24 ! ! !

(February 26th, 2009)

I spent my 21st birthday wandering the streets of Venice on the last day of Carnivale, en masque, ultimately getting serenaded by a flock of large, drunk Italian chickens.

The next year, though less of a Kodak moment, was no less joyous as I spent it in Texas’s best medical center getting the MRI that would prove my four-year-long (now six) hiccupping stint is not, in fact, indicative of a brain tumor.

Birthday 23, though I wasn’t expecting anything, turned out to be just as delightful, as my entire elementary school threw me surprise birthday celebrations, complete with Ingrish renditions of Haapi Baasudei from every staff, teacher, and child (and awesome homemade cards).


Given such a run of luck with birthdays, I hardly could have expected anything special from this year, but again I was wrong – and David truly made it memorable. From seeing my first zebra herds – UP CLOSE! – on white savannah grasses and managing to sneak past at least a dozen crocs in Lake Chamo of Ethiopia’s rift valley, to photographing pelicans, storks, herons, and eagles fishing and almost inciting a hippo charge, I’d be hard-pressed to say it didn’t set a new high for birthdays.

Even better, of course, was that the crocs didn’t decide to try out American flesh instead of pelican; that the hippo decided we weren’t worth the energy after his first warning leap; and that the huge tse-tse flies buzzing about us all day landed elsewhere than on me. In other words, that I successfully survived 24 complete years of seriously fantastic living on this planet. And to prove that survival effort (for which my parents do not give me nearly enough credit), here are 24 ways in which we have skirted probably-fine-but-potentially-really-unpleasant situations so far on this trip, such that I am alive.. to see my 24th.


1) avoiding the infamous Nile River parasites
2) not alarming or annoying the trigger-happy military guards outside Bashir’s palace in the capital
3) battling off in a four-day war the triple-attack eye/throat/stomach virus
4) extricating ourselves on the Day of Rage from the sudden angry mob in Omdurman
5) not getting bitten by the wild and possibly rabid dogs that charged us in the Kareima desert (they were chased away with rocks by locals)
6) sustaining 140 bug bites in a single night with no lasting infection
7) slipping under the radar of the ICC backlash in the Sudan that, despite the BBC’s warnings, didn’t result in nasty foreigner-targeted violence (for us, anyway)
8) keeping a cool head and a tight grip during the great Shihedi fistfight of the 18-year-old male population
9) not sliding off the seriously slippery rocks in my slippy flip-flops at the bottom of Tis Isat, the Smoking Waterfall and the source of the Blue Nile
10) managing with a great force of will to retain all of my body parts (and most of my things) in the 4 a.m. Lalibela bus-crush
11) walking away from the Great Bump of the Dire Dawa border bus that almost rearranged my spine
12) just barely managing to keep my footing on the sheer rock-faces we scaled to reach the Tirayan rock-hewn monasteries (or, more honestly, timing my fall so that when it happened, someone else was there to grab my hand)
13) not having to spend the night of February 10th out on the streets of Djibouti
14) getting hopelessly stuck in deep Somalian desert sand, but not without rescue in the form of the next LandRover
15) religiously using Purell to ward off Hepatitis for the first three weeks of this trip (during which my innoculation was not yet effective.. oops)
16) meeting only with the crappiest of aims from the glass-bottle-hurling kids in Berbera
17) not chancing upon the occasional suicide bomber or other interesting fanatical militant during our time in the Somaliland
18) feeding a half-wild Harar hyena mouth-to-mouth for the sake of a picture and David's amusement
19) not tipping over or crashing (miraculously enough) in any one of a number of crazy bush-taxi rides
20) not angering the defensive, nursing warthog upon whose den we stumbled in Bale Mountain National Park
21) remembering with remarkable reliability to take my malaria pill every Tuesday
22) not catching the malevolently squinting eye of the preying crocodiles of Lake Chamo as they floated by us in their deceptively innocent log-like way
23) quickly getting away from (and thus losing the interest of) the angry hippos who started to charge us
AND no. 24) surviving the last, the smallest, and probably the most serious threat yet of the trip, the huge black and yellow tse-tse flies who buzzed around us all day on my birthday, innocent bugs infamous for their coma-inducing and occasionally fatal bite.

Yessir, we have survived all these (and more).. and I'm officially 24 !