But there’s my dilemma. Life isn’t just about the good stuff; bad creeps in occasionally too. And how am I to handle that bad stuff online? I faced that question last March when my dad passed away, and I’m facing it again now. Not knowing how much I want to reveal, I’ve opted so far to say nothing at all. But that hasn’t really been working. There’s a difference between not disclosing every little thing and intentionally holding back the most important thing. Holding back the most important thing feels not only dishonest but also uncomfortable. And so I guess (at least for me) that’s when a lowlight becomes scatter-worthy.

Here’s what has been going on.*

January 1: Andy found a lump that he promptly had examined by the Embassy doctor, who didn’t think it was anything serious.

January 3: The doctor arranged for blood tests and a sonogram to be done in Cotonou just in case.

January 4: The results were analyzed both by the Embassy doctor and the Regional Medical Officer; neither thought there was cause for worry. Still, Andy and I remained concerned. My dad’s fairly recent death of throat cancer was fresh in my mind, and Andy lost his mom when he was little to colon cancer too. To us, a lump meant cancer, and the possibility of cancer — however tiny — was too serious to ignore. Fortunately the Regional Medical Officer approved a medevac for Andy for further evaluation. Flynn and I were approved to fly back the the U.S. too.

January 10: We arrived in D.C.

January 11: Within the first five minutes of Andy’s appointment, a urologist at George Washington University diagnosed him with testicular cancer.

January 12: Andy underwent surgery to get rid of two cancerous tumors. They were sent for biopsy to determine specifically what kind of cells they contained.

January 18: Andy had a CT scan to see whether and where the cancer had spread.

January 20: Nine days after the diagnosis of cancer — awful days of waiting, worrying, and fearing the worst — the results from blood tests, biopsy, and CT scan were finally all in. And the news was good. In fact, given the circumstances, it was the best possible news we could have received: his cancer was both the less dangerous kind and was caught before it had spread anywhere else. The survival rate for this sort of thing (with proper follow-up care) is essentially 100%.

We are all so happy, especially this little one who actually just moved on from his incessant muttering of “Mama” to a brand new word: “Dada.” Coincidence? I think not.

Though we have the diagnosis and prognosis, there are still many unknowns.

What follow-on treatment will we decide is best? Andy might undergo a low dose of radiation or chemo to slash the odds of recurrence from 15% down to virtually none, or he might just have CT scans and blood tests regularly for the next few years to monitor the situation, and only go the radiation or chemo route if that becomes necessary. (Because his cancer was the less dangerous, slow growing kind, this is perfectly safe.) When we decide on the best follow-on treatment, how long will it take? And what will I do work-wise during that time? After treatment, will Andy be medically cleared to return to Cotonou, or will I have to find an assignment somewhere else? What will become of Andy’s spot on the Foreign Service Register? Appointments Monday and Tuesday with an oncologist and then a radiation oncologist will allow us to start tackling these unknowns.

For now, we’re focusing on the one thing we do know: when all is said and done, it looks like Andy will be okay.

* Posted with Andy’s okay, of course. He says hello and thanks for reading, but he’s still enjoying the “I have cancer” excuse to justify lazing around all day and basking in decent bandwidth and the wonders of Hulu; as a result he has no free time to actually compose a blog entry himself.

Further information from a really interesting article about Coke’s presence on the continent: ”In Africa, most soft drinks are sold in returnable glass bottles. In Coke’s plants they are refilled as many as 70 times each before they’re recycled, depending how far the bottler chooses to stretch the glass. Returnable bottles help keep prices down so the company can reach more of what it calls ‘economically diverse’ customers. Consumers, in effect, pay only for the liquid in the bottle.”

You pay for the liquid in the bottle if you drink the Coke on site and leave the bottle behind, which a lot of people do. But if you want to bring the bottles home with you, you must buy them. Bottles are sold by crates of 24, like this:

When empty, you bring your crate back to one of many bottling shops around town where you swap your empty bottles for freshly filled ones.

