]I’ve learned that my students know next to nothing about nutrition, so when I ask what foods contain, say, calcium, I can get an answer of anything from bananas to milk. The exception is that they generally have a good idea of what is high in sugar (possibly from the high incidence of diabetes?).
Still, a student threw me for a loop the other day when I asked what foods are high in nutrients and received a confident response, “oil!”
My laptop is working for now. I’m not sure why. I simultaneously killed several programs and put it on airplane mode and neither of those things should have worked and could both be correlations, but I’m afraid to change anything.
My phone is not working. Finally bought an Intel smartphone for the equivalent of $43. Two and a half weeks in the screen starts randomly going stripy, and they had to send it to Abidjan.
“We’ll call you when it comes back.”
“On what?!”
So I got a $10 dumbphone, a Nasco. It has radio, a really crappy camera, voice recording, and theoretically internet access although I’ll never type in a URL in the number pad. Oh, and came with headphones. Headphones are a standard feature here, it turns out. Does the US do that yet?
Meanwhile, I have had holes in the ceiling since moving in. They went from 2 to 3, and then I started really bugging the agency about it. Now, this guy is negligent in many ways, not the least of which is never giving me my bills so I’m always forgetting and thus paying late fees (that reminded me to check electricity, so caught that one in time).
He promised to check on the holes. I clear my schedule and wait. He comes, looks, take a photo, sets an appointment for next week to get them fixed.
Again, I clear my schedule, put off everything I needed to do. Move everything away from the holes. Wait. At 5:15PM, I call. “Oh, the artisan decided not to come because it’s raining in Abidjan.” *
Next week, same time, clear my schedule again. Go home, prepare. 4:30, he calls. “He’s not coming today.” At this point, I’ve pushed off trips to Abidjan to get curtains, Bible study, purchasing a microwave and other minor things for three weeks, and simply can’t anymore. (I still haven’t gotten the curtains or microwave, but we did manage Bible study.)
He starts proposing days of the week to reschedule, and I simply can’t. After trying four different days and times and failing, he says, “Well, what do you propose?”
That was the end of my last nerve. I started shouting (ranting) over the phone, in English, everything I’ve just written in the previous paragraph, and that they can’t just make up times and then not show up.
Pause.
“Let me call the artisan.”
He gets back to me in a few minutes. “5:30?”
“5:30 is great, thanks.”
6:15PM, the doorbell rings. It’s the agent himself, not the artisan, with a bag of plaster and one of those spade things. He proceeds to do a fantastically horrible job of filling in the holes (they were too big to simply plug up), and now I have a giant lump in my ceiling that I’m pretty sure the next resident is not going to be too happy with, but hey, not my problem. (Maybe I’ll get a photo up later; no camera at the moment.)
This is now the second or third time that I’ve degenerated into shouting at people, and the thing is sometimes it’s the only thing that works. But, I don’t want to be that person.
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*Abidjan and Bassam get totally different weather.
