We recently drove down to Texas for a short spring break visit. On a remote back­road in south­ern Col­orado, a state trooper pulled me over and showed no mercy. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of pay­ing a shock­ingly high fine. My cal­cu­lated risk did not pay off.

Then I remem­bered back to the park­ing war­dens in Thame, Oxford­shire, Eng­land, where we lived from 1995–1998. That town of 11,000 peo­ple had a full-time park­ing enforce­ment offi­cer. When you arrived down­town, park­ing had to be paid for and no park­ing was free.

Be thank­ful that you can park for free — or that you’ve dri­ven for a while with­out being pulled over.

I am still tak­ing a break from blog­ging until 2012, but here’s another post you may have missed. This orig­i­nally appeared in my first blog on July 20, 2006. Con­text: I was liv­ing in Nairobi, Kenya, Africa. The rules of life are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent there.

A few weeks ago, a col­league asked me if I would stand in a police line-up. This friend had his iden­tity stolen here in Kenya. A South African white guy stole his credit card info (along with oth­ers’) and had made tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of purchases.

The police offi­cer said he didn’t know enough white guys to fill a line-up for wit­nesses to look at. So he asked my col­league if he could find some white men. (Thus, me, along with about eight other col­leagues.) My first reac­tion was, “What if the wit­nesses think I look more like the crim­i­nal than the crim­i­nal does? I don’t want to go to prison!” Then he assured me the offi­cer said there was no chance any of us non-criminals would be con­victed. Mostly I said yes because my other col­leagues did. I fig­ured if they thought it was safe, it prob­a­bly was safe.

In the end, we didn’t stand in a line, as the crim­i­nal chose the option of not stand­ing in a police lineup.

While we were wait­ing for things to get sorted out, the police offi­cer basi­cally said, “We trust you (white) peo­ple.” (And then he implied some­thing like, “This guy really ruined our perceptions!”)

The photo? The police offi­cer gladly gave me the oppor­tu­nity to take that shot. (You should always carry your cam­era!) Of note: he had a South African “Tem­po­rary Pass­port” (what­ever that is!) and a fake Cal­i­for­nia driver’s license (with the address on the card being, “Queen Rd TX” (Yes, that’s sup­posed to be “Texas”.) On the back of the “license” it said “Prop­erty of the US Government”.

The whole inci­dent really gave me a good feel­ing about the Kenyan police. They did a great job appre­hend­ing the crim­i­nal. Admit­tedly, he did some pretty stu­pid things, like try­ing to steal from the same shop three times. (The third strike was his out.)

And another thing he didn’t do was con­sider the con­se­quences of his actions. In the Nairobi news­pa­per on the same day as our line-up expe­ri­ence was this story, “Con­di­tions in [Kenyan] Pris­ons Worst in the World, says Official.”

I am indeed tak­ing a break from blog­ging until 2012, but I thought you would enjoy a post you may have missed. This orig­i­nally appeared on Jan­u­ary 5, 2011.

When Heather and I first went to Africa (1991), we were part of a 3-month-long train­ing pro­gram that was designed to help us love Africa. And adjust to liv­ing there. Part of our train­ing involved liv­ing with a fam­ily in rural Kenya for two weeks.

It was a stretch­ing time, to say the least. (We still keep in touch with one of the fam­ily mem­bers, which shows you it was a good experience.)

Any­how, they ate din­ner start­ing at about 9 pm. We were pretty tired by that time of the day, and lis­ten­ing to lively con­ver­sa­tion in Kikamba (their lan­guage) for sev­eral hours was not always our choice of a relax­ing way to end the day.

So one night about halfway through our time with the fam­ily, just before din­ner, Heather and I were chill­ing in our small room. Our guest knocked on the door to say it was din­ner­time. I went to din­ner alone. I said, “In our cul­ture, it is wrong to wake some­one when they are sleep­ing.” They bought it — after a lit­tle dis­cus­sion on my part.

I knew she needed a break.