It was said on the local news yesterday that a woman went to hospital, worried that she may have avian flu after giving a pigeon the kiss of life. Thankfully it turned out she just had a cold. What caught my attention though was that nobody seemed to think what she did was odd. Personally I wouldn't know how or when to give a pigeon the kiss of life, for which I'm grateful.

Every now and again I wander back to tblog to see what’s happening, and slide back out before anybody notices. Today I feel like leaving a few words behind.

It’s been two years since I wrote about moving to this village I now call home. Adjusting to life here hasn’t been easy but I think I’m on my way to settling, I’m at least satisfied. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be fully accepted here, the locals don’t even accept people from the next village so a paying guest from another country has no chance. That’s not to say that there’s animosity, far from it, but I’m reminded often that I’m not expected to understand because I’m a foreigner.

The old boy across the street died recently. He was a cantankerous old bugger who always wore his slippers outside, had a foul mouth and insisted on calling me “guiri”. I really liked him. I once complained about his shouting through the siesta and asked him to keep the noise down. He simply told me to stop listening. Problem solved.

The day he died I didn’t know what to do, so did the cowardly thing, nothing. It seemed to me that everybody else knew what was expected of them, what had to be done and when. Within minutes the women from the street arrived and laid him out…on the sofa. Then the food started arriving, pot after pot of the stuff. People came and went throughout the evening and over night. The women stayed in the house, feeding whoever would eat and the men stood outside smoking black tobacco. They all wailed.

I’ve thought about him and the day of his passing a lot. I didn’t understand what was happening and I didn’t know what to do, if anything, but as I write this it occurs to me that maybe I wasn’t expected to understand. Maybe.