3rd March, 2009

I have a slightly strange sense of humour, and it’s the little things that make me laugh. Obviously, doing a blog about these things is foolish, as I’m sure that none of these make you laugh, and you’ll go away thinking I’m an idiot. But I’m doing it anyway!

A lot of the time, the things that make me laugh are those that happen with the children or at the school, but last week it happened on the way there, when Ab and I stopped to pick up an elderly woman. She was walking barefoot in the hot sun, a bag of tef (which you use to make injera) strapped to her back, and was very grateful when we stopped to pick her up.

She climbed into the trailer of our car where a few other people were hitching a lift, and Ab continued driving. A few minutes later, I noticed him looked worriedly at his wing mirrors. I asked what was wrong.

“Where’s the lady?” he said.

Things are always falling off of the back of the car when we’re driving (though generally not people) and we were worried that we had gone over a bump too fast and she had fallen off (this is proper off road driving!). Ab got out of the car and went to check – and returned laughing. The woman had curled up on her bag of tef and was sound asleep! When he’d woken her up, concerned she was sick, she waved him away and told him it was better this way. No idea what she meant, but we were just glad she hadn’t rolled off the back …

More often than not, the things that make me laugh are to do with language and the fact we spend most of our time stumbling through the English or Amharic we know in an effort to get the other person to understand. Like yesterday, when I asked Ab why he was staring at a middle aged faranji man in a pair of distinctive blue cargo trousers, and he said, pointing to his own blue cargo trousers, ‘I’m watching my trousers’.

Or today, when we were on our way back from the school. As., the foreman, refused my offer of fasting biscuits and clutched his stomach, saying it was feeling ‘stagnant’. After a bit of a conversation trying to work out how a stomach could be stagnant, he explained it was more an uncomfortable feeling in his chest.

“My heart doesn’t work.”
“There’s a problem with your heart?”
“Yes, it has stopped.”
“Your heart has stopped? That means you’re dead!”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes, I think so!”

Cue an afternoon of comments in the office (not all from me!) about not signing the attendance sheet if you’re dead, and explaining there was no cement bought ‘because As. is dead today’. Well, it made us laugh!

But the thing that made me smile most today was when A. came back into the office after lunch and hissed at me:

“There’s meat in Lalibela!”

What? At first I thought he’d said ‘there’s a meeting in Lalibela’, and my heart sank. Great, another two day fiasco where nothing even gets decided. But then he hissed again and I realised he was talking about meat.

“Really? There’s meat?” Ethiopia is in the two months fasting period required by the Orthodox church, and meat in Lalibela is banned. People have been beaten up for killing an animal here during fasting time (I’m not kidding). Who’s got meat? And will they sell me some?!

A. explained that the woman who runs the butcher’s shop that I normally get my meat from (think a dingy concrete shed, with skinned cows hanging from the roof) is selling illicit meat from her home. Fantastic! I asked him if his girlfriend could buy me some.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll go together tomorrow. I’ll call and get some ready.”

I feel like I’m ordering drugs! I’m half expecting the woman to be selling it on a street corner like they do in The Wire – or Brixton, for that matter. (Of course, this would be slightly more likely if Lalibela actually HAD streets). So tomorrow, in the dark of the evening, A. and I will go to buy meat from some dodgy backstreet, and smuggle it back to the house under our jackets.

See, I told you it wouldn’t make you laugh.