la cucaracha

and hanlie waged war on the cockroach.  (book of nasty creatures chapter 3 verse 85).

 

i found a home away from home; hanlie and jair parada's place (they have air conditioning).  jair is the financial director for ADRA mozambique, hanlie is his wife and they have 2 month old isabella.  shortly after i started to teach the english class for the ADRA workers, jair found out i liked to ride bikes and since he had an extra one, we started to ride in the evenings.  riding was a double benefit, exercise being the obvious one and getting to know my way around the city was the second (which came in handy, a story i'll tell you later).  after we rode i'd hang out at the house for a bit, either to check my 'real' email, burp isabella or just enjoy talking in english with them for a while.  hanlie is south african which means she has a super cool accent.  jair is originally from bolivia but has nationalized to be south african and isabella is south african all the way.  i think she is going to grow up to be either one the most intelligent kids in the world or the most confused.  jair speaks spanish to her, hanlie speaks afrikaans to her (sounds like dutch), she hears them speaking english to each other and the rest of her known world speaks portuguese.  she's quad-lingual from the get-go. 

 

their place is a couple blocks up the street from the embassy.  i needed to go to the embassy to get more pages in my passport.  the friday before last, i left from the school and took the bus into town but it took me so long that the embassy was closing as i got there.  (i didn't know they closed by 11:30am on fridays)  last friday they helped me solve that problem by letting me stay at their place so i could just walk to the embassy in the morning.  it rained all morning.  i wanted to wait till it stopped or slowed a bit but 10:15am rolled around and i thought i better get there before it closed or my trip would be in vain again.  i got there and got pages and made some friends.  while i was waiting for the pages to get sewn in i turned to the security booth and asked the marines how we did in the olympics, they pulled it up on their computer screen and turned it towards the glass so i could look at it.  we started to talk about home and where we were all from.  never thought i'd say this but hearing americans speak american english with american accents was like music to my ears.  we made plans to hang out when they got off duty at 3pm and i headed back to the parada place.  the maid still hadn't showed up.  when it rains, the buses can't go as far into the neighborhoods and i guess she didn't want to walk in it either.  hanlie got isabella to sleep and i offered to attack the mountain of dishes that had accumulated in the maids absence.  she decided a joint effort would be more efficient.  as the rain let up, the humidity increased.  hanlie turned the switch on for the a.c. unit.  it made the worst rumble.  a gigantic cockroach came crawling out.  it was like watching one of those sci-fi films as it squeezed the rest of the way through the air slats and lumbered over the knobs and dials.  i was amazed at the size of it.  (now that i think about it i have seen larger in the dorm at my college in missouri, but it was still big)  hanlie turned the a.c. off and opened the door for quick exit.  armed with a killer spray she annihilated the thing.  it took a while for the little booger to give up the ghost, (if i had had some dr. bronners with me its death might have been quicker.)  she scooped him up with a bucket and had him outside before i even realized that the turd-licker had fallen of the wall.  (i can say turd-licker because jair told me that the cockroaches crawl out of the sewage tank when it rains and since it had been raining i thought it was safe to assume where his home was)