Me & Mohammed

This is Mohammed...not the best picture but it's difficult to take pictures of Africans in dark lighting on Christmas morning. Anyways, Mohammed is the sweet, funny old man that lives behind my house. We sort of inherited him. Our landlord hired him several years ago to guard the place when it was empty. When we moved in the landlord gave us the option of keeping him or not and initially we didn't really think it would be a great idea to have a stranger living with us. Now I can't imagine living there without him, he's kind of like a grandpa.

He's a refugee (as it seems the majority of people are in this crazy place) from the West.

Recently I've found myself living alone in this big house...well not alone really since Mohammed lives there too. Random but there is this Twix commercial on TV in Arabic that repeats for an annoying long amount of time 'me and you, me and you, me and you'. So when it was just me and Mohammed I said 'well, it's just me and you, me and you, me and you now' and he really just looked at me like 'what the heck are you talking about?!?'. Then I realized that, seeing as how he lives in my backyard, he probably doesn't know the Twix commercial. I felt kind of stupid but I also didn't know how to explain any of that in Arabic so we just moved on. No wonder he thinks I'm crazy!!

He works at night sometimes, every 4th night actually, and he is really worried about what I will do on the nights he works. I was explaining to him yesterday that it's all taken care of, that we have another guy who will come and guard on those nights, but he was not content with that answer. Today he went to my boss's house (it's strange but everyone knows who everyone is and where everyone lives and you just never know when someone you didn't expect to know where you live will knock on the door) just to be sure that I really will be taken care of on the nights that he works.

I thought that was really sweet. Now that my friends have moved he's totally taken personal responsibility for me. I really don't have to worry about living on my own because good old Mohammed is taking care of me.