Wonderful Always

My wife lost her comb a couple of weeks ago, and she had a hard time finding a new one. She finally saw a guy walking through the market near our house, but when she asked how much his combs were, he said $6. It's expected that you will haggle for a better price, but with a starting quote like that there's not really any point in trying.

Today we went into a boutique just down the road and, as we were buying milk powder and white beans and butter, we saw that they were also selling massive combs for $.75. Now that's more like it! After we bought it we looked closer at the nifty little bag it was sold in and found this memorable slogan:

"YOUR CHOICE MAKES YOU WONDERFUL ALWAYS"

With a guarantee like that, you know you can't go wrong!

Great People, Episode 2

Yesterday I had to go down to the local police station to get an official paper. When I arrived the lady at the desk handed me a blank sheet of paper and informed me that I need to write an official letter of request.

I wandered back to the front door in somewhat of a fuddle. I am terrible at writing things in normal French, to say nothing of formal French. I had no model to copy, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to write, and I didn't even have a pen! It was at this moment, standing forlornly before the front door of the police station, that I met a great guy.

One of the officers behind the front desk, a good-looking young guy, called out to me and asked if I had been running. I replied that yes, I had been running a little (I had been afraid that I would be late to the police station, so I had run a good portion of the journey and was still sweating profusely). He then asked me what I needed, since I was standing so aimless in front of the door. I held up the blank sheet of paper, now containing a couple of wet spots where my sweat had landed, and told him that I had to write a letter of request and had no idea how to do so. 

He motioned me to come around behind the desk with him. When I got there he layed the piece of paper on the desk and began motioning to various parts of it.
"Put your name and address up here," he said, "And the date here." And here write, 'To Madame the blah blah blah blah' and here write, 'please receive, madame, my most sincere greetings' and then sign your name here."

He looked up and discovered a rather overwhelmed look on my face. He found a pen and said, "Right, what's your name?" He then proceeded to write the entire letter for me, asking for the pertinent details. When he finished he said, "Right, sign here." I signed it, and I was good to go. I walked back into the office, handed in "my" letter, and that was that. Talk about helpful guy!

Great People

There are some great people here. One of them is the guy in charge of the corner shop downstairs.

Tonight when I tried to make supper I couldn't get the stove to light. A quick check verified my suspicion- our gas bottle had run empty. Like most people here, we use 5 liter gas bottles on an exchange system. When your bottle runs out you go to the nearest place that sells gas and exchange it for a full one. We are amazingly fortunate in our apartment because our nearest place to exchange bottles is the corner shop downstairs.

I unscrewed the bottle from the stove and carried it downstairs to the shop. The guy in charge of the shop wasn't there- it was just his assistant running the place. When he saw that I had an empty bottle he said, "I hope we've got a replacement." He looked through two stacks of bottles leaning against the wall but they were all empties. Then he went into the back room. He emerged with a bottle that looked like it had been dragged behind a truck for a couple of miles. But it was full, and that was what mattered.

I payed him for the gas and started back up the stairs, carefully holding the bottle out in front of me so I wouldn't get grimy marks all over my shorts and T-shirt. I've had this T-shirt since 2001 so it would be a shame to mess it up now!

Unfortunately a bottle full of gas is a lot more heavy than an empty bottle. I was doing my best to appear manly and strong as I struggled to navigate the twisty staircase with my awkward burden, but I still had a slight grimace on my face.

I came around a corner halfway up the stairwell and met the shop manager, who was coming down. He saw me before I had a chance to wipe all signs of the grimace from my face and promptly insisted on carrying the bottle up the stairs for me. I refused, but before I could say anything more he grabbed the bottle, wheeled around, and marched up the stairs ahead of me. When we got to the top of the stairs he plunked the bottle next to our front door, duffed his hat (in my imagination- he didn't have a hat in real life) and trotted back down the steps. I tried to say "thank you" in his language but I messed it up. He got a kick out of it anyway and I heard his laughter echo up the stairwell. What a great guy.

Passport photos

I am lazy, though my definition of laziness is a bit strange.

I need to re-apply for my national identity card, and in order to do that I need to have three professionally-made passport photos. Most people go downtown to a special photo shop to have them made, but I'm too lazy (and cheap) to go downtown.

