There is probably no one in America who;  is of voting age, has any amount of money, has or is looking for a job, can read and has a lick of sense,  that does not have some level of concern about where our country is heading and what our future holds economically.  Consider me in this group, although some might question the “lick of sense” issue.

As if you haven’t made your own mental list of what we are now facing here is a good start.

FINANCIALLY we have staggering US debt that has tripled in just the last 2 years through stupid, non productive, pork barrel spending, designed, arguably, to further control a portion of our population hell-bent on getting something for nothing and increasing political power.  Globally, we see all of Europe, especially Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain drowning in a sea of debt from decades of egregious spending patterns that allows people to retire in their 50′s with salaries almost equal to their working wages.  Continental Europe’s dominate currency, the Euro, is in grave peril.  Even though our own financial house is built on sand, there is an occasional flight to US Bonds, illustrating that we are probably just the tallest midget in the room.

In SOCIETY, un-employment is expanding.  The tax burden is increasing in spite of  historical data that shows that by  reducing tax rates production is increased and tax revenues rise.  Counter intuitive but true.  The resulting unrest in our society is growing exponentially.   The entitlement driven group on one side faces off against  over burdened taxpayers and job producers on the other resulting in growing polarization within our society.  Often this battle breaks down along racial lines.

POLITICALLY there is also exploding polarization.  Obama has proven to be an empty suit, devoid of both truth and the experience to deal with issues apart from spending money we don’t have to to solve problems created by spending too much money.  The housing bubble was caused by “encouraging” people to borrow  excessively to buy houses they couldn’t pay for and then ask prudent people….tax payers….to pay for these excesses. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be pillared for their part in this fiasco.   When there was recent move to require 5% down on loans to potential house buyers, Dodd said,  “that is unfair because then only people who could afford it could buy a house.”  These people live among us folks…..and they vote….and sometimes they are elected to lead us.  God help us!  The reason for our impending collapse is so clear that Stevie Wonder could see it…..a pervasive entitlement philosophy that perpetuates enslavement to a lack of responsibility.

These issues put you and me in between the catalytic duo of….mortar and pestle. Our global world is the mortar, The American People (I hate to hear politicians use this phrase….it seems so hollow given what they try to do to us) are the collective material contained therein and our liberal government is the pestle…grinding away at our minds, wealth and future.  This precipitates volatility in all segments of economic life WORLDWIDE.  We have to do something to prepare for the  retirement or worse yet, incapacitation, that we inevitably face   The question, therefore, is where do you invest your assets?

Understand that this is not to be considered as personal investment advice for you.  I simply lay these thoughts out for consideration.  The DJIA is currently at roughly 10,000.  I doubt it will be there a year from now.  I bet it is either significantly higher or significantly lower.  Likewise, interest rates are at almost all time lows.   For them to decline would mean severe recession or depression.  Rising interest rates would signal inflation, which if taken to the extreme could be “run away inflation.”   Gold is currently priced at about $1200 an ounce, only slightly below its all time high.  My guess is that it will be above $2000 or below $500 an ounce a year from now but not at its present level.

We have never been in the global peril we are in today regarding sovereign stability of currency worldwide.  The consideration of a hedge using gold or silver has the lustre never before seen.  Gold did reach $800 an ounce in the early 80′s but did so largely on the fear of runaway inflation.  Currency collapse was not a  major fear at that time..  The threat of major sovereign currency problems does exist today.  Thus, gold could have some value as a hedge in many portfolios.

We all should weigh these assets in light of our own time horizon, risk tolerance and return objectives as we allocate assets to the various classes of investments.  Seek good counsel.  Think outside the box.  Consider the track record of those giving you advice.  Also, consider how your advisor is being paid…..by transactions or by value provided.  Move cautiously, but move!

