Religious Irreverance

It was a moment of pure comedy genius.

We have had to do a fair bit of translating at our first weeks meeting, as there are two German participants who can’t speak French. So me, LG and Noxy have taken turns translating their English into French and visa-versa.  All good, but surely there was some room for comedy……or even some unintended religious irreverence.

Indeed there was.

LG was translating into French. The guy from Germany was, well shall we say, rather evangelical. As he began his speech it was not long before he turned “to a story from the bible”. I could see LG cringe thinking she’d struggle with the vocab as he launched into a min-sermon.  All was going fantastically well, until he said “Jesus is Risen”.

She paused, miss hearing him and asked him for clarification. “Jesus isn’t….?”

“Jesus is Risen” he replied a little bit more emphatically.

“Jesus isn’t” she retorted.

“Jesus is Risen” he said, this time with traditional charismatic hand gestures.

LG smiled, thinking she had finally got it and then began to say to the room rather triumphantly in French that “Jesus n’est pas..” to which the whole room piped up in exasperation saying “Non!, Jesus est Ressuscité!!!!”

There in that exchange of words caused by a simple misunderstanding of a translator was a summary of debate on the whole foundation of Christianity. The evangelical insisting that Jesus is risen, and the sceptic reply that Jesus isn’t. Comedy genius

The religious irreverence didn’t end there though. as later on that night, we realised Noxys room was decked out in the finest piece of religious kitsch I have ever seen; hands down (as seen in the piccie). At first sight it looked fine. A large crucifix on the wall with Jesus on the cross.  The genius was that when we turned the light off, Jesus glowed in the dark…..very brightly!

A new breakdown job

I always thought that running a wine bar in Paris for no profit and letting friends use it to play music and sell art was going to be my ‘Breakdown’ job; you know, the job you think you’ll do when all goes belly up and you need to just start again. Well, i now have a new one. I am going to man the land border at Aflao between Ghana and Togo, raising and lowering the rubber rope that constitutes the countries boundaries.

The border was quite simply chaotic, chilled, manic, confusing, logical, noisy and relaxing all at the same time. It seemed almost too cliched to be real. We joked that it was the sort of experience you had on a gap year and would then regale friends on your return for years with ‘this one time, we went through the Togo border and…” So I will spare you this, but you can imagine it was a brilliant experience. The officer even felt obliged to live up to stereotypes and try and bribe us, except he only asked for a bottle coke and he had already issued our visa!

We called our colleague in Lomé who said he would come to meet us but to just relax at the border, so we sat catching the rays on a wooden bench in no-mans land between Ghana and Togo, looking out to the sea, chatting and taking it all in. I then bought us drinks off a passing cart and waited there by the road leaning on a wooden post directing cars and lorries through the border as everyone seemed oblivious to everything going on. It odd to feel so relaxed in such chaos. That was it, that was to be my new breakdown job. If i couldn’t work the rope, then i could always sell bottled drinks from a wooden cart.

So you now know where to find me

Paxan, Matilda Asante would eat you for breakfast

A four hour drive from Accra to Lomé via the border town of Aflao is not exactly beautiful, so the thought of the driver putting on a Ghanan political chat show did not at first fill me with excitement. Little did I know I was about to hear the famous Matilda Asante

Now she makes Paxman look like a shy kitten in a new house. She was simply awesome as she took politician after politician apart one by one. She was not overtly aggressive though, just brilliant at reading between the lines and exposing them. You could almost hear the guys sweating at the other end of the telephone line as she prepared to ask her questions. “Are you saying then that you have failed in your responsibilities and duties for which we are paying you?” was one deadpan line she delivered, followed by another where he simply said “So, reading between your words, you have hoodwinked the electorate”. It is now wonder she has won numerous awards, including BBC Local On-Air Campaign of the Year.

I would encourage you to google her and see if you can see or hear any of her work.

Flirting

I am often told that i flirt a lot: rarely told that i flirt well….

I am currently sitting in business class, sipping a fine red wine and enjoying my almost flat seat courtesy of the First Officer, whose name i actually can’t remember anymore. For once it has paid off. Me, LG and Noxy have just been personally escorted from our seats (in what i will now refer to as pleb class) to our new ones by the well dressed officer whose name i just can’t remember. Even listening to Coldplay is an enjoyable experience.

It all started when I did my usual tactic of flirting with the stewards, which has usually got me a few extra chocolate bars and on one occasion a bag full of plane wine to take to Sierra Leone, developed into a conversation about why i was flying to Ghana and what i was then going to do once I got to Togo. He seemed genuinely interested and told me the First Officer’s daughter was going to to Ghana to do voluntary work. I said wed be more than happy to talk to him if he wanted a chat. A bottle of extra red wine later (which would have been bonus enough) and he appeared next to us and we got into a chat about his daughter and her future work. I admit at this point Noxy took most of the lead, whilst LG was almost oblivious to it all, but once it was finished, as if asking us out on an illicit dates he said ‘would you be embarrassed if i asked you to come and sit in some free seats up the front?’. Embarrassed?!?! Ecstatic more like! For once it had paid off! As we left our stuff on his command, as if escaping from prison, he led us up front to our new fully reclinable seats, as we struggled to contain our childish excitement.

We live in our own world at times in this job,and it was nice to feel special and valued. I have often written about how it is very easy in our field to be so damn self-relective and PC that we often loose the bigger picture. Well, the First Officer whose name I am now really upset I still can’t remember due to the wine thought what we do was important job, he warmed to us in our talk and wanted to do something special for us.

Thank you First Officer. Not just for the seats, but for the recognition.