Travel

I think I stopped giving grits a chance many years ago when Lucy became our family pet. She's an amazing bird, a Yellow Naped Amazon parrot that has an unbelievable vocabulary, an infectious laugh, can tell my identical twin brothers apart and eats grits every morning for breakfast. Sounds charming but think about being awakened by a bird with a loud, piercing voice calling my name every morning demanding her grits.

By golly, you better get them right or she gets mad and starts screaming. She likes her grits a bit runny, butter, salt and pepper with a sprinkling of cheese. They need to sit for a few minutes so they won't burn her beak because that really makes her mad. Get it right and she turns into this loving soul who will say in her lovely southern accent "Praise the Lord" and "You're a very pretty girl." Gee thanks.

We were going to take a cab to Damascus for dinner, but we couldn’t get our visas, so we headed south.  I was in Jordan, the Middle Eastern Sundance Lab had ended.  The aspiring filmmakers and their mentors were dispersing back home to Cairo, Beruit, Ramallah and Casablanca.

With time on our hands – the writer’s strike had been called 24 hours before – a fellow mentor and I headed south with our guide, Mohammad Gabaah, to the desert of the Wadi Rum (The Valley of the Mountains, in southern Jordan.)  You’ve all seen it –  yes, you have – even though you don’t realize  it.   It’s the last leg of the journey T.E. Lawrence took, when he crossed on camel to get to Aqaba, 45 miles west.  (The guns are no longer facing the wrong direction.)   And where David Lean spent nine months shooting his hagiographic biopic.

We had reservations for a "secret dinner" at an undisclosed location for the last 2 weeks that I sadly can't disclose to anyone. To say that I was very excited would be an understatement as I have always fantasized about what it would be like to have my own private dinner club, but that is a whole other story.

This saturday night in Maine it was very cold and clear, the sky was full of stars and just a perfect half moon guided our way as we barreled down country roads riddled with frost heaves for over an hour-heading for a small coastal "unnamed" town. We are instructed by an email sent just 2 days before to arrive at 6 sharp, but we arrived a half hour early and parked in front of the still dark location. We look at the facade of the old brick building for any sign of activity but there is none, just a soft light coming from the shuttered second floor windows. Our vehicle is one of only 3 cars parked on the whole of Main Street, every car that passes slows down and notices our presence. Do they know that we are waiting outside a underground dinner club or is it just something one does automatically when they live in a small Maine town. We feel a bit anxious – will dinner be good? Will the company be interesting?

If you ford a river with the crowd, the crocodile cannot eat you.
         –Malagasy proverb

My husband, Bill Rollnick, and I were part of an American Red Cross team traveling to Madagascar to help implement the global Measles and Malaria Preventive Initiative. In October, our team was part of a joint partnership led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, CDC, WHO and the Malagasy government in which millions of Malagasy children, ages 9 months to 5 years, received measles vaccine, Vitamin A, de-worming medicine and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.