So often, John, you trigger a recovered memory. Here’s today’s:

The ambassador’s residence in Cameroon is in the capitol, Yaounde (one of the most romantic names I’ve ever heard), and therefore too far away from our posts to receive us for a welcome party. However, after a year, our two doctors insisted we come to the capitol for our end-of-the-first-year-check-ups because they wanted us to have chest x-rays, probably because we were smoking unfiltered Honey Bastos cigarettes noted for containing shreds of tobacco stems which didn’t burn or biodegrade, for that matter.

The lovely ambassador saw to locking his liquor cabinet, but one of us managed to jimmy it and we drank all his bourbon, 25-year-old scotch, and everything else that was in there. This after we’d been to dinner at what was supposedly the best restaurant in the city and ordered “all of the above” at the ambassador’s expense.

This Yaounde memory has now triggered another–the prank pulled off by the same guy who freed the ambassador’s liquor. We were supposed to stop off at the lab and give urine and stool samples. This volunteer took all our stool samples, dumped them out, and collected cow shit from the street and re-filled the cups. The next morning, our PC doctor told us we should all be dead.