When making investment decisions today, how does it feel to be between the mortar and the pestle?

i take baby maybelline on daily walks in our yard to look at all the lovely flowers, herbs, and veggies that abdul, our gardener, grows for us.  having a gardener in africa is a necessity.  plants here grow faster than weeds and the grass grows a six o’clock shadow by ten a.m., i swear.  anyway, last week i had baby m on our morning garden survey when a massive, hairy, ghastly monster of an african bug targeted my nose and dive bombed it.  before my lungs could attempt a gasping breath my face stole all the air and never let it out, every cell swelling larger than it’s neighbor until i looked more like ted kennedy than ted kennedy does.  i ran inside to bury my head in the icebox like a frightened ostrich and i scoured the house for my bottle of dog benadryl- the only kind we have- which is twice as strong as the human stuff.  this next move didn’t pass my that-don’t-sound-like-a-good-idea test but i downed three full strength dog benadryls while my nose burned with the intensity of a thousand flaming suns.

oblivious little maybelline cooed and deposited her nonstop slobbery spittle on my shoulder while i stared into the mirror, willing my face to reverse its course and slim back down.  after ten minutes of wasted longing, my right eye closed up shop on account of the upper lid fusing with the lower one.  it was disastrous.  thankfully the benadryls kicked in just before the panic did so i wasn’t as mortified as i normally would be if my face blew up like a puffer fish while totally sober.

three double-dose benadryls are like magic mushrooms for nursing babies so after the next feed baby maybelline and i fell into a three day slumber.  one would assume, wrongly, that seventy-two hours of rest and antihistamines would return a grossly inflated face to normal.  instead, the next few days were devoted to fretting over my whale of a nose, my pores stretched to a size that could hide battleships, and a taut itchiness that a rough scrub from a brillo pad couldn’t fix.

only one thing could lessen the shame of such a mess and that’s chick-fil-a but in the absense of high quality american grease and salt, meryl streep runs a close second.  i parked it on the couch on that first day of my sabbatical from the public and watched the devil wears prada.  i felt much better after a ninety minute escape to hollywood’s calculated dialogue and size zero wardrobes.  oh meryl, you always know how to throw a subtle, well timed wink at the camera to keep us believing in the lies of the movies.

six days of hermit-living later my face finally relented and shrunk back to a presentable size.  i know how shallow i was to hide out, avoiding my vain hang-ups about appearances but i’m thankful that i had. i looked awful.  thank goodness that whatever attacked my face had a bark much bigger than it’s bite.  i had nightmares of the flesh eating insects i’d learned about in vet school but the good lord spared me.  all that swelling and disfigurement on the one body part you can’t conceal will anhialate your resolve to be above such things, i guarantee it.

dang this continent and dang it’s dreadful, stinging bugs.  this is all too dramatic, i know, but six days of five pounds of water weight that won’t leave your face will do that do you.

my posts are so sad recently.  if you’re looking for a lighthearted entry, check back later.  today is not your day.

we have a dear friend, sarah, who works for a surgical clinic in the upcountry where food is scarce and death is common.  it’s a very specialized NGO that provides a surgical service no one else can and they save loads of lives, mostly children, but march was a bad month.  they lost more babies in march than they’ve lost in the past twelve months combined.  i would tell you which organization it is but i can’t because donors tend to frown on failure.  in non-profit circles (at least the ones i know over here), it’s common to rearrange numbers so you’re in constant success, always in the black, two thumbs up, because if you’re truthful about a bad month like march you lose sponsors.  What the moneybags back in america want to see is their dollars adding up to bunches of saved lives.  what they don’t see is the local staff pocketing drugs, babies who’ve seen the witchdoctor first, or all the mothers who waited too long to come because of the shame in having a sick baby.  in order to keep afloat, the non-profits must work like dogs behind the scenes to post numbers.  big numbers.

once a month sweet sarah comes back to the big city for groceries, a slice of our famous friday night homemade pizza, and some much needed take to balance out all the give.  we love having her because it means a free babysitter friday night and a lovely friendship on saturday.  she does her own dishes, sings to baby maybelline and lets me vent about the last month of toxic poo diapers and slow afternoons.

this month she vented.  she saw a somali woman brought her precious four month old baby for a major brain surgery.  it took her too long to make the money needed for bus fair into uganda so by the time she got to the hospital her baby was almost gone.  she didn’t know it, though.  she hoped to leave with a healthy baby but instead she left with her daughter wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed in her suitcase.  her baby hadn’t survived and it’s “bad juju” to share your space with death here in africa.  if her fellow bus passengers knew there was a dead body with them on the bus they would kick her off and leave her stranded so the surgeons had to help conceal her baby’s body for the trip home.  she’s too poor for a cell phone so they’ll never know if they made it.

