The publishers of my first book asked if I would consider a trip back to Kenya to update for a larger second edition in 1999. I Immediately I set upon a plan to stay in Africa for two months, train with my old friends, and at a leisurely pace befitting the hot equatorial sun, take notes for the works. As, at a last minute notice, I was traveling with a woman, I agreed to take a millennium mini two-week holiday off the African coast, on an island called Zanzibar. A country that had often intrigued me for its exotic sounds, and its fame for spice.

Initially the planned break, for the millennium celebration, had been to hike up Mount Kilimanjaro. It is Africa's highest peak, yet an attainable climbing goal for a fit person without undue exertion. My friend in the nearby town of Arusha had the trip all planned, and a number of the local Moshi law enforcement, who policed the Mountain, were running comrades of mine. Being a running 'nut' this climb would be beneficial from all angles; I would remain at altitude, do something special on the millennium, and get a great experience to cap the year.

Then the problem arose, I knew the girl did not have the physical capabilities to hike at the rate I had planned. Zanzibar was thus a compromise. On reflection a dumb one too; the isle is nearly entirely Muslim populated, and the Muslims were not going to celebrate this event.

Kenya was great, from my point of view. We stayed with a friend of mine who had rented a 'luxurious' property. We had electric, and a trickle of running water! I was expecting much less, the girlfriend more. Tempers began to fray. Hair dryers were not an option, and the entertainment was somewhat rustic. The more she disliked the location, the further I fell in love with the surroundings.

However as I was running hard the days passed where no amount of bad will or verbal tirades could dull my optimistic mood. The research for the book was progressing better than I had dared to hope. A friend, and Champion of the World, Paul Tergat, lived a mile away and every time I visited his house to question him there was a slue of other athletes to query and quiz.

Leaving for Tanzania and the holiday break we traveled by bus from Nairobi to Arusha. It was in the relative comfort in a large and modern bus (as pictured at the ticketing office). The transport was too good to be true; I had again expected much worse. However, the 'much worse' arrived in the shape of a dilapidated bus for the second, and longer leg of the journey, from Arusha to Dar Es Salaam when we had crossed the border. At the marketplace in the town a ramshackle carriage over laden with cargo, passengers, and farm animals looked like a death trap of demonic proportions.

I am getting ahead of myself here, but at the borderline I had a strange premonition, that I should not go where I was going. But back to that day in Arusha town...

We stopped for the night in Arusha as the bus journey demanded. In the late afternoon we strolled up through the town towards Mount Meru. It was on this walk that my imagination began to wander.
I had remembered my friend Simon Robert Naali, the commonwealth games bronze medalist in the marathon 1990. Simon had become a friend through competitions we had run in Sweden; we both represented the same company, Saucony. By a freaky coincidence he had won that medal in a race that had inspired me to start running; as a 22-year 40-cigarettes a day heavy drinker my teeth had nearly fallen out of my mouth as I channel flipped and spied Carl Thackery running for England in the Games - I used to run with Carl as a nipper. So I begun running - the main duel was Simon leading the race for many miles.

In the mid nineties whilst he was back home and training for the Stockholm Half Marathon, Simon was thumped on the back of the head by a taxi-car wing mirror whilst running along a road. He bled profusely, went home to the village where medical supplies were lacking, and a few days later he died of a blood clot to the brain after, what was thought, a small recovery period.

I had stood looking at the great Mount Meru and imagined the fragility of life. I wondered how many times he must have run on these tracks in his home village. Simon had been instrumental in my interest of African running, not only had he run so well, invincible at times, but more than that he brought something much more to the table.

Zanzibar was fun, actually a welcome break from the running of endless miles I had been logging in Kenya. We hired a small motorcycle and incredulously managed to ride it over the rough northern roads on the island exploring the wildlife. I still kept up a basic running regimen, as was my habit, though it was jogging along the beach near the breathtaking shores of the turquoise Indian Ocean. Watching the royal blue Dolphins frolic and seeing the fishermen sit on the shore with pearly white teeth patching rough-hewn homemade nets. Fun things happened like I had to hurdle a mad lobster one day who came snapping and chasing me, or I would catch a glimpse of a wild monkey leaping from a tree, as if trying to run with my pace.

I had a favorite cafe called the Africa House, where one could look out at the Indian Ocean on a vaulted balcony and drink a cool beer; life was good.

