Big Fish

*Warning: The contents of this post are not for those of faint heart, those nursing, pregnant, or who may become pregnant. If you have kidney or liver problems, talk to your doctor before reading this post.*

So, two funny stories “off the record” from Nigeria, those I am not sure the general audience would be terribly interested in hearing. First story: I was over in the compound across the street the other night, having dinner with another missionary and some friends. Night fell and as there was no NEPA (Nigerian for electricity) that evening, we made our way back across the compound with a flashlight, held out in front by my gallant companion. We were walking across a basketball court, wide and level and to all appearances completely free from debris, when I had the very good fortune to stub my toe, hard, on a rock in my path that was a little bit larger than a brick. “Ouch,” I said, or some such thing, for my companion stopped and came back to check. I assured her that I was fine, having only clumsily stubbed my toe, and onward we went. But by the time we were at the gate of our friends’ compound, I could already feel a suspicious wetness growing in my shoe. We made our way back up to our flats in our compound, and my friend came back up to my flat to see if there were any battery run lights for me to use (there weren’t). I came in and immediately went to check out my foot with my flashlight, which I had foolishly left in my flat. Sure enough, the top half of my poor sandal was soaked with blood and my toe looked somewhat worse for wear. My friend noticed and kindly offered me the use of a bandaid, and then off she went for the evening. So there I was at 10:00 on a pitch black night, bleeding into the bathtub and trying to clean off my toe with a little cup of purified water, since I wasn’t really sure what the water here would do to it, and doing all this by the light of my little flashlight. (The toe is, by the by, more or less fine, as when I finally got a look at it, it was just a small cut on the end of my big toe that caused all the trouble).

Second story, happened only today at lunchtime. Now, the thing that you have to understand about this story is that NEPA goes off fairly frequently here, usually only for 15 minutes to an hour, but sometimes as long as a day or so. And when it does, there is no power in my fridge. So, today, having no NEPA and little food in the house, I decide to use the goodly can of tuna fish that had already been purchased for me upon my arrival to make myself a tasty tuna melt sandwich. (Yes, we can get cheese here, but it is rather costly). So I open up my wee can of tuna and what a sight did assault my eyes. This was the strangest tuna I had ever seen. First of all it was packed in oil, but it was so, so dark, like a grey-pink-black combination that looked fairly vile. I wondered what might be in the can besides just tuna, but poked around and managed to spoon out a few spoonfuls that looked okay. Then, the mayonnaise. Now, I know that mayo is a rather common ingredient in tuna salad, but I have never been that big of a fan so I am not sure what possessed me to try to put it in in the first place. But I opened up the jar, which still had its plastic ring, mind you, but had been in my fridge for a full day while there was no NEPA. And yet, mysteriously, there was a thin layer on the top that looked and smelled suspicious. So I spooned out that top layer and threw it away and proceeded with the making of my sandwich, adding lots and lots of garlic powder to the mix in the hope that I might taste nothing else. I cut the bread and added some thin little slices of cheese. Into the frying pan it went, where it shortly became even more of a fiasco because I had cut the bread too thin, so it started to fall apart and stick to the pan and very soon, I had a mangled mess of dark tuna and crumbling bread on my plate. This whole time I had been cooking, I had been growing more and more anxious as I looked upon what I very soon planned to force upon my digestive tract. But I was desperately trying some very positive self-talk to psych myself up to eat this hideous sandwich, and failing miserably. A first bite: Fishy, very, very fishy, with a little bit of raunchy mayo flavor and soggy bread thrown in. No, I said to myself, this is delicious. This is the best tuna fish sandwich I have ever tasted. More bites. More anguish. More positivity. I was strongly reminded of the hideous can of coleslaw that Jer tried to force himself to eat in good old Eire, and felt strongly tempted to go lie on the couch or perhaps pack the beast up for some hungrier day. No, I thought, if you can’t eat it now, think how much worse it will be cold.

Another bite, and another. Halfway through the sandwich. I stall when I find something of a foreign nature (i.e.—not native to the fish, or perhaps too native?). This is the final straw. My eating stalls, waves of nausea pass over me. I feel a strong urge to vomit. Shannon girl, I tell myself firmly, it’s less than two dollars worth of fish. It’s not worth it. The sandwich, however, cannot be altogether abandoned, my Scotch-Irish sensibilities keep screaming. So, the fish is duly scraped away, trying to retain as much of the precious cheese as is possible. The last bites are successfully down, my frugality is satisfied, but now I have to come face to face with the full horror of what I have done. Surely, surely, I said, I am gripped by the throes of death. No one could eat such foulsomeness and yet live. Is this to be my tragic, untimely end? Woe to me, to have sailed across seven seas and battled giants and ogres only to be brought down on the shores darkest Afrika by a foul fish! Panic and emptiness. Panic and emptiness.

To make matter worse, not only is my mind still reeling with the thought of the black death inside that can that I actually freely chose to put inside my body, then I have to contend with the heavy weight of guilt that comes of actually having disposed of the filthy creature, rather than eating it. Mayhaps it would not have been so bad if not so many things had been going rotten of late. There was the couple of tablespoons of mayo earlier that day, but not only that, there was the half a melon that turned to translucent goo in the fridge while the NEPA was gone, as well as the leftovers of the salad that I had for lunch that wept strange juices in its sad Styrofoam container and had to be pitched. Wicked, wicked girl to waste such food! It should have been eaten, rot and all! It’s not like I have much food to begin with, without pitching half of it into the garbage. I was very angry that I was so weak, then, as to not be able to stomach the corpulent tuna. Who dares to go to Africa when they are too sissified to eat a tuna fish sandwich? I made many dire threats to myself about being sent home to eat chocolate bon bons on couches of indolence and slowly be crushed by the guilty weight of inaction. But I writhed in my very marrow to think of eating it, and so, alas, I lost the day. Kai! I suck at this game.