Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

and a thin yoghurt-like drink. The rest of my family adored the cevapi, and
ordered it often in restaurants. When that happened, I would take a tomato
salad and pick at my fresh mozzarella while my family dug into their meat.
The other exception is an unnamed stuffed pepper that was served to me
when my family was having dinner with our landlady. Having been raised to
eat everything on my plate, I managed to get the entire, spicy, painful pepper
down my throat. Seeing I had finished, I was promptly furnished with a
second. Needless to say, I ignored the eat-all rule and didn’t touch that one.
Visiting a Parisian café, no one in my family could pass up the chance
when we noticed escargot on the menu. It came in a circular orange
container dotted periodically with holes. In each a snail floated in garlic
sauce. Except for a certain chewiness, they were delicious, and are by far
both the most outlandish and the most delicious meal I had overseas. Of
course, I may have been predisposed toward adventurous eating. When we
lived in Louisiana before going abroad, I, at the age of six, was one of the
few in the family who took to raw oysters with horseradish and Tabasco. It
was a point of pride with me that I had managed to down six or so in a row
when grown men beside me couldn’t swallow a single one. I suppose the
snails may have reminded me of shucking and sucking raw oysters down on
the bayou.
AI: In reading your non fiction piece, “Navy Blue,” some of us had feelings of guilt for
being unaware of other people’s suffering or of being born privileged. Do you deal with
guilt on a daily basis? When you returned from your travels back to the U.S. were there
any overwhelming feelings that existed for you?
ELP: Living in war zones was by far the most unsettling thing I have had
to do. As I mentioned before, I attended a Bosnian school for a few hours
every day as a second grader. To get to school, I’d go down our street, notice
the bullet holes in our wall, cross a Sarajevo rose or two (the imprints of a
mortar shell explosion that was later filled in with a red paint or resin as a
memorial) and pass the remains of a bombed building. My family walked
through the tunnels that the Bosnians dug in order to receive supplies when
they were under siege, and returned home to listen to our landlady tell us
stories of going down that tunnel nine times, each time loaded down with
50 kilos (110 lbs) of basic survival supplies on her back..
In Sudan it was even more direct. All around me I saw beggars in
the street, people making do with nothing. My brother always tried to
give money to every person he saw was in need, but when we moved to
Khartoum, if he took out a coin he had twenty children under the age of
eight clinging to his pant legs, pleading with him for food. Walking home
from school, we’d kick dust up into our eyes, pass a monkey tied to the
stunted palm tree across the street, and wave the flies away as we entered
the yard. We bowed our heads while we entered because soon after we
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