On the 29th of December 1999, I was running along a secluded deserted beach just outside of Stone Town. It was a stunning run, the Sun was coloring the entire vista in a gold smattering of rays, even the dolphins that jumped from the sea were yellowed; I felt as if I could float along this beach forever.

Two men approached me with questioning eyes and huddled speech. They were dressed in rags and were conferring under their breath with each other. I clearly remember the jacket one man wore, with old pinstripes ingrained with age and dirt. I slowed from my run to a walk assuming they were coming to ask for help, or merely being friendly. It was blatantly obvious that I was their focal point, as only the sand and sea was around. The vista could have appeared on a postcard as that tropical desert island. I stopped and asked first in England, then in Swahili, "What do you want?"

I was gravely wrong in my decision to stop. When only a meter from me one man swiftly drew a large rusty machete knife hidden under the cover of his jacket. The blade was ugly and curved like a scythe. He quickly raised his hand and in a nanosecond I realized that I was the intended chopping block.
Instinctively my arm went up to stop the heavy blow. Blood flew as if from a shower nozzle through the air when the metal rammed and cut into my bone. At that moment the other man uncovered a long club, which looked like a homemade baseball bat, and whacked me over the head with tremendous force. I fell stunned to the sand.

Just moments later, I can now presume, I regained consciousness as they were trying to remove my right sneaker. My watch, sunglasses, and the left sneaker had been pulled from my body. I sprung up and attacked the man with the knife; instinct must have told me the blade was the greater evil. The other man hit me repeatedly with the club, the blows falling mainly on my back and shoulders. Somehow, through sheer anger and a dulled sense of not actually feeling that I was in the moment, I managed to take the knife. I dragged the blade from his hand.

Now the tide changed, they shrunk back as I yielded the knife. They were very upset about not getting the other shoe but they dared not to approach me. Ironically, I had sent boxes and boxes of mostly used running shoes to East African athletes over the last five years through a program I had developed whilst in Kenya during 1995/6 yet here I was arguing about one shoe!

"Give us the shoe", one yelled, the other asked for his knife(!) I stood my ground challenging them to approach me at their peril. I clearly recalled the absurd oddity they expected me to return the blade!

I was covered from head to toe in blood when they finally ran off. Not only me but also the surrounding sand was tinged with crimson. My wrist was awful; I could see the white bone with some stringy things that were severed sticking out by the bone. Obviously in a state of shock, I really thought my hand would fall off at any moment.

With my other hand I felt my head and realized that my skull was cracked and dented. It is a very odd sensation to run your hand along the contours of your skeleton and feel an oddity. Clotted blood was everywhere and my hair was a matted mess.

Oddly, I felt very at peace with the world and just wanted to lie down on the warm sand and go to sleep imagining the serene Indian Ocean gently bringing her tide in to swallow me up. I was very close to doing so. With a pounding head, I sat on the sand and started to lie back. A thought jolted my mind, survive - the chapter is not supposed to end here. I quickly got up with a sense of urgency for the first time in the whole episode. I removed my white 'Irish' singlet that had been a swapped gift from a friend of mine who (oddly enough) had persuaded me to go to East Africa for the first time five years ago) and tied it tightly round my wrist to act as a bandage. I then set off jogging, looking for help on the deserted shoreline.

I could not see very clearly at all, just images of dull color. I kept blacking out and nearly fainting, seeing stars and flashes of light. I could hear the Sea on my left, my bare left foot splashing over the wash of the tide. I knew I had only to jog two miles from where the hired bike had been parked. The only noise I heard was a zing ringing constantly in my head; almost a whining sound.

Miraculously throughout the attack, and I only became aware of it now as I ran, I had tightly held on to the bike ignition key, it had not been planned at all. I also had the machete, just in case the attackers returned.

I ran as I had never before, staggering and scared that with my elevated heartbeat the blood would pump ever faster from my body. It was very painful to run, I did not want to run, and then I wanted to run. I moved with this mental conundrum. My head ached and hurt in a fashion I could not describe, and I had a queasy feeling that I was close to losing so much blood that I would faint and bleed to death within the next stride or two.

I made out a big building after quite some time to my right and recognized it to be the old derelict presidential building. The bike that I had driven to reach this spot was nearby so I cut off stumbling through a garden and bush convinced any moment I would drop and faint. By now I could barely lift my legs and I had to half stumble to get through some thick grass and worse to follow, straddle a barbed wire fence.

