Eids-giving

You might be surprised to learn that our own little town in this far-strung corner of the world was full of holiday spirit on Thursday. Stores were closed and children were out of school. Kitchens were stashed with all sorts of good food and roads were full of people traveling to spend the day with their families. Town itself felt deserted but you could feel happy energy buzzing out of almost every home you passed. For the handful of Americans in town, it was fun to bask in the atmosphere of a good home-cooked lazy family holiday provided by all our neighbors and friends who were celebrating Eid.
Despite being very far away from our own families, we managed to pull off a pretty impressive spread ourselves. The organization next door has a few American staff and they had a huge turkey and green apples flown in on one of their supply planes. We bought up all the sweet potatoes and black-eyes peas in town and googled home-made pie crust recipes. Seven of us spent all day in the kitchen cutting, mixing, stirring and improvising while blue-grass music blared out of someone's laptop in the background. We invited friends and co-workers over to share in the feast and when it was all said and done, people from five different nationalities gathered around the table. And it was SO good! In good ol' American fashion we all ate until we couldn't breath and then jumped up and down a couple of times to make room for pie. In fact, I think we all got a little drunk on tryptomene because we all started acting so silly. We had so much fun.
I think it was so good because it caught us all by surprise. No one there was related to each other and the whole premise of Thanksgiving had to be explained to the newbies. The only inclement weather outside was a duststorm and the closest thing to a football game was a world cup qualifying match that might have been playing on a satellite TV several miles away. But it really felt like Thanksgiving. A little in what I imagine was the original way. You know, "We are all just surviving and we are thankful we have each other or we are all going to die" kind of way. But it was mostly the other way. The little bit hokey, warm fuzzy, "We are with the people we love, in a place we love, eating food we love and we're so thankful to God for these blessings" kind of way. Now that's a good Thanksgiving.


Our friend Jarrod was a Thanksgiving first timer and didn't pace himself...

Post Script

So, if you haven't read the blog before this one you might one to do that first. I wrote it a little too soon. An hour into our "quiet" afternoon, another fire came pouring over the hill behind our house (right behind) and we spent another couple of hours lighting other fires to try and save our newly thatched tukul and tent. Once again, we were blessed, but this one left me shaky. Our compound is now surrounded by charred earth on three sides.

Wildfire

Shortly after breakfast this morning I heard what sounded like loud wind heading our way.
This didn't bother me that much as the wind really has been unbelievable lately. It has been blowing through in unexpected gusts, blasting around the side of the mountain like it is running for its life, knocking chairs and kitchen ware off of our porch in it's hurry to get somewhere further away than here. The walls and floor of our tent bulge all around us then buckle violently back out in a way that makes me too nervous to sleep. (Last night I asked Bryan, "Why does this wind scare me so badly?" He answered "Because our house is made out of fabric.")
But the wind never hit our tent this morning. I looked out in the direction of the noise and saw a wave of dark black smoke and realized what I was hearing was fire. Lots and lots of fire. We watched it for a while hoping to see it die down but within half an hour a tsunami of orange flames that would occasionally burst as high as thirty feet in the air was rolling towards our home. Our neighbors (who lost their entire compound to fire last year) had a team of guys out starting smaller fires to try and head the wildfire off. Bryan lit a handful of grass on our camp stove and ran out to join them. I ran inside and started packing go-bags just in case - passports, laptops, my bible and family photos (and if you must know, a little bit of make-up and a favorite bra. In this part of the world that loss would hurt.) The black sky was full of ash and dozens of hawks trying to catch small animals fleeing the heat. It looked and sounded and smelled so awful.
Amazingly, the fire seemed to die down almost as dramatically as it started. Other than the singed hair on Bryan's hands and arms, we were ultimately untouched. The afternoon is now completely still and quiet, and other than the crispy blackness right outside our gate, you wouldn't have even known the fire was here only hours ago.
I expect there will be a time that we will loose things to fire. It seems to just be a part of life here. But this morning I just kept thinking, "Not yet. Please not yet." Some days this place just feels insane! Days are blisteringly hot and dusty while nights can feel freezing. The shockingly intense rain and thunder have been replaced with equally amazing wind and fire. All of it sweeps in so unexpectedly. And all of it seems so extreme. All you can do is pack up your underwear and pray.
And as scary as it can sometimes be, I have to admit, I kinda like it.

