Saturday, November 24, 2007

In your jeans...

Frank was the first team member I met in India. He's a 68-year-old Indian-American who grew up in the Indian city of Goa before moving the United States in the late sixties. A few of us were waiting for the bus to take us to Bawana one morning after breakfast. I was practicing my Hindi on Nivita, and making her laugh/cry with my mispronunciations. I had been flipping through the medical section of Frank's Hindi dictionary and was having a blast switching the word "dost," which means friend, for the word "dust," which means diarrhea. You can see how much fun that would be. During a break in the hilarity, Frank spoke up and very seriously said, "You know it's funny, but diarrhea is hereditary." We all stopped laughing and were earnestly waiting for Frank to expound on this fascinating idea when he came back with the kicker. Giggling to himself, as he always does when delivering a punch line, he said "Yes, you always find it in your jeans." It took a second before we even realized the joke (jeans/genes), but he had us in tears with that one. It's not so much his material as it is his delivery. He can't help but laugh himself before he gets the joke out. It's so endearing, that any joke he tells, no matter how corny, soon has the whole team cracking up.

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