And freshly filled ones are delicious, if I do say so myself. There’s nothing like soda from a glass bottle (not to mention real sugar rather than corn syrup), which is why we’ve already consumed, well, quite a few. We’ve been saving the bottle caps, and I’m a little scared to see how many of them we have by the end of our two years here…

Much to my surprise, the yelling did not stop at the sight of me. The women did not apologize and, embarrassed, stumble back to their separate jobs, as I would have expected. Instead, the screaming intensified. I was here to act as judge. They would each present their case and I could decide which of them was truly awful.

She locked me out of the bathroom. She acts like she’s too good to eat any food I cook. She only cooks food she knows I won’t eat. She doesn’t say hello to me in the morning. She purposefully slams the door loudly so the baby will wake up. Such accusations – each of which was accompanied by a long and convoluted story — continued for a half hour, me watching the whole scene wide-eyed just as Flynn had been before.

Let me be perfectly clear. This wasn’t a lively discussion. It was screaming. Thirty minutes of it — of two grown women, screaming like children.

Finally Flynn started fussing. “Sorry,” I said, “I need to feed him.” I hustled off to the kitchen to prepare a bottle, relieved that I had an excuse to extricate myself from this awful situation that for some inexplicable reason I hadn’t extricated myself from before. However, the women and their screaming followed. I let it continue for ten minutes before I finally interrupted.

“Okay,” I said slowly, in my rusty French. “Here’s what I want to say. I know my French is not perfect, but I understand the majority of what you’re telling me. It seems there are a lot of problems between you two. I don’t need to know all the little details about these problems. What I want to know is this: what are you asking from me?”

They both stood silent for a moment before the conversation began again – slowly and calmly this time, in a manner that made me think my question would soon be addressed. But before long voices and tensions rose, and then again I was simply listening to screamed accusations. This time they were mostly coming from the nanny. The housekeeper comes to work late. She leaves for three hours in the middle of the day. She doesn’t work unless you’re here to see.

The housekeeper began to defend herself, but at this point I was done. I didn’t care about who was or wasn’t telling the truth. I cared that this argument was happening in front of my son and that I’d somehow allowed it to continue this long in my presence.

“Look,” I said, “I’m done for today. It’s a holiday weekend. I came home early to spend time with Flynn. I’m done listening. And you are both done working. We’re all done.”

And with that I took my baby upstairs to his room where I stayed until both of them left. Is this what it had come to? Hiding out in my own home? I decided at that moment that I could not leave Flynn in a house with two women who so obviously hated one another. Even if there was no future screaming (which I doubted) there would certainly be tension, and that wasn’t okay. One of them would have to go, and although the nanny certainly wasn’t blameless in this fight, it couldn’t be her. Flynn loved her, and we liked and trusted her. This whole thing seemed very out of character. The housekeeper, on the other hand, had never been great. I would never fire her based on the nanny’s accusations, but a lot of the nanny’s accusations confirmed suspicions we already had.

When Andy came home and heard the story, he agreed. After the holiday weekend we talked with Human Resources at the Embassy to learn about the process for letting someone go. Then, after work, we braced ourselves for a difficult conversation. Andy felt sick as we waited for the housekeeper to finish her shower. I paced around in the kitchen. Neither of us has been in a position before to so negatively impact another person’s life. We felt awful about it. We wanted to change our minds, but we didn’t because we felt more awful about the idea of not doing right by Flynn.

Let’s just say the conversation did not go well. There were objections and protests. “I don’t accept this,” she said, throwing the letter we prepared back at us. Then her kids peeked their heads into the doorway. Her kids being at our house so often without our knowledge or permission was one of the problems, but still, I didn’t want to fire anyone in front of their kids. But they stayed. Then she called her husband, and he came over too.

She asked how she was supposed to feed her kids without a job — with those very kids standing right there, staring at me. Rationally I reminded myself that she quit her last job with an Embassy family because she didn’t like the work conditions, so if she were really concerned with feeding her family she probably wouldn’t have done that. I knew her husband had a stable job with another Embassy family. I knew we gave her a generous Christmas bonus as well as a generous severance. Rationally, I knew we gave her plenty of buffer to find a new job and that we did all we could to make sure those kids were fed.

