Nativity

The Story is so much easier for me to imagine now than it once was. The images are perhaps no more factual than the blue-eyed cherub in a sanitized barn. But its truth is powerful to me today. This Christmas my heart is somewhere far away from where I now sit. And this story is a balm to my bruised heart.

He normally would be the one astride the donkey, his calves bobbing along the animal’s warm sides as they pick their way down the dirt road. But he had seen her stumble beneath the weight she hides gracefully under the gauzy folds of her tobe and watched her catch her breath with the gathering pain. So he helps her up onto the worn saddle and leads the animal carefully between the stones in the road. The grass one either side of them is dead and yellow, the air thick with the seasonally hot dust. He wipes sweat from his brow into the white sleeve of his jallabiya and glances back at her, not knowing what to ask her. But her eyes are closed.

By the time they reach the village the sun has sunk into a violently colored haze on the horizon and night is spreading her wings across the sky. A thin sickle moon and a single brilliant star hang caught in the silhouetted branches of a baobab tree. A skinny dog howls as they pass the first few huts on the outskirts of town. The scattering of lantern lights and the thick murmur of warm voices in the darkness around them marks the flood of people who have come home to be counted, as does the smell of smoke, urine and competitively thick perfumes. The twang of a traditional love song floats from the copse of neem trees where people have gathered to laugh and drink marissa out of clay pots through long reeds. A baby cries from somewhere close by. Donkeys bray in unison in the distance.

The first funduk owner actually greets them and offers explanation. The last bed…so many people…no relatives here? But the others are too busy to really notice the worried young man and quiet girl or to comment on the fact that she rides the donkey. They just continue drawing water from the barrels, shuffling trays full or leftover food or pouring cups of scalding mint tea, hardly looking up as they mutter, “Sorry we’re full.”

He is growing desperate when he salaams the final place, a homestead with a tin door half eaten with rust and no fence. The woman who uprights from over a cooking fire shakes her head before she even greets them, and waves her wooden spoon apologetically. His heart sinks as he hears the girl behind him catch her breath with another contraction. But then the woman squints into the darkness. “Yusif?” she says, “Yusif, walid Yakob?” His mother’s cousin cackles in recognition, then sighs and waves them in.

The rakoba is thick with smoke. The coals, the color of something living, feed the wood that keep the flies and approaching desert night chill away from the clan of goats and family of cows that crowd under the grass roof. He brushes pellets of manure away on the most level patch of sand and lowers her down. In the firelight he can see her flawless black skin is shiny with sweat, her brow furrowed in concentration. He wishes her sisters were here, the ones with broods of their own children who would support her while she squatted against the wall, shouting at her and berating her, pushing her to bring forth life with the crushing weight of love and tradition. But there is no time for that now, she stifles a scream and leans into him as he plumbs the depths of his heart for the strength they will both need.

They are both terrified until the moment the baby slips out of her torn and exhausted body. She falls back on the mat that Yusif’s relative has managed to scrounge up from somewhere and he looks at the baby in his hands – wet, pinkish grey and squalling. He has never held a baby this small before, never touched life this new. With tears he doesn’t fully understand straining at his eyes, he carefully unwinds the white ima from around his head and wraps it around his firstborn. Mariam’s beaded wrists are strong when she reaches out for the baby, despite her exhaustion. She pulls him close to her and then guides the breast Yusif has never touched to the baby’s small mouth. The baby reaches up and rests his splayed fingers against the decorative dots and scars of her dark skin. He closes his eyes.

The small family is just beginning to doze when there is movement in the grass just beyond the circle of their fire. Yusif reaches instinctively for the wooden bom resting beside him just as shapes emerge out of the darkness but relaxes when he hears the soft clink of a goat’s charm. The boys greet him shyly and then sit at a respectful distance. The eyes of their sleepy herds glint like small lights in the night; the boys’ eyes, still brimming over with the remnant of a brilliant light that was theirs alone, never leave the sleeping baby. They are silent until one pulls out a robaba and begins picking out a wiry tune; the song is haunting and holy in its sparseness. Yusif’s also relative appears out of the darkness with a bowl of sorghum aseeda, dampened with a pool of green weka, and a pitcher of water. She pauses when she sees them there, smiles and then raising one gentle fist into the air she lets out a loud trill, her celebratory cry rising alone in the quiet night.