it happened again the next day to a fourteen year old girl.  her mother had to convince a bus driver that the large box she had was luggage and not a coffin.  no tears, no grieving, no freedom to be honest.  both mothers braved the ride to somalia with their daughters’ bodies but without their souls.

god bless those souls.  god bless those mothers.  and god bless our sweet friend, sarah, for being the woman who loves and serves women like the two somali mothers.

i cleaned my pantry this week and it took about four hours to get it done.  it fit conveniently into mabelline’s two morning naptimes and it made my life feel so much better.  all that yummy food organized like a grocery store- snacks to the right, sweets up top, canned goods on the floor, nutella immediately past the door at arms’ reach.  the gross thing about the whole ordeal was that i had to stop and wash my hands three times during those four hours because they kept turning black and sticky.  it took two washings and a few sneezes to figure out i was washing pure pollution off my hands.  it filters in through the screens on the house and settles in places that aren’t moved often such as the bran cereal box and the rice cake bag.  the nilla wafers box is pristine, of course.  

this morning on my walk with baby mabelline and the dog it hit me square in the lungs where all that pollution is coming from.  the nasty diesel trucks in town.  they’re the kind you don’t often see in america anymore- the ones that toot massive black clouds from the exhaust pipes when they accelerate.  when you’re hoofing it behind a stroller you can’t avoid the smog so you part it like the red sea and pray your baby isn’t breathing in at that moment.  then she usually sneezes and you pray she expelled it all.  it also comes from all the trash they burn, the untold zillions of toxins they dump in the street from any and everything, and the general filth of the third world.

 the same day i realized my pantry was experiencing a toxic fallout i also saw a taxi driver clad in a tennessee volunteer sweatshirt that i know was from the late eighties.  i remember it from when i was a kid and that made me laugh.  it didn’t make me forget about the sludge coating my lungs but it did lighten my mood about it.  who knows the route that old sweatshirt took to land on that guy’s back?

i’ve been to other third world countries before uganda and i’m sure i’ll go to others after this post but i’ve never lived in one.  it’s one thing to go on a vacation or a mission trip to somewhere impoverished but it’s a whole other thing to set up camp and plop yourself down in the middle of the mess.  in one sense, we’re protected from it because we’re behind a six foot wall with a guard.  on the other hand we’re surrounded by abject poverty at every turn after we pass through our six foot wall.  on some days the poverty reaches us on the inside- our guard and maid have both lost children in the past year.  both kids were over two years old and neither knew why their child died.  ”that’s just africa” they say when you ask.  my maid was holding baby maybelline when she told me about her son’s death and she said “don’t worry, madame.  white babies eat well – she will see her old age.”

i grocery shop at kissimente, a collection of stores you could loosely term a shopping center although it’s really nothing more than a filthy, open-air strip mall.  before you open your car door there are two or three barefoot, hungry kids begging you to buy some of their rotting produce.  it doesn’t matter if you smile, if you refuse, if you ask their name… they don’t care what you do as long as you hand over some money.  it’s pure desperation on the lowest of levels.  there’s one guy in particular who’s so miserably destitute that he’s known by everyone in town as “that poor guy at kissimente”.  he has severely deformed legs that don’t work and he gets around by walking on gnarled up hands that are holding worn out flip flops for protection from the concrete.  he’s dusty, threadbare, and bone skinny from hunger.  his only means of survival is begging but for every one of him there are five hundred cuter, faster, more charming kids that get to your car before he does.  it took me three months to have the courage to look him in the eyes but when i finally did it, there was nothing there.  that kid is dead inside, beaten to death by his poverty.

