Monday, May 22, 2006

Monkey In My Kitchen

The electricity was out so I was cooking my "cutta dahl*" in the dimness of the late evening by just the light of the gas flame. I caught something out of the corner of my eye and thought a large stray dog had come into my kitchen. Not a pleasing thought but believe me when I say that it would have been preferable to turning around and seeing a very LARGE monkey throwing onions over his shoulder out of my vegetable baskets. (I think he was looking for a raw potato but unfortunately for him, I was out).

Now these are not cute, nice monkeys. They're big, ugly and mean.** This particular one was about 3' high seated, probably weighted about 80lbs and his tail was long enough to cross my whole kitchen.

I don't think he saw me standing there or he wouldn't have come in in the first place, and I was backed against the counter with nowhere to go so I was reluctant to gain his notice. If he came at me I was cornered.

I needed a weapon.

I stepped over his tail, crossed to the other side of the kitchen and got one of our long handled reed brooms. With that raised high I went back to my former position about four feet away from the monkey who was still searching for potatoes. I must have made a noise in there at some point because he turned and saw me and jumped back so he ended up in the middle of the kitchen.

I raised up the broom again and he jumped the rest of the way out the kitchen door and sat on the wall behind it contentedly eating a mango pit that he had previously picked out of our garbage.

I shut the door and made the rest of my dinner by candlelight.

* Cutta Dahl is lentils with pieces of raw mango added to make it tangy. Yum.
** See pictures from my post on March 18, 2006 "Monkeys Visited On Thursday." I have no idea how to do one of those link things where you just click it and go there. Sorry.

4 comments:

Matt Mikalatos said...

Rebecca--

Your brother Dan sent me this story. I thought it was great. I was thinking about putting a link to it on my blog but didn't want to do it without your permission. Dan and I do basically the same job right now, and we met in East Asia when we were both still there. Anyway, you can check out my blog at mikalatos.blogspot.com if you want, or send me an e-mail at matthew.mikalatos@uscm.org. I hope you don't mind me dropping by to read from time to time, I'm really interested in ministry in India. Thanks!

Rebecca O said...

I'm going to send you an email too but I wanted to say thanks for leaving a comment. I'm considering renaming my blog "The Blog Where No One EVER Comments." Or something like that. I'm still working on it.

Matt Mikalatos said...

You know, Dan is really hard to get to make a comment anywhere on-line. What is it about posting on-line, Dan? Hmmmm?

My problem is that I constantly comment everywhere. So it's nice to have another friend overseas to bother with my ramblings.

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