compartment with several very ripe-smelling, older gentlemen. By hour two I had rubbed a full tube of cherry Chapstick under my nose (the only pleasantly scented substance I could find), but I was still inhaling that musty, vaguely chicken soupish, sour-wash-cloth odor. Finally, I chose to surrender my paid compartment seat, and squatted on the floor in the narrow train corridor where every person on the entire train bumped into me at some point. I didn’t get much sleep, but my nostrils were pleased.

No burning suitcase smell up here!

When we lived in Mali a few years ago, I recall sitting on the couch in our house one day with the windows wide open, a fresh, spring breeze drifting through the windows. Then before I knew it, an acrid, chemically smell invaded. As I slammed the windows shut I saw a trash pile burning across the road where an old vinyl suitcase had been tossed right on top. I can still conjure up that smell in my head today. We also lived a couple kilometers from the abattoir, which is a beautiful sounding French word for slaughterhouse. Sometimes if the wind blew just the right way, the scent of butchered sheep and cows resting in the warm Malian sun would make its way to our windows. I’m still deciding if that aroma was worse than the blazing Samsonite.

Entrance into the chamber of horrors (aka, the wet market)

We now live in Shanghai, the world’s most populous city, where my nose and ears get a workout every day. For example, the wet market, a place where vendors sell fresh meat, seafood, and produce, is a stone’s throw from our apartment building. When we first moved to this neighborhood, we thought this would be a real plus—inexpensive, fresh food straight from the farmers and fisherman, right at our doorstep. But on our first visit inside I was sure I’d entered a recently unsealed crypt full of mouldering bodies. The stench was overwhelming. Plus, there were mounds of guts from fish and eels and other bizarre water creatures that were still wriggling. I fled, dry heaving into my shirt that I had pulled over my face. The only thing that would have been worse is if everyone was eating Fritos in there.

Unfortunately, we must pass the wet market daily on the way to the morning bus stop at 5:25

Wet Market, 5:30 AM, already in the red zone on the stink-o-meter

AM. And I can tell you with confidence that the very last smell you want to encounter in the pre-dawn hours is rotting seafood. But fish markets always smell bad, you might argue. But trust me, this isn’t a fresh-fish-sitting-in-crunchy-ice kind of smell one would encounter at, say, Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle. That smell is almost pleasant, with a vibe that reminds you of a sleepy fishing village with colorful boats bobbing in the harbor.

But this wet market has no such vibe. Nope, this vibe is more of a “you slipped and fell into the carcass of a decomposing sperm whale that had eaten a tanker ship full of vomit.” It’s a place where the juice from those underwater creatures has run into cracks and seeped into the concrete to fester in the humid Shanghai air, day after day, turning into something that I believe could be used in warfare instead of nuclear bombs. Seriously, this odor would bring anyone to their knees–and yet, the wet market it is crowded with shoppers all day long who are certainly not dry heaving into their shirts.

It’s more than just scents here in ol’ Shanghai, though. For me, the sound that is synonymous with this city is that awful noise people make when trying to clear their throat to gather phlegm for spitting (seriously, just hearing someone say the word “phlegm” is an assault on my eardrums). But hearing the actual expulsion sound is cringe inducing for me. And trust me, I cringe a lot, because I hear it all day long, even through the closed windows of our third-floor apartment. Even when I’m wearing Bose Noise Canceling headphones. Even when we’re inside a restaurant and someone does it outside on the street. And probably even when I’m inside a submarine in the Mariana Trench 35,814 miles below sea level.

It’s horrific, like someone is hurking up a chunk of lung. And everyone does it—young people, elderly ladies, probably famous Chinese movie stars. And as with the wet market experience, this sound causes me to dry heave. Of course, there is the foul aftermath of this sound to contend with as well, which is why the sidewalks here are always dotted with wet spots and why I look down when I walk on the sidewalks here, and why our shoes have never, ever touched the floor inside of our apartment. No lung matter on my shiny wood floors, please.