when i get fussy about the heat and inconvenience of africa, i sometimes think about that guy at kissimente.  he lives every waking moment of his life on the steamy pavement of that rotten shopping center in uganda.  i’m not trying to dish out a guilt trip, i’m maybe just putting it out there that america is insulated from true poverty.  you have to search it out if you want to see it and even then it’s sort of soft poverty.  the american government hands out loads of opportunity to anyone willing to make use of it.  in uganda you are either related to the president and therefore can do anything you want or you are not related to anyone of consequence and there’s no ladder for you to climb.  you’re stuck at the bottom.  or maybe you’re stuck below the bottom like the guy at kissimente.

we don’t take america for granted anymore.  there’s no final lesson here, i’m just saying this is what it looks like to work through some of the culture shock.

there’s only one guy in uganda who knows what quality ice cream tastes like and he’s the belgian butcher who sells it for twelve bucks a liter.  mind you, a liter is much less than a half gallon so that would be something like twenty five bucks for a half gallon like you’re used to buying.  francis and i enjoy the occasional gluttonous evening of ice cream and brownies so we used to buy the belgian stuff but  paying twelve bucks a liter for ice cream is more gluttonous than eating it so i got the bright idea to buy an ice cream maker.  we’d been making our own ice cream for about a month before i had a second bright idea to find real vanilla beans to use in my recipe.  tropical countries that grow coffee almost always also grow vanilla beans but i couldn’t find them anywhere.  you can’t find ugandan coffee in uganda, either.  they export every bit of it and only sell some pretty awful ground up dirt packaged to look like coffee.  the brand name is “good african coffee” and they clearly need a new marketing director.

anyway, while i was in the states i shopped around for cheap vanilla beans but the cheapest ones i could find were about seven dollars a bean.  it would take two beans to flavor a batch of ice cream so that would make my homemade ice cream more expensive than the imported belgian stuff so i put it back on the shelf.  as i was doing so, i caught a glimpse of a familiar flag printed on the container.  a ugandan flag.  dang if those vanilla beans weren’t grown in uganda!  and dang those ugandans for exporting everything good and holy that grows in their soil.   i shook my fist in the air and as god as my witness i swore to track down those blasted vanilla beans if it took the rest of our tour to do it.

after settling back into my african life, i dug in my heels and decided to get to the bottom of this.  someone around here is growing vanilla beans and i was hellbent on finding them- our occasional gluttonous brownie and ice cream nights depended on it.  wouldn’t you know the first person i asked said “oh, that’s easy.  go to the veggie stand lady at the belgian butcher’s shop and ask for them.  they’re never on display”.  of course they’re not.  why display something you’ve got for sale?  i immediately sent francis to the belgian butcher’s veggie stand and do you know how much they were?  about 50 cents a bean.  he bought ten beans and we’ve eaten vanilla bean ice cream every night since.  

we’ve had three dinner parties since the discovery of the belgian butcher’s secret stash of cheap vanilla beans and our ice cream is almost legendary.  people are already asking for it.

dang if i didn’t just spend 24 hours in a metal tube with a newborn only to land in the heat and dust of east africa.  it was a long and glorious 4 months in america but it had to come to a bitter end on tuesday.  mabelline and i packed up all our burp cloths and diapers and headed east to meet back up with francis.  i won’t complain about the flight cuz my baby did pretty good but i might take a moment to purge all the evil thoughts i’ve had about this forgotten country and it’s wacky ways.  

first off, it smells bad.  my house is open-air and every window is screened in.  this is fantastic when a delightful breeze finds it’s way to my yard but it’s downright abominable when my neighbor burns his trash.  in a poor country where most folks live on a dirt floor, how is it that my neighbor has enough trash to burn around the clock?  i’m a wasteful and consumptive american and i couldn’t burn trash for more than 5 minutes a day.  and is it possible he’s actually a scatologist because his trash smells like 8 kinds of poo, it’s terrible.

secondly, they didn’t learn how to drive in my absence.  i know this because i’ve already been bumped and i’ve only driven once since tuesday.  the pedestrians have also not figured out that death can happen as a result of darting in front of moving cars.  you can’t drive 200 yards without someone ambling out in front of your car.

