We don’t encounter a lot of shopping carts in Benin, so sue me. But trust me, I can drape a mosquito net like a pro.

It’s been over two weeks now, and I have no idea where they are. Rumor has it that my boy owner might not be back for quite some time, and let’s be honest, we all know he’s my favorite (I could do without the other two, frankly).

Last thing I knew we were all together enjoying a nice family Christmas.

Then, boom, gone.

What did I do to deserve this?

I suspect it might have something to with that new miniature owner. But you all need to understand that it doesn’t count as stealing his food if he is the one to reach down to give it to me! And licking it off his face? Well, once it’s on his face it’s no good to him, now is it? I’m just helping. And yes, sure, one time I accidentally bit his hand going for a cracker, but it was a mistake and I served my time out in the yard and learned a valuable lesson.

If you want to know the truth, my owners have not paid enough attention to me since that little guy came along. So really, I should be the ones punishing them. But I miss them anyway. The lady who usually tags along with the little guy is here tagging along with me now. She lets me sleep under the covers with her so I guess she’s alright. And I hear she also saved me from having to go live in a house with other dogs, because she knows how much I hate other dogs. So that’s good at least, but I’d still like my owners to come back, even the little one. Please tell them that whatever I did, I’m very sorry.

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?

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.

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.

Not only did we get a new embassy couple three weeks ago, but they happened to be assigned to a house just down the street from us, so we finally know some neighbors. And as if two new faces weren’t enough, another new officer arrived just this past week too.

The guy that just arrived is in the shell-shocked “it’s so cool to finally be here and see all this new stuff, and I have so much adrenaline to keep me running” phase. I remember that phase fondly — it’s what allowed us to cram our first weekend full of more activities than we managed in the subsequent month. It was before we realized how overwhelming our jobs would be, how overwhelming combining them with a newborn would be, and how overwhelming mixing all that with navigating a new culture would be. The others, the couple who have been here three weeks now, are likely in the “what in the world have we gotten ourselves into” phase. I hope for their sake they don’t linger in that phase as long as we did.

In other news, related only in so much as it also pertains to something else that’s new:

Flynn can crawl! Well, “crawl” might be a bit generous. Andy prefers the word “creep” to describe his sometimes up on all fours but sometimes snakelike slithering movement across the room. But still, if he sees something he wants, he no longer needs our help to get to it. For better (toys) or worse (remote controls, cell phones, power cords, Abbey’s tail…).

The American Forces Network, or AFN, gives us access to American programming while we’re overseas. This is particularly nice since we live in a country where streaming anything over the internet is almost impossible. Even though we only get 3 channels (and our jealous of certain co-workers who get 10), we appreciate that we get some prime time programming and can count on having access to major sporting events.

Sometimes we question AFN’s programming choices (Big Brother three times per week? The Buffalo Bills every Sunday?) but ask anyone what they think about AFN and the first thing they’ll mention will be the PSA’s. You see, instead of commercials, we get PSA’s, mostly produced by the military, but sometimes by other groups.

So far we’ve learned:

• Shaking your baby is bad.
• You should never post personal information on the internet.
• Applying for citizenship for your baby is a long and complicated process.
• You should dress nicely when overseas so you make a good impression.
• Traffic and recycling laws are different all over the world.
• If you only have a limited about of time to use the internet at a library, write down all the things you want to do in advance so make the most of your time.
• Gary Sinise believes people might know him primarily from his musical endeavor, The Lt. Dan Band.

Because we get PSA’s instead of commercials, we’ve certainly learned a lot, but unfortunately, we have no idea what movies are playing.

I like my hair long, but only when I can blow dry it. Since Flynn arrived that hasn’t happened. In the first few months I was just too busy. Who has time for that when there’s a baby crying to be fed or burped or held? By the time I started work, skipping the hair drying became more of a choice than a necessity. Flynn no longer needs constant attention, but since I’m away from him for at least 11 hours a day already, I want to give him attention whenever I possibly can. Our morning play time is probably the best part of my day, so I’m not going to sacrifice even five or ten minutes of it just so my hair looks better. Hello, ponytail.

So, my hair’s been kind of a mess lately. Today, driving past a salon, I made an impulsive decision to just cut it all off. Had I made this decision in advice I could have brought along some pictures or looked up some haircutting vocabulary, but with none of that at my disposal I went with a simple straight across cut, at a hopefully very fast air drying shoulder cut length.

How does it look?

Well, according to at least one person, hilarious:

Click here.

Imagine this continuing for fifteen minutes, because it did.