Drums

I am propped up in bed with the computer on my lap, enjoying the comforting security of a wide mosquito net. My sick baby sleeps within arm’s reach under her own net and the last time I checked her fever was still down. Bryan reads Chinua Achebe next to me, the light of his Kindle helping to divert the tiny bugs that can still fit through the mesh from my screen to his. Outside, like every night that we have been here, drums beat wildly under a full yellow moon, as exotic and other-worldly as a cliché scene in a movie I would ridicule. I am so curious about them. Who is drumming and why? What do the words to their songs mean?

In some ways I wonder what in the world we have done this week and in other ways I wonder how we did everything we did. The logistics of getting building supplies in this place is a never ending nightmare which has kept Bryan fully occupied and simple living has kept me busy. I made cornbread on the stove top the other day which felt like a huge accomplishment; I washed a couple loads of laundry by hand and have kept the house relatively clean. I kept my panic under control when the first night adder sashayed into the house and almost worked up the courage to kill the second one myself in the kitchen. (I let Bryan do the dirty work both times.) The third one that dares enter my house has it coming for him.    

On Thursday we went into the camp to greet some old friends. Many men have come by the house to say hello or have crossed our paths in the market. But most of the women I once knew are as home-bound as I am and I was excited about getting out to see them, even with the long walk.

The camp feels like a camp. There is space between the homes and people come and go freely. Little kids walk back from the pond with mudfish slung over their shoulders on home-made poles. But UNHCR tarps drape over almost every roof. Men sit in threadbare patches of shade as though waiting for something. Some are working metal or leading tired donkeys down the road. But there is a lot of waiting. Or at least the feeling of it.

I had a sweet reunion with my dear friend Aisha. She was one of the last people I saw on Thursday. I had already had time to cry behind my big sunglasses as we were swarmed by throngs of children who were shooed away by old men and women with babies on their hips, each soul pressing around us holding more stories than I could imagine. And all somehow happy. I was happy too. By the time I saw Aisha I was able to keep it together, which seemed somehow culturally appropriate. But she threw her arms around me in a long giggly hug which didn’t really seem that culturally appropriate at all, so maybe in the end it would have been okay to just cry in her shoulder. It was so sweet to hug her neck.

She has a new baby, a fat little girl named Khajija. I did the rough math while I bounced her on my knee and realize Aisha was at least four months pregnant when she fled her home, carrying small children for days on end. She looks good, isn’t much thinner than when I last saw her and her kids seems healthy. Her UNHCR tent is pitched in a shaded area with a wide sweep of clean-swept earth in front of it. But when I asked about her oldest child, a girl who was living with her grandmother in another town when war broke out, Aisha looked calmly away and said someone called her a few months back to say the girl had died in another camp in Ethiopia. She was eight years old.

On Sunday afternoon Bryan played ultimate Frisbee with some other khawajas on one end of the airstrip (the end with the wreckage of an old airplane). I sat on a mound of dirt and watched while Annabelle played with a bunch of kids nearby. A couple of little boys batted iridescent dragonflies out of the sky and brought them to her patiently even though she would end up letting them slip through her chubby fingers and back into the sky almost every time. I sat and watched and thought about a lot of things.   

I’ve had moments of feeling overwhelmed by the refugee context, of the sobering reality of what living here will mean. I have lots of questions about how all this is going to play out still. I sit with Aisha for half an hour under a tree and my heart constricts in longing for a time when we both still had houses to serve tea in and her daughter was still alive. With a pang of guilt I often think, this is not what I wanted. I wanted a place where people were settled and in a place that felt like home to them, even if it didn’t always to me. I wanted a place where I might have to work through what it means to have a friend who struggles to pay her kids school fees, but not what it means to help her keep them alive. I wanted a place where I would have to live simply and adjust to roughing it from time to time, not a place where I would have to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a prefab house with no plumbing that you can’t get to by even a really crappy road. I was ready for complicated. But why does it have to be this complicated? I have thought this so many times this week.

I hear the irony in my voice when I say these things. I know if questions were visible, my own would be one among thousands tonight blocking out the moon and stars overhead with their number. Why does it have to be like this? Why? I am not the only one thinking this.

I can’t answer these questions for myself, much less for Aisha and the thousands of people that live in the camps with her. But in those moments of conflicting emotions, when I sit thoughtfully in the dirt and watch my joyful daughter receive generosity from refugee children, I find myself returning to a couple of things that I know to be true. Things that help center me.  