they say when you leave a place you don’t like you end up mourning things about it you never realized were so good.  as i was dodging my 65th pedestrian of the day i decided that i couldn’t spend the next year and a half whining about how foreign africa is so i set out to find the things that i might one day miss about uganda.  the thing is, it’s foreign to us westerners but WE are the outsiders.  it’s so american of us to be frustrated with them for not acting like americans.  it took some soul searching but here’s what i came up with to balance out my first two complaints:

first off, you don’t pump your own gas.  there’s an attendant who fights other attendants for the right to pump your gas, clean your windshield, and check your oil.  they’re very quick and you only have to tip them about fifty cents for all that work.  i usually tip about a dollar so they will like me and give me extra fuel.  i swear it works.

secondly, a really good massage only costs about $30 for an hour.   i dig a good massage and today i had an hour with zora, the best masseuse in town, while francis watched baby mabelline.  the thing about an african massage is they don’t honor the unspoken american code of spa modesty. zora exposed parts of my post-baby body that i haven’t dared let myself see.  it would probably require special state fair fun house mirrors for me to see those parts but zora felt they needed airing out.  back up… this half of the post is devoted to things i will miss about uganda so strike that last part from the record.   i loved my surprise massage.  i will one day miss $30 totally exposed massages.

even though africa is still very african i’ve decided to be ok with it.  i hope you’re ok with where you are, too.

hello friends, it feels like it’s been a month of sundays since i last wrote.  i left africa one happy day in the fall and i’ve been prancing around america like i hadn’t left ever since.  i romped around drinking in all of america’s excess, opportunity, and chick-fil-a milkshakes like a carefree schoolgirl until i woke up on december 3rd with dreadfully painful contractions of the uterus.  precisely four miserable hours later my sweet baby mabelline kicked and fussed her way into the real world. not one man has asked how the delivery went but every mother i’ve met since has asked for all the gory birth details so in case you mothers out there are curious, the cliff notes go like this:  

4:30 am:  contractions start at 4 minutes apart.  

4:34 am:  francis and i panic.

4:38 am:  shoot.  these dang things are still coming.

6:30 am:  i hobble into labor and delivery swearing like a sailor inside my head.

8:15 am:  while still signing release forms, my midwife tells me to push.

8:16 am:  blinding pain sets in, internal sailor swearing ramps up.

8:30 am:  cute little 7lb. 4oz. mabelline arrives and takes a nap on my chest.

baby mabelline is a month old now and since we’re living with my parents while in the states, i’ve had lots of chances to sneak away and act like the carefree schoolgirl again, albeit the schoolgirl who smells of milk and doesn’t so much prance anymore to keep those 25 flabby extra pounds at bay.  you know when you prance, it prances too but it doesn’t keep time.  if you prance left, it prances right and nobody enjoys watching that happen so this schoolgirl now keeps a carefree but very controlled pace. 

life before baby mabelline had it’s fancy dinners out, it’s long shopping days at nordstrom’s, and it’s lazy afternoons of manicures and pedicures.  life after mabelline has it’s eat-whenever-you-can lunches of wheat thins and last night’s leftovers, it’s 1 hour mad dashes to walmart between naps, and it’s predictable afternoons of nursing and burping.  i used to fret over wrinkled clothing, now i’m proud if there’s no bullseye milk rings on my shirt.  

my standards of fun sank to an all time low, too.  there’ve been a few times in the past month where as long as i could leave mabelline with my parents i was happy about painting the town red with the windows down in my mom’s old ford taurus no matter where i was headed.  kenny rodgers and dolly parton would be serenading me on my way to the grocery store to pick up more diapers but i didn’t care, i turned it up and sang with ‘em.  of course the windows are down to air out those blasted milk rings on my ill-fitting maternity shirt, i settle for kenny and dolly because i don’t have time to search for some cooler, hipper, modern station, and i’m thrilled to be in the taurus because unlike my lemon of a car in africa, it will break 40 miles an hour.  i think even in africa, where my standards for EVERYTHING are lower than a ditch digger’s shoes, i would have poo-pooed such a scene but not now.  let the wind blow through my shirt and not my hair, i don’t care, because it’s now fun to be away from the house if even just to rush around walmart for more huggies.

happy new year from mabel, francis and mabelline.

