Frenchmen Beware!

I came home this afternoon to find our maid finishing up and getting ready to head for home. She LOVES to talk despite the fact that I am Arabic-impaired and she knows about the same number of words in French. These conversations can take an hour or so. Today I came home to work on our preschool rubrics for the French K4 program, so I was hoping to keep the conversation down to about 15 minutes or so, seeing how we never really seem to understand much that the other is saying. We greeted each other for about 5 minutes and asked three or four times how the other’s family was doing. As usual she mentioned something about France (I think she likes using the word Franzia because it’s one of the words she knows I’ll understand). She said something about a house in Oulfa (a neighborhood) but I didn’t really catch on to what she was talking about. Then she started talking about how much she hoped I would find a husband (you can pretty much guarantee that is going to be the way an older woman here will steer the conversation). I think she then told me that she got married at 15 years old, had a daughter at 16 and a son at 19! Whew! She continued talking about a husband and how he worked in the phosphate industry. At this point I thought she was talking about her husband. It turns out she’s on the lookout for MY husband. When she told me about Oulfa she meant she had started working at a nice villa in Oulfa and the owner was a French man whose work involves phosphate (I’m not even really sure what phosphate is except I faintly remember it showing up on the chart of elements in high school, I think). So anyway, she hasn’t yet met this French man, but I think she told me that when she meets him she is going to really check him out. If he is good, she wants to hook us up so that I can live in a nice villa and he can buy me a nice car. But she said (I think) if he is not beautiful, then he’s no good and she’ll have to keep looking!