Quote of the Week

When I moved into my new apartment I found a USAID computer there (with a rinky dink monitor even smaller than my laptop) that the housing guy said the person who was there before me asked to borrow.  Well, I finally got around to contacting the IT guy in our office to go over and pick it up.  So a couple of days ago we hopped into the Polaris (smart me rode down with him instead of walking to the house to wait for him - it was sunny and hot) and we drove down to pick it up.  Well,instead of picking it up he just moved it into storage at my apartment building (where they had all sorts of huge printers and stuff - though nothing interesting enough for me to say, “Hey, Kelvin, can I borrow . . . .”).

Kelvin is our IT guy.  He’s a local national and while we were driving down the street all the neighbors were calling out stuff to him and he was saying stuff back.  It seems like everyone knows Kelvin. He would go from speaking proper English (with me), to Liberian English (another Liberian who works at the embassy) to street Liberian English (with a woman washing her clothes outside near my old apartment) with no problem at all in the transition.   

Well as we were driving back to the embassy, the gate closest to us was closed for monthly maintenance so we had to drive around to the main gate, which is the one closest to the bat tree.  As we were driving up the parking lot towards the trees, the bats started swarming.  I tell you, that is one impressive site.  So we drove near the bat tree, then made our turn into the gate to get inspected.  As we were driving in, the guards were looking out at the bats.

“Look at that, look at all them bats.  Hey Kelvin, you ever eat bat?”

“Are you kidding, no way man!”

“Oh, it’s sooooooo good!  It taste just like fresh monkey!”

They then went back and forth on whether bats have enough meat to be worth eating, with the other guy arguing that there’s lots of breast meat on a bat.

All of this was of course said in street Liberian.  As we were pulling out of the gate Kelvin looked over at me and asked. “Did you understand what we were saying?”  I said, “Well, if he said bat meat tastes just like fresh monkey, then yeah!”  Kelvin’s eyes got wide, then he just shook his head.  A few seconds later he said, “It can’t have that much meat on it’s breast, it’s a flying rat!”

You know, when I was listening to the guy, I really expected him to say, “It tastes just like . . . chicken.”  I’ll never hear that statement again without laughing.

“Oh, it’s soooooo good!  It taste just like fresh monkey!”