now the doctor really IS in.  it’s been like an african vet episode of m*a*s*h around here.  no good drugs, no way to sterilize instruments but to boil them, no staff or good equipment to help in case of emergency, just you and a scalpel.  maybe if i try the crazy act like sergeant klinger they’ll send me home and i can import good drugs myself.  

 i just finished my second surgery of the week.  the first one had me sweating bullets because of all the complaints i just listed above.  africa is a hairy place and doing surgery in these conditions is dicey to say the least.  it had to be done and the owner knew it so we ignored our better judgement, scratched up some anesthetic drugs, used up alot more of my vet stash supplies, and got to work.  on her kitchen table.  the lighting is deplorable in every building i’ve ever been in over here so we had to position the table near a window and we commandeered two lamps from atop the fish tank.  i also wore a caving headlamp which was comical.

the drugs i used were archaic- the cat might have gotten the same level of pain relief from a shot of whiskey and a bullet to bite on but they just don’t import the good stuff because no one can afford it.  even mr. patel, my dodgy indian drug importer couldn’t get what i needed.  sadly, this means all the people of uganda suffer through surgery on old drugs with terrible side effects.  i could’ve used the whiskey to boost my confidence but they say that’s not good for the baby so archaic drugs with no liquid courage it was.  it went fine and the cat looks great these days.  

that was last week.  this morning i neutered a former stud dog.  this is normally a routine procedure but normally the overbearing and emotional owner isn’t standing over your shoulder gasping and moaning while you work.  even francis, my much more compassionate other half and medical assistant, was rolling his eyes at her drama.  i kicked her out after she started crying at the sight of the first needle.  you can’t cry in surgery, it just won’t do.  even if it’s your own dog in your own kitchen.  the caving headlamp made a stellar repeat performance and the dog and weepy owner are recovering nicely- sans two haggard old family jewels.

on deck for tuesday afternoon is ear surgery on a wild african dog.  those can be exceptionally bloody so we’re doing that one outside on the truck bed.  it could be an adventure because this dog is pretty vicious and mucking around on the ear hurts but this ain’t my first rodeo.  it’s nothing hotlips houlihan couldn’t handle so i’m going for it.

ooooh, does that make your health conscious self shudder?  all your food has an additive mixed with a preservative unless you frequent the whole foods.  and even then i bet they sneak something in most of their packaged products to make them last longer since it wasn’t likely grown, processed, or packaged anywhere near your home.  well in uganda they don’t add preservatives to ANYTHING.  i thought this was great for the first week i patronized the grocery stores but now i long for preservatives, chemicals, additives, or anything to make the dang food survive longer in my fridge.  in real life, when fruits and veggies don’t get a dose of preservatives they last about 1/4 as long as things you buy in the states.  this wouldn’t be so bad if you had a personal chef, could get to a grocer without sweating away five pounds of something that sadly isn’t melting off your hips, or could depend on finding what you need every time you venture out.  

i like to minimize the number of times i fight the nasty traffic and heat to get to the grocery store because in uganda, if your list includes more than bananas and pineapples then you have to go to 4 grocery stores to complete it.  no one place has everything so shopping takes all day.  monday they’ve got boxed milk but they don’t have eggs.  tuesday they may have eggs but they don’t have apples.  today, actually, they had cartons of strawberries -5 berries per carton- but they cost two dollars per berry and were already shriveled so i passed.  i haven’t seen a berry of any type since i’ve been here but that price is downright ungodly and i was sure if i bought them god’s wrath would instantly smite me like the guy that touched the ark of the covenant so i piously kept walking.  

they also won’t let you enter a store if you’re carrying bags from a different store so you have to let the expired butter melt in your car while you rush around store #2 in the hopes of finding yogurt that’s not out-of-date.  even if you stomp your foot, hem and haw, show off a pregnant belly and stare them down with a determined look on your caucasian face they won’t budge.  there’s an armed guard at the front of every store so you just can’t win that argument.  i have yet to discover what the heck is that valuable in the lowsy grocery store.  maybe it’s the onions due to rot in 12 hours.

this is why i wish they would do us all a favor and use preservatives.