Resto World

Today at Resto du Coeur I was in charge of tea and coffee. I was rather frightened at first. I had never in my life made a cup of coffee. I had only the most foggy of vague ideas how coffee makers worked. Fortunately there was another girl there with me for the first hour and a half or so. She talked fast but I managed to figure out how to make the coffee and also learn a little bit about her. She is fairly young (early 30s?) but has already done a ton of things, including several years in the military. Now she works with adults who have special needs (like psychological special needs, not just mental and physical).

The coffee and cake is in the room where people hang out before going in to get their food for the week. Each person has a specific time that they are supposed to show up, or at least a half-hour window. It is written on the little card that they get when they sign up, but some of them don't know French and apparently can't read "10:30" either. Either that, or they have no clocks and/or concept of time at all. There was one woman who came in at about 8:15. After 15 minutes she wanted to know why she hadn't been called yet. One of the workers looked at her card and said, "Dix heure et demi. deux heures" (10:30. 2 hours) and held up two fingers. I don't think that meant much of anything to her. She had two small kids who were relatively well behaved for the first 20 minutes. After that, the younger one started getting restless.

After his fifth or sixth piece of cake I stopped letting him take it. I mean, maybe he was hungry, but we had to save some for the others... But it was quickly obvious that he was eating cake for something to do, not because he was hungry. About five minutes later he came over while I was doing something else, grabbed a bunch of coffee stir sticks, and then ran off and started playing with them. Once he was tired of those he went for the cups in the garbage... Oh my. I'm pretty sure his mom is used to just letting him run wild. His older brother (who was probably 5) always had an eye on him and would drag him away if he got into too much trouble at any one moment.

There was another guy wandering around too who couldn't understand why he had been there for an hour and others were only there for 10 minutes. He didn't speak English, so I tried to mime for him but he wandered away somewhere between "Look at the clock" and "Do you have a card I could look at?" Ah yes, the language barrier... Even though I now operate in two languages, I am amazingly limited on the global scale.

And finally, I had forgotten to post that last week at Resto was the first time I picked up a French word play in normal conversation. Thanks to the way the French leave out parts of most of their words, they have a lot of homonyms (words that sound alike) and homonym phrases. They love to make jokes out of these. Last week one of the guys asked my coworker, "Qu'est-ce que tu pense de ça?" (what do you think of that?) in reference to some topic I have now forgotten. My coworker replied, "Je vais prendre une mirroir et reflechis." (I'll get a mirror and reflect on it). I laughed. The other guy groaned. Haha! I love corny jokes.