Looking in the Claff Box

Nairobi is wintery cold and grey. Somehow everything is coming apart at the seams even more than usual. Yesterday was a Day of Many Rants.  So things which make us laugh, uproariously, are all the more welcomed.

Since the grenade attacks and heightened security level, security guards check for bombs in Nairobi. But its not the systematic approach I remember from IRA threat days in UK.  Male guards check men, and have the electronic scanner toys. Female guards check women, and just look in your handbag. It's not clear whether the electronic scanner should beep (showing it has a working battery, but might have found something malevolent), or be silent (suggesting it hasn't). Both  are accepted, in an accepting way.  Guards check cars going into prime targets or underground carparks. They have the swish mirrors on sticks, and check that you haven't attached a bomb to the undercarriage. And they systematically check the boot.  Not the contents of the boot.  I've seen them let in pickup trucks full of scrap iron.  They've let me in with the suspicious contents of a cello case and a trombone case, unchecked.  What they check, rigorously, is the tiny hidden flap, where in well ordered boots people keep the accident kit. 

It suggests a certain logic and order to the world. If you had a bomb in there, you'd keep it nicely packed away, tidily.  Like a dolls house. But it so frustrates me.  'If you're going to look, do it properly.'

Yesterday a guard gesticulated through the window:  'I want to look in the claff box.'
Three of us in the car, none of us understood at all.  Two minutes later, still didn't get it. Claff box?
He meant the glove compartment. We opened, he checked.

Two hours later when we left the shopping mall, we giggled watching incoming motorists scratching their heads too. Dumbfounded. 'Claff box?'  And the extra two minutes delay for each car clogged the traffic, gridlock in each direction for ten minutes.   In the drive home someone only had to call 'Claff box' for the rest of us to giggle, uncontrollably. Oh the power of language teachers, rejoice! 

Strangled yelps

There's a strangled yelp, known only too well to dozing language learners. Friday afternoon, first lesson after lunch, lulled into a somnolent comfort zone and then, doused in cold water, a question, requiring an answer. Now.  ???????!!!%%

I've squealed its extreme versions. As an 18 year old who'd decided she didn't want to be an au pair, I worked as an auxiliary nurse in a hospital in Nuremberg, Southern Germany.  What does the A level student say when waking a ward of elderly patients at 6 am, as they growl at her in unison in their deepest Nurnbergisch dialect, without their false teeth in?  Worse still, answering the ward phone, when an impenetrable staccato instruction would issue forth, requesting instant action.  Was that go and meet the lift on the third floor?  Or go and pick up three patients from the bottom floor?  To X-ray or to A&E? Sofort.  Help.

Or on the intensive Welsh course, true immersion,  aimed at those of us who needed to bring our Welsh from a standing start to professional-level competence in three months. From 'bore da' (good morning) to 'annwyl cyfeirion' (dear councillors, necessary when addressing a council meeting to request funding).  Based on the heavy-duty Hebrew courses offered newcomers to Israel, it ran for four full-pelt hours a day. After the first week, 'dim Saesneg o gwbl', 'no English at all.'  The adrenalin-high, enthusiastic, interactive teacher who moulded his teaching style on children's tv's Mr Tumble, who would shoot rapid-fire random questions at the 7am class, throwing a smartie at your hands if you got the question right, at your head if you uttered the scared yelp. No place to hide. Aaarggghhh.  Not helped by the fact that Welsh has no one word to grunt for 'yes' or 'no'. You need to have been listening from the start.  'Would you like a cup of tea?' 'I would.' 'Are you volunteering to come and explain this to us all.' 'I'm not volunteering.'  Eeek again.

So I should have more sympathy.  I've worked as a language teacher. I can do slow speed and simplified language too.  Or maybe I'm now a recruit who's survived boot-camp, who has quashed any empathetic streaks, and joins in the hazing with relish?  But you know it hasn't been a meeting of the minds when the observer 8 year old son says, in a flitting moment of reflection between mad-dog tours round a muddy garden on his bike, 'Mum, he didn't understand you at all.' Nope, I think you're right there.

Sometimes its that the concepts I want to get over are too new, too complex in their implications.  'Stop,' I said very firmly to the driver of a dumper truck recently.  He was trying to unload the contents of his truck onto his business district building site. Site the width of a dumper truck, he had managed to back in under the mains overhead power cable, but now, offloading, the bed of his truck was a centimetre below it, and rising all the time. 'If the truck pulls down the mains electricity cable, it won't just be you dead and me dead, but all the guards there, and these children here.  We'll all get electrocuted if the cable comes down in this pool of water.'

Sometimes, stream of consciousness, I'm thinking too fast, and also delegating clearly unpalatable jobs. 'Today there's the electrician coming about the lights which fused in the rain, but can you check they work before you let him go again.  Snakes and snails set off the electric fence again last night,  please could you go round and take off the dead bodies before they trigger it again?'  We've all done that deadpan gulp, shifty look behind, 'Who me?  Anyone else around she could possibly mean?  Fried snails and snakes, that ain't what I signed up for luv.  That's specialist work. Needs rubber gloves that does.'  Or that would be the UK translation.  Here, fair enough, what you get is ???!!!%%%

And sometimes, as all language learners know, we were just snoozing, zoning out, elsewhere. Snug, in a faraway land, musing on home time, weekends, castles in the air and pastures new. And the yelp is a yelp of protest, distress at being dragged, kicking and screaming, from pleasant dreaming to present reality.  ???!!!%%%