Story from my British friend (I of II): Evil Eye.

I had coffee this past weekend with my one British friend, who was in a very chatty mood. His dad is from the Sudan and he lived there for a while when he was a kid, and he was telling me about how when he and his family went back to the Sudan when he was in college, he had decided to talk his entire Sudanese family out of belief in the evil eye if they brought it up.

As it turns out, his one cousin had recently gotten married and then she got sick, and though they took her to a zillion doctors, they couldn't find anything wrong with her.

"Don't you think it's just some virus?", he told his relatives, and he says that as soon as he said that, his younger cousins in the room started looking at each other like, "Man, is this guy stupid."

Then, he said, his aunt told him that science is great and can cure many viruses, but there are some things that science can't explain.

Then, the whole conversation degenerated into talking about how the family had been showing everyone wedding pictures, and so they were trying to figure out who they had shown the pictures to at around the time his cousin got sick.

Also, later that week, my one British friend came down with something, and his aunt told him that he was a victim of the evil eye, because he had just graduated from high school the past year and would be a perfect target for envy.