Regarding this spitting thing, I’ve actually heard people say that it’s “cultural.” Yeah, no. I fully honor and embrace the many cultural differences I’ve encountered here, like how Chinese people avoid confrontation, or have no sense of personal space, or how they talk so loudly that I think they are arguing when they’re just chatting about buying eels at the wet market. But hocking up a big loogie is not a part of any culture—it’s just a terrible habit, like picking your nose or making those loud sounds when you yawn. It’s a habit that one could kick by simply drinking some hot tea, or maybe by not eating slimy, wet market sea creatures that look like they belong in a horror movie.

In the meantime, for the morning walk to the bus stop I’ll be dabbing under my nose a generous amount of Gucci Guilty Black Pour Homme cologne, a scent highlighted by notes of coriander and lavender but also with base notes of patchouli–a combination that creates a scent that’s bold and noticeable without being overpowering (or so the reviews say). As long as it’s powerful enough to mask rotten shrimp and Fritos, I’m good.

Chapter 28: Go Ask Alice (or Hazel, Rosario, Rosie, Mr. French, Charles in Charge, or Fati)

Posted on February 1, 2015 by 2seetheglobe

For many years everything I needed to know about household help I learned on TV. The

Alice always makes it better. Source: alimartell.com

Brady Bunch taught me that maids wore powder blue frocks, gave you something fresh-baked when you were down in the dumps, and lived in some mystery room located in a vague part of the house (Alice rocked!).

Hazel, along with Rosario from Will & Grace, taught me that maids had smart mouths. Mr. French from Family Affair and Geoffrey from Fresh Prince of Belair taught me that butlers had facial hair and vague English accents. Charles in Charge taught me that teen idols looked great as a

Rosario lets Karen Walker have it.

nanny but probably weren’t the best choice in terms of teen girl supervision. Rosie from the Jetsons taught me that robots can totally pull off a French maid’s uniform. And really, what else does one need to know besides that?

Well, maybe a little more. My first real life exposure to a domestic happened when I was a 16-year-old exchange student in Peru. I lived with a middle class family—two teachers and their four kids—and a maid who would just sort of materialize at times. She was young, probably about my age, and unlike Hazel or Rosario, she hardly ever uttered a peep to her employers (least of all some witty, Rosario-like retort such as, “I’d ring your neck, but I don’t want to be standing in a puddle of gin!”).

Nope, this gal kept her head down, no eye contact, and kept occupied doing things like boiling stuff on the stove. Now the first time I lifted the lid off one of her boiling pots it contained everyone’s white underclothes, and the second time it was fish heads, so suffice to say I didn’t do a lot of lid-lifting after that. She also went to the market every day to buy the foodstuff we would eat at lunch and supper. I went with her once, and credit her with making me understand that guinea pigs can be pets or entrees.

Our maid in Peru, rockin’ the big cuffs.

One day I asked my host brother Paco where this maid lived. “On the roof,” he answered matter-of-factly. I immediately envisioned her curled up in an abandoned pigeon coop or sleeping under a lean-to propped against the chimney. Then I made my way up there one day and saw that there was, in fact, a little structure that I supposed was a maid’s room and while small, was really private with a great view of the neighborhood. I’m pretty sure that Alice on the Brady Bunch would have been pleased with this scenario as she could have easily smuggled Sam the Butcher up here without anyone knowing a thing.

I later found out that maids here came from poor families and only made a few dollars each week, which is why most middle class families could afford to have one. They certainly weren’t as beloved as Hazel or even Rosie the Robot Maid, and I sometimes winced at the way the family spoke to ours. I was even told by the family one time that I shouldn’t speak with ours unless I needed her to do something. Small talk be damned!

Years passed and I moved to steamy South Florida where once again the world of household help would come alive before my very eyes. I lived just across the Intracoastal Waterway from glamorous Palm Beach, an otherworldly island of warped fantasy where the uber-wealthy had mansions on the ocean full of maids, butlers, cooks, assistants, house managers, drivers, social secretaries, dog handlers, food tasters, and tiara polishers. Here were some of the highlights of my household help encounters in Palm Beach:

Human Video Game

In my previous career as a landscape architect, I designed the front lawn area for a media mogul whose mansion sat on the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. At the firm where I worked we rarely did residential work and now I understand why. I was given the task of creating a preliminary design, and then a few of us paid a visit to the home. We, of course, had to park in the service area and were ushered into the back door by a gaggle of housemaids wearing crisp, black and white shifts. They led us to an area inside the door where we sat on a bench, and in hushed voices they told us to cover our shoes with velvety cloth covers, not to touch the walls as we walked up the stairs, and various other instructions that would ensure no trace of mere mortals would remain once we departed.

