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B] 6SZZ O\R 0OQY continued from page 34 he was always conscious of the art of tea. His father was British, his mother from Burma—for Rich, this made her "more British than the British." She practiced—and inculcated—the essential rituals of the classic tea service. "Warm the teapot first," Rich remembers. "Loose-leaf tea only. Tea bags were an abomination before the lord. And God forbid if one put the milk in first—that really was a capital offense!" Whenever someone countered that the Queen added milk to her cup before pouring the tea, she was heard to say, dismissively, "Well, what do you expect of the middle class?" But Rich is not a tea snob. His resume as a news cameraman and photojournalist reads like a travel guide to hell and back: Lebanon, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan and more. Tea has been along for the ride. He takes it in whatever form he can get it, hoarding what little he finds in transit in case it might not be available in his next far-flung destination. While working in Bosnia, he spent time based out of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, where he had access to the familiar trappings of normal life: tea, milk and sugar. In fact, the tea produced such a sense of normality that Rich at times detached himself from the genocidal ethnic con- flict bubbling around him. "I was having a perfectly normal English Breakfast tea in my room one day," he recalls, "watch- ing Serbian snipers embedded in the hills surrounding Sarajevo as they killed civilians in the street below. Oh, and our hotel was being shelled at the same time." Rich has also been hit—once by a sniper, once by shrapnel from a rocket- propelled grenade. But his ultimate piece of tea wisdom came at a moment that was traumatizing in a different sort of way. "I once had to dive into a latrine trench full of human feces and urine to avoid incoming mortar fire," he relates. "And as my face buried itself deeper into the trench and its contents, I could hear my mother's voice telling me, 'Everything looks better after a good cup of tea!'" THE URGE TO LINGER Elizabeth Foley was working as a documentary film producer in Kenya when she experienced a moment of ambient danger infused with tea. It was 2000, and she and a camerawoman, both novice documentary filmmakers, had embarked on a quest to locate a lost tribe. The tribe had lived so long in a swamp that the people had developed a sort of webbed feet—or so the story went. The women set out in a Jeep filled with expensive camera gear. The roads were rough—in fact, little more than two parallel ditches. The jungles were dense, humid and, worst of all, filled with ban- dits. The Jeep churned slowly through the ruts—very slowly to protect the cameras—until the women's backs were aching. Finally !$ TEA ALMANAC 2012 they came to the checkpoint that divided Southern and Northern Kenya. The sight of heavily armed soldiers scanning the tree line for bandits was not entirely reassuring. While officials scrutinized their papers, the women were directed to wait inside, of all things, a tin-roofed shanty serving chai. Now living in Seattle, Foley still recalls that first cup. "It was divine," she says nostalgically. "Maybe it was the situation, the unexpected place, our exhaustion, not to mention the sense of danger lurking all about us, but it tasted really sweet and good, and it lifted our spirits. It gave us calm and confidence." They knew they had a serious drive ahead of them, but they stayed on for a bit, savoring the chai's flavor and the moment of tranquility. OUTDOOR SERVICE: Afghan Commandos from 1st Company, 2nd Kandak, drink tea in Afghanistan's Paktya province. The women eventually retrieved their papers, duly stamped, and proceeded on. No web-footed pygmies did they find. Just another legend. But there had been no bandits either, so on the whole, they were grateful. Arduously they toiled south, sloshing and grinding their way back down the same rutted road they had come in on. The torture was dispelled once the chai shack came into view. They stopped at the checkpoint. The soldier smiled broadly and told them they were in luck: The truck ahead of them had been ambushed, the driver shot, the assailants driven off by Army gun- fire. They decided to have another chai, this time in silent appreci- ation of their good fortune. They were alone with their thoughts, each wondering to herself what might have been. "I often think that first cup of chai might very well have saved our lives," Foley says. "Not the chai alone, but the time we spent lingering there in the café because of the chai. … If we had pressed on, we would have found ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time." JUST ADD SNOW LEOPARD Peter Zahler, director of the Asia program at the Bronx, U.S ARMY/ISAF MEDIA/PFC. ANDREW VIDAKOVICH