Home for Christmas

I am not the only person in the world who responds to the question, “Where is home to you?” with a grimace and a long exhale. In fact, my answer is much simpler than a lot of people’s. Even so, many friends have been surprised by my apparent inability to answer that question simply, and even more so by my occasional lack of desire to even try. Others have tried to help me out by generously assuming to know the answer: “It must be Kenya, right? I mean that’s where you grew up.”; “You were born in the States, went to college in the States and have always lived with an American family. America will always be home…right?”; “You have made your home in North Africa with your husband” or “Your parents live in Tanzania. Going to see them must be like going home.” The truth of the matter is none of these places will ever exclusively encompass every aspect of that deeply warm and completely comfortable word. Each and every place holds a different piece of the beautiful puzzle that is home to me.

That being said, this Christmas, I am really enjoying this particular piece of the puzzle.

Bryan and I dropped out dusty packs in a puddle of Christmas lights a few days ago after weeks of whirlwind travel across three international borders, five airports and a dozen government offices. Before this week I had spent only one night in this house my parents now live in. The dogs in the yard are unfamiliar and I haven’t learned the trick to the hot water in the guest room shower. I don’t know which shelves to put the clean dishes in yet. But somehow, this unfamiliar house feels like home. I know the old Lamu chest in the living room well and could pull out of it albums full of pictures of us from Christmases gone by – hair mussed as we smile gap-toothed in our Mickey Mouse pajamas ensconced in piles of shredded wrapping paper. I know the rough feel of the worn Ethiopian carpet even though it is now relegated to wall-hanging status; it allows patches of wall to peek through the bare spots from years of wrestling with Papa after supper. The little brass gecko from Thailand still perches on the wall behind the Christmas tree, perpetually waiting for a mosquito to come just a little bit closer. Book shelves full of Penguin Classics expose me shamelessly. “The Prison of Zenda” and “Jane Eyre” lean their tattered backs against each other; “Ivanhoe” and “War and Peace” incriminate me with their only half worn spines. Like the sibling you will lovingly squabble with by day three no matter how old you are or how long you have been apart, my allergies have flared up as I inhale in dust, pollen and perfume these familiar things have collected and carried with them from house to house over the years. I am breathing home.

 When pressed to answer this question I find so difficult, I often truthfully resort to a tired cliché. Home is where my family is. Which means with Bryan, Mama and Papa, Abigail and Baby all here with me this Christmas, I am home. I am with the people I love the most in the world and am so grateful. But some of the people I love most are not here. Deborah and Joshua, I am missing you today more than I think I ever have. A piece of the puzzle is still missing.

For those of you savoring the bittersweet beauty of an incomplete and ever-changing puzzle this Christmas, as well as those of you reveling in the joy of the whole picture, merry, merry Christmas! May you enjoy the rich sweetness of home.               

Soul Food

I read the other day that my baby is practicing swallowing. He or she is sipping away on his or her amniotic fluid (yum) and, most interesting to me, while working out all those developing esophagus muscles he or she is also getting a tasty sampling of everything I am eating. That’s right. Baby is tasting everything I am tasting (albeit with a distinct hint of amniotic fluid flavor I suspect). This thought amused me the other day as I reflected on the assortment of culinary oddities I have been passing on.

One of the few items in our house that treads the fine line between luxury and necessity, thus earning it a place between layers of underwear in our 15-kilo bags on bush planes carrying us back from East Africa, is nam-pla, a fishy sauce from Thailand that pervaded the kitchen of my Bangkok-raised mother throughout my childhood. And now, even though I have spent no more than a week or so in Thailand in the course of my own life, at least once a week my own little kitchen in the middle of arid North Africa is filled with the balmy smells of limes, hot peppers, garlic, coconut milk and onions all delicately strung together with salty nam-pla rationed out greedily from a tall glass bottle. And when I sit down to a steaming bowl of neu-pat-prik tumbling over a mountain of white rice, I imagine my unborn child smacking his or her lips and daydreaming about the summers he or she will spend savoring curries at his maternal grandmother’s kitchen table.

But my mother-in-law has been here with us for the past couple of weeks and the smells emanating from my little kitchen have plucked me right out of tropical Asia and plopped me into the heart of the humid antebellum South. The mouth watering stench of turnip greens bubbles from a huge pot on my gas stove supported gently by the buttery warm scent of baking cornbread. Black-eyed peas are soaking in a pot on the floor nearbye. And when I sit down to a glass off ice-cold sweet tea and a bowl of salty wet boiled peanuts (“bolled” I’ve been informed, not “boi-led”) I imagine my baby savoring that taste of Georgia and daydreaming of the Easter Sundays he or she will spend at his paternal grandmother’s house stealing spoonfuls of purple-hull peas.

When I eat these foods I feel like I am doing more than just getting full. I feel like am ingesting memories and emotions and traditions. I am eating a heritage. And I wonder if my baby can taste those things too - the complex beauty of one, the warm comfort of the other. Bitefuls of the people who already love him or her so much.

Yesterday afternoon I felt the baby kick for the first time. Not just a suspicious swish or a vague bubble-burst like I have been. I felt an all-out kick, a tiny heel shoved into the palm of my hand resting just right of my belly button. And it made me smile. Which one was it, Baby? The green guava dipped in sugar and hot pepper or the leftover piece of pecan pie?

French Toast Breakfast

We ran into one of the officials from the local government office on Tuesday at the airstrip when Bryan and Mama Dona flew home. Seeing our happy reunion, and no doubt considering the Eid celebrations ahead, the official told us not to worry about registering Mama Dona officially at his office that week. “I’ll just come by the house to get her name and paperwork tomorrow,” he said and waved us off.

He popped in the next morning as we were finishing up a jet-lagged breakfast amidst the detritus of new clothing tags and stray Starburst wrappers. As Bryan went to fetch her travel documents (“legal” travel here is still carried out under a rebel movement stamp of approval), Mama Dona welcomed our government official friend to a plate of French toast and a cup of tea, her big Southern hospitality both jutting oddly out of place and yet simultaneously melting in perfectly. As the official carefully worked the sticky slices onto his fork my mother-in-law began to ask him questions. What is your name? Where is your home? What is your language? How many languages do you speak? Her happy curiosity about this new part of the world spilled out in an eagerness to learn as much as she could all before breakfast was over. Each question was answered concisely in concentrated English, though often accompanied with a subtle smile. At one point, after lamenting the fact that her babies have chosen to live so far away, Mama Dona patted Bryan’s hand lovingly and pointedly asked our guest, “Now where does your mother live?” The official swallowed the bite in his mouth and then answered matter-of-factly, “My mother was shot during the war when all of our people were trying to run across the border.” Bryan and I exchanged glances while Mama Dona took this new information in. “Oh. And how old were you when this happened?”
“I was eleven.”

“I…I’m so very, very sorry.”

There was a moment’s silence and then Bryan explained that our guest had spent almost twenty years in a refugee camp and had only returned to his childhood home a few years ago, when the peace agreement was signed. “But I was very lucky.” Our guest went on casually, wiping his face with a napkin and giving the travel documents a cursory glance. “I learned English there and received an education. Now I have this job.”

Bryan eventually walked our guest back out to his motorcycle at the gate and I begin stacking up syrupy plates. Mama Dona stayed sitting in her chair at the table and then said in a voice as monotone as the departing official’s, “Okay, I am going to have a good cry now.” She then picked up a paper napkin, delicately unfolded it, put it to her face and began to sob. I put down the dishes I was holding and wrapped my arms around her, a few of my own tears sliding into her silver blond hair. Through her fingers I heard a mumbled “Oh God why? He was only eleven…” and then later, “I knew this happened. We all knew it was happening but it was so far away.”

We sat like that for a while. And I watched as many of the emotions I have experienced in the past year and a half – the guilt and grief and gratitude – all bound themselves up in one conversation, one face, and one story all around my table in one morning over breakfast.  

   

Greek

Thing 57 that I like about living here: the frequency with which simply grocery shopping intersects with sheer unexpectedness.