I know that the one I live for has asked his followers to live helping people who have a lot less than they do. That is unarguable, (believe me, I’ve tried). And I know that the people I am living next to right now fit the bill better than just about anyone I can imagine. There are few people more deserving of a bit of a break, a bit of justice than people like Aisha. That is undeniable.

So if this life we have chosen and this work we are stubbornly fighting for a chance to just try is messy, if it is hard, even if it turns out to be one big failure, it is still worthwhile. Or at least it seems that way to me when I sit and think about it for a little while. This is the kind of thing, the kind of place, the kind of people worth using up one’s life out on. God knows it’s a mess. But despite my fears and grief and an occasional sense of deep loss - none of which will go away soon I feel - I cannot shake, cannot pull off, cannot dig out of the sinews of my heart the burning sensation that this is right.

So here we are.

I just got up and checked on Annabelle. Her fever is back so I gave her some ibuprofen and watched her suck it down and then nestle cozily back into her Graco pack n play. I breathed a prayer of bare-bone thanks and then crawled back into bed next to my sleeping husband. The drums are still pounding out in the darkness. Maybe tomorrow I will find out what they mean.

    

Thirsty

The night before we left Loki I became aware of a growing sense of emotion, something between anxiety and sadness, eclipsing the edges of my excitement but always in the periphery of my heart’s sight. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was or why it was there but I felt it. But as we crawled in bed that night and I snuggled away from the sagging mosquito net and deeper into Bryan’s arms (one of his favorite things about crappy nets) I realized that a year had passed since I had been to North Africa. A year had passed since I had seen those faces, held those hands, tasted those flavors and heard those sounds. I was returning to somewhere that was home for over two years but had been jerked out under my feet in the confused rush of one strange night. And now I was getting ready to go back. Bryan had been back twice already and I had lived vicariously through so many of his reunions and rediscoveries. But this was my first time back. And like so many of the sweetest things in life, this return caused a twinge of something less definable than mere happiness. 

We landed on the wide airstrip now full on UN bulldozers and WFP planes. I lowered my heavy self gingerly down the ladder and stepped into the brown dust. Refugee women carrying bags of food walked across the airstrip on their way back from the camps and kids waved at Annabelle from mounds of dirt in the near distance. The last time I stood in this place I was jostling a four month old while a kind-eyed woman told me that the home we had just left behind was bombed ten minutes after we left the ground. But I decided to reign in those memories for the moment and just took sweet heavy sips of my surroundings, resisting the urge to guzzle. 

It’s difficult to know what to say, I feel both so parched for words and yet drowning in them. I find myself wanting just to describe little pieces of the world around me, as though they better speak to the story I want to tell. 

There is a broad plain behind our compound that is flooded with chai-colored water and full of naked children, their bodies like wet obsidian in the sun. They laugh and splash in the warm water, and I heard them once shriek “Antanov! Antanov!” and then dive for cover from the pretend shadows of the real planes that drove many of them from their homes. 

Apparently thirty minutes before we arrived, our very pregnant neighbor rushing to get home doubled over on the path in front of our house, squatted in the grass and pushed her baby out of her body. When help quickly came the baby boy was gently picked clean of dry leaves and carried home in a basin next to his wet placenta. Even now I can occasionally hear healthy newborn cries from the hut across the way.    

On our first evening here Annabelle, (“Hana”), and I took a walk down the road and were quickly engulfed in curious children. I stepped back and just watched as Annabelle nonchalantly shared her collection of pebbles with the kids. They traded her green pods of small beans. And then to peals of shocked laughter my bold daughter began touching everyone’s belly buttons, one by one, (most of which will already exposed, though not all) and proclaiming proudly “Button!” A couple of the kids exclaimed, “She knows Arabic?” and I had to laugh too. Buton is the Arabic word for stomach.  

On a personal  level, it’s amazing the things that feel “homey.” I forgot how much I enjoy bathing from a bucket under the stars with my husband every night. I love looking through the steam of whatever I am cooking and seeing deep into every direction - kids playing in a puddle, women carrying firewood home on their heads, drowsy goats resting in some patchy shade. I love lingering early morning breakfasts that smell of sweet tea and passing smoke, the one meal of the day during which I am not sweating. I love long messy greetings with groups of people, inquiries into family and health braided over and under lots of thank yous to God.