They led us up a sweeping grand staircase, and I couldn’t help thinking how much our velvety foot covers were polishing each marble step, or how easily we could have slipped right off and plunged to our deaths where, I was sure, no trace of our blood would be left behind. At the top they led us down a darkened hallway where every door was closed. We stopped in front of a set of double doors where one maid tapped so slightly I wasn’t sure it even made a sound. The door opened and there stood the mogul and his wife, bathed in glowing light, like some Renaissance Medici portrait. They glanced at our shoes (feet covered, check) and pointed us inside the master bedroom while the maids disappeared back into the dark hallway.

Our project director made quick introductions, but there were no handshakes, probably because we didn’t have velvety hand covers. Then she quickly explained that I had roughed out an idea for the lawn that included fountains, plantings, paving crafted from baby unicorn horns, and such. I unfurled my drawing and the mogul and his wife nodded as I explained each part. Then they explained why we were in their bedroom, thank goodness, as I was beginning to think this was going to turn in to one of those “Eyes Wide Shut” party scenarios. Mr. and Mrs. Mogul felt that from the balcony off the bedroom they would have a bird’s eye view of the front lawn, and could better imagine my design in place.

There were indeed fabulous sets of glass doors across the front of the bedroom, offering sweeping views not only of the money-green front lawn, but of the sapphire blue Atlantic Ocean. For a few minutes I tried to explain where each part of my design would happen (“Now, over there by the Central American gentleman trimming your grass with sterling silver scissors will be the first statue, and over where your Labradoodle and Chihuaweiler are enjoying their pâté and finger sandwiches will be the fountain, etc., etc.”).

Then because Mr. Mogul was having difficulty imagining the new design, he asked if I might go to the lawn and indicate the exact layout of each feature. We did have marking paint in the car, sort of a powdery, neon orange spray paint we used to “draw” on the ground, so I grabbed a can and a measuring tape and headed to the front lawn.

My actual design completed, photographed by a secret drone.

For the next hour I was like a petite video game character controlled by the Moguls up on high. I’d spray a line and they’d shout from above, “No, no, further to the left.” And I’d kick the old line away with my foot and respray. Then, “No, too small!” and I’d scuff away the paint and spray a larger diameter circle to represent the Dom Pérignon-filled fountain. To think I had pitied the housemaids who seemed so controlled over, and now I was the one with a joystick up my rear! But in the end (haha) the design turned out great, which just goes to prove that video game characters are people too.

The Greyson Bed

I once accompanied a photographer friend on a shoot at another waterfront mansion. We had the run of the place since it was off season and this hotel-sized abode was merely a vacation house. As we were snooping, I mean, looking around for new angles to photograph, we found ourselves in the laundry complex. It was easily as large as apartments where I had lived, and included industrial sized washers, dryers, steamers, padded tables for clothes folding, an array of shiny silver irons, and some sort of medieval-looking contraption that I was sure was a torture device for maids who had disobeyed (or maybe it was a clothes presser, whatever). Of course this showroom of laundry appliances served a whopping two people (who apparently changed their clothes every 12 seconds).

Make sure the gauze curtains are tied JUST LIKE THIS! Source: aliexpress.com

Then, tucked on a shelf crowded with exotic detergents from Europe, we found the mother lode….a series of little wooden models of beds, complete with headboards, tiny cloth blankets, and little silk pillows. On the base of each model was a label that said “How to Make the Greyson Bed” (name changed to protect the innocent). Yep, the household staff was immune to bed-making blunders because they had a precise model to follow! We did look around for other models (e.g. “How to Wipe the Greyson Butts”) but came up empty-handed.

Merry Christmukah!

Both Jamey and I sometimes earned extra money by helping a couple of local companies decorate Christmas trees in Palm Beach for the holidays. We would arrive at a mansion with a massive evergreen imported from Lapland or wherever, then wrap the interior trunk and every branch with a gazillion white lights that could easily illuminate Carlsbad Caverns from top to bottom.

