EMMA AND OKRO

27/04/12

Today (Friday) was the market day at Marche au Kpasse and I had not eaten eba in more than a week and it was killing me, lol. So I bought some garri, palm oil, seasoning cubes, vegetable oil and some other things. On the previous day, Roukeya, the house help and occasional cook, had helped me buy okro (gombo) and vegetable (legume), salt (sel) and chicken (poulet). I already had some fish in the freezer. I told Emma I was preparing Okro soup and she offered to help me. By the way, her step-father is a Nigerian and he loves eating okro. In any case, she wanted to see how it was prepared. She helped me chop the okro and helped me stir and taste for salt. And when we made the eba (pate), she helped in turning it. It was fun, really. And when we had dinner that evening, she really enjoyed the food because it was spicy. It was my first time living with a white person in the same house for a week! She’s a really nice person and genuinely cared for the kids at the Orphanage. She even said she’d come back.

Well, last Sunday (29/04/12) she had to travel back home because her two months came to an end. I didn’t go with her to the Orphanage on Saturday which was her last day there, because it would be too emotional. She didn’t come back until late in the evening and her eyes were swollen from crying too much. And when I asked how it was, she just started crying again. Wow, I even had a few tears in my eyes to. It doesn’t take much to get me teary, so imagine if I had gone to the Orphanage with her that day! I would have been bawling, lol, because it doesn’t take me much to get teary-eyed. Seeing a dead chicken on the road is even too much for me to bear. My eyes get wet and I get all philosophical and shit. So I did myself (and the people at the orphanage) a huge favour by not going that Saturday. Haha, it would have been a case of crying more than the ‘bereaved’ (in this case, Emma).

Now that Emma has gone back, the house is really quiet because it’s just me for now, until another volunteer comes next month. I miss her and the stories she told me about her step-father, her father (now married to a Japanese with whom he has a baby boy) her sister, step-siblings and her boyfriend.