Back at the bike, I waited for the girl friend that had been at the public park field. When she came towards me she stopped as in shock, she later recalled wondering why I was dressed all in red. My body was now awash with blood. The bike started the first kick (luck that I had the shoe for the kick start!) and I drove in a dangerous and terrible fashion after tying my wrist to the handlebars and slipping the clutch.

I went straight up the middle of the main road that led back into Stone Town. We passed cars on either side and I could barely see the center white line that I was taking for a direct guide back to town. I was trying to continually depress the horn as a warning to all around me, I cannot remember if I was successful or not but I must have been a sight to behold. Passing the local hospital the woman noted that it was closed for the day, just my luck.

Arriving in Stone Town a man on a bicycle pedaled up to our side and kindly offered to direct me to a medical clinic. I slowed the bike, the girl jumped off the back seat, and I virtually crashed the machine into the building after selecting a grating first gear. The power in my right hand was not sufficient to pull back the brake lever.

The clinic was an empty ramshackle house with bare gray concrete walls and a wooden bench. The time of the year was Ramadan and as luck would have it, the doctors had left to feast as the sun was now down. However, one nurse was on hand and she poured water over my head from a tin bucket, as I lay prone on the bench. The girl was crying in the corner with her hands clasped in prayer and the nurse kept on saying 'Oh my god, oh my god.'

I asked, only with a hope of hearing something positive to give me hope, how bad my condition was to the nurse and she said two words 'very bad.' She looked at me with the pity one bestows on a dying dog and again muttered, 'very bad.'

That I was a little rational and I felt so close to passing out made me believe I needed a blood transfusion, fearing the worst I called out that I would not have one and risk receiving infected blood. Little did I know the 'hospital' did not have such facilities! That became my quest, to remember to tell the Doctor, when he arrived, that I would not take any blood.

Finally, a cheerful doctor arrived and after hosing me down with another bucket of water, he laid me on the concrete floor. Apologizing for having no anesthetics he sewed my head and wrist up, and then put me to bed. No antibiotics either. "All I can do is wash the wounds, and stitch you up." I was led upstairs to a room with an army bunk. He made some joke about what he received from the Red Cross and it being nothing to do with medical supplies.

Soon after, I was left alone in the house. I did not sleep that night in that empty deathly quiet stone room. I lay and thought how stupid I was to have stopped running, why did I? I replayed the scenes repeatedly in my head, every time believing this sort of incident would never happen to me. I kept on thinking, 'wake up, it is only a dream, it has not happened, wake up.' Nevertheless, sadly I was not asleep. I shall not try to describe the pain in my head, suffice to say it was a constant reminder of the reality I was facing.

The following morning I got up and walked about, finding no one around I went down the stairs at the speed of a slug and shuffled out of the medical center into the bright heat of the day. I was completely disorientated and could hardly find my way back to the Dhow Palace hotel, my residence that was only a mere few hundred yards away. I must have asked for directions at least twenty times. I presumed I only needed rest before I would be fine again, but it was not to be.

I had lost copious amounts of blood and felt very weak. The task of any bodily movement needed a recovery pause. This I was expecting. Therefore, I resumed a normal life, but after a couple of days, I knew something was seriously wrong. We went to another doctor who intravenously fed me antibiotics and cleaned up the wounds. "For a head wound it could be dangerous for infections..." I was told, no arguments there!

It was an Indian Father and Son, the Mehta's, and they became my rocks. 'Baba has brought you to me, it is fate," the elder man, Gaurang said speaking of the Indian God in whom he believed and based his faith upon, "All things happen for a reason." Although he left me searching at that time, it was indeed true. I would revisit the nightmare again to reach the truths that was later to be revealed.

Meanwhile the woman was becoming very irritated with my behavior. She kept telling me that she felt as she was in prison, and this was possibly the worst holiday of her life.

She thought that I was suffering from depression and should just 'snap out of it'. When I wanted to lie in bed she would harass me and tell me to accompany her out to the town, "Do you want me to go alone and get attacked too? Will that make you happy?" Or on other occasions she yelled for me to "Be a man" and take her out to dinner. I had barely the strength or will to stand let alone walk.

I would dress in pain and silence, descend the three floors of double stairs, and walk across the town with her to a restaurant. When telling her I did not want to eat, she would accuse me of being obstreperous, difficult, and anti-social. We would traipse back to the hotel where she would order herself room service and I would lie on the bed dreading the next night when we would invariably act out the charade again. Life was not so enjoyable at this point.