Next we’d open box after box of fancy ornaments from the Nuremberg Christmas Market

The Palm Beachers always asked for Christmas trees made of humans, but they were just too big to fit into their fancy parlors. Source: Flickr.com

—supplemented by box after box of even fancier ornaments we bought at overpriced local boutiques or antique shoppes—to hang on each bough, often along with fresh pears, apples, and pomegranates, as well as fresh roses and hydrangea with their stems in tiny tubes of water, as well as tiny baby reindeer that would wiggle and coo (okay, not really reindeer, but they would have if they could have).

And where were the families as all of these decorating festivities were occurring? Why, sitting on the couch watching, naturally! Apparently it’s an annual holiday tradition…the “watching of the help doing the Christmas decorating.” Which made it even a little weirder that many of these families were Jewish.

So that was my extensive background knowledge regarding household help. Mostly these were worlds I would really never be a part of, something I was reminded of each time I was scrubbing my own toilet bowl or scraping off some random, dried, really sticky substance from the refrigerator shelf. I was my own household help, without the powder blue uniform and crisp white apron Alice wore so well (although I was pretty good with Hazel/Rosario-style one liners).

So imagine my surprise when Jamey and I found ourselves in our own Downtown Abbey-like arrangement here in sub-Saharan Africa. After we had signed our contract to teach at the American International School of Bamako, we received an email explaining that we would have a guard posted at our home 24 hours/day, paid for by the school. Since we had pretty much sold everything we owned before arriving, these guards would be protecting such valuable commodities as our collection of Old Navy boxers and our rare assortment of toiletries purchased from Target (that’s tar-JAY, by the way…very French).

Our favorite Fati

Then we were asked if we wanted to keep the maid, Fati, and gardener, Oumar, that were currently working at the house. The maid’s salary at the time was $150/month, and she worked 5 days a week, 8 hours/day cooking, cleaning, shopping, and doing the laundry. The gardener came twice a week for 4 hours at a time and was paid $50/month for cutting the lawn, planting and caring for the flowers, trimming hedges, watering, and sweeping paved areas. It took us 1.5 seconds to decide “yes.” Lady Grantham, eat your heart out!

Having household help was an interesting adjustment for us. Fati, our maid extraordinaire, certainly has made me feel like Lord Grantham. I remember that feeling I’d get back in Florida when I’d spend all day Saturday cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and taking care of the yard. I would be wiped out by evening, but everything looked so damn sparkly good that I didn’t care. I’d marvel at how shiny the fixtures looked, how the wood floors gleamed, how the yard looked so manicured. Now, that’s the feeling I get EVERY day when we return from school, except we don’t have to lift a finger and can just lounge on the sofa and eat bonbons and throw the wrappers on the floor (full disclosure: Not only do I NOT throw bonbon wrappers on the floor, I do a before-the-maid-gets-here cleaning so she doesn’t think we are cavemen).

One of the many downsides I’d discover about to doing your own housework is that two days after cleaning, everything is a mess again (I’m not blaming this on Jamey per se, but let’s just say that our ideas about cleanliness differ somewhat). Then you just start to dread the weekend when you have to do all of that housework yet again.

We fit right in.

Now the dread has vanished. We come home from school each day to a sparkling clean house with tile floors so shiny we could skate on them, or at least do one of those Tom Cruise slides from Risky Business (except wearing pants because I don’t think maids should see our Old Navy boxers). The bed looks hotel-ready with plumped up pillows stacked squarely on top of each other, crisply folded edges, and the sheet turned down just so. The sinks, toilets, and showers glisten without a water spot in sight. Often there are fresh flowers on the table in a glass vase (which we now pronounce “vahz” because we are just like the Crawleys or the Moguls at this point).

Then comes the most wonderful, enticing fragrance of all: the smell of dinner that we

My favorite meal is the one someone else cooks. Thanks Fati!

didn’t have to cook ourselves. Yep, every afternoon dinner awaits on the stove, a fully cooked meal in a sparkling clean kitchen. It’s almost like that device the Jetsons had in their kitchen, where they would press a button and a turkey dinner or massive plate of spaghetti would appear. Even better, when we finish eating we just leave the dishes in the sink, where, on the following day, we find them miraculously clean and put away in the cupboard.