Sadika

It's so weird to get on Facebook these days and hear people talking about pumpkins and pies and leaves changing colors. Leaves are changing colors here too but that's mostly because there has been no rain for about a month and its so freaking hot that everything is slowly dying. Thankfully the wind is picking up too so even though it is hot, it isn't still. On breezy nights I find that it's quite easy to imagine that you are sleeping in a big boat instead of a big tent. When the wind picks up in the middle of the night I hear green canvas sails creaking overhead and outside my window I see moonlight reflecting on endless grassy currents.
This has been a much better week than last. Though a prideful part of me perhaps hates to admit it, one of the reasons for my renewed optimism is having found a new friend. Heather and her husband moved here from another part of the country last week to continue working with the organization next door to us. She's a little older than me but doesn't have kids yet either. She is a nurse, rides motorcycles, hates snakes, loves the movie "Man From Snowy River" and speaks Kiswahili. Her parents live in the same coutry as mine and she has a little sister back in the States. She even had a pet dik-dik for a little while! Apart from my own sisters, I have never met some one with a life so similar to mine. There is so much she understands about me without me ever having to verbalize. Which is of course why anyone who knows me would immediately suspect that I would hate her guts. I kinda thought I might too. I have always enjoyed being THE girl in most situations; and if not the only girl, than at very least, the only one who rides a motorcylce. And until lately I have been. (I should specify, the only English speaking one. Even if my Arabic was remotely good enough to use in a conversation about culture stress, I'm still not sure how far that would get me). But one trip to the market together with her proved me very wrong. I think I underestimated how much a friend helps in transitions like these. Someone who is shy to try her language too but pushes you to want to try a little harder. Someone who will shield for you when you try on skirts in the market and has tips on how the heck to cook egg-plant. Someone that even lives close enough to shout asking if you are okay when a six inch praying mantis lands on your face and you scream bloody murder (purely hypothetically speaking.) A friend. Who knew that it would be so nice to have one around?

Friday

Thank goodness it's Friday.
Friday means a quiet market, construction workers who leave our compound early, and football matches in the evenings. It means home delivery injera and wat (as in, a guy hops on his motorcycle and brings across the border to our house) and a few episodes of our latest addiction - bootlegged copies of the first few seasons of "Smallville." (I know it's lame, but we are nothing if not easily entertained.)
I'm glad it's Friday too because it's felt like a really long week to me. I've been frustrated a lot. The charms of living on a construction site by day and a campsite by night are wearing a little thin. We can see progress every day so I know I should only be thankful. Our toilet is working so beautifully that sometimes I want to sit in there far longer than is necessary, and our well-fed solar panels are generating lots of bright white light into the tent. Our neighbors across the way are still happy to let us mooch off of their internet which is incredible (though sometimes in order to skype we have to sit with our laptops in the waist-high grass of the field between our two plots - like that guy in the ad they show at the beginning of every British Airways flight.)
But even with all these wonderful things I have felt frazzled all week. When I realized that the curtains for our tent that I had worked so hard to explain in Arabic to the tailor fell off of the back of my motorcycle somewhere on the way home, you would have thought I had just lost the Shroud of Turin. When the pot of lentil sloppy joes I had made for guests came out tasting like lentil dish-water I had an internal melt-down. When the sprung rat trap was dagged half way across the yard and empty two mornings in a row I started just waiting for the maimed rodents to hunt me down. And these are just the "big" things. I have been frustrated over a dozen more little stupid things all week.
So on our night to relax a little, I reflect back on this long week, hope that next week is better and thank all of the people who made this week really not as bad as it seemed some times - the vegetable vedor who bought us a frozen orange drink just for trying to speak Arabic with him; my husband for for going back to look for my lost curtains and for the man on the side of the road who found them for us; the guy who teased me for wearing a rival soccer jersey and all those silly little kids who ran down the road with us on our jog this morning. And lastly, for my three new chickens whose ungraceful panic over grossly exaggerated and misplaced fears makes me cringe and laugh on an almost daily basis.