I knew I was very ill, it was too painful for me to dress and when we walked in the street, I could not distinguish between the simplicity of left and right. This was apparent on the very first day, but I had not understood my confusion. I did not tell anyone about this weird phenomenon of hearing a simple instruction and not being able to carry out the direction. She mocked me calling out that I was stupid when I made a wrong turn; I would just turn and right myself.

A further sign of my incoherence was I would also dress with my clothes back to front; the buttons of my shirt would be on my back; when I tried to pout the clothes on it all seemed normal. Each moment of the day my fragile head bumbled feeling as though the bone was bouncing inside a tumble drier. Seemingly, each passing hour my head hurt worse and my orientation deteriorated. I wanted to sleep, forever. I can honestly say at this moment I was pretty close to wanting to throw in any towel and concede, chapter or not!

We had the CNN channel on the television in the hotel room, each moment they replayed scenes from Millennium festivities around the globe, people having fun and partying. Scenes from Times Square, back in my adopted home of New York, played with an ironic twist. It was only then I felt physically robbed. A day supposed to be in celebration, anticipated for years, stolen from my library of years. We had managed a celebration of sorts drinking beers and eating Indian food on a rooftop in the Stone town. Later we had been driven to a club until 03:00 am - I had just sat quietly, from 10pm onwards, wishing for sleep as the festivities rolled by, nothing more. I remember the actual midnight hour and my only thought was wishing I had never come to Zanzibar. I felt compiled to do something on that night.

I needed to get back to Europe to survive, that was something I knew for sure. My faith in the sanity of African Hospitals was clear with memories of visiting the local hospice in Iten, Kenya when injured a few years earlier. There were two very large rooms, male and female, too few beds and many bodies in them. One medicine, malaria tablets, were administered to all regardless of our ailment - on that visit I was lucky, I got a vitamin C tablet, because a box of those had arrived at the hospital.

The day I was unable to move my left arm (not the arm that had the wound) I phoned both the Swedish and British embassies (having papers from both) to ask for help, but received none. The British told me to await a visitor from their offices, "We'll send someone out to see you, and do you know I also got attacked? Quite common old chap, you'll be okay." I waited all of the next day lying in my bed longing, hoping, for a knock at the hotel door, a sign of help, but no one came.

When I phoned the next day the woman informed me that being attacked was 'everyday occurrence' and that I should just relax and sit out the days until a flight became available. No, I was informed, the Embassy could not bequest any of the airlines to help expedite any change to my flight ticket. "It would not be right to ask." I was told. Okay. All flights were overbooked due to the Millennium, and my flight left from Nairobi airport some few hundred miles away.

So I called upon Alfred Shemweta, a Tanzanian athlete/friend who lived in Dar Es Salaam. He tried to get help changing my ticket so I could fly back to Europe. Alfred told me that I would need a police report if we were to try to change the tickets on the airline. I had a task to do; I slumped down the hotel stairs out into the street.

My woman friend came with me and we went to the local police station and asked for a written report. The heat and humidity were terribly oppressive for me in Zanzibar. I hated to be outside and felt faint whenever I was three feet or more away from a rotary fan. Zanzibar, in December/January, is a tropical vortex of heat and humidity. Flies buzzed around my head and sweat trickled down my brow, I felt locked in a whirlpool of heat and confusion. We were in the fever of the African summer.

Disturbingly, along with the very little feeling in the whole of the left arm that had developed I now had shooting pains if the limb touched or brushed upon some object, then I felt as if I was receiving an electric shock.

Once inside the police station house we were instructed to wait and then wait some more. My female companion kept on standing up and saying that she was leaving, but as much as I hated the place the thought of having to go through this ritual again the next day kept me on the bench.

Finally, without authorization but after at least an hour's wait, I went behind the police desk and into the back room where the commander in chief was sitting. Upon my angered begging, he began hand writing a report that was very inaccurate and written plain scrap A4 paper The Officer was annoyed that I had not used the knife to maim the muggers, "That would have made identification much easier for us if you could have scarred them."

In an island where one tourist in three is robbed (according to the said Officer) I was not in the mood for line-ups. The Officer continued, "You are lucky they let you live. Often to avoid being identified they finish the job!" He finished this sentence with what seemed a grim glee of finality. Drawing his finger across this throat.