Often it’s a newly available product. It may be grapes or it might be goat heads. Each is equally unexpected in its own way.  Other times it’s an unexpected event. The local crazy woman gets in a fight with the local crazy man and you duck behind a mound of potatoes to avoid being hit in the head by a flying rock. Some days it’s just the weather. A surprise thunderstorm, freak wildfire or sudden dust storm creeps up without warning. You just never know if your trip to the market is going to a regular ol’ stroll through outdoor aisles of cabbages and tomatoes or something brand new that you walk away from saying, “Well, I have never seen (smelled, tasted, felt, heard etc.) that before.”

A few days ago my meeting with unexpectedness came in the form of a person.

I first noticed him while I was assessing cucumbers at my favorite vegetable stall. He was on the far end of middle aged, short, heavy set and dark haired. I couldn’t see his face but his arms and profile were dark brown – much fairer than most people in the market and much darker than me – “normal colored” as Bryan and I like to say, using a somewhat un-academic term for the complexion of most of the world, as first introduced to us by a Central Asian friend. Someone could have easily convinced me that the man in the market was a citizen of anywhere from Morocco to Mexico and many places inbetween. I had never seen him before and he didn’t seem terribly familiar with the market, though he certainly wasn’t completely out of his element. As I walked away I heard him speaking to the vendor in flawless Arabic.

A few minutes later at the bread stand the stranger passed by again and this time we made eye contact. A Khawajia in a head scarf is of occasional interest to non-locals so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he waved and turned towards me. As he approached I made a quick scroll through my mental rolodex of categories of people in this area, his loud English greeting narrowing my quick search. UN affiliate? Flip-flops and a light button-down shirt that looked well hand-washed: Probably not. Businessman from the North? Gaudy jade crucifix dangling around his neck: Unlikely. Very, very lost tourist? (Insert new category into rolodex) Effortless navigation of language and goats in the road: No. As he shook my hand warmly and started into an overflow of friendly questions well-seasoned in an accent I couldn’t quite place, I was drawing a blank. Who was this guy and what was he doing out here?

After I satisfied his similar questions with a brief introduction, he returned the favor with gusto. “My name is Antonio. I am ethnically Greek,” he said proudly, as the accent I now recognized from a movie about a wedding clicked into place, “but” he continued with equal pride, “I am a national of this country!” My expression must have shown the mix of the confusion and interest I felt because for the next five minutes in the middle of the sandy road, he colorfully narrated a very condensed version of a fascinating story, pieces of which I had already heard from locals but had only chalked up to urban legend, (or in this case, rather rural legend actually).      

The man I met in the market is the son of a Greek merchant who moved to this tiny town in the 1960s, right after the British, Egyptians and Italians had all been politely asked to leave the broader area. Why he chose to move here, I still don’t know, but he opened up a shop, built a house, dug a well, raised a bunch of kids and eventually died and was buried just down the road. His kids grew up, moved a few miles away to the state capital, got married, built homes, opened up shops and are now raising kids and grandkids of their own. And on this particular day, I stood talking to one of those sons who had returned to the town of his birth to visit his father’s grave. Of all the people I might have imagined this man to be, it wasn’t a Greek North African coming back to visit his roots.

This man’s passport, memories, livelihood and family are all inextricably linked to this part of the world. I wonder how often he has been to Greece, if ever. Though he stands out, this country is his home like nowhere else in the world. But as he said goodbye he cradled my hand in both of his, smiled as greasily as his hair and said warmly, “I’ll be in town for a while. We should get together for a beer!” and I realized that, however North African we may turn out to be in the end, the influence of our fathers’ homelands doesn’t go away quickly. (Good naturedly inviting a married woman twenty years your junior to share a drink in an Islamic society just somehow seemed very…Greek at that moment.)   

I have seen this man in town a couple of times since that day though we haven’t spoken again. He is usually sitting with other shopkeepers and seems to be deep in conversation each time. I imagine they are talking about how this town has changed in the last fifty years and I would love to sit down and eavesdrop. But I just keep walking and think of the questions I would love to ask him if we ever do run into each other again. Like: What was it like to live here as a kid? Do you eat mussaka (sp?) or kisra at home, or both? Do your kids speak Greek? What do you think about the politics of this country? Does the well your father dug still have water in it?

What a fascinating world we live in. I love meeting people whose stories and experiences I would never have imagined up myself, people who don’t quite fit any category I’ve come up with yet. I love having to constantly add new entries to that mental rolodex of mine.

November

Stepping out of October and into November has felt like shrugging off the light cotton sundress you wear to spring picnics and pulling on that scratchy sweater that has been stuffed in an old trunk all year. Almost overnight the once cloudy skies have been bleached a dirty white and our cool mornings and evenings have been replaced with oppressive heat. Right on cue, the tall grass and lush leaves are all turning yellow-brown and the mosquitoes are in one last feeding frenzy before they die out with the evaporating puddles. Ash sifts through the air and settles on our laundry and drying dishes while the horizons burn with feral bush fires. My garden only has a few days of produce left, and everything I pick comes pre-cooked: my basil leaves are steamed on the bush; my carrots are baked before they come out of the ground; and my cherry tomatoes feel boiled on the vine. As vividly as I remember the intensity of the dry season last year, the sheer greenness of the rains washed all memory of the experience from my physical body which is responding like it has never been through this before. And as recent as the rains were, after only a week of their absence they already seem like a distant dream. It is amazing how quickly things change here. I can't believe I ever used to heat up my bath water.

Bryan is leaving for a week tomorrow – first to the Southern capital to work on government documents and then on to East Africa to pick up his mother who is coming for a visit. We are so excited about her upcoming visit. She is the first member of our immediate family to come here and we are so excited to introduce someone we love so much to other things we have come to love so much. We are not without trepidation though. North Africa could be considered an acquired taste and this is her first trip to the continent. Bucket baths and lizards may not be as charming in real life as they sound in emails. I am proud of my mother-in-law already though, even if this adventure turns out to be a bust. She is the least likely candidate in our families to come visit us in the middle of nowhere Africa at the beginning of dry season a month before a political brouhaha that could result in the world's newest nation. She isn't the mother who grew up overseas or the sister who wants to be a doctor in Congo. She isn't the father who served two tours in Vietnam or the sister who runs half-marathons. She is the retired math teacher from Georgia who loves her diet coke, is a little bit overweight, and is having a hard time leaving her hair curlers behind. She is nervous about the lack of air conditioning, sleeping under a thatch roof and trying out the sorghum and okra. And to be honest so am I, a little bit.

But a week from Thursday, she is stepping on that trans-Atlantic flight with a bag full of sunscreen and mosquito repellant (and if I know her at all, good things for us) and is coming to see her babies. And that, my friends, is true love. She has heart as big as the wildfire that will consume the hill behind our house any day now and a capacity for loving people regardless of who they are that I believe will overcome the overwhelming newness of life here. There will be hard days, but in many ways I think I may discover that she may not turn out to be as "unlikely" as I once expected. (And on the slim chance that I am dead wrong we will finish off the whole party with a safari and beach holiday in East Africa….)

The next few weeks will be an adventure for us all, one I am quite excited about. Mama Dona, we can't wait to see you!

A Night in the Life…

After we clean up the dishes from supper together, I go get our pajamas out of the tent and spray it for mosquitoes while Bryan fills up our water filter with a bucket from the tank under our rain gutters. I then take the big kettle of hot water off the stove and carry it to the shower while Bryan fills up our bath buckets with water. In a few months (weeks?) when the rains finally stop and our tanks our full of brackish water from the hafira I will miss this cold clean rain every night. But tonight I just enjoy being able to see all the way to the bottom of my bucket. We top off our buckets with steaming water from the kettle and lather up under what we pour over ourselves from metal cups. We talk while we bathe - about our day, the new word we learned, our families, or lately, what our baby will be like. I sometimes forget that there was a time when bathing together out of buckets was not a part of ordinary life. And I think I will miss it when the time comes that it no longer is. When we finish we shake out our towels left hanging up from last night. More than once we have found small black scorpions hiding out under the damp cloth, but there are none tonight. Once Bryan didn't shake out his towel first and a startled six-inch skink made a panicked dash across his wet body. My hysterical laughter (and helpful attempt to stay as far away as possible) didn't help the matter much that night and we now keep a big stick in the corner of the shower – ready for use on the day those seeking sanctuary in our towels are a little more menacing than lizards.