But wait….there’s more! Next we wander into the bedroom where the dirty clothes from the previous day are clean, ironed, and folded. Fati even irons the socks. It’s the same with the yard. Just as the bougainvillea or the pomegranate tree or the lawn is about to appear unkempt, we come home to find it all trimmed to perfection. Our vegetable garden is planted, composted, watered, de-weeded, and harvested for us, but I still say, “Look at these tomatoes I grew in my garden!” In three years I’ve done dishes twice (emergency situation), and just a month ago I took out the garbage for the first time (I actually did not know where it went, and the guard took it for me).

Speaking of guards, we have two that take turns on 12-hour shifts. They open the garage door when we arrive or leave, carry our packages to and from the car, wash the car every day, water everything that grows, feed our cat when we are away, sweep the dirt road in front of our house, and pre-screen any visitors by ringing the bell and letting us know whose waiting outside the gate; we decide if we’ll will/won’t have an audience with the visitor (It’s all very Pope-like). The school pays their less-than-$200-per-month salaries, but we supplement that and also give them dinner occasionally because, well, we couldn’t sleep at night if we didn’t! It’s disconcerting to go from the near-bottom of the economic pyramid (lowly teachers in the U.S.) to the near top here in Mali. Our modest teaching salary, nearly 20 times higher than what Fati our maid makes, makes us the Palm Beachers of Bamako.

The sock drawer.

So before we ever make any requests, we always decide first if it is Mali-normal or Palm Beach-weird because we definitely don’t want to be one of THOSE guys. Take, for instance, sock folding. After Fati launders and irons our socks, she folds them, but individually, thenstacks them on the dresser. Now this means that I’m forced to unfold the two individually folded matching socks, put them together, then refold them as a pair before putting them in the sock drawer, which, by the way, I have arranged by colors from primary to secondary (red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, brown, black). Asking her to fold them as a pair and put them into the correct colored stack in the drawer? That would be Palm Beach-weird. So I do my own sock refolding, laborious as it is. We all have to make sacrifices, you know.

Audrey Hepburn and her trench coat. She has no medical conditions.

Unlike the help on Downtown Abbey or Will and Grace, our employees only speak French and Bambara. I’m great in both languages when it comes to greeting them, commenting on general weather conditions, and telling them I’m tired when we get home from school. Beyond that, it’s a crapshoot. Fati and I write notes in French back and forth nearly every morning, and thank goodness for Google Translate which sometimes is actually accurate. But when it’s not, it’s REALLY not. Like the time I translated a Fati note and told Jamey it said something about a problem with a trench coat, and we wondered why anyone would ever need a trench coat in sub-Saharan Africa, and why would she even bring up wardrobe issues with us anyway. Well, after a colleague did an actual translation, Fati was actually telling us about some medical issues she was going through. So it’s a good thing I didn’t write back something in French like, “Geez, just get rid of that trench coat and get a windbreaker—it’s Mali for God’s sake.”

And also unlike the Crawleys, we do take the time to chat with our household help every day, and get somewhat involved in their personal lives (our guard Niambele’s family picture is on our fridge). Now granted, on Downton Abbey there is no mixing of the help with the aristocrats—well, except for the chauffeur who married one of Lord Grantham’s daughters, but we don’t have a chauffeur, although we could for about what we pay the gardener. We’ve loaned/given them money (for school fees, to build a room onto a house, for driving school). On every trip we take we bring them all back a gift, and we give them a double salary during the Muslim holiday of Tabaski. We even bought a donkey for one of our guards whose previous animal was donkey-napped (it happens).

We don’t take Fati or Oumar or Niambele or Sidibe for granted, and we certainly appreciate the hard work they do to make our lives easier (and much, much lazier). I would hope that Lord Grantham, the Bradys, Karen Walker, the Banks family, and the Jetsons felt the same way.

And I can assure you that I’ll never direct Oumar’s landscaping from my perch on the roof deck, nor create a model for Fati of our preferred bed-making style, or even have them decorate our Christmas Madagascar Dragon Tree while we watch. That’s just Palm Beach-crazy.