So it’s been two weeks since I have written anything new. In that time I have been working on an entry about a trip I had taken to see some coffee processing. Every time I sat down to work on it I found it dry and boring to write about, which in my experience means that if I am not having fun writing it, you’re not having fun reading it. It’s not that the process itself is boring; actually I am a gear head and like to know how things work so for me getting to spend a weekend experiencing that, proved to be one of the best weekends I have had. Needless to say I have received quite a coffee education in the past weeks. I’ll continue to work on that entry and see if I can’t work out the bugs.
Much has happened since I last wrote so where to begin? In one of my first entries I had written about our gate keeper, the lush. Well he is no longer the gate keeper, after much discussion between my roommates and I, it was decided that while he provided hours of entertainment he provided us with no accountability. That was an interesting dilemma for us; we had his termination letter but we always felt that his pension for alcohol made him unpredictable.
In the islands I would liken it to a Dr. Jekly and Mr. Hyde affect, when the guys were off the rum they were your best friends and very pleasant to be around, when they were on however, you really couldn’t predict how they would act, same principle applies here. Since the university employs him it was decided that the university should present him with his walking papers while we stand back and watch.
Having no TV or Internet for entertainment, all we have are our books and daily stories to keep us going at nights. When the day came for the university to let the guard go you might as well have billed this as the pinnacle of our week, if we had pop corn we would have popped it and beer, we would have drank it, as we watched to see how crazy the guard might get. To our surprise when the news was delivered instead of fireworks all we got was a fizzle. What we didn’t realize is that the guard wanted to quit more than we wanted him gone and that when the ax was dropped all he requested was back pay for holiday not taken. That was anticlimactic, no one told us the rules for the guard such as days off and lunch hours, because of that we never gave him a lunch hour and never let him leave the premise. He stated that he felt like he was in prison and was happy to leave. When the day finally came for his departure, he was singing church hymns about being free while dancing around the yard, not what I expected at all. I will miss the hours of trying to translate what he is saying and most of all having him stand at attention and salute me every time I enter the gate, maybe I can get my roommates back home to do that.
The new guard, while not as charismatic as the old fits better into our little family, him and Israel have a developing friendship which makes for a more efficient household and also we know the gate keeper rules so we no longer keep prisoners.
Speaking of Israel, we like to teach him things, whether it’s explaining how the planets move around the sun or just working through his English workbooks with him. One night he was trying to grasp the concept of where all his housemates were from and the scope of the world in general, the world is big and there is lots of water, that’s general knowledge for me and something I take for granted, not for Israel however. Realizing this I hatched a plan to locate a map of the world and label the countries with the name of each housemate. When I carried this plan out, Israel looked at it for a second and then said “the world is big and there is lots of water” and then for the next hour proceeded to grill me and my housemates about our respective countries; that was a fun night.
Speaking of housemate we got an unexpected addition to our house. One evening me and Lenar were sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing when we got a call from the University informing us that our new roommate was on the way. We were unaware that we were receiving a new person. This could have been either been good or bad. My house mates and I all have our own quirks and with not knowing what to expect we were afraid of how this would upset the positive balance we have developed throughout the house. Turns out we had nothing to fear, Zahyid our new roommate is from Pakistan and is here to help the University role out the much talked about Wireless network on campus. He has useful skills, like knowing how to kill roosters and cook them.
My most favorite part of living in the island was street culture or hanging out with your groups of local friends on the street watching current events unfold before your eyes. The reason I like this so much is because at any monument one of your buddies could appear with a live rooster in hand and that usually meant we were about to have a cook out, and I was about to learn something useful like how to kill and prepare a rooster for dinner.
When Zahyid learned about my “bush skills” (killing live animals and having cooks), he states “that’s common place in my country and because I am new we will buy a live rooster and I will cook it.” It’s at that point I knew he would fit in and the rest of my roommates were about to learn something useful. It’s in Israel job description that we can at any point send him to the market to collect groceries and dry goods for us, well the day before we killed the rooster we surprised him with a request to go the market and buy us a live rooster that we were to kill the next day.
Israel is a little timid so he immediately had a problem with this… he stated that he would get the rooster as long as it didn’t bite him and that he would not kill it, agreeing to those conditions we sent him to the market for a rooster. I usually take lunch at a restaurant in town so as to practice my French; Israel must have seen me on his way back from the market because he entered the restaurant with this very big grin on his face as if he just accomplished something huge. Sitting there having my lunch he proceeded to show me this box and he goes take a look inside. Peering inside the box was the largest rooster I had ever seen, and I must have been the baldest white guy the rooster had seen because as soon as looked in the box the rooster felt obligated to crow very loudly, alerting all the customers and restaurant staff that we had just brought a live rooster into the building, everyone just stopped and looked at us, at which point I ushered Israel out and told him to try and find accommodations at the house for this animal we were about to eat.
Yi, our Korean roommate got wind that we were about to kill a rooster, and with Israel arriving home with rooster in hand he promptly stated, “that must be our dinner for tomorrow, we should call him Raymond, my boss is named Raymond and he gives me no direction, I do not like my boss” from that point on the rooster was named Raymond. We were glad that we were only keeping Raymond for a day; he felt it was his job to let the household know that the sun was beginning to rise at 4:30 that morning. When the witching hour finally arrived, everyone in our household was present for the event, even our new guard, who provided us with very valuable advice. This proved to be a fun break from work and my daily routine it also provided us an opportunity to share Raymond, with Mike the other Intern, as well as other local friends we had made. The night was spent enjoying our dinner, as well as with me and Mike making final preparations for our trip to Uganda in the following days.
No comments:
Post a Comment