Stories

I actually wrote most of these words late last night in my daughter’s muppet notebook by the intermittent light of my cell phone while Annabelle slept in the room with me. Now it is late once more, the night before another long trip. But the words are still burning in my heart, like they need to be written again.

Granted, I had a few reasons to cry already when Bryan called. Devastating news of cancer from not one but three dearly loved people in my family’s life has reached us this week leaving us feeling far away and helpless. It was my baby sister’s last night in Tanzania for what will probably be a long time, and the last time I will see her before some sweet and yet unknown reunion in the future. And after almost three weeks apart I am just flat out missing my husband. Five minute phone calls on a satellite phone just aren’t cutting it anymore.

So Bryan could have told me just about anything last night and I probably would have started crying. But when he told me about some of the stories he had heard that day, not so much narrating a story as flatly stating facts out of his own numb shock, I felt like something inside of me broke.

He told me that people spent the afternoon talking to him about how when they ran for their lives, leaving everything behind and walking through the wilderness for weeks to get to safety, the very old and the very young were most vulnerable. This is not surprising. I’ve probably even said that very thing to others before. But I’m not sure I ever stopped to imagine what that might mean. I didn’t imagine crippled old men whose houses were burned down around them by their own people while they were respectfully left in their beds instead of being abandoned to the approaching enemy. And I didn’t imagine the mothers who made it days, maybe even weeks into their journeys’ before realizing that they could not carry all of their small children any longer. And deciding to save the children they could, they left their smallest babies to die alone under a tree while the rest of the family carried on. But those are the stories Bryan heard yesterday.

I can’t stop crying about those babies. And I know my tears are mere raindrops in a roaring river. I find myself begging God to have please, please, please picked up every single one of those babies and cradled them in his arms while they died alone. I don’t know if I can bear it otherwise.

I find it so difficult to understand that this world is a place in which one day, while I was chopping an onion for dinner or sleeping dreamlessly or washing my baby’s hands, another woman was kissing her baby’s head and walking away to leave him under a tree to die alone. How is that possible? How could those things have happened simultaneously? Surely I should have felt her heart break into a million pieces in that moment too. One soul cannot contain that kind of pain; surely all of creation should stumble under that kind of burden. And yet she walked away and somehow, miraculously, my world did not so much as shudder. I didn’t know to stop chopping or sleeping or washing, to fall on my face on the floor and weep for her. For all of us.

In my grief and shock I have this reaction, this flicker of audacity to believe that surely, surely I would have been able to do something different. That, had I been in her place, some source of strength or store of resources would have been made available to me that were not available to her. That I would have found a way to save all my children. I comfort myself with the lie of thinking that I could ever understand and dare make different decisions in that hell. That I somehow love the child I pushed out of my body any differently than she does.  

Some days preparing to go to this place – to develop an unwritten language, teach people to read and write, help people process their trauma – these things feel too big for me. But sharing their stories is one thing that has never felt like too much. I have always been excited thinking about listening and giving voice, even if only in very small ways, to the suffering and injustice of the voiceless. If nothing else, I have thought, when I am not strong enough to try and heal or comfort or restore in any measure, I can listen and I can write.

But when I imagine sitting before that woman and hearing her voice and her story for the first time, while my children and hers play at our feet, I think, oh dear God, I am not sure I am even strong enough to do that.   

  

    

Phone Call

I’ve imagined the conversation so many times. I’ve always been nervous that I wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it, but when the moment actually came, to my surprise, the words appeared out of nowhere quite naturally. Whether my eroded Arabic made choosing words easy, or the traumatic circumstances that prevented goodbyes in the first place allowed small talk to have an ironic comfort, I’m not sure. But it was good.

Bryan and I had talked a couple of times already and sent a dozen or so texts back and forth between North and East Africa. But trying to cram the emotional and sensual experience of reuniting with old friends in a refugee camp of 110, 000 people in a place that shows up on very few maps in the world is not something that can fit into a time-conscious long distance phone call or fifty character text.

When Bryan passed her the phone at first I just heard the background murmur of a tea shop. But then Zainab’s voice pushed to the forefront salaaming me almost shyly, as though she was sitting in the chair across from me and not a thousand miles away. My first reaction was to laugh and she laughed too. And then a tidal wave of emotion swelled over my voice and swallowed it whole. I was suddenly grateful for the physical and cultural gulf still between us, that she couldn’t see my contorted face or hear my voice break. I was afraid she would think, what do you have to cry about, though in my heart of hearts I know she wouldn’t.

How are all your people? And your children?

Praise be to God, we are all well. How is your baby, is she walking yet?

Yes, yes. Hana is walking..

The conversation was laughable. For a moment I could almost doubt that she had ever been running for her life, that she had ever walked for weeks with her babies to get to safety. For a moment I almost thought she really did have all she needed to eat and feed her family.