Clean and clothed, we brush our teeth outside, spitting white foam into the dark bushes off the path and rinsing out of a big bottle of filtered water. Glancing up while I brush I see high clouds pressed thin against the swollen darkness of the sky, like cotton pulled apart by inexpert fingers; but the stars that do push through the bare spaces are pale and timid tonight. We close up all the windows in the house in case of rain, pat the head of the white shadow in the dark with the wagging tail and zip ourselves up in the tent for the night. After we flip off the inverter everything on our compound is dark except for the door-shaped glow of a lantern coming from the hut near the gate where our guard stays. I think I can catch fragments of voices still coming from his radio but other than this, the only sound is the low drone of the generator next door and the far off squabble of wild dogs. The night is cool enough still to snuggle under my grandmother's sun-faded quilt and fall asleep close to my husband.

When I wake up I can tell I have been asleep several hours by the silence of the generator and the pressure in my bladder. I lie still for a moment wondering what woke me. I hear a low growl from our tent porch and then a snort and rustle in the grass behind our fence line. Asad barks a few times and the nosey donkeys huff in an irritated manner and continue their midnight grazing somewhere further down the path. Fully awake now I swing my legs out of bed and reach for my headlamp. Bryan stirs and I ask if he needs to go too. He mumbles incoherently then groggily slips on his crocs and grabs his own flashlight. As I stoop to unzip our door I hear the creak of tiny footsteps on our canvas roof overhead followed by a curious mew. When we are both outside, Nimir springs lightly from his comfortable perch on top of our tent and follows us down the path to the bathroom. In the dark, he is completely invisible unless our lights hit his green eyes.

When I am finished and waiting for Bryan I glance back up at the night sky. The clouds have disappeared by now and the stars gleam like they were embedded in newly polished glass. The Milky Way stretches boldly across the sky, arching her spine like a diver springing backwards across a dark pool of water. I am almost amazed to have been sleeping through such beauty. As we walk back to bed Nimir pads silently along beside us. When we reach the tent he springs back up to his canvas hammock over our heads and we step inside and collapse back into bed. Often I fall back asleep in moments, but tonight the cool air and bright stars have roused my mind and I lie awake for a while. I hear Bryan sniff and think he is probably awake too but we both lie silent. A tinker bird chirps from a tree on the hill behind our house. I listen for the bush baby we have only occasionally hear chirping from the hill too, but she is quiet tonight.

I eventually resort to mere counting, my brain too interested to be lulled by anything less dull and I eventually loose count around 350. The next thing I am aware of is Mama Hen squawking to be let loose from her hen house and the pleasant twangs from our guard's radio. The bulge in the canvas above my head stretches lazily and I roll over. Outside my window the morning is grey and still damp in its newness.

Animal Crackers

Recently a box of goodies arrived on the bush plane that flies in every two weeks with my name on it, sent from a dear friend far away. It was full of goodies from the States, mostly snacks that helped her get through morning sickness a few months prior and that she thought I too might enjoy. Needless to say, they were worth their weight in gold, and I have carried out a delicate dance between hoarding them Gollum-like (my precious) and savoring them with all the restraint of a kid going through her stocking on Christmas morning. And yet, as amazingly crunchy as the honey mini-wheats were for breakfast and the little goldfish crackers were for mid-morning, mid-afternoon and mid-evening snacks, I may have derived the most pleasure from this whole experience by simply inhaling the fragrance of the contents of the cardboard box right after I opened it. It smelled like America. Mmmm....

Last week I took a little baggy of the treasured animal crackers that came in the box with me to our language lesson and munched on a few while conjugating active participles. (I know, only a pregnant lady could have kept her appetite through that.) I absently mindedly shared a few with our language helper and the old man who tends the grounds at the school where we meet. Fairly soon our lesson had digressed from Arabic grammar to a lengthy discussion about the animal crackers.

"What are these?" the older man asked. Proud to know the words for both "animal" and "biscuit" I informed them that they were "animal biscuits" from America.
"These are animals?"
"Yeah. Animals."
He picked up a cookie, held it up to the light and squinted for closer inspection. "Well, what is this one?"
"That one? Let's see...that one is a...um....well, that's a bison."
"A what?"
"It's like a hairy American cow. Nevermind. Let's look at another one."
"Okay, what is this one?"
"This one is....uh...crud. This one is a bear. "
"A what?"
"A bear. It walks on four legs, but can stand up on two. It's really mean."
"Oh, you mean a lion."
"No, no, not a lion. I don't think you have bears here."
"Does it climb trees?"
"Uh, sometimes."
"It's a lion."
"No....not a lion..."
"Does it eat people?"
"Yeeeah...
"It's called a lion. Li-on."
"Well, maybe sorta like an American lion. Let's look at another one."

The subsequent zoological research into the cookies resulted in several bison, a family of bears, a herd of deer, a couple horses, a potential llama and one very North American looking sheep. It was with great excitment that we eventually identified a camel. Eventually the name-that-animal game just turned into some serious snacking. At one point our language helper said with his mouth full of bison, "These are delicious. They don't make biscuits like these here. They make good animal biscuits in America." So at the end of the day I guess it was decided that ethnocentric cookies are pretty good after all.

The mystery animal. Any guesses?

Real

Sometimes this blog is hard to write. The words I most often find myself wanting to put down are descriptions of this beautiful world as I discover it day by day. I want to write about people and places and experiences that are completely new and exciting or charming. But even to me my thoughts sometimes read like romanticized daydreams right from the pages of an Isak Dinesen short story or the delusional monologues of a cross-cultural junkie in the throes of honeymoon stage culture shock. I don't mean for everything here to sound beautiful. It isn't. (But maybe you are laughing as you read this because to you my words most often describe a place you would like to visit right after your summer holiday in Mogadishu, and stories of soldiers, monitor lizards and simply dreadful heat are all just really, really depressing. If that's the case, than this particular blog entry is not meant for you. Just skip it and come back next week.) Whatever the case may be, sometimes I worry that I will do my current home a disservice by most often writing about its good aspects – all those things that are legitimately beautiful or gracious or interesting. But places that are only beautiful are not usually real. And more than anything, I want my blog to make this place feel real.

On our trip to the state capital last week I got manhandled. I was perusing a scarf shop alone when the very friendly owner helped himself to a handful of the one up-side to pregnancy so far (and no, I don't mean a glowing complexion) and though I initially (naively) attributed the incident to an unfortunate close-proximity folding accident, when it happened again I lay the overpriced item down and walked out in a huff. The incident bothered me and for a little while I couldn't stop thinking about it. Was I overacting? Was I under-reacting? I don't know how I would handle the situation in my own culture much less someone else's. All I knew is that I hated being taken advantage of because of the idea that all women by themselves are just inviting trouble. And I really hated being taken advantage of because of the assumption that all Western women are incredibly loose anyway so why should she really mind?

I tell you this not to make you upset for me or to reinforce some silly stereotype. I do it for quite the opposite reason. I want you to know that this place and the people who live here are real. They are jerks and opportunists and bigots, just like everywhere else. Remember that. But remember that so that when you hear me write about the old, very traditional man who buys our tea after we hardly do more than greet him respectfully, you will know that that too is real. When you read about the road engineer who gives us a truckload of gravel to build our garage for free just because he appreciates that we moved here to try to help in some small way, know that is real. The women who insist on sharing their only meal of the day though it's hardly enough for them and their kids and our friend who runs a local school even though half his students can't pay a dime are real. People here are selfless, forgiving and hospitable beyond belief. They are so achingly real.

I went to town alone today alone and bought some material to make pillowcases for my couch. Beyond the usual greetings and bargaining no one said or did anything really out of the ordinary. No one except maybe the male shopkeeper who came up to me unbidden and insisted that I take a handful of his dates from his breakfast plate. Day after day, for good or bad, I am overwhelmed by the realness of this place.

