Something about Africa, must be a latent gene....

My younger daughter, while in law school in the States, learned that law students, during their summer breaks, were supposed to clerk for Supreme Court judges, or intern for some big important firm. But this was during the height of the Cheneybush recession, and no one was interested in taking her. So she applied for, and was accepted by, the U.N. War Crimes Commission in Sierra Leone. My wife freaked out at the thought (this was in between Ebola breakouts), but she's pretty much the fearless type, and she went. She remembered to take her malaria pills, but still picked up some deadly infection while on a week's vacation to Senegal. The local doctor had sold all his antibiotics on the black market and gave her sugar pills instead. I was about to fly down there and try to find her, but she finally agreed to bug the U.N. doctor for some real antibiotics, and she came back alive. She acted like nothing had gone wrong at all, talked about it as if she had come down with a cold or something. She came back singing the praises of Africa, wanting to go back, which she already has, and all by herself.

Now it is the turn of my brother's younger son, who studied Arabic and international relations in college, and got a job with some think tank in Washington. We thought his first overseas assignment would be to Egypt or Jordan. Oops. He has been in Abuja and Kano for the last few months, right in the heart of Boko Haram country in Nigeria. He does not speak Hausa or any other local language. Maybe being in the Islamic part of the country, he will run into some speakers of Arabic if they don't know English, which is still widely used as the lingua franca in Nigeria. But he sent us this photo today, and it appears he is right at home there. My parents must have passed on some latent gene........
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