patience grand frère ... patience big brother

Hello Hello Silver Bloggers, Dreemers and Hivians.

If you know me, I like to take the alternative route, the least trodden path, and so this post will be no different.

Welcome to Generations, my response to the second prompt in the Silver Bloggers / Dreemport collaboration challenge. If you have entered then thank you, if you have not then we can't read what you wrote!

When the prompt was being dreemt up I did presume that most people would be posting about what their mammy telt them so to speak. Or perhaps a grandparent or two thrown into the mix, maybe a Dad, father or even a teacher etc...

This is all super. but it is essentially passing down wisdom from our elders.

What I was keen to read of course, is people who were going to buck the trend.

We have a lot of youngsters joining in this prompt today, so I wanted to see how they were impacting the lives of elders or people older than them?

Are any of them doing this?

I love to listen and have been called Uncle since my teens. I can sit on a park bench and a total stranger will come up, sit down and then proceed to tell me their life story or worldy problems.

More often or not they were older than me, now of course the numbers are growing the other way round!

So what things do I remember from my Mother...
1 Edward you can do whatever you want.
2 You make your own luck, and you are lucky Eddie!
3 Count to ten.
4 No matter how tough you think you have it, there is always, always someone somewhere worse off than you.

So what sticks in my mind from my Father
1 No Surrender
2 Don't let the bastards grind you down!

No, of course there are a fluff load more of things that I took on board.

I want to tell you about a six year old boy and a chicken.

We make our own luck, to a large extent I believe that. Do you?

To cut a long story short, I got a phone call from a work colleague. I was in my early twenties and living in Newbury in the South of England, he was calling from Gabon in West Africa.

Their Site Process Engineer had resigned and they need a new one like now.

Me, fluff yes.

Puts phone down, where the actual fluff is Gabon

I got to Heathrow, London's big airport to be met by my agent...

Ehmm Edward ... You have to be 25, as Shell don't let Senior Engineers be under 25 in their African operations, so pretend to be 25 if anyone asks you. That's not a problem is it?

What was that about always telling the truth, the trick of course was not to be asked.

I boarded the flight to Paris...
I boarded the flight to Libreville the capital of Gabon
I boarded the flight to Port Gentil (the oil capital of Gabon).
I unboarded the flight to Port Gentil!

Nope someone had a chicken in a crate on my seat. No problem thought I, I will have a few beers and catch a later flight. Turns out the crate had two big white fluffy chickens in it, and when they went to lift it, the latch opened and out flew two white fluffy chickens on this little plane. People trying to grab them, do you know they are wee buggers when you want to catch them!

Eventually, they were caught, and I got on the plane to Gamba a village for the oil terminal. I was pretty fluffed.

I was to be based down here in Gamba and up country at Rabi.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Here is a young white kid in deep darkest Africa, realising he never actually asked the agent anything about where the place actually was, or what the fluff he was supposed to be doing.

I met some of the construction guys who were just finished with a 48 hour shift, bed nah they were off to a bar. Fluff yeah can I come, okay into the jeep and down to the local village.

Talk about having your eyes opened. The bar was a table made from a pallet stuck on top of two big tractor tyres in the middle of the sand. There were no roads in the village. The kids were playing with no clothes on. They just peed on the sides of the houses, it was as if I was watching fans of a Celtic Rangers football game. The houses were shacks, a couple had managed to get corrugated iron sheets for a roof. The others not so good.

This was poverty, real poverty. Here was I coming to help a country with their oil production and the government was another corrupt piece of crap that had their citizens in poverty. But the kids, they laughed and they laughed.

I had a blast during my stay in West Africa. I worked in Gabon, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Daddy of them all Nigeria.

To me, everyone was so fluffing nice. I used to work for months at a time, and when I went on leave I will give whatever I had to the locals wherever I was.

I thought I could drink before I got to Africa. Boy did I find out you can drink more and sleep less.

So I mentioned being up country. If I thought that Gamba with its shacks in the sand was basic well upcountry was jaw-dropping.

We had to be choppered in, this was proper broccoli jungle. When you fly over it looks like heads of broccoli from the air. There were no vehicle trails yet let alone roads, but there were bodies of water.

My job was to design Early Production Facilities for the production of oil.

That was where I learnt to think on my feet. What the actual fluff was I doing, half the time I had no clue. I was like Red Adair, working with the construction guys who were beasts. Play hard, party harder I learnt what that meant.

There was nothing to do up there, except work eat drink pass out and repeat. One week we decided to take a day off, and got a tree trunk dug-out canoe and went exploring.

Image by Valéria Rodrigues Valéria from Pixabay

We came across three straw type houses on the side of a river. We stopped and I saw three chickens running around.

Big fat plump chickens...

How I could go a roast chicken dinner!

Now you have to picture that we had been drinking palm wine by the bottleload as we had been chugging along on our wee adventure.

We stopped and got out, and were met by the wee chief with his gun pointing at us. They had never seen people up there until very recently so we were lucky he never took aim and blew us away.

We got chatting away, it is amazing how drink seems to make fluent in any language in their head, true for me anyway.

He got his special brews out, and by now the four of us were quite literally legless.

Then the fluffing chickens kept running and clucking and running and clucking, or at least I became aware of it.

Something inside me snapped and I went running after them, dived missed and landed with a thud on the dirt. Stumble up and proceed to do the same thing, again and again.

This went on for about five minutes and this time I just lay on the ground.

Next thing, this wee boy lies down beside me.

Puts his fingers to his lips and whispers patience grand frère....

Patience big brother, what the fluff was he talking about. Then the absurdity of the whole situation dawned on me. Here I was absolutely no idea where I was, off my head lying on the ground chasing chickens being told by a wee Gabonese boy to be patient.

Fluff's sake, it is normally me that tells people to be patient.

I have had enough of this I thought, and so proceeded to get up.

This little hand grabs my elbow and again he whispers patience grand frère

What is he on about, but I did as I was told.

The next thing I knew, he snuck out his hands and had a chicken up in the air by the feet.

Smile he is now shouting

patience grand frère... patience grand frère

Woohoo weeman, everyone was making jubilation noises and we go back to the chief.

I was in awe of this wee boy. Turns out he was 6 and a son of the chief, well he was head man so the law of this jungle was whatever he said it was.

He was some haggler though, we agreed to buy the chicken and paid a heck of lot for it, but it was worth it. I did infact roast it over a fire in their village.

Patience indeed is a virtue, some things are caught easily if you just wait and bide your time.

That little boy?

His name is Joseph which I found a coincidence as one of my father's middle names is Joseph.

Well Joseph and his sister Giselle now live in France, and Joseph qualified a couple of years ago as a Doctor.

Joseph and his chicken are forever stuck in my head, and he had such a profound affect on my life I helped sponsor him and Giselle to go to school and amazingly to actually goto university.

We can learn something from each and every one of us!

So don't lookdown your nose when someone younger offers you advice!

Thanks for visiting and enjoy the rest of your day!