I’ve also been reminded of all the things I don’t like about this life, mostly superficial. The cones of bugs that swarm around the little islands of lights over our heads are claustrophobic in the evening and I hate the fine sheen of mud that repellant leaves on my dirty skin at the end of the day. It’s hot, not even as hot as it will get but still oppressive to my Nairobi weakened system. And the drop latrine. I’m not going to lie, this private-minded seven-month pregnant lady is struggling a bit with the tin outhouse full of flies shared by six other adults and, purportedly, a rat. I have confirmed you can’t squat, poop, balance and cry at the same time, at least not pregnant.

The tears have come in more than just the toilet. Even with the natural pacing that comes with pregnancy and toddlerhood - the 45 minute walk into the camp has been delayed until little girl’s naps naps and Mama’s energy levels align, and settling into life rhythms, even just temporary ones, has been time-consuming with solar panels and gas cookers to set up, mosquito nets to string and boxes to unpack – but even with this, I have still felt overwhelmed at times. One moment it’s the trying to remove the live bug from my husband’s ear while my toddler panics in the background (you would think I would be the person least traumatized by that incident, wouldn’t you?) Another moment it’s hearing hauntingly familiar songs from another lifetime trilled out in a hot church building. In these moments I felt overcome. And I have cried.

There is so much to soak in here. And it’s hard to pace yourself when you are so thirsty. 

Lokichoggio (again)

We woke up at 5:15 this morning to catch our flight out of Wilson Airport, the launching pad out of urban East Africa to half-a-dozen of the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster areas and most exotic game reserves. I felt a twinge of self-consciousness as I squeezed my Motherhood Maternity clad belly and squirmy eighteen-month-old obtrusively between UNHRC representatives in linen business suits reading glossy dossiers, and tourists in North Face gear toting professional grade cameras around their sunburned necks in the small crowded airport terminal. But that’s who we are I suppose, our own complex category of crazy heading into the beautiful mess that this part of Africa can sometimes be.

We are here in the outpost town of Lokichoggio until Wednesday when a bush pilot friend will fly our chartered Cessna up North and drop us off. Right now Bryan is out of cell range somewhere near the border trying to get our passports stamped in at the hut they call immigration. Annabelle is sprinkling sand on a bored looking tomcat sitting in a green canvas chair nearby. She’s collected a handful or bottle caps and pebbles in a plastic container at her feet and periodically looks up to exclaim something unintelligible about the noisy guineas in the bushes. We are only one foot out of civilization and already she is happier than I have seen her in weeks.

I am too, I think.

Sweat is wearing a path down the back of my calves though Loki’s dramatic skyline is heavy with rain clouds. Mary Katherine is tossing and turning inside of me as though she can sense the change in the world outside too. But it feels good to be on the move again. It turns out the thing I grieve the most about our lifestyle lately, our ever-packed bags and changing view from the bedroom window, is also the thing that makes me feel invigorated today. Or maybe it’s just because in this case the move is taking us one step closer to putting away the suitcases for good for a while. I’m not sure. But even with the sweat and the promise of far more to come, I’m really excited.

We will be in North Africa for about five weeks before we come back out to wait for Mary Katherine to be born in Nairobi. We will stay in the simple house of some friends working with another organization (they are in Nairobi to have their baby right now) while we try to get our feet under us. Bryan will be working to get a fence up around the plot that will become home and a couple of cement slabs laid for what will eventually be our floors. Annabelle and I will be doing a lot of adjusting back to the life we have been away from for a year – bucket baths, creative cooking with eggplant, making the secret nutella stash last, learning language, making new friends and catching up with old ones, trying to nap in the heat.

Choosing to deal with Braxton Hicks and potty training a strong-willed toddler in a part of the world that doesn’t have running water, electricity or any fruit in the market beyond the occasional tomato might seem a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. (It alternates between the two for me depending on the day of the week and how much sleep I’ve had the night before.) But in some bizarre way, it sounds like everything in the world that I want to do. I’m going with the two people I love most back to a life that I have missed. Genuinely and deeply missed. It’s not going to be fun every day. But something tells me it’s going to be really good on at least most of them.

Sometimes I wonder if I am being overly-glib. In the next few weeks we will see if eventually that one-too-many ants in the sugar bowl, that one-too-many mosquito bites on my baby, that one-too-many degrees on the thermometer after sunset will send me over the edge. Maybe it will, who knows. But right now whether out of an intrepid spirit or profound naiveté, I am really looking forward to the next season of life.