We arrived to the hotel in Agra. We spun around, amazed at what we considered a spacious room. “Look!” I exclaimed, “complimentary water! And snacks!” A few minutes later she emerged from the bathroom. “This is a classy joint; they gave us toiletries – shampoo, conditioner, dental kits, the works! And, an extra roll of toilet paper!”

At that point, we both burst out laughing. We realized we had been traveling for too long in developing countries when we get excited about the presence of adequate toilet paper in the bathroom.

Arriving back to the hotel after an intense working dinner (and more computer problems) we walked up to our rooms, discussing the plans for the next day. It was already 1 am and we were due at our first meeting at 7:30 am. Oh, sleep. How I miss you. We got to her room first. She inserted the card key and the light on the door flashed red. Not again. It seemed like every time we left our rooms, our keys wouldn’t work. I tried my key in my room, which was next door to hers. Red lights flashed.

We walked back down to reception to have our key cards re-keyed. After four days of this, she had reached her limit (I was simply beaten). “Enough of this! How come every time we leave our room our keys don’t work?” The desk clerk smiled and wagged his head. “Ma’am, when the other person uses the key, it disables your key.” My colleague and I turned to each other in amazement. “Then what’s the use of giving two keys? Each of us has a roommate. There are two keys for each room. Why would you disable one if the other is used? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He smiled again, immune to her criticism. “It’s for security purposes, ma’am.” She started to issue a retort, but thought better and simply sighed.

India always wins.

While in India, I contracted both a stomach virus and a computer virus. Unfortunately, I was offline for over a week. Fortunately, I was near a relatively clean bathroom. For some unknown reason, the hotel stocked its bathrooms with quarter rolls of toilet paper.

India always wins.

The travel agent assured me it would be easy. She booked my tickets, all I had to do was go to the Indian Airlines ticket counter in the Delhi airport, have my tickets printed, and pay for them. The reservation was there — what could be simpler?

Just about anything.

I left my luggage with a colleague. The driver who picked us up led me outside, up a flight of stairs, over some scaffolding, and down a narrow hallway. This was the ticket office? It was. I explained what I needed. The agent nodded and pointed for me to sit down. After sitting there for several minutes, the driver asked how long it would take. The agent explained he couldn’t issue tickets there, that he could only issue emergency tickets, of which mine was not. As we left the office, I wondered why he told me to sit down and wait.

After checking into the hotel and sleeping for a couple of hours, I booked a taxi to the Indian Airlines office in town. I entered and was handed a number. 80. I was ushered to a huge, dark room on the right. I noticed that number 64 was being helped. I settled in for a wait, determined not to get impatient. I listened to my iPod, took a nap, studied the men around me. Interesting, there were no women here. An hour and a half later, 80 was called. I walked up to the counter and smiled. I explained my needs, he shook his head and said, ‘Wrong room. International tickets are across the hall.” “But, but, but…” I stammered. “They told me to come here.” He looked at me and shrugged. “Sorry. You need to go across the hall.”

Lesson number one: India always wins.

I walked across the hall, where there was no number system. I worked my way up to one counter. The old, unengaged woman pointed to another counter. I went over there, trying to balance politeness and aggressiveness. The young woman pointed me to another counter. I went to that counter and simply stood there. When there was a vacant seat, I took it, expecting to be told to go somewhere else. But I wasn’t! The woman helped me for over 45 minutes, in between talking on the phone and chatting with co-workers. I couldn’t believe it took me over 3 hours to get three short segments of a flight issued that were already reserved.

However, I didn’t get upset. I simply remembered: India always wins.

I arrived to India at 1 am in the Mumbai airport. As I walked off the plane, a warm gust of wind enveloped me. In a daze, I walked through the airport. Or, rather, walked around the lines, and lines, and lines, trying to figure out how to maneuver to catch my flight to Delhi. I wasn’t worried; I had three hours before my connecting flight took off.

A young turbaned man began talking to me in one of the lines. He was coming back from the UK, where he studied, to visit his family. He was an engineer, and would start a job in Panama soon. We stood in the security line together, talking awkwardly. I had to ask him to repeat several sentences; he had to do the same. Suddenly all women were pulled from the line to go through a special security line, attended to by female security guards.

I passed through this checkpoint, then another, then another, before entering the boarding area, mere minutes before my flight was to depart.

In the Delhi airport, while waiting for my checked luggage, my turbaned friend approached me. We chatted more. He was surprised to learn this was my first visit to India. His one piece of advice: “Don’t let the lines get you down.”

Whenever we work in our in-country program offices, we somehow feel we can accomplish double what we normally would. What normally happens is that the last night in-country, we end up working ridiculously late then crashing on the plane en route to the next destination.

This trip was no exception. My colleague and I worked at the office until about 1:30 am the night before/morning of our departure. We called a taxi to take us from the office to the hotel. As we entered, the driver, somewhat surprised, said, “Leaving work now?”

We laughed and I said, “Yes, we are working a bit late tonight.”

He guffawed. “Ack! Not a bit late. This is LATE. No bit about it.”

The inspector called and demanded I come to his office in Pretoria to file an oath regarding a police case that I’m part of in South Africa. I was sitting with our lawyer in her Jo’burg office; it was physically impossible for me to get to his office before it closed. I turned to her, “Can you help me deal with this? I’d like to make an appointment for tomorrow, but our phone communication skills aren’t exactly happening.”

