A cracker to have with cheese, please....

This week, considering I'm practically sleeping at my work and 'teaching' whatever English nonsense bubbles out, I've decided to let you in on the quality of characters I teach and who never cease to amaze.

Koko Bis, whose actual name is Guy Phillipe on the role call is from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. He's about forty years old with not a wrinkle on his beaming, smiling face. In my class he has the loudest laugh I think I've ever had the privy in hearing and he takes a very, very long time in silence before he answers even the most basic question. In his personal life, he has three children who still live with their 'crazy' mother in Paris, his home for about fifteen years before he came to Montreal and he works six days as a butcher. He proclaims himself a special butcher, (why special - I still haven't got an answer) and a philosopher but to me he's got the goods of a class-A comedian.
Now, every Monday and Wednesday night for the last month I've seen Koko Bis tell the nine other students bits of his life story through a whiskey breath, which fortunately has reverted back to its original smell (his breath that is) due to the influence of his new Jamaican girlfriend. Not because she said so, I might add, because now instead of coming home to an apartment with only a bed, chairs and a table, he had a loving woman.
  
Two stories which spring to mind revolve around his illegal activities in France and his abscess.

As I mentioned before, Koko Bis lived in France for fifteen years. Fifteen illegal years, I should say.
But how could he do that? You ask. Wouldn't he eventually be caught by the police who travel in groups of three in France just waiting for an ethnic to walk down that street so they can demand their papers? Well, yes. And he was caught. Many times. But as Koko Bis will delight in telling to his avid listeners, he never had any fear of the police or the authorities and so they never cuffed him, booked him or threw him out of the country.
"You must respect them," he preached, before he told us of one time he got in a physical scuffle with them.
Perhaps his recipe of fearless respect was the perfect combination for a lineage of French cops...

And now to the final short story of the wonderfully entertaining Koko Bis.
His abscess. When he was a child of nine he developed a rather large abscess on his arm. His father was advised to take him to hospital promptly, which was many miles away. They tried many different medicines and treatments in the hope of not having to go to the hospital. When nothing worked Koko Bis grabbed a knife and sliced it open, much to his mother's horror. The family called him crazy which stuck with him until adult hood even though the action of piercing the protrusion not only let all the puss out but healed itself in three days.

So there it is.

A real cracker...