Skin Deep

On our trip to the State capital last week we got a phone call from a friend who works in the town we live in but whose family still lives in the "big city." Even though he wasn't around, he wanted us to take the opportunity while we were in town to visit his home and meet his wife and kids. We were worn out from running errands and sitting in government offices at this point so we were happy to have an excuse to relax with friends (even friends we had never met before). On Friday morning our absent host's sister, a stern, well-dressed woman in her fifties, showed up at our hotel and escorted us back to her home in the back of a rickshaw (a three wheeled wonder-taxi). The home was a modest two-room building and a spacious mud kitchen in a small courtyard shaded by guava trees. Though we weren't sure what to expect, or what was expected of us really, the many hours that passed that afternoon were once again marked by sheer North African hospitality.

This day also proved to be a curious reverse of our more typical experiences here as Bryan found himself the only man among a household of well educated sisters, wives, daughters and neighbors. In fact, he spent several hours hanging out with boys in the courtyard while I was ushered inside and treated to something incredibly beautiful, quite literally. Apparently, like everywhere else in the world, when women get together here they like to make each other up and as a guest in this culture I was treated to the works. Our host's wife shooed all peeping eyes away from windows pulled up a stool at my feet and sat down with a porcelain dish in hand. She then folded my skirt up carefully around my shins and proceeded to apply cool red henna to the soles of my feet. She worked patiently for the better part of an hour, shaping the mud in swirls across my arches and heels, working it gently between my toes and across my nails. When she was finished an animated conversation began among the women in the room about who should do my hands. A younger girl was voted as the best artist present and after carefully sewing a torn piece of plastic into a long cone, she filled it with more henna and began tediously turning my hands into works of art. At times I couldn't watch her delicate movements forming petals and leaves, afraid I would wince or start sweating and mess up her hard work. When she finished I was propped up like a broken manikin while we waited for my appendages to dry. During this time our absent host's sister returned from the kitchen with a small makeup bag. She told me that it was now time to do my face. Painting up my face seemed somewhat less charming than decorating my hands and feet and I stammered something along the lines of – no thank you, that's so sweet to offer, but really not necessary at all. She would hear none of it though, and still bound by my wet hands and feet, I had no choice but to sit still and soak up the moment. My worst fears were realized when the first thing that came out of her bag was a razor blade that she swiftly ran across my eyebrows and jaw line. I pushed back all the images of the bearded lady at the circus that came rushing to mind and just closed my eyes in resignation as pencils, creams and powders were all applied in turn. When she was done and a mirror was thrust in front of my face I felt like I was looking at a reflection of someone who had just stepped out of a brothel in Cairo. Bryan's smirk made me suspect he was thinking the same thing. However, my beauticians applauded their efforts and assured me I looked gorgeous (though I can't help but think surely, surely there must have been a hint of "Wow, it doesn't look quite the same on her as it does on us, does it…" behind their smiles somewhere. Somehow the purples and blacks just didn't compliment my skin tones quite the same way.) The finishing touches were oil for my hennaed hands and feet and a brown paste rubbed into my neck and arms that smelled like sandalwood. Later, our absent host's sister slipped me a small vial of the stuff and said a two syllable word I had never heard before. I thought she was telling me the name of the spice but when I asked her to repeat the word she smiled and repeated the word(s) that I understood this time. "For sex." I tried to keep the high notes out of my giggle as I nodded and said thank you and she did what I feel like was the North Africa woman's version of a wink and a "Thank me later" look.

We left that evening with full stomachs and full hearts. I was a little shy to look at people from under my heavily lidded eyes in the rickshaw on the drive home but most people seemed to be more interested in my floral hands and feet than anything else. "Mabruk!" they said and continue to say to me even now as the dark brown swirls are slowly beginning to fade away.

Several people have said - now you are a woman from this country! - and even though we all know that will never be true, I receive those words as a compliment and I think people appreciate that in and of itself. In retrospect, I think my fairy godmothers were very thoughtful in what they gave me last week. They no doubt knew it would make me happy to be treated to something special like henna. But I suspect they also knew that others around me would appreciate it too. In just one very small way, for a while, I look a little more like people's wives or daughters or sisters and I feel people warm to that. In this way, these women's gift was more than just skin deep.

Road Trip

We got in late last night from a five day trip to the State Capital. We left by bus early Tuesday morning, an experience I will add to my New-Year's-Eve-In-Time-Square-List (otherwise known as "The things I am so glad I have done but never want to do again"). Public transport in this area is limited to "buses" that only run in the dry season when the roads are actually passable. Due to a lot of work on the road and light rains this year (previous blog posts notwithstanding) we had heard that "buses" were running daily, though the trip was six hours long and people were sometimes being asked to get out and walk across the river crossings. Nonetheless, government paperwork and low oatmeal supplies beckoned, and owning only a vehicle without doors or a windshield, we decided that "buses" were the way to go. Besides, we are always up for a little locally flavored adventure. I say "bus" of course because somehow I fear that just bus does not conjure up the right image. Think more along the lines of metal seats, metal windowless window frames and a metal roof all welded into or over the cargo bed of a beat up old lorry. Slap on a coat of bright blue paint, peeling campaign posters, ostrich feather hood ornaments, 30 sweaty people inside and five sun scorched guys on the roof-rack outside and you have our "bus". Really once we started lumbering down the mud-contorted dirt road I felt like we were in the belly of a massive blue army tank being slowly beaten to death on our way to war.

Our fellow travelers were varied. They mostly seemed to be men travelling alone – a soldier in uniform, a young man in a t-shirt and sunglasses, an older man in a jalabiya with a cane. But there were a few women too – a pretty one in a bright yellow tobe, a young mother miraculously nursing her baby as we hurtled down the road, an old woman who looked like she was probably travelling with her granddaughter. The most interesting traveler to me was a large dark skinned women dressed in folds of green tie-dye. She had on gold rings and a silky looking shower cap. From the way the bus driver waited without complaint while she held up the bus to buy some bottled water before we left, I guessed she was someone important. Her three sons travelling with her confirmed that they were probably a part of a military commander's family being educated at some English school outside of the country by the way they obliviously sang along with pop music pounding from their ear buds and loudly muttered "Whatever!" every time we had to pile off the bus for soldiers to rummage through bags and travel papers at check-points along the way. We later found out they had lived outside of this country all of their lives and were just coming back for a quick visit. At one point one of the boys sighed wearily, "Man, it sure is hot in this area," which made Bryan and I smile for some reason.

We stopped for lunch at a small village at crossroads nearly half of the way there. We piled off to throw back a cold soda and pita bread stuffed with grilled meat and some lime. The road was lined with mud and thatch shops selling food and drink to hundreds of people passing through. Besides those of us travelling by bus, there were many Fulata, a nomadic people group that stretch all the way from here to West Africa. I have had a week to think of how I could possibly describe how colorful, exotic, beautiful and thoroughly unfamiliar the Fulata look to me, (and honestly even to most other people around here), and I am still at a loss for words. Though I have seen them often now, they never fail to completely amaze me. The men wear tunics and flared pants of black or green with colorful fringe and embroidery. Their hair is usually shaved high off the brow but combed tall and flat, like a pharaoh's crown. They carry long wooden sticks whether they are with their herds or not, and it is not uncommon to see them with swords. The women are dressed in black cloth with brilliant embroidery. Their hair is also long but elaborately braided and clasped with bronze or silver hoops and combs. Their ears and wrists are absolutely drizzled with beads and metal. Sometimes they have dark tattoos on their cheeks. Every time I see a group of Fulata women I feel exactly the same way I do stepping into some upscale department store in an American mall and running into a group of stylish women out shopping together: out of place, out of style, out of my element. Their pride and beauty is intimidating and completely mesmerizing all at once.
Once we were all back in the bus I quickly came to regret not sucking it up and just hiking up my skirt to pee behind a scraggly bush at the edge of the market like everyone else. Thankfully, the road got better the closer we got to the state capital and we eventually hit tarmac. We arrived at the "bus station" in the late afternoon, retrieved our dusty bags and headed off to "The Friendship Hotel" where we usually stay. The bright pink satin bedcover (we forgot that hotels here don't come with actual sheets) and water squirter on a hose by the toilet (we remembered that one and came armed with toilet paper) were easily overlooked in light of the amazing air conditioner that blasted away the dust of the road and the TV that had two English channels. It felt good to be in the big city.

