Ok. I'm still here in Haifa. And so to keep this traveling blog a little bit more interesting than endless stories of me not going anywhere, tonight is going to be storytime. Tonight's story is about one of my heros. One of my Super-heros. Who I have met only once and chatted to for all of ten minutes. She's Super Velma.

I met Super Velma here in Haifa about a month ago. She was sitting on a little folding chair outside the small pilgrim house in the Baha'i gardens around the Shrine of the Bab and Abdu'l-Baha. It was around noon and she was sitting in the shade, enjoying the lovely afternoon, chatting and smiling and having a wonderful time. I found out later that she had been sitting there all morning, waiting for a friend of hers that had been unexpectedly tied up. When asked why she didn't find somewhere more comfortable to wait, she said simply "Could you think of a more wonderful place to spend the day? I'll stay right here thanks." Hard to argue with that.
Anyway, so I wandered over to chat and we got onto the topic of traveling. She said that she had been all over and I asked her for some highlights. There were many. Here are two of my favorites:
In 1971 she was living in Uganda and loving it. And then Idi Amin took over. Now, she was a US citizen and therefore needed a visa to stay in the country. She also needed a valid visa to leave the country without being arrested. Somewhere in the confusion of the military take-over and all of that, her visa expired. And being American and without a valid visa in Amin-run Uganda was not a pleasant thing to be. So she hid.
Now, at this point in the story I had to lean forward and ask, "sorry, you what?" thinking I couldn't possibly have heard her correctly.
"I hid," she repeated.
"Hid where exactly?"
"In Uganda."
She had been off in the villages when the coup had taken place and was too worried to go back to Kampala, and then once people began to understand what was happening she decided to stay where she was and hope that things got better. But they didn't. And so for 8 years Super Velma hid out in Uganda. Hiding in villages in the south west of the country. The family of a woman that works upstairs from me here in Haifa helped to hide Super-Velma during this whole adventure and when I asked her about Super-V she just laughed. Because in spite of the danger and the uncertainty, Velma was really enjoying herself. Making friends and hanging out.
After Amin was overthrown in 1979, Super-V left Uganda and continued on her merry way.

The second story was about the last place she had been before heading back to settle semi-permanently in the US a few years ago.(she's in Colorado Springs, about which she says, "It's so boring!"). She had been traveling around China when she came down with something that no one seemed to be able to identify. She checked into a hospital in some medium sized city (...sorry, I'm not so good with the city names) where there was only one doctor that spoke any english. He immediately told all of the nurses that she wasn't to be left alone as she was their guest and she should be well taken care of.
"You know," she said to me, smiling "at first it was flattering, they would come in to see me all the time, smiling and laughing. There were at least 2 nurses there all the time. Which I suppose was so they could at least talk to each other, since they couldn't talk to me." But I guess having hordes of Chinese nurses in your room chatting away to each other 24/7 in a language you can't understand can get a little tiresome. Especially since no one could figure out what was wrong and poor Super-V was slowly wasting away. But when she told the story of her endless days in the hospital and the endless tests of the baffled doctor, she smiled and she laughed and she expressed genuine regret that she couldn't have been more helpful to that doctor. "He was so nice to me, I just wish I could have let him figure out what was wrong." Eventually she was strong enough to jump on a plane and get whisked back to the US so she could be diagnosed with a thyroid condition and "sent off to boring old Colorado Springs." She was, at this point, about 70 years old. Or perhaps 75 (I'm guessing, I am far too much of a gentleman to have asked her age.)

And she told these stories in a gentle voice while her eyes shone and her hands danced in her lap. "You should travel while you're young and strong," she told me, and then after a pause, "and you should travel when you're old too, because being old is no excuse for slowing down." Looking at the deep creases in her face, her brilliant white hair and the cane leaning against her chair, I can see that she sure didn't slow down. But her traveling days are over now. This trip to Haifa was probably the last time she will be able to leave the US.
And I have no idea how to end this now. Other than to say that she was one of the coolest people that I've ever met. Super-Velma: Traveling super hero.