Ihh, verse. Oy. (name that movie)

"It's like I keep tellin' ya! You gotta stay focused!"
Yes, folks. I've been watching Hercules again. In fact, I'm listening to it right now. "I'll be all right... I'm a big tough girl. Tie my own sandals and everything. Bye bye, Wonderboy..."

Ouf. That's all I can say (actually, it's not ALL I can say since I'm about to expand on that thought). I've spent all of Saturday in my apartment, trying to get something done. I did the dishes, and I've spent a few thousand hours on the computer. First, putting off the papers I have to write, then trying to find inspiration for the papers I have to write, then pretending I was writing the papers I have to write. It's so much easier to write when you're not being graded so much on content! So, so far, I've got about a paragraph. And a new folder on my desktop with articles about caring for the elderly. So, I started on my blog entry super early today in the dim hope of finding additional inspiration for my papers. On the bright side, I've got til October 1st to turn them in. But I really want to spend as little time as possible once I get home working on those papers- I'll have a new semester starting a week after I get home. I don't want to get my summer term stuff mixed in with it! I will so not have time. I would like to invite any college graduates to email me any quick tips on writing 15 page research papers. Total, there's one 15-20 pg. paper with a 2-3 page abstract, a 15 pg. paper in English and a 7 pg. paper in French. Unless I want to do both of those last two in French, in which case they'll each be 7 pages. The one I'm particularly worried about is the research paper. I have to analyze the relationship between the French State, the Catholic church, and associations such as Les Petits Freres des Pauvres in the assistance of the elderly. Yikes! Political literacy, here I come.

Funny story. Yesterday I accompanied Makou to the other side of town to for a doctor's visit. The travel time was about 45 minutes both ways (from her apartment, plus about 20 minutes to mine), and the doctor's visit lasted about 5 minutes (I'm not exaggerating, p.s.). When I dropped her off at her apartment, she invited me in. It was a really nice place. Not extravagant, by any means, but simple and festive. Up to now, the apartments I've seen have mostly been dirty and messy and run-down. Makou didn't have very much, but she had a nice brightly-colored floor mat (a big one, like a rug except it looked like it had been woven from bamboo or something) from Senegal, a flowery green bedspread, and a bright tablecloth, with some fake, and once again bright, flowers on top of it. She had a small kitchenette, a little TV, and even a shower! (As much of a shock as it is to us spoiled Americans, it is a luxury for some of these people to have a shower in their apartment. Sometimes they don't and so they have to go to public showering places.) I sat down at the table, and, upon finding out that I don't drink coffee, she offered me some "agrumes" (citrus fruits) juice. She said, "I'm sorry, there's no sugar in this juice!" I replied that it wasn't that big of a deal, and when she saw that I liked the juice (which came in little pop cans), she gave me the rest of them to take home with me, since she didn't like them. Then, as I had an impending appointment, I told her that I should probably get going. "No, wait! I have potatoes!" I realized that she wanted to feed me lunch. I went in to her kitchen and talked to her while she served me. I asked her to just serve me a little bit since I wasn't super hungry (I'd had a big breakfast). She filled up my plate with more potatoes than I'd managed to eat in one meal in my whole life, I bet. (Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration) "Maybe just a little bit less...?" She added some more to the pile. She's relatively new to the French language (speaks some sort of African dialect) and so I think she probably misunderstood me.
In any case, the potatoes were delicious! I tried to ask out what spices she'd made them with, but as far as I could make out, there were only tomatoes, onions, salt, and garlic. I could've sworn there was some sort of turmeric or something in there... It was also served with some sort of meat. Fish, I think.
After I'd managed to finish my heaping plate, I started to thank her for the meal, but before the sentence managed to leave my tongue, she started to say, "Serve yourself seconds, my daughter. Please, serve yourself more, if you liked it at all." Ah! Ultimate guilt trip. Maybe it's a politeness thing to eat a lot when you're invited to someone's house in Senegal? In any case, I was so stuffed by that point that all I could do was smile weakly and heap another spoonful onto my plate. She's always been so sweet to me, and I wanted to be as nice as possible with her. She said, "That's nothing!" (It was a very small spoonful) but it was the best I could do at that point. I tried to reassure her verbally that I loved the meal that she'd made and that she was a great cook, but I'm not sure how well it worked. Anyway, I was short on time and so I had to leave right then.

Since then, I've thought a lot about her. A good chunk of the people we help in Les Petits Freres des Pauvres don't have any family, or if they do, are completely estranged from them. Makou has a big, loving family, but they're all in Senegal. 300 euros. She is 300 measly euros away from being freed from the misery of loneliness and Parisian stairs and metros with her arthritis and seeing her son again, but she's stuck here. That's a third of what we paid to get my plane ticket to France this year, and even then it was about half off what it would have been if we'd paid full price. And yet, with her almost nonexistent budget, she prepares me a huge meal, gives freely to me, and stays happy and smiling. "We all have the same God," she said the other day. "God looks on the heart. Some of the people in my religion are bad and want to kill people who don't have the same beliefs that they do. That is not good. God looks on the heart, and what he cares about most is that we do our best to follow him the best we know how."

We hear a bunch about misery in the United States. We watch Les Miserables movies in our English classes and study 3rd world countries in our Social Studies classes and then learn about the widow's mite in Sunday School. For me, this is a chance to see it up close. And I see three sides of it. Though a bit more rare, there are those who are pretty bitter at the lot that God has given them in life. Most common are those who are confused about why they've had to go through the things they have. Sometimes they try to reason it out and they conclude that Man is destined to be miserable. And then, there are people like Makou. They go through things in life that we can only read about and then they pick themselves back up, slap a smile on their face, and look for someone else to serve.