Peter was an American living in West Africa – assigned to live in the same village where I’d been living for nearly two years. He arrived volatile, smug, self-satisfied and condescending. During one of our first conversations I used a vocabulary word that he found amusing, stopped me, and blurted “I’m surprised you know that word.” He incorrectly corrected my pronunciation of the word Reykjavik. And he was one of those people who would just suddenly lose his temper, create a dangerous situation, or ruin everyone else’s night.
Well, I left three months after he arrived and began receiving increasingly unhinged emails from him. He was teaching English to the children who lived in his neighborhood. One of them robbed him. He was furious and expressed so much ugliness. Then they started a cooking class and he began a social media campaign for a spice company to endorse him and the kids. They never responded and he lost his mind.
He burned his house down and moved to the capitol until he ended up getting kicked out of the country for being dangerous and unpredictable.
