4 May 2011.

Truth is the best of the intoxications.

J'ai tres envie d'essayer ca. Learn French By Podcast gives this example if I were watching someone surf: I have a lot of envy of trying that.

John, who will be the manager [at a GWD treatment center], catches me practicing my weak French and asks what state I am from. I put away the headphones and we start to talk about where we're from. He grew up in Jonglei, a state in South Sudan that is still seeing a lot of conflict these days. When the war started, he went to Ethiopia, he says, and then to Kenya and Uganda. On foot? Yes, by footing. With your family, I ask? No - he was a torab. No word for it in English; in Arabic it means someone who someday will help the state. When the war started, in 1987, he was seven years old, and along with all the other young boys he was taken by the government to go to school, to grow up to be old enough to join the army. Walking all the way to Ethiopia took two months, and it took all the skin off his feet to do it. We had hunger, we were tired. Oh! It was very hard, he says. John was one of the lost boys. But there is no bitterness when he talks about it. What kind of question can I follow this with? How did that feel, when you were a boy? Was it frightening? No.... when you have a brave heart, nothing is hard, he says. There was a bishop who would come to see us, bringing a little clothing, a little food, and to give us encouraging words. He would say, Hope, says John.

Antonella [the clinic manager, a nurse, general badass] is one of ten children, from a family where her mother was one of four wives, all best friends. Her mother's two brothers both died of snakes, one killed by a python in the fields and one bitten by a puff adder. Her mother promised to give her firstborn girl to her mother, Antonella's grandmother, so that she would have company, but it took two tries, Antonella's two older brothers. Antonella moved in with her grandmother at the tender age of three months, and she suckled until her grandmother gave milk. She grew up thinking of her mother as an aunt, calling her by her first name. Do you want to know why I went to school? she asks me. Naturally. Once, she was out tending to the smallest baby goats, she says. But she was willful and left them to go play. At the end of the day, when she came to fetch them - ha! Like that! All 60 lying on the ground, their throats... all the blood sucked out by a leopard! You are no good at this, her grandmother said. I am sending you to school. [Anto tells tall, taller, towering tales. I love every one.]