"Sorry!!"

Apologies for the unexplained silence.. for which I hope to now offer a belated explanation. Despite the confusion it elicits from the occasional visa-seeking creep who asks for it, I actually don't have an address, a problem I've been trying to remedy through emails for several weeks now. Technically I suppose I live in Atlanta, which is sort of fun for me to tell people because I've never actually been there. My attempts to solve the homeless problem have met with an increasing lack of success, generating a correspondingly accelerating level of panic, and the task has admittedly eaten the lion's share of my internet time in the past week. Again, apologies.

Coupled with this is the fact that I haven't felt much up to writing lately. Maybe I'm just suffering patriotic sympathy pains for my country, but it happens that despite my having been out of North America for nigh on five months, the influenza crisis there has coincided with one of the most tenacious bouts of the flu I have ever had. A full week after the feverish worst of it passed I still had a sore throat, difficulty breathing, fatigue, dizziness, a stomachache - more or less the textbook symptoms of H1N1 - and a horrible racking cough that attracted a natural amount of attention from anyone who tried to interact with me. Embarrassingly, the bouts were frequently so racking as to drive me to lean on the nearest wall while my lungs choked away on an invisible assailant. Of course I felt awful about it - why is it that spewing phlegm into the breathing atmosphere is the body's preferred method of disease management? - but each time I tried to apologise, Nigerians beat me to the punch. "Oh, sorry!!" they would exclaim at my coughing, eyebrows furrowed in concerned sympathy. "Sorry, ma'am!" I was relieved to find they didn't want to roast me on a spit and purge their country of my germs, but the eager apologies - which continued invariably from city to city - took me by surprise. "Oops- Sorry!" blurted the clerk ringing up my water. "Ohhh, sorry ma'am!" soothed the hotel receptionist with feeling. "Sorry, sorry," mumbled the policeman perfunctorily as he checked my papers. Coughing in a crowded bus elicited a chorus of appeals for forgiveness - in which my own were inevitably lost. My hoarse "Excuse me, I'm sorry" just couldn't compete. I hacked my way across Northern Nigeria and right up to the border with Niger, where the cheerful border officials added their own "Oh, sorry!"s to those of their countrymen, before one joked, "Do you have swine flu?"

The ensuing chuckles all around at this well-timed joke ended awkwardly as the sergeant flipped back to check the front of my passport again. American. Nigerian security officers have gained some little notoriety for finding a heretofore unheard-of problem with your papers, your bags, your stuff, or even just you, and then demanding massive bribes for the privilege of evading arrest.

Amid an increasing global anxiety about the potential swine-flu pandemic, African countries are beginning to clamp down on their borders (see news). Huge regions of West and Central Africa have banned pork imports, and Ghana, Cape Verde, Gabon, and Senegal now have thermal health checks at all borders. Locals are being warned against travel to "infected countries", and increased health personnel have been deployed in all international airports. In an interesting reverse of the typical paradigm, North Americans, especially from the United States, are subject to increased health inspections at African borders, or even banned altogether.

With my hacking and rasping, there's no way I could have passed a single such check. Luckily, neither Niger nor Nigeria has their health act together, and despite the shiny posters warning against H1N1 already pasted to the walls of the both border post offices and detailing my symptoms to a tee, I coughed my way through their land border.. twice. After a lovely week in Niger in which I rested, recuperated, and pointedly avoided my inbox with its inevitable "I would want to meet in person before selecting my roommate" replies, I am back in Nigeria, and finally feeling like a human again. Homeless, but healthy!

But thank you very much! to all those who wrote asking whether I was alive and where, whether I'd been kidnapped, and offering to contact the embassy. Am very much alive in Kaduna, Nigeria, and despite the fuss about the Canadian lady a week ago, I foresee no kidnappings on the horizon! (Knock on wood for no copycat crimes. And besides, she was released basically unharmed..)
And on that note: despite the latest hostage deaths in the Delta, David still entertains hopes of travel to Port Harcourt... but this democratic cow is a wuss. While I don't actually think either of us would be killed if kidnapped, I ain't down with the prospect of losing my personal freedom to cranky rebels, and instead of Port Harcourt I'll be squatting like the cowardly toad I am in Benin City. Cheers!