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I made a comment on Facebook about the funny things that happen in Greenville… so I thought I would share what some of those funny things are.

-          Kou and I have been trying for the past year or more to get (and keep) the hospital dispensary organized, with the drugs in alphabetical order.  Every time we go there we re-organize it, because people keep making up their own alphabet. 

-          We have an old man who “brushes” in our yard.  Brushing is cutting the grass with a cutlass (machete).  Our house is built on a place that used to be swamp, and it doesn’t take long at all for the whole place to be overgrown.  Kou and I wanted to plant flowers in front of the house, so we asked him to prepare the place – both of us trying to describe a flower bed, where he would just dig up all the packed-down dirt in one area that we can come and plant flowers in.  Every time we walk in or out the gate today, we find another way that he (mis)understands us.  First there were five or six little tiny holes in the yard.  Then there was a very narrow line of ground that he dug up.  Then he understood the idea of a flower bed, but we told him that he should look for black dirt to replace the rocky stuff that he dug up.  We showed him where to put the dirt that he took out to even out part of the driveway.  When we left the house a little bit ago, we left little mountains of dirt all over the place.  I don’t know if we’ll ever describe our intention correctly!  The crazy thing is, he seems to understand me with my “sirese” (American English) better than Kou, a native Liberian English speaker!  

-          Along with the same old man, we have one old man named Sunday who is a security guard.  He’s my favorite, (is it all right to have a favorite staff member?) but at the same time he’s a very simple man.  Anyway, all day today while the other old man has been trying to understand how we want the flower bed, Sunday has been on duty, supervising the man.  So every time one of us went to correct anything, Sunday would say “Okay….  Uh-huh… Yeah I got it now” and then would proceed to make sure that the man was doing whatever we had told him to do. (So Sunday may have contributed to all the misunderstanding!!!) 

-          Sunday is the same man that Kou and I sent to buy some food for us a few weeks back.  It was in the evening, and we wanted bread and roasted meat.  We gave him 30 Liberian Dollars (LD) to buy 3 pieces of bread, and 150 LD to buy 3 portions of roasted meat.  We all started laughing as soon as he came back – carrying 2 portions of meat (100 LD worth) and 8 pieces of bread (80 LD worth).  When we told him his mistake, we laughed even harder because his response was, “It’s not bad… you can eat it all” – but then when we told him we didn’t want to eat all that bread, his next response was, “It’s not bad – I will go back and change it.”  And I was surprised, but he really was able to go back and convince the people to take back 5 pieces of bread so he could get the money to buy the other portion of meat!

-          Let’s see… I just heard the Sinoe County police passing with their sirens on.  They just received two pickups in December.  The first two or three days that they had their pickups they drove crazily all over the place, with sirens screaming the whole time.  Early in the morning, late at night, they were driving around crazily with their sirens on showing everyone their new toys.  Until they drove over a piece of metal that was in a mud hole and cut a hole in the bed of one of the pickups!  After about a week both of the pickups were rather banged up.

-          This one has a sobering aspect, but has a funny part as well.  The part of it that makes me sad is that it involves a little 16-year-old girl who is HIV-positive and just had a baby.  Kou and I, along with the HIV counselor at the hospital, had spent quite some time with the girl and her mother (who is only like 31, the girl’s mother also has a 7-month-old baby), trying to explain to them and teach them about what it means to be HIV-positive.  Anyway, we hadn’t seen these people since the baby was born.  They came to the hospital yesterday and were trying to register the new baby.  When they register a baby they ask the mother’s name and the father’s name.  So the registrar and Kou spent about 10 minutes talking to the girl trying to figure out her “husband’s” name (he started paying her dowry and all… her family consider him her husband!)  All she kept saying was something like “Dokydo” which is like a nickname.  Finally they had to ask the girl’s mother, and she said the girl’s husband’s name was Augustine.  Then to find out the last name was another few minutes while the girl and her mother discussed what the real last name was!  Finally, they asked the location where the child lives.  As we started comparing the patient’s charts, we found out that the girl and her mother (who live in the same village) had reported living in different places on their charts, and the place they said the new little baby was from (like a week old) was a totally different place! 

Anyway, some of that may not be too funny to anyone who’s never lived in Greenville or doesn’t know the people involved… but that’s my story of the funny stuff happening in Greenville.    I guess the bottom line is that although things can get really really frustrating in Greenville, I feel blessed to be able to laugh about lots of things, and to have someone like Kou to laugh with!