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<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="color:black">Dear Friends</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="color:black">This is a story like none I have heard before.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="color:black">Regards</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="color:black">Crispin</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:12.0pt;vertical-align:baseline"><cite><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"inherit",serif;border:none windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0cm;font-style:normal">John Stover</span></b></cite><b><span style="font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"inherit",serif;color:#101010">“As a newly minted American Foreign Service Officer in 1979 my first posting was to Muqdishu, Soomaliya. They didn’t have an agreed upon written language until 1960 so foreigners never
had any reasonable way to learn the language until years later. As the junior officer in the Embassy I was the designated dogsbody for most of the trash tasks. I was asked by the Agency for International Development Director to find out why Somalia had fewer
miles of paved roads in 1979 than they did at independence in 1960. Talking to the usual Somali diplomatic cocktail party goers turned up no useful information so I violated the common diplomatic practice and actually left the city and visited and talked to
village people. Answer was simple. When camel dung supply was low the wife lucky enough to live by a paved asphalt road went out and dug out pieces to burn in their earthen stoves. (Hard to light but long burning) Younger kids were sent further down the roads
to bring back ever more pieces. By the ‘80s the roads were mostly trashed…[snip]”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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