Kat debrancher-ed
I’m just not in the mood today. Seeing a man carrying 10 dozen eggs on his head doesn’t cause me to notice. I’ve seen it all before- let’s see you carry 10 dozen eggs, a saucer of milk for the puppy, and recall where you left the phone number for this week’s hostess for Wed playgroup. My French tutor didn’t show today. Not suprising since it’s raining so hard the avocado branches outside the window are a grey blur. I’ve been trying to penetrate two documents. The first is the two page instructions en francaise for cleaning the distiller. After painstaking research, I translated the first three lengthy paragraphs to read “people who don’t clean this machine will be sorry”. More work with the English-French dictionary led to Couper l’appereil ou debrancher l’alimentation electrique= “unplug it”. I’m not getting very far very fast. The other document I’m struggling with is in English. The handbook for preparing a contract for household help reveals all things bureaucratic here. It insists that I must buy a certain cahier at the little store downtown near Kermel market. Then I present this to a distant office whose administrator stamps each page of it before I begin its use. Then I record each payment…. and do what with the third copy of each receipt? The handbook goes on to say that a particular document must be sent by registered mail to the employee. That’s when I stopped reading. Registered mail? To what address? I’m not sure where Astou lays her head at night, but I’m sure it doesn’t have an address. It doesn’t have a telephone. Or a street name. Maybe not even a street. And what would the return address be? The villa next to M. Dji? On to plan B.


SOS
Today we heard a siren, then saw an ambulance, the SOS Medicine. This is unusual, the first one we’ve heard in a month of being here. I imagine that that’s because most people deal with emergencies with a little home triage effort. I wonder what the ambulance and team offers. Our new friends Vanessa and family were aroused one morning by the neighbor’s shouts and frantic beating on their door. They fled the house and found that an outside electrical box had caught fire, the flames reaching up to the second story. A crowd gathered with buckets of water and fire extinguishers to control the fire. A fire department was called, but never arrived. They relied completely on the courage and generosity of their neighbors. I’ve come to understand that a helpful crowd will gather.