African joys

It was particularly warm last night. Granted ‘warm’ is a relative term around these parts, because, well...ok, hell, ‘warm’ doesn't exist here. This is a land of harsh extremes. So let's start over.

It was freaking hot last night. I spent the evening hours in Hassi Messaoud, our operations hub for the flying we do throughout Algeria. I shoveled down a lovely meal of something indiscernible, smothered in other indiscernible-don't ask, don't tell-loveliness, with a side of curiously unidentifiable mush that I'm fairly sure smiled at me at least once during the course of dinner. You just cannot get African food, in all its glory, elsewhere. Thank God. A few days earlier I entered the company cafeteria for lunch and picked up the menu du jour just as the local attendant came to retrieve my meal coupon. Each day you have a choice of two exquisite entrees and a plethora of randomness laid out on a central table. Glancing at the 2 choices I did a double take. July 5th: Haricot verte avec poisson o Meat love. Surely the menu did not say Meat love. I laughed as the attendant looked on quizzically. "Monsieur?" he asked. "Yes, I'm sorry, ummm, I'll...errr...Je voudrais le Meat Love." "aaah, oui monsieur, le meat love est bon!" "I was afraid you'd say that!" I said laughing. You might wonder why I'd order meat love. It may sound even more risqué than ordering fish with green beans in the middle of the Sahara desert, but I had an urge for the Love. Minutes later I was handed a platter with a ball of ground beef, some parsley scattered ornately on top, and about 5 soggy french fries. "Le meat love, monsieur, bon apetit!" Mmmmm, mmmmm good!

The meat love it turned out was a hard boiled egg wrapped in about 1/4 of a pound of hamburger. It was, to say the very least, interesting. It took me a while to stop giggling like a school girl about the plates name, but once I cut into the mystery that lay before me I started laughing even more. It was a concoction that our cook in Abeche, Nestor, would have been very proud of. Nestor's crowning culinary achievement was his fruit salad, with mangos, canned pineapple and thinly sliced, cold canned hotdogs. He was proud, very proud. The pride lasted until the next morning when our mechanic, Leo, threatened to remove his scrotum with pliers if he ever made the dish again. Maybe I should send him the recipe for Meat Love.

After dinner, with a dangerously rumbling stomach warning of misery to come, I made off to talk to my beautiful fiancé on Skype, the internet telephone program. We recently bought web cams so that we could both see each other while chatting, and it always puts my heart at ease to see her smile live on camera. We spoke for sometime before I retired to my small, single sized mattress in my balmy room. The air conditioning was misbehaving, sending bursts of cold air for a few moments, and then turning itself off for 15 minutes or so. I fell asleep atop the covers after watching 10 minutes of amusing Arabic pop music videos in which women with fully covered faces sang seductive songs. Oh, I’m sorry, did I say amusing? I meant slightly depressing.

Around 5 am I woke up barely enough to realize that the air conditioner had revived itself from its mechanical slumber and that the temperature had dropped significantly. I drew the covers over me and started to drift off again into my dream. Through fading consciousness I heard what sounded like a small rattle coming from the AC and then a fairly loud "THWUMP-POP". The sensory nerves in my eyes produced a bright flash as something hit me square on the forehead, and my eyes rolled immediately to an alert posture. Thinking it was probably a chunk of ice that the unit had finally dislodged, I brushed my face and chest off seeking to swipe the mystery object from my bed. When my hand brushed over my chest I hit something big and cold. It moved.

It actually ran down my chest and stomach towards the sheets below. I simultaneously, and violently jumped from bed shouting something along the lines of "oohaahuuuuuhauah!!!", fumbling for the light switch. After a few moments of terrified searching, I found the switch and flicked it on. As the fluorescent lights flickered slowly on, illuminating the white walled room and my now disheveled bed, I caught glimpse of the culprit.

A cockroach the size a small Jack Russell terrier sat alert on the bed, staring my direction as if taunting me. "Sup buddy? You want a piece of this?" he yelled. I stood dumbfounded for a moment, slightly relieved it wasn't some large, prickly and poisonous black scorpion that I've heard about. Then my anger towards the paratrooper cockroach took hold of me and I answered with a resounding 'Hell yeah I do you bastard!'. After a rather non eventful battle, the cockroach was deposited in the trash bin and I wiped my sandal of bug goo on the rug by the door. As I went back towards my bed I saw little black specks freckling my white sheets and my white pillow. It would seem that my AC had been struggling due to a build up inside its vents. It also would seem that the now deceased, dive bombing perpetrator had been struggling to build a little residence for himself and his 100,000 relatives inside the very AC that sat 4 feet over my head. When the AC finally won and dislodged the pest it also dislodged a million flecks of cockroach shit all over my bed, and me.

I went back to the trash can and hit the cockroach again, just for good measure.