Homecoming

I had a one-night layover in Dubai on my way home. I’d been booked into the airport’s palatial hotel, and once I dropped my bags off, I combed my hair, swiped some color on my lips, and headed to the Irish pub I’d seen on my way to Iraq, hoping that my luck with free drinks in Dubai would hold out. All I had in my pocket were some Iraqi dinars and my credit card, which I was loathe to use here. The bar was as smoky and enticing inside as it had seemed from the outside. I slid onto a stool, my elbows on the mahogany bar, my eyes on the price list. Shit. This place was too rich for me.

“What’ll ya have, miss?” the bartender asked, buffing the shine on a crystal glass. “I . . .” My fingers fumbled in my pocket and slid over my credit card. I hesitated. And the gods intervened.

“What do you fancy?” a tall, sandy-haired man asked, sliding onto the stool next to me. “On my tab,” he said to the bartender. My luck had held. God, I loved Dubai, a place where drinks were forever free.

I had two glasses—alright, maybe three—of white wine before slipping back into the maze of the airport and into my room in the hotel, where I slipped into a blissful bubble bath and between clean, crisp sheets in a real bed. Then I fell into the deep and satisfying sleep of the truly weary. I woke early; I was already wondering how the crisis in Liberia was faring. . . .

As it turned out, it was to Sudan that I would head the following winter when the government there backed a silent genocide against the rebels and the villagers who supported them in a remote, barely accessible region called Darfur.