By Lorna Tychostup

There was a fly pestering me today. Sometime after my shower I was sitting in my kitchen by the window. The light is good there — good enough for me to pluck my facial hairs — a must if I am to go to the wedding at the Al Huda squat camp tomorrow. If I don’t take care of them, the women of the family that has adopted there will take care of them with the “string” method. You really don’t want to know. It IS painful, much more painful than the one-at-a-time tweezer pluck method I use ever since my first visit to the camp last Feb. When the women tried to usher me inside to remove my mustache hairs. The man I had gone there to interview arrived in the nick of time but later in the privacy of my hotel room my female translator, Amal, removed them with the special string method.

Anyway, as this fly was dive bombing me, I remembered the words I read in a book once, “Look to nature for the signs…” and wondered what this fly was trying to tell me. “What is coming?” I thought, always associating flies with death. “Will it be me?”