Flood

Yesterday after we came home from church and the market, I laid down on our sisal rope couch and fell into the kind of sleep that, in my experience, is only brought on by heavy (legal) drug use or intensely oppressive heat. The kind that paralyses your body no matter how badly it wants to move but magnifies your simmering dream-thoughts into swollen, completely incoherent dialogues that leave you confused and feeling anything but rested. Since I hadn't taken anything other than a prenatal vitamin that day I managed to pull one eyelid open and focus all my energy on reading the numbers on our digital thermometer. It read one 120. (Granted, it was in sun-lit window but still…) Satisfied that my coma was simply heat induced I drifted off for a good 45 minutes and had nightmares of the rapidly approaching dry season.

When I woke up the sky was a weird shade of yellow-gray, like an old bruise that was just beginning to heal. I stumbled to the kitchen and put two oranges in the freezer, hoping they might revive us a little. When I came back into the living room a breeze suddenly blustered in the front door without warning, sending papers flying and shaking a plastic chair threateningly. Bryan and I exchanged groggily hopeful glances. Just then a sharp slice of light made us wince in the broad daylight giving us a heartbeat of warning before the ensuing crash of thunder shattered the mountain behind us. The storm that hit was one of the biggest ones we have had this year. As the rain started pelted our tin roof Bryan ran outside to zip up all the canvas windows in our tent-bedroom while I started closing our wooden windows in the house. I bolted the door behind Bryan when he came back dripping wet and like good sailors on an only partially sea-worthy vessel, we began battening down the hatches. The wind was blowing the rain horizontally from the South-east meaning water was soon pouring under our front door. I rushed to stop the water with towels but it eagerly made its way around forming a seasonally river flowing through the middle of our house. The river was fed by tributaries from the water falls under our windows and soon we stopped fighting and just resorted to moving furniture and books out of its way. When shouting over the roar of rain and wind around us was no longer helpful for actual communication we were reduced to simply laughing and taking a few pictures of what honestly felt like Poe's maelstrom. Off of the back porch our rain gutters gushed foamy white water into barrels that simply overflowed into the rushing brown water on the ground. Our tent valiantly withstood the wind put looked dejectedly wet in the storm and I dreaded finding out what all was lying ruined on the floor (it turns out, not too much). After about twenty minutes the storm turned and the rain came pouring in from the North-west. Thankfully, our back porch shields that side of the house and not as much water found its way in this time.

This morning when Aisha came to work and saw us laying wet clothes and towels out in the sun she laughed and said that everything in her house got wet too (though I suspect her "everything" really means everything and not just a lot like it means for us). She then shook her head and said, "That was a lot of rain yesterday. It's leaving now though. The dry season is very close." I thought it was interesting that a monster thunder storm seems to mean that the rain is on its way out. Apparently it wants to be remembered. I try to assure it that it will be. As much as I like keeping my rug dry, there is nothing quite like a good storm out here.

Ultrasound

Saturdays are ultrasound days at the local hospital.

I am still amazed that this establishment, hardly more than a rural clinic servicing hundreds of kilometers in every direction, has an ultrasound machine at all. It has no running water. Its electricity is pumped in from a generator out back. The toilets are moderately clean pit latrines. But it has an ultrasound machine. And on Saturdays women with various sized bellies politely hidden under colorful tobes line the breezy corridors waiting for their chance to glimpse that grainy image of their baby. This Saturday, I was one of those women.

Bryan and I went in at ten in the morning. We parked under a flame tree in full bloom near to the store room where boxes of medical supplies were still being unloaded from the recent DC-3 flight. We walked into the building which has whitewashed walls, green shuttered windows and a broad tin roof. Everything smelled mildly of antiseptic which reminded me of the Dettol we used to wash out newborn puppies in as kids. People sat in small clusters in the courtyard or waited on benches in the hallways. Hospital staff in blue uniforms passed by carrying buckets or slips of paper. Two doctors care for the hundreds of patients in this hospital, but I didn’t see either one of them.

We were met by our good friend James, a Kenyan nurse who works at the hospital training traditional birth attendants in this area. He has birthed hundreds of babies in at least three different countries that I know of, and if given the chance, I would let him help me birth mine in a heartbeat. He is a gifted nurse and very good friend to Bryan and me. James showed us into his office, a dim room with a desk, metal cabinet and small hospital bed with a blue mattress. Behind him a door opened into one of the wards and I could see a line of beds, mosquito nets and a tall woman empting bedpans. In the bed closest to us, just beyond the wall, I could see two bare feet with their soles facing back towards us.

I told James about our first visit with the doctor in East Africa and that she had asked to be sent e-mails about our monthly checkups out here. I had assured her that we would have access to good prenatal care and James assured me that I had not in fact lied to her. We went through the basics quickly: blood pressure, good; urine sample, good; weight, good; uterine height, good. And then James asked us the question I had been waiting for, “Would you like to see your baby?”

On the creaky hospital bed I was actually a little shy to pull up my shirt so the woman in the headscarf could squeeze the cold clear gel onto my bare skin. In a world where I never show my shoulders much less my belly button it felt odd to be lying there so exposed, but no one else really seemed to notice so I let it go. James ran the ultrasound wand over my stomach and I craned my neck around to look at the tiny gray monitor. Bryan leaned in closer and two more women appeared from nowhere and stepped in curiously too. I guess it’s not every day you get to see a Khawaja’s baby. It’s not every day for me either so I didn’t mind the company.
The first thing we saw was what looked like an orange seed in a cashew nut. The image was fuzzy and honestly, I am still quite new at recognizing my own uterus. The grey and black and white static was bleary and confused. But then James settled on a place and our baby jumped to life. Even with my neck twisted back awkwardly to look at that tiny screen, I felt like I would recognize that unrecognizable seed anywhere. He was jumping and waving like he knew we were watching. She was dancing and moving like she knew she had an audience. Spastic, uncontrolled brand new muscle spasms have never been so lovely to behold. “Your baby is very energetic!” James said. “He or she is already taking after their father.” I replied. James took his time and let us take in our fill of newly un-flippered arm and leg buds, the broad curve of a little-less alien head and the breathless flutter of a heartbeat. The women around us tittered at our excitement and when I told them it’s the first time I’ve ever been pregnant they smiled happily and shook my hand.

We left the hospital only thirty minutes after we had arrived and without having paid a cent. (The hospital is run solely by a relief organization in the area.) As we drove home I couldn’t help but be so happy. I know that in a few months when it is 114 degrees outside and I feel like a beached whale, I am going to be thinking of all the other places in the world I would rather be pregnant. And the next time that craving for a Reeses Pieces Dairy Queen Blizzard hits, I might be a little pouty for a while. And if I go into labor early and have a baby in a hospital with no running water, I might freak out a little bit at some point along the way. But on Saturday, being told my baby was perfectly healthy by a good friend I trust implicitly, in a place that feels more like home every day, (and without having paid a fortune!) I was overcome with just feeling very, very blessed.

A Sunday in the Life

Because it’s a weekend and the dishes can wait one more day, breakfast is usually just bread from yesterday’s market dipped in honey, and maybe some bananas. The honey is thick and amber colored and tastes as wild as the weather it is made in. It’s sold in old water bottles and the first inch is usually crusted over with honey comb and dead bees.

We leave for church shortly after nine. We drive past people streaming into town balancing rope beds on their heads, swinging chickens by their feet or leading donkeys with full sacks of sorghum on their backs. Everyone is heading to town for market day. Even as we drive in we see the lorries with ostrich feather hood ornaments and outrageous paint jobs barely disguising metastasized rust loaded down with gunny sacks full of onions and limes. Men with scarves tied around their heads toss the sacks off of the vehicles to other men who carry them on their backs up stairs and into shops. They whistle and shout at each other while they work.