Instead I moved a couch so I could move a bookshelf so I could put a chair against our white living room wall in the exact spot where the sunlight was hitting it. Then I borrowed the lamp from our flatmate's bedroom (the one and only lamp in the apartment) and stuck it on the bookshelf, hoping it would provide a satisfactory amount of "fill" lighting. I had to figure out what to put my camera on while I sat in the chair and smiled. I finally settled on the clothes hamper I haven't been using. Sounds "professionally-made" so far, doesn't it?

I took some pictures with our handy little camera, uploaded them to my computer, and used the GIMP to make it look like I had used a real fill light instead of a pathetic desk lamp. After some research online I edited the photos down to 35mm x 45mm and emailed them to myself.

I then went in to work, where we have a color printer and some photo paper that has been sitting on the shelf since possibly the turn of the century. Before printing my "for real" photos, I did some test runs on a regular piece of paper. There was far too much yellow and not enough blue, so I had to tinker with the printer settings a bit. I also noticed that the printer was streaking a bit, but there wasn't anything I could do about that.

Then I said a quick prayer, carefully lined up my vintage photo paper, and clicked "print." When it came out, I saw that the first row of photos contained a very obvious purple streak across my hair where the yellow ink cartridge had apparently failed to work. How many people do you know who are such hardcore Vikings fans that they would streak their hair purple for their passport photo?

Fortunately I had anticipated trouble and printed several rows of photos at once. The rest of the pictures came out okay.

I grabbed the paper cutter and presto! 3 professionally-made passport photos. I'm a professional, right? I'm a professional at something anyway, even if I'm not quite sure what.

I probably need to get a real hobby, but this kind of thing is just so much fun!

Sleepovers

Rainy season has finally hit, and that means sleepovers! Last night we were playing games at a friend's house when the power went out. We found some candles and began telling stories been candlelight.
My wife was telling a very strange story (because she wanted  it to rhyme) when suddenly the wind whipped up and started slamming doors shut all over the building. We "battened down the hatches" just in time for the first blast of rain.

The rain was heavy for a good while. We couldn't see much outside because of the power cut, but we figured there was probably a good deal of flooding going on. There probably wasn't much point in trying to get home through the flooded streets, so we set about making sleeping arrangements. My wife and I got the guest bed, which was a pretty sweet deal. Guest beds are a great invention, especially during rainy season.

The fantastic thing about last night was that we had toothbrushes along, even though we hadn't been expecting to spend the night. My wife had two spare toothbrushes in her purse because we had to stay overnight at another house two weeks ago when a similar storm hit during the evening. It's the little things that make a big difference!

Ready... Set... Not Ready? Too bad, Go!

When I was back home I got myself psyched up for the idea of building close friendships with guys here. And shortly after I got back, I went to visit some of my friends. And then, well, life set in. I like having local friends, but I like having them on my terms. Seeing them once a month is often enough for me. It takes a lot of mental energy to visit them because here you don't visit just one person; you visit their entire family. Their entire family will be speaking a language you don't understand very well and following centuries of cultural norms and expectations that you know little about. Trying to navigate these cultural elements and nonverbal communication methods requires an intense amount of concentration.

It also requires physical energy because transportation here is primarily on foot, and when you visit somebody's "family" that often includes their parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and possibly a few close friends- most of whom don't live in the same house and possibly not even the same neighborhood.

So, like I said, once a month is sufficient for me. But that isn't often enough to really build a deep friendship. I think I knew that, but I also wasn't motivated enough to change it.

And so, two weeks ago God brought somebody knew into my life. He was walking along behind my wife and I as we were chatting away in English. When I paused for a moment he greeted me in the local language and then switched into choppy English. We had a nice chat, partly in English and partly in French, and when we had to part ways he explained that he wis hoping to go to a conference in Oregon in September and he needs a lot of practice speaking English. So I gave him my phone number.

Since then he has called me at least every other day. We've met up three times, once for half a day. He is a really nice guy and a lot of fun, and he is assertive. He isn't pushy, but he also has his heart set on becoming great friends with me in a short period of time. Sometimes I feel a bit intimidated, but then I realize that I think he is exactly what I needed. Thank you, God, for pushing me out of my comfort zone again.