We tried our best to explain our position. We apologized. But after an hour of explanations and protests, again, we decided we were done. “This is not a conversation for the whole family,” Andy finally said. “And it’s not a negotiation. We have already made our decision. It’s done.”

In the week since then, there has been a noticeable difference in the mood at our home. The nanny is clearly happier. Even though we now have to cook our own dinners and do our own dishes, we feel far less stress in the evenings. And, interestingly, the house is really just as clean as always. Letting the housekeeper go was the right decision my kid — I’m sure about that — so why can’t I help but think about hers?

We kept Andy’s family Christmas Eve tradition of chili, and then my Christmas morning tradition of cinnamon rolls. Usually we opt for the ready-to-bake variety, but this year out of necessity we went the homemade route. After a record-breaking four hours of present opening on Christmas morning (open a few presents, deal with baby meltdown, repeat) we took a long nap before dinner with the Embassy crowd. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the beach, as is local tradition. That still just seems wrong.

These lovely little bungalows have porches looking out on the ocean. Unfortunately this time around we picked a room on the lagoon side of the resort. We’d heard the ocean side was nicer, but we didn’t really care whether our windows looked out to lagoon or ocean. However, we hadn’t known that the rooms on the lagoon side don’t have porches. Darn. Lesson learned.

A waving red flag told us that it wasn’t safe to swim in the ocean, but that was okay because there were three pools surrounded by lounge chairs. Even better.

Bar service was available at the pool, and then meals were served at this outdoor restaurant. I enjoyed a delicious seafood pasta that wasn’t even all that overpriced.

Since we stayed for less than 24 hours this time around we only enjoyed the pool, but there are also canoes, kayaks, tennis, mini golf, bikes, four-wheelers… plenty to do to fill a weekend.

While nice, it’s not exactly a four-star resort. (The management realizes they should supply shampoo in the bathrooms, but it comes in tiny bottles that have clearly been used again and again for years, for instance.) Still, we’ll take it. We’re already planning another longer visit  in February when my mom is in town. And yes, we’ll be shelling out the extra $20/night for a porch where we can sit listening to crashing waves.

Well, guess what!

I was out grocery shopping yesterday at Erevan, the giant supermarket I’ve written about before, and what did I find? Santa! Flynn was home with Andy, but I high tailed it out of there immediately to fetch him. Back at Erevan, we produced this beauty, which is possibly the most amazing first Santa picture there ever was, if I do say so myself:

Foreign Service friends, can you compete? If we stick with this career path I imagine there will be many more non-traditional milestone pictures to come.

Andy’s over in the corner ordering pizza — surprise, surprise.

Those of you reading in the United States cannot possibly appreciate how amazing it is to have a restaurant that looks, well, like this:

It’s definitely a nice respite from ordinary life in Benin, which entails things like, oh, having to navigate through a herd of cows.

Score one for the cows then, but score one for us later as we ate delicious, delicious burgers. They were much tastier than the pizza, but since the pizza is half the price of other pizza options in town, we’ll probably be eating it again too.

Flynn isn’t old enough yet for Santa, so there’s no need for a big reveal on Christmas morning. Because of this our tradition for now is to place gifts under the tree as they arrive in Amazon boxes or care packages from grandparents. They serve as our holiday decoration.

As the pile of wrapping paper- and ribbon-covered boxes grows into a mound, we’ve both started to feel a little uncomfortable about it. We can’t help but see it through the eyes of the two Beninese women who work in our house every day and are watching it grow right alongside us. Marie, Flynn’s nanny, helps open up and then break down the boxes. Bernadette, our housekeeper, is careful not to disturb the presents as she mops the floors. Both women have children themselves, and while I don’t know what Christmas mornings look like at their homes, I’m fairly confident their piles of presents are a little different.