At the city square we turn down an alley and leave the simmering energy of town behind us. We park in the shade of a neem tree and walk into the courtyard of the dilapidated stone building. I can’t remember if the structure was originally built as a church or not, but during the war it passed hands several times and was even used as a goat pen once. Now, despite the fact that it is usually full to overflowing, it still brings the word “crumbling” to mind. The energy inside, however, speaks of anything but decay. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The room is long and narrow and the only light filters in weakly from the windows along the walls. A group of nearly thirty is singing loudly over the pulse of a drum and I suspect I am taking one of the singer’s seats as I squeeze into a school bench next to three other girls. When the song ends and people shuffle to wedge themselves back into the crowd, another language group is called and a dozen more men, women and children make their way to the front to sing in their mother tongue. On and on the musical chairs goes until every language represented has been given the chance to sing. When we all stand to sing together, in Arabic, English or even Kiswahili, we must overlap our shoulders like a handful of cards to make room for each other.

After church we make our way back to town for lunch. Under the green awning of our favorite restaurant we greet the smiley cook who is partially hidden behind a veil of smoke and steam bubbling from metal pots and clay incense holders in front of him. We place our order and step inside, crossing a greasy floor to the nearest free table. On the table is a red plastic bowl full of salt and a pitcher of water. We sip our cold Fantas and casually greet the men sitting at neighboring tables. We watch piglets and goats root at rotting tomatoes in the square outside. In an unlit room behind us a man rolls out sheets of filodough on a rack, preparing the sticky sweet basta for the evening crowd. Our food is brought on an aluminum tray as wide as our table by a boy in a well worn apron. Beans topped with jibna (a cheese much like feta) and diced onions are surrounded by an assortment of round bread and folds of sorghum kisra. There is a dish of vegetable soup and another of grilled meat. We tear off pieces of the bread and kisra and dip them into communal bowls of beans and greens. The food is good. Better than I ever imagined it could be the first time I tried it. We eat together, occasionally bumping knuckles over the hot peppers or limes and I think that whoever said food eaten by hand tastes better because it involves one more sense was probably right. After we eat we wash out hands from a tap in a barrel outside and carry on to the market.

Selling kisra

As is often the case, things have slowed by the time we get there, though dozens more mats than usual dot the ground of the market like a melted checkerboard. On the mats in the sun are piles of onions, tomatoes, limes, garlic, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, watermelons, soap, and clay coffee pots. Some men sit under umbrellas but most simply squat in the heat shouting out the price of each precarious mound in front of them. We pick our way through the maze, asking prices of some things, the names of others, slowly filling our guffa with groceries for the week. I am delighted to see a woman with a basket of eggs for sale, and even happier when she says they are not yet boiled. I am already thinking of the banana bread and pancakes we will have this week as she picks them out of their grassy bed and places them carefully in a sack for me. Women in gaudy tobes make the rounds too, scoffing at unacceptable prices and bargaining loudly. Small boys weave their way through the crowd with wide trays of roasted peanuts. Donkeys nibble at purple onion skins while their owners pile rope beds or sacks of flour onto the cart at their backs.

As we finish up our shopping and head back towards the ATV I feel a hard slap on my back which makes my stomach drop for a moment. But even before I turn I know who it is. Jema is standing there smiling broadly in his dirty white jallabiya and holding out his hand for a warm hello. I don’t know Jema’s story but I suspect either autism or something darker from the large round scar on the side of his head. I continue to be amazed by people’s gentle incorporation of him into daily life, and have watched him deliver tea to shop keeper’s porches or help the man at the “gas station” pump fuel out of large barrels. Today he answers my simple questions with silted grunts and dramatic gestures, a part of some story I can’t hear but wish I could understand. Eventually he ushers us on our way and we continue towards home.

At home we play a round or two of “Settlers of Catan” with Dan and Laura, and Dan wins again. We later try to skype family but the internet is moody and we can’t get through tonight. The day ends much as it began, with a light supper of fruit and maybe popcorn. The sun sets and the mosquitoes come out so we retire to the safety of our tent. We read in bed but after a while we begin to doze so we turn off the inverter for the night. Everything then is dark and quiet except for the drone of a neighbor’s generator. We drift off to sleep and wait for Monday.

Lemon Drops and Limes

Yesterday morning as I leaned off the edge of our back porch and stared at the contents of my dinner, lunch and mid-day snack from the day before splattered on the ground in front of me, I realized that the convenience of always being about five steps from "outside" just might balance out the inconvenience of having one toilet on the far end of the compound over the course of the next seven months.

Ah, yes. The grim stories of morning sickness that have filtered to me across the ocean in recent weeks are now mine to share in. But I take comfort in the fact that I am now a proud participant in the (in)glorious experiences that characterize some part of the lives of so many women throughout the history of the world. I am just doing it with a bad taste in my mouth today.
One of my favorite things about living in a part of the world that I didn't grow up in (or my parents either for that matter) is getting to see firsthand how vastly different people all over the world are from each other. But the one thing I like even more than that is getting to glimpse how shockingly similar people all over the world are to each other. I have a feeling that pregnancy and motherhood will give ample opportunity to witness this over and over again.
Yesterday Aisha, the woman that helps me wash clothes and dishes, let out a little snort of laughter when she saw me feebly nibbling raisins on the couch. "Are you sick?" she asked. "No. The baby is just making my stomach hurt." I then did a probably unnecessary pantomime of vomiting (which turned out to be a new vocab word for the day) and she laughed as I suspect only a mother of three can. She then picked up a wedge of lime from off of the kitchen table. "Suck on this. It will help." She said and set the lime on top of a canister of lemon drops that my mother-in-law swears contributed to her survival twenty-some years ago.
Later in the afternoon two other women, acquaintances from down-the-road, popped in for a visit in their shiny new tobes for the Eid weekend. After some small talk I hesitantly told them our good news, still a little unsure of the most culturally appropriate way to let the cat out of the bag. My bumbling was rewarded with lots of high-pitched and only partially intelligible gabble of congratulations and advice. One of the first things the woman in the yellow tobe said was "Suck on limes if you feel sick. When I had my stomachs I went to bed with a lime in my hand so if I woke up sick I could suck on it right away." "Don't drink coffee!" The other said. "The smell will make you sick." "And don't cut onions or raw meat. That will make you sick too!" "Don't eat hot peppers. They will make your heart hurt." "And don't be afraid to tell your husband no. Just tell him to leave you alone, even if he hits you!" This remark made me first blush and then cringe, though my guests cackled at what seemed to be their own joke, following it up with an assuring, "But he will love the baby so much when it get here. And he will love you for giving it to him." On and on the conversation went like a vibrant de ja vu of e-mails and phone calls from college roommates, aunts and sister-in-laws who have all carried babies very far away from here.
I have been feeling much better today and know that I am richly blessed to be so healthy so far. It was significant to me to hear my friends and neighbors talk yesterday about the babies they have lost along the way. "Just pray a lot. Pray all the way through and Allah will hear you," they say and their voices speak of both peace and loss. I am grateful for all these women in my life, both here and far away. Their strength and senses of humor are endlessly encouraging to me in this new adventure. I may just trying going to bed with a lime tonight…

The first of the obligatory awkward pose picture - 8 weeks and counting...

Having my cake and eating it too

Our final week in East Africa was so good. Though we spent a few days running around working on travel documents and logistics we were able to get away for a couple of days to celebrate our good news together. We jumped on a bus heading out of town and spent a couple of nights at a nice hotel on a nearby lake. Bryan was very excited to see hippos for the first time (outside of the zoo) and we both enjoyed biking through herds of giraffe, zebra, gazelle and warthogs in a neighboring national park.

But perhaps my favorite part of our time out was at a hospital back in the city where we got to hear our baby's heartbeat for the first time. The doctor says "our little orange seed" as we have taken to calling him or her (though apparently he/she is the size of a big raspberry this week) is growing perfectly so far and, with God's grace, will be arriving sometime around April 24th. We are so very thankful and happy.




And now, one hop, skip and several long jumps later we are home again. And as much as I enjoyed the luxuries of East Africa, it is so good to be back. We fell asleep in our own bed last night listening to the whirling, chirping, buzzing cacophany in the moonlight outside our big screen windows. We woke up to our ridiculous rooster and the twanging of stringed instruments floating across the morning from our guard's radio. Eid is just around the corner and town seems bursting at its seams with people buying food and gifts from shops overflowing with nice things.