I have had several conversations like these this week. As Bryan finds (and is found) by friend after friend after friend, a woman who once showed me how to brew coffee properly or who patted my pregnant belly knowingly will ask him if she can use his phone to call me. And almost a year since I last heard her voice, we greet and chat and inquire about each other’s children. We say, God willing, we will see you again soon.  

Bryan is excited. I can hear it in his voice as he rattles off stories of whose families are there safely, what’s available in the market and what people are predicting for the future. He says the situation is bad, very bad, and yet maybe not as dire as we feared. People are hopeful, as though the worst has passed and somehow, in the slowly settling dust, hope is still standing there alive.

Bryan says there are babies everywhere and has reported back about several friends with new little ones. I am amazed and amused by this fact, as is everyone else apparently. I suppose there are limited recreational activities on hand when you are sitting in a refugee camp (or hiding in the bush?). People thank God for his generosity and congratulate us on the blessing we will also receive in January. Many of our friends back home think we are crazy to be thinking of taking a baby and pregnant wife to a refugee camp. But we are in good company it seems.

I’ve felt residual guilt about having been away for so long, for having jumped on a plane in the middle of the night and not come back. At least not yet. But Bryan tells me everyone left not long after we did, not on a plane obviously, but they scattered and lost track of each other too. And as he walks around this camp, stopping by tents and huts to greet former neighbors and teachers and shopkeepers, he witnesses reunions of old friends and relatives, other people who haven’t seen each other for almost a year. It would be absurd and wrong to compare my situation to that of our old friends. The differences are innumerable. But in small ways, ways that for some reason matter to me, those differences may not be as vast as I may have once thought. And that excites me.

One of the people that Bryan ran into a couple days ago was the man who built our house in North Africa. He made it across the border safely along with his wife and children and grandchildren. When Bryan met him again he was busy making bricks for someone else’s house and he and Bryan shared a laugh. “Are you ready to do this all over again?” Bryan asked. “We’re ready!” our friend replied.

I think maybe I am too.

    

Pangolin

We just came inside from an early morning rendezvous with a pangolin.

Apparently these rare creatures are known for their divining powers around here and in-between using him to predict the next rain shower, some local farmers brought him by the house to show him off. It’s by far the weirdest animal I have ever seen. Somewhere between an anteater and a hedgehog, it looked like a lopped off dinosaur tail loping around the yard on two tiny back legs. With its surprisingly calm and wise little eyes buried under thick armor I almost believed it really could have told me the weather forecast if I asked it to. Annabelle, still in her Carter’s frog pajamas and with oatmeal on her face, tottered around barefoot after it, dragging babydoll behind her. She squatted down next to Aunt Abigail (who was braver than her mother) and posed for a picture, grinning “cheese” before reaching out and running her hand across the scales as wide as her palm. Not even a year and a half old and already petting pangolins.

Bryan jumped on a bus to Kenya a few days ago and is flying North from there today. He will be gone a couple weeks, spending time in the refugee camp trying to find answers to our many questions. I already miss him like crazy, but am anxious to hear what he learns. There is a long list of people I hope he finds and I am both hopeful and terrified to hear how they are. While he is traipsing around the bush in North Africa, Annabelle and I are hanging out in Tanzania at my parent’s quiet, cool house, waiting again, but enjoying the company.

It has been fun to watch Annabelle readjust to the continent of her birth. She spends most afternoons wandering around the back yard, picking up bruised franjipani flowers or rocks, or sometimes slipping leaves through slats in the baby goat pen for the kids to nibble. There is a troop of neighborhood children who whisk her off from time to time and she alternates from overwhelmed to overjoyed by their presence, depending on her moods. Her shins are scratched up and she is filthy by bath time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her so happy. Watching her through a screen-door is a bit like watching an echo of my own childhood and it makes me realize how much I want my daughter to grow up in Africa.

I want her to grow up in Africa because I want her feet to be honest-to-goodness filthy at the end of the day. I want her to grow up, maybe not color-blind exactly – she’s already had her hair and arms rubbed enough to know that people are different – but to grow up so cheek-to-cheek with those differences that they don’t really feel like differences anymore. I want her to know what poverty is, what it eats and drinks and how it plays. I want her to be outside. A lot. I want her to learn languages and music styles, even ones much of the world has never heard of. I want her to be a dang good tree climber. I want her to see enough of this big world that she never once regrets missing out on high school band trips or cheerleading tryouts. I want her to have first crushes on boys that look different than she does. I want her to grow up aware of how wealthy she is, and thankful for it. I want her to grow up thinking that beauty is thick hair and bright eyes and a strong, healthy body. And I want her to grow up having strange pets, probably not pangolins, they’re a bit too scaly for me even if they can tell the future, but other peculiar things she will one day tell her grandchildren about.

There are plenty of things still to wonder about, even a few to worry about from time to time. But watching my daughter play this morning I couldn’t help but think, “It’s good to be back.”

(P.S. - I am back in the land of touchy internet too so sorry for the wonky formatting of pictures and text...)