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forgetting any family member’s birthday.
    The bus had to wait for sheep to cross the road just outside the capital city. I was putting on my lipstick when we heard the explosion. Tongaville is made of mud walls like what’s known as stucco in America. The town was far off, all one color on a flat desert so it looked like a toy fort. One round tower blew into a thousand pieces. The shock waves were so strong that sheep fell against the front of our bus. They got terrified andwere climbing up on each other. They don’t look like our American sheep but are black and have very skinny legs. Their coats are thick as powder puffs, only greasy. Seeing how scared they were scared me.
    Some of us tried talking sense to our tour guide. He wasn’t any Father Flannagan. We’d all expected a priest, even though the brochure didn’t come right out and promise one. This guide was not even Catholic, but some Arab with a mustache. He spoke English so badly you had to keep asking him to repeat and sometimes even to spell things out. We told him it would be a mistake, driving into a town where this type of thing was happening. But he said our hotel rooms were already paid for—otherwise, we’d just have to sleep on the bus and miss the Game Preserve the next morning. We were so tired. Half of us were sick. Somebody asked for a show of hands. Majority ruled that we go in and take our chances. But my instinct told me, definitely no.
    Mrs. Whiston, we’d been in Egypt earlier. It is dry and outstandingly beautiful but as far as a place to live and work, it lags way behind Ohio. But, maybe that’s just me. Thanks to Egypt, I had the worst case of diarrhea I have ever heard of or read about. You cannot believe how low a case of diarrhea can bring a person’s spirits and better judgment. Because of it, I voted Yes, enter Tongaville. In my condition, a bus parked on the desert, where there’s not one blade of grass much less a bush for fifty miles, was just no place to spend the night. So, like a pack of fools, we drove into Tongaville, right into the middle of it.
    The bus was air-conditioned, and we couldn’t exactly hear what all of them were shouting at us. Then Miss McMillan, who’s in your parents’ snapshot and at seventy-nine is still sharp as a tack, she said, “CIA, they’re yelling CIA,” and she was right. First it sounded like some native word but that was because they were saying it wrong. Miss McMillan was on target as usual. The only ones who’d voted to skip Tongaville were her and the three Canadian teachers who often acted afraid ofus Americans, especially the Texans, and who wore light sweaters, even in Egypt. “Father Flannagan’s World Tours” was spelled out in English all over the bus. Some of our people said it had probably tipped off the natives about our being Americans. But after three weeks with this group, I knew we weren’t that hard to spot. I never thought I’d be ashamed of my home country, but certain know-it-all attitudes and rudenesses toward Africans had embarrassed me more than once. This might have been my first world trip, but wherever I am I can usually tell right from wrong. The Texans especially were pushy beyond belief.
    Hotel workers came out and joined hands and made two lines for protection, a kind of alley from the door of our bus to the lobby of the Hotel Alpha, which was no great shakes but, by this time, looked pretty good to me. Your father, I remember, was the last to get off because he kept photographing rebels through the big tinted back window. They had already started rocking the bus and he was still inside it running up and down the aisle taking pictures of their angry faces near the glass. Your mother just plain told him to come out of there this minute and he finally did. I made it upstairs to my room and looked out the balcony window. The crowd had climbed up on our bus and pried open the door. They swarmed all over it, about a hundred half-dressed people, so skinny