I like being in a world with indoor plumbing, broccoli, public transport, hospitals and ice cream for a while but I love this world of donkey carts, bucket baths, open air markets and head scarves too. I feel so blessed to occaionally enjoy some of the finer things in life with more appreciation than I might have before, and then return with fresh eyes to simplicity and what often feels to me like a good bit of adventure. Sometimes I think my life is a like helping myself to a huge slice of rich chocolate cake and then looking in the the refridgerator to find the cake still perfectly whole.

Good Things

Having some down time together in East Africa is always a welcome treat, and there are a handful of specific things I always look forward to when we are back here. Java House strawberry milkshakes just about tops the list for me I have to admit...

We also love going to see movies (this time out it's been Inception and the A-Team), hot showers, pedicures (those are my feet not Bryan's), wearing blue jeans, riding buses and matatus, eating sukuma wiki at sketchy restaurants in the middle of downtown, eating Italian at fancy restaurants outside of town, green apples, pears, cappacinos and...more milkshakes.

But there are a handful of things I am appreciating on this trip out that I never would have though twice about before. Things like ginger ale, plain toast, peppermint and crackers. Simple little things that have a knack for suppressing nausea. And that my friends is because I am oh so happy to tell you that we are pregnant! Most of you probably already know this from phone calls, e-mail or Facebook but I wanted to announce it here too. I will write more about it later. Right now we are still just enjoying time together and soaking in this big change. Just know that we are so happy and that we appreciate your prayers so much.

Cargo

One of the things we love about life here is that somewhat odd phrases like, "There's a cargo plane landing on the airstrip in two hours that has room on it if you want to go!" is cause for immediate action. Such was the case yesterday. Like other organizations working in this area, our policy is to spend ten to twelve weeks in country followed by two weeks out for R and R. However, unlike other organizations, we don't have our own planes flying in regularly so we rely heavily on the available space of other people's planes coming and going. The difficult part about this is that it requires a lot of flexibility and very loose travel itineraries. The fun part is that you never know quite what to expect.

So at about noon yesterday Bryan and I were plucking damp clothes off the line and stuffing them into our packs alongside travel documents and passports as we rushed to meet the plane that had decided to come in a day early. We managed to pack up in record time and jumped into the ATV with our coworkers Dan and Laura and started the fifteen minute trek out to the dirt airstrip. The UN has been pouring a staggering amount of money into repairing the road to the airstrip lately and despite dodging a few spastic bulldozers, we were making the best time we ever had on the freshly grated road. But as we eased around a bend in the road we saw something that made our stomachs turn.

The first thing that registered was two men sprinting down the road towards us, the second with a big stick in his hand. But our attention was quickly diverted from the men who sped past us to the Land Cruiser stopped at an odd angle on the road in front of us. Its bulbar was nosed up against a mound of dirt on the side of the road and all of its doors were flung open. A donkey lay sprawled in the middle of the road, its load of goods from the market scattered several feet in each direction. Three or four people were pacing awkwardly near the vehicle and one girl, an East African expatriate I recognized from one of the NGOs in town, was staggering towards us. As we pulled up and jumped out of our car she slumped to her knees. I could hear her hysterically crying, "Jesus, sweet Jesus!" over and over again. Following her tearful gaze we could see an awkward mound of fur under the front of the Land Cruiser. Next to it was a long blue form. "There's a man still there!" the girl screamed. "He's under the car." The next few moments were a blur of Arabic, Kiswahili, and English as people from three different countries tried to communicate through their anger and fear and confusion. We were already out of cell phone range so Bryan pulled out our satellite phone to try and reach the doctor in town while Dan went to the front of the car to try and get whoever and whatever was underneath out as safely as possible. In the midst of all this the man with the big stick returned and added his ire to the already volatile situation after unsuccessfully chasing down the driver of the vehicle who had fled seconds after the accident. Eventually someone else got in the driver's seat and began to carefully back the vehicle up. We all held our breath as the car rolled backwards crunching miserably over gravel and sacks of food. I was waiting for the screams of whoever was caught underneath the car and dreading what we were about to see. But instead of the mangled body of a person we all breathed a sigh of relief as we saw nothing other than a second donkey, bloody and obviously in shock, but unbelievably alive and thankfully, alone. Next to him was just a long blue plastic tarp rolled up with string. I never thought seeing such a badly hurt animal would make want to laugh with relief, but it did yesterday, though still through tears.

We eventually made it to the airstrip and climbed a ladder into the belly of the cargo plane. Webbing flapped behind our seats, holding back thirty-five feet of air in the now empty cargo bay as we lumbered down the dirt airstrip and up into the low lying clouds. The praying girl who had also been heading to catch the same plane put a scarf over her face and slept. And as I closed my eyes on tiny propeller-blurred trees and rivers outside my window and settled into the deafening roar around me, I found myself saying a quick prayer too. I really, really hope those donkeys survive and go on to live miraculously long lives and tell their donkey grandchildren about the day they took on a Land Cruiser. Because if they don't survive, I suspect there will be a family in a village far from town that will miss them very badly.

Good Run

I often kick around ideas for a blog when I run in the evenings. This week I had flirted with a few random ones: how extracting maggots from my cat’s leg (I won’t tell you how many) has given me great peace that I didn’t miss my calling to the medical profession after all; how much the faded photographs a soldier showed us of himself crouching in tall grass with an automatic weapon reminded me of sepia tinted images of my father-in-law in Vietnam; how sad I am that a good friend is getting ready to move away and excited I am that my baby sister is about to start college. But as I set out to run last night all these pieces of the week peeled off and fluttered to the ground behind me. And at the end of a long week, it’s the memory of my run itself that lingers most.

I set off around six. Dark clouds were building in the southeast, but rain has been illusive lately and I didn’t expect it to come through. But I hoped it would. Though I am running a lot these days, I’m still not one of those people who enjoys it much more than how I feel afterwards. Though my runs get longer every time I go out, not a single one begins without the fleeting thought of “Can I really do this today?” So I play mind games with myself to get through it. Don’t start running until the stream and don’t stop until you get back to it. Short run have four different sections, long runs have six. Run fast up hills, slow down them. If a path separates then joins itself again, take one branch out, the other branch on the way back in. And always sprint the last stretch home. These rules structure every run I take.

In the first village I passed through I greeted a man digging around his sorghum and an old woman sitting on a stool with several babies at her feet. But after that point I saw no one else on the trail. The sandy path was full of prints under my tennis shoes – cows, goats, a bicycle track and little bare footprints. A lone black donkey trotted down the trail, easing me over into the grass as he made his way resolutely somewhere and I wondered if anyone was looking for him or expecting him. I heard lizards scuffle in the brush as I went by and birds cry from small trees but saw none of them. At one point a torn black plastic sack made me wince as it slithered near my foot. I was jumpy after my friend who often runs the same trail killed a puff adder sunning itself on the path last week. This made me start thinking about how I would say “I’ve been bitten by a snake!” in Arabic but all I could come up with was “I’ve been eaten by a snake!” which I fear would provoke more laughter than assistance getting to the hospital. I decided right then that I should look that one up, just in case.

The rain hit at almost the furthest point out on my run. It started as a light drizzle but steadily gained momentum until it sounded like the footsteps of thousands of little feet running in the grass beside me. It hit my forehead in cold drops and rolled down my nose into my open mouth. It soaked through my nylon pants which began sticking to my knees. I expected laughter as I ran through a second village, a crazy white woman running in the rain, but all I saw were sheep huddled under a baobab tree and smoke misting out of small huts. There are so many baobab trees in the village that I was almost untouched by raindrops through its entire length. At the edge of this village there is an old hand-dug well that they say was built as many as ninety years ago by British soldiers. I have always wondered why British soldiers would dig a well this far out of town and am curious if they thought the baobab grove was as beautiful as I do. There are usually a handful of women there pulling jerry cans on long ropes up out of the ground who offer me a drink as I go by, but yesterday the place was abandoned. And yet yesterday, I suddenly would have liked nothing more than a drink from that well.

