Biggie and the Devil Diet - By Nancy Bell Page 0,23

were greeted warmly by the people and shown to two small huts, which were to be our homes for a whole year. We cooked our food over a wood fire and brought up water from a nearby stream— there are many streams crisscrossing the savanna."

"Ugh. How could you stand it?" Mrs. Muckleroy said.

"Oh, you get used to it. It was the heat that was the worst— that and the insects. We had to check our beds every night for scorpions and other vermin. And we had to boil our drinking water. There's always the threat of cholera, you know."

Abner Putnam scraped his chair back and went to stand by the window. I looked and saw that the clouds were getting blacker. The wind had died so not a leaf moved on the two mimosa trees in the backyard. "Think I'll see if everything is taken care of out there," he said, heading for the door.

Jeremy got up, too. "I'm going to see if Rex is up and about," he said.

Laura waved them out of the room. "Go on, Grace."

"Actually," Grace said "their diets were not bad; they relied heavily on seafood and fresh fruit from the forests. They make a spicy stew from fish and thicken it with cassava juice."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Cassava? It's a plant that has a tuberous root, like a potato. Do you ever eat tapioca?"

"Not any more than I have to," Monica put in.

"They have it in the school cafeteria. Yuk," I said.

"Well, tapioca comes from the cassava plant. The Indians used other plants from the savanna— things we in our country are unaware of. That's where I got the diet."

"Why would they need a diet?" Biggie looked skeptical. "I've watched lots of nature shows— and I've never seen a fat Indian."

"You're right," Grace said. "It's the civilized world that overindulges on food. Indigenous folks rarely do. The person who needed to diet was Sammy Spratt, a member of our own team. The poor guy was so overweight that he suffered something awful from the heat and the rigors of life down there. Frankly, I don't know how he ever passed the Peace Corps physical. Who knows? Anyway, things got so bad Sammy was afraid he was going to have to give up and go home— and he really didn't want to do that. The villagers laughed like crazy when he came around. They had never in their lives seen a fat person."

"Poor old Sammy," Monica said.

"Well, you can say this for Sammy, he was a trooper," Grace said. "He was determined not to give up even though he had heat rash in every fold of his body, and he huffed and puffed at the slightest bit of exertion.

"One day I was showing some of the women how to make a salad from some of the native greens. Sammy walked by and they began to titter behind their hands as usual. One of the women, Arawa, asked me why he was so fat. I couldn't tell her. 'I can make him thin,' said the oldest woman in the group. The others laughed and nodded their heads. When I asked her to explain, she said not to worry, that she would brew up a potion that would make him thin in a matter of weeks."

Grace smiled, remembering. "I promptly forgot about it until a week later when I saw that Sammy was noticeably thinner. When I remarked on it, he looked embarrassed but confessed that Mea, the old woman, had been bringing him the potion to drink every night at bedtime. He said he had never felt better in his life. I'll admit, I was concerned. What if she was giving him strong emetics or diuretics that might damage his health? He said no— that his body functions had not been affected."

"And he kept on losing weight?" Biggie asked. "Without going on any diet?"

"That's right. Not only that, his skin tone improved as well as his eyesight and hearing. He felt wonderful! Within the month, he was down to his ideal weight and feeling even better. I asked the old woman to give me the formula for the potion. I wrote it down, put it in my foot-locker, and just left it there. We were so busy with other things."

Just then, Jeremy came back into the room. "Rex wants to rest until three," he said.

"Fine." Laura pushed her chair back and got to her feet. "Suppose we all retire to the living room where we can be