The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2016 57 and down into the box. Uh oh! Watching the box from a safe distance until Dan returned, all aplomb lost, I kept trying to think of where in the Washington area you called to treat scorpion stings. Walter Reed? Did we have a phone book yet? Did the phone even work? “Oh, Dan,” I called, relieved he was back. “There’s a live scor- pion in the dish box. Let’s get the box into the carport to finish unpacking it. Here are tongs. Get the plates out. Carefully.” Dan lifted the plates piece by piece, looking under each one cautiously till the scorpion appeared, nestling itself under the last one. “You could sell something like that to the zoo,” suggested the van driver who was delivering the goods left in storage. “No, we need to kill it,” I declared. Which Dan did by squash- ing the box over it, firmly. “And burn the box. Now. Who knows how many eggs might be in there? We don’t need scorpions in our Virginia garden.” So he burned it at the bottom of the driveway. That took care of that. Bravery Above and Beyond Oh, yes, the giant cockroach up the loose dress? The time: 1960. The place: a reception at the home of the British deputy high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, then-Malaya. I had worked closely with his wife in a well-baby clinic sponsored by the women of St. Mary’s Anglican Church, so she and her husband were kind enough to invite us. Dan was the first third secretary the U.S. embassy had ever seen, and that night we were far and away the most junior of the diplomats and government officials at the reception. I could sense the disapproval emanating from the by-the-book, rank- conscious U.S. ambassador’s wife when we greeted her. We then went to find our ambassador. He was talking with the jovial Brit who was still head of the Malayan navy. Several months pregnant, I was wearing an elegant, loose- fitting party dress. As we stood in the middle of the crowded reception talking to the two men, I felt something crawling up what I assumed was the outside of the back of my dress. “Dan,” I whispered. “Please brush off the back of my dress.” He did so unobtrusively, but fruitlessly, so I said, “Please reach just inside the neckline and find whatever it is.” “It” was a huge cockroach. While Dan rushed to the open veranda door to evict the hitch- hiker, I carried on chatting as calmly as I could. The ambassador was clearly not amused. The head of the Malayan navy smiled broadly. Fishing a coin out of his pocket, he presented it to me as a “Royal Medal for Not Screaming: Bravery Above and Beyond.” n