I could not care if the attackers were caught or not. With such shocking statistics if those two were found their replacements would have been in business with a snap of the fingers. Maybe they robbed me to feed some starving daughter, or sister. I decided not to air these thoughts with the local police who wanted me to revisit the scene of the crime and scour the beach for suspects.

All the facts were muddled up on the Chief's report, his writing was barely legible, and he appeared more interested in whether the Embassy would mind his spelling mistakes. It was beyond ridicule; when I glanced down I read, "His arm was chopped off by the attackers."

Basically I was looking for something that could be presented to an airline with credibility. I was told he, as Police Captain, had no letter-headed stationary, looking around the office I believed him. I went back to check on the woman.

The nightmare took another twist; she now highly irritated, grew tired of waiting and said she was leaving. We left without an official report. Yet one more worry, yet one more step backwards.

I was beginning to believe that I would never leave the island, it was a cruel quirk of fate that nothing was progressing, and I was diminishing into an invalid with each day. I remember lying in the hotel bed thinking about the continual sequence of steps towards degeneration I was taking. I could not feel my left arm, I could not tell the difference between left and right, I could not walk in a straight line, and I had an eye-blurring headache continuously that was causing blackouts. In addition, this day my left leg was not acting the way it should.

Another strange sensation was I had full comprehension of the fact that I was going nutty. I had a combination numbered padlock; I remembered the digits, dialed in the numbers 761, and the lock refused to open. I knew something inside of me was not functioning as it should. When I told someone else the numbers, they could open the case.

I knew, somehow, that I was about to get to another stage of deterioration and dreaded to imagine what it should be; what was I going to be waking up and not being able to do tomorrow, or would I wake up. The days crawled by joined together with arguments, irritation, and rapid deterioration.

Following a particularly harrowing morning argument, I decided I was going to set off to try and find Kenya. At the breakfast room, she had scolded me for dropping a piece of cake-bread and embarrassing her in front of the other guests. My level of the horizontal had taken a twist; I held the plate at a skewed angle that I presumed to be flat but was indeed sloped, so that anything placed on the plate quickly rolled off it. I can assure you I really wanted to eat that cake; it had become my favorite object in life and the only meal in the day I had a taste to swallow.

Screaming, as if the very hotel was on fire, she yelled to me that I was an embarrassment to her, I was stupid and she doubted that I was so ill. I should add that the African disposition is demure and unobtrusive. Even on a deathbed an African will often inform you quietly that he is 'Mzuri sana' fine. To argue in public is inappropriate, and in a hotel breakfast room virtually unheard of event. I cringed for the obvious embarrassment she was inflicting on the guests as the room echoed with the power of her larynx. After the oral tirade my mind was set; I reached the edge of the cliff and was ready to jump.

The mission to be done straightaway was to eradicate myself from this situation. I decided at all costs I wanted to get away from her, and the scene of the crime. I always believed that whatever issue to be dealt with had hurdles, but forward movement gave momentum to clear those barriers.

Zanzibar clearly haunted my every thought. Although now I could not even take a couple of steps in a straight line, I planned to go back to Kenya where at least I had genuine friends. Let me be ill - that was my reality, and be with peaceful people - that was my only wish. I staggered back to the hotel room like a drunk on roller skates, and began to stuff my possessions into my backpack. The girl trailed behind refusing to give me a moment of peace, screaming that my belongings at our apartment would find themselves in the East River upon her return to America.

A vortex of noise, a compression of her anger, the oppressive force made me press on with as much haste as I could muster; I feinted and collapsed onto the rock-hard concrete floor. The thump snapped my collarbone and badly bruised my face. The woman ran to fetch the doctor who came and arranged a driver to take me to the docks. We immediately set off to mainland Dar Es Salaam for a better-equipped hospital. A group of Indian men carried me from the car onto the ferryboat seated in a hoisted chair but even though there were four men carrying the chair, high above their heads, I was dropped on the gang walk as one of them lost footing and his balance. That fall, albeit for two seconds, lasted a proverbial lifetime. I tried to imagine a position in which to land. At every possible angle I had injuries, it was going to hurt. I felt pain like a corkscrew moving through my head, slowly twisting with blinding agony as I smashed onto the plank walk. The boat ride thereafter was pretty tolerable.