Last night before she left for the day Bernadette made a comment about the gifts. I think she said something about it being a lot of presents for one little baby, but I couldn’t totally understand her French over Flynn’s crying and Abbey’s barking. I asked her to repeat herself but by then she thought better of it. Instead she just shook her head and said never mind, that see would see me on Monday.

It was after I told Andy about that exchange that he asked if we should maybe move some of the presents to a closet.

We’ve never been entirely comfortable being on the more fortunate side of the “have” and “have less” divide. There’s a lot of guilt. When I feel sorry for myself for working long hours, I remember that however long I work, Marie, who is taking care of Flynn while I’m gone, is working longer. And her salary, while generous by local standards, is a miniscule fraction of mine.

Now I feel guilty about the presents too. While the pile isn’t necessarily excessive by American standards – especially since my mom readily admits she went for quantity over quality, and that many of the gifts are garage sale finds – it must seem ridiculously extravagant to Marie and Bernadette. (And just wait until they see the finished pile; there are an embarrassing number of packages still on the way.) I imagine they consider their own children and think it’s not fair.

I agree. It’s not fair. In my opinion, little about wealth is. There’s a small element of intelligence and hard work that factor into the mix, but I believe luck of the draw in terms of what position in society you are born into and what breaks you get in life play much bigger roles.

While I was living in New York City I tutored a young boy on Manhattan’s notoriously wealthy Upper East Side. His parents, while smart and hardworking, were no more smart and hardworking than me. Yet they were born into a very different faction of American society than myself, raised in a small farming down in the Midwest. After our sessions his mom would make small talk with me, trying to treat me like a peer. She’d compliment something I was wearing and ask where it came from. “Oh, T.J. Maxx? I love that store!” she would say. I knew perfectly well that nothing in her closet came from T.J Maxx. People who live in 10 million dollar townhouses don’t shop at T.J. Maxx, and that’s okay. It didn’t make her a bad person. If I were in her position I would probably shop wherever she did too. It wasn’t that she had money that irritated me but that she tried to pretend that she didn’t.

The other thing I remember about that mom is that she was generous, but not to a point that felt like pity. When it came time to calculate my hours and write me a check, she always rounded up. When the holidays rolled around, she would think of me in her gift-giving, offering a present that was special and not something I would or could have bought for myself, but also not embarrassingly extravagant. I appreciated that.

Come to think of it, I had been modeling that mom’s behavior in my treatment of Marie and Bernadette. I round up when calculating their overtime. I gave holiday bonuses and have ordered gifts to give their children, things my Beninese colleagues suggested the kids would appreciate – a doll for Bernadette’s young daughter, a Nerf gun for her young son, and nice backpacks for Marie’s two teenagers.

But unfortunately I now see that I’ve also been modeling the less-than-ideal behavior of that mom, trying to pretend like we are all in the same boat. I should stop asking them for suggestions about restaurants or weekend activities; I’m probably not going to go to the same places they do, and I should stop trying to pretend otherwise. I’m not fooling anyone. And I wouldn’t be fooling anyone by moving Christmas presents to the closet. This is my reality right now, and as long as I’m generous and kind to those around me, that’s nothing to feel guilty about (or so I keep telling myself).

Besides, wealth is relative. Marie and Bernadette both have food to eat and roofs over their heads, which makes them a lot better off than many. In certain situations perhaps they feel guilty for having so much. As for me, while I’m on the “have” end of the spectrum today, that could change quickly — as quickly as receiving an onward assignment to, say, Paris.

After a while conversation drifted to online shopping.

“Where do you get the best price on multi-grain Cheerios? Netgrocer?”

“Has anyone found a site that sells double-stuffed Oreos? Amazon only has regular ones now.”

“You know what you should really get for lunches? Annie Chun’s noodles. They’re so much better than that Ramen crap.”

One of the privileges we enjoy as diplomats is access to the diplomatic pouch. We can ship online purchases to a warehouse in Dulles, Virginia, and then the government transports it across the Atlantic for us for free. There are a few restrictions – no liquids, nothing huge or excessively heavy – but it’s still an extremely useful service. In addition to buying our favorite non-perishable food item we can keep up on American culture through magazine subscriptions and Netflix rentals.

