The other night, Sam went out to ask the guard (who is also our pastor) what he wanted to drink with his dinner. When she came back in, she had a confused look on her face. So I asked her what Richard wanted. She said, “Well, he either wants coffee or milk … or he told me to go away.” Since Sam didn’t want to go back out to ask him again (especially if he had told her to go away), I went out to ask Richard.
I asked Richard in French what he wanted to drink, explaining that Sam hadn’t understood him. He answered in English: “I said coffee with milk.” In French, coffee with milk is “café avec lait.” Lait rhymes with away, which explains why Sam thought he said, “Go away.” We all had a chuckle over that, Richard in particular. But Sam still refused to bring him his dinner that night but made me do it.
Our poor guards have had to suffer through our American cooking. We had some rather interesting concoctions last week. A few weeks ago, C asked the men if they could pick us up some canned chicken when they headed into a bigger city. C was thinking of the chicken that’s similar to tuna. One misunderstood and bought canned processed chicken (think chicken flavored Spam). We decided to try it a few times last week. The first time, Sam thought we could make it into a decent chicken salad. And then we opened the can and saw the processed nature of the meat. Nevertheless, we forged ahead with the salad. The chicken was so processed that I think we put a full teaspoon and a half of pepper in to counterbalance the salt. Overall, we decided that the chicken Spam tastes like bologna. I proceeded to call the concoction “Spam salad.”
If a Spam salad sandwich wasn’t un-African enough for the guard, we proceeded to make Kraft-style macaroni and cheese later in the week. We decided to fry the chicken Spam, thinking it would taste like hotdog. It didn’t. Richard let us know that he did not like the mac-and-cheese.
While the guards may think our cooking is odd, nothing we make can compare to what some of the nationals eat. When Sam and I came home from school, C told us to head to the backyard to see what the neighbors were cooking up. And lo and behold, our neighbors had gotten a snake in the village and were preparing it for lunch. They held up the snake skin for us so that we could get a picture. Thankfully, they did not offer any snake to us.
