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A night in a French Gendarmerie’s Prison Cell!

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The old Gendarmerie in Montauban It was a dark and stormy night… Quit that and get to the story...  A long, very long time ago when I was a young, very young woman, my sisters and I used to spend our summers in Southern France doing what we did best in those days, party.  In the summer, most French villages down south have block parties.  Their block parties consisted of the entire village participating.  Sometimes, they managed to get some famous singers to perform.  Between block parties, discotheques, getting up late in the morning, sunbathing in the afternoon, we had a great life; a shallow life one would say, but we were young.  We had an apartment in one of those converted townhouses, with only one main entrance.  The old man living in the apartment facing us didn’t like us at all.  Actually, he didn’t like Asians, and he didn’t like noisy girls.  We came home late, and according to him, we were not nice.  One night he decided...
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Places!

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Haiti, a country I learned to love.  I was not sure what to make of Port-au-Prince when I first arrived  (this will have to be in my next posting) ; then Barnett forwarded an email about participating in a Progressive Dinner.  I've always liked Progressive Dinners, and we did a lot of that in the Foreign Service.  I called the person responsible for coordinating the event and asked if we might end the evening at my house with desserts and coffee.  The answer was "yes."  That was my introduction to Robin.  It was a successful event, everyone went out of his/her way to make all of us newbies welcome.  I made lots and lots of Lao and Thai desserts using the mangoes and coconuts I found in Petionville. In a corner of my living room, I had a comfortable arm chair, a lamp, and a small table covered with books that I would pick up and read every morning while sipping coffee.  In particular, I like the Daily Spiritual Reading.  Robin actu...
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My love affair with the African continent...

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What do you do when you are married to a Foreign Service officer? You travel around the world. And if you are with USAID? You travel around Nations of Rising Expectations. Sure we have posts in Rome and Paris, but my husband does not get sent to those places. Except for one time he was sent to Paris for two weeks to evaluate the one and only house owned by USAID in Paris, near the Place Concorde, in a cul-de-sac; otherwise inhabited by Arab Sheiks and Princes all having more money that USAID can count. We were in Afghanistan when Barnett told me that our next assignment was going to be Mauritania. “Mauri-what?,” I said. To simplify the matter, he showed it to me on a map. Since then, we had a globe, and he would point out our next assignment each time. As an Asian/French teenager, you know about Africa because you studied geography. Even then, it was not the best subject while I was in school. I landed in Senegal in 1978, I looked around, and except for the fact that there ...
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