As we Embassy workers exchanged online shopping tips, the nonprofit employee – who doesn’t of course have diplomatic pouch privileges — couldn’t help but shake her head and laugh. “Really? You guys can’t live without multi-grain Cheerios? You know they sell cereal at grocery stores here, right?”

“Yes but those cereals and bad, and so expensive too,” someone retorted.

“And noodle soups? Seriously? You know, you can just walk outside and order some Beninese stuff on the street.”

Of course she was absolutely right, and as I saw her reaction to our lifestyle I couldn’t help but think back to my experience as an exchange student in Niamey, Niger. I’d crossed paths with the Embassy crowd back then and had looked down at them for just the sort of conversations I was now engaging in. They seemed to be living in an American bubble, completely uninterested in local culture. I remember thinking: what was the point of living abroad if you were just going to recreate your life in America?

And now here I was, doing exactly that. That double-stuffed Oreos question? That one came from me. I watch American TV on the American Forces Network stations the government set up in my house.  I take my People magazines with me to the beach. I teach my cook to make tacos and lasagna.

Before I committed to being a Foreign Service Officer, I asked a friend from that semester in Niger who was now a diplomat himself whether it was possible to approach oversees life just like we had as students. Could I eat local foods? Could I spend my free time with local people? Could I entertain myself however the locals did? “Of course,” he assured me. “There are people who build American bubbles around themselves, and there are people who don’t. It’s really your choice.”

Today is the fourth-month anniversary of our arrival in Benin. It’s an interesting time marker for me, because it’s the exact same amount of time I spent in Niger. Yet after four months in Niger I was fully integrated into the community. I felt so at ease that even now, 11 years later, I look back on those four months as some of the best in my life.

And after four months in Benin? Well, I still think of myself as a newcomer.

I’m fully aware that it’s my own fault. Do I eat local foods? Not very often, because they sometimes make me sick, and I can’t deal with being sick when I have 12-hour workdays to get through. Do I spend my free time with local people? Well, no. I have a kid – I’d rather spend my free time with him. Do I entertain myself as locals do? No, I don’t do that either. It’s exhausting to navigate traffic and crowds to get to the non-expat side of town. I can’t spent my free time doing things that are exhausting; I need to build back my energy to return to work.

Being abroad as an employee and a parent is a different beast than being abroad as a student. I can’t sit around all did drinking tea under a baobab tree; I have a job to do. I can’t venture off to a giant labyrinthian market on a whim; I have a baby’s safety to consider. Still, those things don’t explain everything. That America nonprofit worker has a demanding job too, and some of her colleagues with similarly demanding jobs have kids on top of that. Yet they are still better integrated into Beninese culture than most of my Embassy colleagues. Why?

The reason, I think, is because we don’t just have any job; our job is to serve the interests of the United States of America. That’s why we get paid to spend time between tours just hanging out in the U.S. If we forget what it’s like to be an American, then we have no business being American diplomats.

At the same, I think it’s important for American diplomats to show a willingness to embrace our host cultures. There was a big uproar a few weeks ago surrounding the U.S. Ambassador to Laos who made a bit of a fool of herself by rapping in Laotian. Yes, she looked silly. But I maintain she did more for Laotian-American relations by joining in than she would have sitting stiffly in the audience in a freshly pressed suit. I was surprised not to see a single blogger or editorialist come to her defense.

All that is just to say that I still do hope to bust out of my self-created American bubble more when Flynn’s a bit older and I’m a bit less tired, because I do think it’s important. But at the same time, I’m also not going to let myself feel guilty about my People magazines or double-stuffed Oreos. I’m an American, after all, and it’s even more important that I don’t forget that.

And as for that nonprofit worker who didn’t understand the Embassy crowd’s preoccupation with 0nline shopping, well, she gladly accepted my invitation to watch her favorite NFL team on my American TV channel. We all have our guilty pleasures.