The hospital in Tanzania was not much better than the Kenyan hospice in Iten. But at least people now believed I was sick. I had an uncomfortable short bed and lay next to a man who made me grateful for my small injuries. His eyes were a colorless opaque gray, and his face gazed like a blank school blackboard without memory or expression, revealing a lone solitary tooth. The word hospital belied the establishment. Dark rooms where we were left to remain, not waiting to be treated. The bodies, and my imagination positioned myself, were lined up as though waiting for death, for the patients had lost all hope. A furnace at the room's end would be fitting, just slide the bodies in, one by one. Sickly coughs, groans of displeasure, and gasps were the only noise. The woman came to visit daily, and incredulously our relationship took a turn for the better. We began to talk, and dare I say it, in a friendly manner.

Doctor Mehta, my friend from Zanzibar and Alfred, had fought hard for my return flight and eventually the Doctor met someone influential at KLM he'd once delivered at birth who now helped switch the tickets. The doctor told me it was all Baba's doing. I was beginning to believe in this Baba.
I was two days in that hospital in Dar Es Salaam where I stayed until flying to England; I think four people in my ward had died during this short period; I only guessed from the fashion the warders removed the bodies from the beds.

To alight the plane I had to fake good health; airlines, rightly, usually don't carry invalids on commercial flights. There was a risk I was told with the altitude that my condition could worsen, but I was willing to take any chance to get out of Africa. I wore cheap Jackie Onassis style sunglasses to hide my eyes, and we placed a hat over the head bandages. I limped up to the check in counter the best I could.

In London I was rushed by ambulance, ably and gratefully aided by airport staff and the woman, to a local hospital. I would later read the forms collected at this time and marveled at my incoherent answers to the medical staff's simple questions. Apparently I did not know the name of the President of the United States, primer minister of England (I changed my answer twice), and when asked for my home address had given an address to an area of Manhattan where I had never lived in my life. When the extent of my injuries was revealed, I was rushed with sirens blazing to a larger hospital, Charring Cross. I had the biggest blood clot right next to the brain that the surgeons there had ever seen. It was squashing my brain, so I was told hence the fact the left side of my body had ceased to properly function.

Typically, the blood clot is a layer or three away from the brain that is protected by these sheaths. My clot was right next to the brain. Inexplicably I should have been 100% dead by this time. I should have lasted only four days after the blow, like my friend Simon, according to the expert doctors; it was now eleven days.

Even the gash on my wrist was a miracle, a twist to the left and my main artery would have been severed meaning again I probably would have died having bled to death. One more inch of pressure and I would not have been to use my third and fourth finger - the tendon was nearly cut straight through.

In surgery, the term was 'Right parietal craniotomy for evacuation of extradural haematoma.' My skull was repaired with the bone flaps put together with a series of titanium plates. I woke up from surgery in pain, but compos mentis again.

On the right side of my head was a tube from inside my skull draining the blood, my left side had the broken collar bone so there was no absolutely no comfortable position to rest. Staples had been pressed into the skin on my head to hold the flesh together. Nevertheless, I did not mind, I was so happy to have been medically treated.

When I was alone in the hospital ward, I would slide out of bed and onto my legs, first just to feel the weight of my body, then to use the muscles. I was determined to leave the hospital as soon as possible. Thus on the rounds the doctors were amazed at my quick recovery, they hardly believed I was the same person. I was supposed to be in the ward for weeks, I was released after less than a week. I had a large air pocket in my brain, and would have to remain at low altitude for a while. So I took a train to Scotland to recuperate, the woman had since returned to America.

Five weeks followed, on arriving back in New York. One week later I jumped into a race in Central Park and ran 20:36 for 4 miles; I knew I was on the road to recovery. In July a big hearted CEO of an internet healthcare company offered a $10,000 donation in my name to Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital if I would complete the New York City Marathon. I did so, finishing 35th, and the CEO of the company met me on the finishing line with a teary eye, she did not ever tell me she was dying from cancer and I found out she was buried a few months later with my medal around her neck from a mutual friend. My survival, her loss was a reminder of the bigger picture.

That's jumping ahead, more strange adventures happened in the next couple of months. I set off training for New York City Marathon with no running clothes or shoes spare those I would leave an apartment with on a night in July to begin Chapter Two. That of course is another story, not a regrettable one, as again it took me in a certain direction, and toward a happier life, but the end of this story is that I lost one shoe in Africa but I learned values and lessons beyond my imagination in the year of the millennium. Thus the foundation became Shoe4Africa, not shoes.