She took over. Evidently her phone communication skills with the inspector weren’t much better.

I arrived the next day to Inspector Pitja’s office at the agreed upon time. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I knocked harder. Still no answer.

I called his cell phone.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” he demanded.

Trying not to cop attitude, I replied, “Outside your office door, at the police station. I thought we were meeting at half past eleven.”“DON’T MOVE!”

He arrived minutes later. Being in a standard, no frills government building, watching this man in front of me in a purple silk shirt, sporting an afro, I felt as though I was in a made-for-tv movie from the 70’s.

“SIT!” he instructed my colleague and me. We sat on the hard, straight backed wooden chairs in the office that wasn’t much larger than a closet. A small closet, at that. I looked at the faded, mint green, standard government color walls, flakes peeling in one corner. The inspector stood behind his desk, flipping through mountains of paperwork, looking for our particular case. Once found, he stared at me with bulging eyes and said, “NOW. YOU WRITE AFFIDAVIT. YOU KNOW HOW, RIGHT?”

“Actually, no, I don’t. What information needs to be included?”

He didn’t answer me for a moment, simply staring, not comprehending how I could NOT know how to write an affidavit, that process that takes up so much of his time. He began flipping through our fat file. “WHERE IS THAT FUCKING AFFIDAVIT?”

I took great care not to look at my colleague. I knew if I did, I would start laughing, which could be considered inappropriate.

He found the affidavit and shoved it at me. “SEE. AFFIDAVIT.”

I held it, reading the statement of another colleague. I wondered, silently, if I really should be seeing what someone else testified. I obviously didn’t respond quickly enough for the inspector. In an exasperated voice he shouted, “AFFIDAVIT. WRITE IT. I, LORI MCLEESE, PASSPORT NUMBER, DOOT DE DOOT DOO DOO, AT RESIDENCE DOOT DE DOOT DOO DOO, SWEAR DOOT DE DOOT DOO DOO…” As he shouted, he held his hands up near his shoulders, flipping them over with each syllable of doot de doot doo doo.

The laughter bubbled dangerously close to coming out.

“YOU HAVE DEGREE!”

I wasn’t sure if this was a demand or a question. Hesitantly, I said, “Yes. In education.”

“THEN YOU WRITE AFFIDAVIT. NOW!”

I smiled. “Thank you. I’ll do that now.”

“HURRY!” he demanded as he gave me a sheet of tired lined paper and a ball point pen that had seen better days. “WRITE ALL YOU KNOW. I’M GOING TO DURBAN. I NEED TO FIND MY ACCOMMODATION, MAYBE SATISFACTORY, GET A BOTTLE OF WHISKEY. WRITE!”

I put pen to paper, following his doot de doot doo doo instructions as well as I could remember. He thrust the file at me again, opened to the page of the f$@#ing affidavit. “JUST LIKE THIS!”

And he left the room. My colleague and I dared to look at each other for the first time since entering the confined space. Laughter erupted. “Where are we and what are we doing?”

I scribbled as quickly as possible, wanting to get back to my office and allow Inspector Pitja to get closer to his bottle of whiskey.

He hurried back into the office.

“YOU SMOKE?”

My colleague and I both said no at the same time, as I continued to pen my affidavit.

“SO GOOD! THAT MEANS YOU GO TO CHURCH EVERY SUNDAY.”

My colleague, a Jew, and I, a non-practicing anything, looked at him hesitantly. Should we explain there is no correlation between church attendance and smoking? We smiled and I continued writing.

He lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out the window. A knock at the door and two other government officials entered. They dismissed us with only cursory glances as Inspector Pitja hurriedly extinguished his cigarette on the stacks of files on his overloaded wooden desk. I briefly stopped writing to consider how quickly the office would burn, given the solid wood furniture, the ton or two or paperwork stacked on the desk and in corners, and what appeared to be leaded paint. Probably would go up in flames pretty fast. I remembered we were on the third floor and made a mental note to jump out the window once I saw flames.

I continued writing.

His colleagues left. Inspector Pitja lit up the smashed cigarette. “FINISH!”

I smiled. “There is so much to write, sir. I am almost done.”

I concluded with the mandatory “This is true; I can state this with clear consciousness,” and the other doot de doot doo doo statements required before applying my signature.

I handed it to him, respectfully, with both hands. He took it, stared at it, then looked up and stared at me in silence for many uncomfortable seconds. I simply stared back, not smiling, not showing any emotion. Boisterous laughter ensued. “ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. THIS IS PERFECT!”

Only then did I smile. “Thank you. Thank you for your assistance. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

Only the meeting wasn’t over.

“THIS GOES TO CASE. I CALL YOU. YOU COME IMMEDIATELY! IMMEDIATELY I SAY!” and he pounded the small section of the desk not plastered with files.

“Um, I live in the United States.”

“I DON’T CARE! YOU COME IMMEDIATELY! IMPORTANT!”

Let’s try this again. I chose my words carefully. “I don’t live here. I live in another country. It takes a long time to get here. I am happy to go to court, but I would need a month notice to make the plane ticket.”

“FINE! TICKET, NO PROBLEM. BUT RIGHT AWAY. YOU DON’T WAIT!”

This meeting was over. In so many ways. I smiled and thanked him, wishing him safe travels to Durban and hopes that he found a bottle of whiskey to his liking.

Is surprisingly tender and delicious.

Is what our lawyer always says in exasperation. I find it surprisingly refreshing, just like the real thing.