Now I have lived in Asia since December 31, 2002, and I speak the language pretty well. Not as well as my husband, which I get reminded of all the time when strangers hear me speaking BM and proceed to tell me about this really amazing guy they know who not only speaks BM but can speak like five different tribal languages, too. YEAH, BUDDY, HE CAN SAY, how are you? IN FIVE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES; BIG DEAL. blech. I KNOW, I MARRIED THE SHOW OFF.
Anyway, I don’t often learn new words. It’s not that I am so fluent in the language that there are no words which I don’t know; it’s just that I am rarely listening well enough to notice words I don’t know. But today this one stuck out.
See, I have this helper. I love her. If I had to choose between my helper and my husband, it would be a HARD decision. (I think he’d win, but only because he pays the bills. We had better just hope I never have to make that choice.) She comes in twice a week, cleans my house, watches the small child (despite his protests) and irons all five thousand of Joel’s button up shirts. I would die for this woman.
But she can’t tell a story to save her life. You’d think that coming from such an oral culture like she does, that she’d be a great story teller, but she ain't. When the woman is telling a story, she tells you what she had for breakfast that morning, how much she paid for her taxi and every single detail of the conversation she had. I can hardly make it through a story; I usually get mentally distracted by the time she gets to what she had for lunch.
Today, though, she starts telling me about her five year old niece, and the moment I looked into her eyes, I knew I needed to pay attention. In fact, just from the look on her face in the first five minutes of bland storytelling, I was already feeling sick to my stomach. Apparently her niece (who is like a daughter to her; she talks about her all the time) was asleep in the room with her two younger siblings, and while the grandmother (who was watching them) went to the bathroom, the girl disappeared. Like VANISHED INTO THIN AIR kind of disappeared. The other people in the living room didn’t see her leave, and despite half an hour of searching, she was nowhere to be found.
My heart was racing at this point. I forgot to tell you why. She told me at the beginning of the story that the little girl told her she had seen something. And apparently that something had come back to get her.
After half an hour, the grandmother went back into the room again, and there was the little girl. They couldn’t wake her up that night, and the next morning, she refused to talk to her family. Finally my helper went over there, and the little girl told her that a man had come to take her away to a wonderful place where her feet didn’t touch the ground when she walked. And she was happy there, but she remembered that there was one person here who loves her (my helper) and so for her, she came back.
So my helper's solution? Her mom and dad need to be nicer to her, stop yelling at her and never ever punish her. Then she will be happy here and won't disappear again. Because apparently when small children disappear like that, it's likely to happen again, and if it does, they will never want to come back.
Apparently the family held a ceremony to honor their ancestors to ward off bad luck, but they didn’t do it according to tradition, and so this spirit came and took the little girl as punishment. At least that is my helper's theory; she has issues with her brother's MIL.
This brings me to my new word. I'm not even sure exactly what it means because she kind of whispered it and didn't really want to explain what it meant. Apparently it is one from your ancestors (hers is from her father's side) who watches over your family (not necessarily always in a good way). Hers teaches her magic while she is sleeping; in fact, she told me that his magic/knowledge is too powerful for her and she doesn’t want it, especially because she doesn’t sleep well when he’s teaching her, and dang it she needs her sleep. The woman works all day cleaning houses and then works all night at a coffee shop making pau; who has time for a third job as witch doctor?!
Ummm, isn’t that C.R.A.Z.Y.? So now I am on a mission to figure this word out; I wonder if *I* have a spirit that is trying to teach me magic in my sleep? Hmmm, I'm off to find out. :)
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