At the rock where I turn around for long runs I almost broke a rule and actually stopped. The rocky green mountain rose wet and magnificent on my right. The heavy black clouds were rumbling menacingly behind me, still dropping cold clean rain. And the most unnaturally pink sunset was flaming directly in front of me, hurting my eyes with its brilliance and throwing my exhausted shadow back towards the storm. It was breathtaking. It seemed like I was the only person in the world, which felt beautiful and frightening.

But I didn’t stop. I slowed long enough to take try to soak it all in for one long moment, breathed a deep “thank you,” and turned back into the storm and ran home.

Libyan

The last coincidence in a long line of coincidences that finally makes you realize that the coincidences weren’t actually coincidences at all but rather your failure to understand something very clear to everyone else around you is usually the one that sticks in your mind. At least it’s been that way for me lately.

A few days ago I was buying some black and white beads at my favorite bead shop in the market when a man in the stall next door said hello. I had never met the man before and we quickly went through the usual greetings and a name exchange. This only happens about fifteen times per trip to town so I didn’t think anything of it until Bryan walked up and the man said something a wee bit odd to my husband. “Hello! I just met your wife. It’s nice to meet you as well.” He then asked the question that gave it all away. “So, are you from Libya too?” While Bryan looked at me for clarification I had one of those moments where dozens of other vaguely confusing occasions suddenly fall into place in a flash of blinding clarity (“Libya, how are you today?”; “Wait, where are you from?” or “You’re already half African”). We later explained the situation to a friend who laughed out loud at our story. “Libby” he said, “Your name means Libyan in Arabic.” Libyan. I am the Libyan. You may be wondering how in the world I couldn’t have known this before now. I’m wondering that a little myself. But there you go.

A second “coincidence” that I have noticed lately is what language educated men choose to speak to me. I have had a chance to explore this theory on several occasions too. Most recently it happened when we were introduced to a teacher at a local school. He was well dressed and carried himself with the kind of confidence I sometimes see in people who are well travelled. And despite the fact that Bryan initiated the greetings in Arabic, he replied in excellent English. Language is political, social and religious, and just like us, people here are often eager to practice languages they weren’t born into, so when the man shook my hand I complied with a general “Hello. How are you?” But to my surprise he overlapped me with a “Salaam Alekum. Inti kwaisa?” I quickly changed gears and answered him in Arabic before he turned back to Bryan and started into a conversation in English. This always surprises me but it has happened enough that I think it can’t be random. All I can come up with is that because women are typically far less educated than men in this country, if they are lucky enough to speak a major language at all, it will probably be Arabic and not English. I think that by default, educated men will speak to me in Arabic and my husband in English because he is a man. And I am a woman.

You might think that this subtle sexism would bother me (if that is in fact what it is). But on the contrary it delights me. For someone to first see my gender and not the color of my skin is so refreshing, even if it comes with a suitcase full of assumptions. When I run or go to the market or drive down the road, I hear “Khawaja, khawaja!” over and over and over again. And though it doesn’t always bother me, being constantly reminded of how starkly I stand out is not always comfortable. Which is why I am trying out something new. Lately I have been taking the time to stop on my runs to tell every mob of waving six year olds on the edge of the path that my name is Libby. I have told the fresh teenager at the butcher trying to sell me suspicious looking meat that my name is Libby. I have told the group of women balancing impossibly large containers of water on their heads as they walk past my house that my name is Libby. And little by little I think it may be paying off. There will probably never come a time when I won’t be called khawaja. But it’s the important things that I want people to know. That I am a woman. And that I am Libyan.

Minding my ن s and ب s

It has been so cool lately that I feel like we have all been making up for those sleepless, sweat-drenched nights of a few months ago. The sunrise hardly makes a ripple on the surface of my sleep in the mornings, and throughout the day vague memories of dreams drift across my mind in fragments – pieces of the kind of lives lived only under miles of deep slumber. Even Asad only stumbles onto the back porch well after breakfast, bleary-eyed and groggy and Nimir, who has recently struck up an affair with the pretty black and white cat next door, is dead to the world until at least three o’clock in the afternoon. Only the chickens seem to be willfully up at a reasonable hour these days, and all nine of them follow us with an air of disgust from tent to bathroom to kitchen until they get their breakfast of sorghum and sesame seeds.

We’ve bumped our language lessons up to four times a week now (which may be a more rational explanation for my increased desire for sleep.) Arabic language learning continues to be the source of my greatest sense of accomplishment and my deepest discouragement. There are days in conversations when all the “random” questions fall just right and gullible people exclaim, “Wow, you know Arabic so well!” And then there are those days when the most basic and childlike request is so completely void from my vocabulary and grammatical awareness that you would never in your wildest dreams imagine I have lived here for a year. (And that is not false modesty.) Sometimes I console myself with the thought that learning a new language in our case has come complete with a new script that goes from right to left and a twenty eight letter alphabet, each of whose symbols have three unique forms. Though I know we sound like eight year olds trudging our way through Fun With Dick and Jane (in our case Ahmed and Zainab, actually), we really can read a lot of things now, albeit belabored. And the other day, when our teacher asked simple questions to which we wrote out full-sentence answers on lined paper, he could read our answers, even through his chuckles. So we are making progress, though I often worry it’s slower than it should be. (I should clarify that I am speaking only for myself here. Being married to a freak-of-nature-language-learner is a two-sided coin. And I say that with the deepest affection.) One thing that eases my mind however, especially on bad language learning days, is to think of how much better I will be at teaching other adults how to read and write because of this experience. I don’t remember becoming literate the first time I did it. But I am quite certain this second go around will stick with me for quite awhile. From now on, I will always have great admiration and empathy for that person awkwardly grasping a pen, tongue sticking out as they shakily struggle to curl an unfamiliar shape. Because right now, that person is me.

Couch

Two weeks ago, we dragged ourselves into the compound covered in mud, soaked to the bone and freezing cold after a crazy drive home from our trip out West. The drive back to hours longer than it should have as black cotton mud caked our wheels solid about every kilometer, locking us into immobility. Even after the guys scraped tens of pounds of mud out of the wheel wells and we could continue inching our way down the road, it often took two of us to fight the steering wheel into place so we wouldn't go careening off into the bush. Our poor little golf-cart-on-steroids was probably scared into performance by the sight of dozens of other vehicles half swallowed in mud and abandoned until the dry season. Altogether we counted one lorry, one tractor, two tractor trailers and six motorcycles- all casualties of the rainy season roads. Since being back we've decided that the next few months will probably be more wisely spent in office work, language learning and home repairs than travelling.

So, we've spent the last few weeks working on our little house. Our teammates flew in on a chartered flight with supplies a few days ago and I honestly felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder greeting Pa as he came in on the wagon. Not only did we have a few boxes of peanut butter, olive oil, cornmeal, shortening, vinegar, spices (and yes, Nutella) but we also had a COUCH! I feel so materialistic saying this, but I have to confess, this chunk of wood and cushioning has changed my world. I love having a couch! It's a futon actually, a very blasé piece of unoriginal craftsmanship purchased at the East African equivalent of Wal-Mart, and a few character-adding scratches show it had a rough trip in the back of the Cessna Caravan. But setting it down in our living room you would think we were looking at an 18^th century French armoire. We have a couch. We can sit on it and read a book in the evenings. We can welcome guests into it for a cup of tea. We can even take a nap there on rainy Sunday afternoons. A couch. I had no idea it would be such a big deal.

I have also been enjoying my newly rearranged kitchen. It is now separate from the dining room/living room and my shelves are painted. I have been enjoying cooking so much more now that I have more space, privacy and a prettier view of the little mountain. I remember when my kitchen was the front porch of our tent and my stove was a little camp burner. When we moved into this building with nothing more than a few trunks and a set of plastic chairs and table I felt like we had moved into a mansion. And now I have a gas stove and oven, gas refrigerator, solar electricity and a pantry full of things to eat other than lentils. It's amazing how really
simple living can make fairly simple living seem so luxurious. Or maybe more amazing is how quickly luxurious living can become discontenting (I don't know if that is a word but it is the one I want to use). Hmmm...

I promise though, all I need to be happy is my Nutella.