Mariam looks at her baby and wishes she had even a single strand of black and white beads to tie around his wrist. She pulls the ima a bit closer around his small body, worries that he is cold. In this moment of bewildered peace, she cannot yet imagine the gold that lavishly dressed foreigners will one day kneel and place on the dirt floor of her mud hut. Or the night similar to this, when they will run for their lives from the government troops intent on massacre. Tonight there is no place for the future and its unknowns or the past and its dreams. There is only tonight - the animals, a few unwashed boys, a dying fire and a tiny baby, utterly dependent on a poor carpenter and his wife.

The Diaper Bucket

When we came back in from branch meetings in East Africa three months ago, we brought a stash of diapers with us. Annabelle was still un-potty-trained and MaryKat was in cloth diapers during the day but paper at night, so Pampers size 3-4 filled up a modest portion of cargo space on our Cessna caravan charter.

When we got settled into the tukul again I started energetically back into the routine of taking wet and soiled cloth diaper inserts and faithfully depositing them into the big blue bucket full of Dettol water sitting outside our front door and faithfully washing them all by hand every few days and hanging them out in the sun to be zapped dry. Bryan had suggested I hire someone to wash the diapers for me but I somehow cringed at the thought of someone else having to handle my kids poop. And though it’s not a chore I love, I’ll admit to a surge or pioneer satisfaction in seeing rows and clean white diapers hanging on the line and feeling my hands mildly chapped from getting them that way. And there is seriously nothing cuter than seeing a fat baby scooting around in hot pink plastic pants over her cloth diaper (her “super pants” as Bryan calls them). Yes, when we got back I was feeling an almost patriotic dedication to the cloth diaper cause.

This feeling evaporated completely after about one week.

First, of all, I realized I needed every ounce of available energy to cling to sanity in those final weeks in the tukul as the rats were trying to recapture the territory they had claimed while we were away. We had a wave of guests from the outside that meant an uptick in cooking and cleaning in general with not a lot time leftover for washing diapers. Then, here recently, Annabelle practically potty-trained herself (the height of my pride as a parent thus far has to be her nonchalant success over a drop-latrine while I held her over a hole that could swallow her alive covered in flies and general malodorous dampness in a refugee camp while 50 kids squawked for her attention just outside the tarp shielding us), leaving more than enough paper diapers to get us through this term without having to go back to cloth at all. And of course, there was also just the sinking realization that hand-washing diapers is actually not fun at all, whether you are pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder or not.

So what started as MaryKat in paper diapers for “just a couple of days” became a luxurious habit that lingered on.

At first the diaper bucket (still full of dirty diapers) was left neglected by the front door under the excuse of, “Just until all our guests leave…” But then we moved into our house and it stayed where it was. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months.

You see where this is going.

Here it is. My name is Elizabeth Harrison and I left a huge blue bucket full of poopy baby diapers half-soaking in rancid water for two months in the blazing sun.

Really.

For a while I think I held out hope that maybe the rats would just magically carry it away one night and I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, but then I realized even they aren’t that disgusting. I thought about just throwing it all away, burning it maybe, but besides the fact that these diapers were an incredibly generous gift from some very precious friends, the truth is that  that sooner or later I knew I would need the cloth diapers again.

So yesterday, approximately 42 days after I had last peeked inside, I stood armed with three basins of water, a massive bottle of bleach and small tub of detergent and took off the lid to my diaper bucket.

At first glance I thought I was looking at some kind of animal and almost ran to grab a weapon. But then I realized I was just seeing the long fingers of translucent white fungus growing up towards me like amphibious hands reaching up for something to grab on to. Which was both a relief and a disappointment, really.

It. Was. Gross. I won’t go into any more details but let’s just say there were colors and textures and smells in that bucket that were like an entire bayou boiled down and concentrated into about ten liters. I soaked and rinsed and scrubbed and resoaked about a dozen times before I hung them out on the line to let the lovely North African sun do what it does best and kill every last living thing that could have possibly survived.

And you know what? They look good. We lost a couple diapers in the line of duty, true, but the rest are more or less unscathed. I looked at my clothesline full of pastel plastic shells and unbelievably-close-to-white diapers waving in the breeze and felt immensely satisfied. The deep-seeded shame at being the kind of mother that lets her baby’s undergarments rot in water for a month was replaced by the simple happiness of a wrong made right and the redemptive rawness of my hands. Like somehow scrubbing the life out of those diapers (hopefully literally) made up for the neglect and general badness of the situation, for lack of a better word.

As we were crawling in bed last night Bryan said, “You know what? I feel like it’s all starting to lift. We’re in the house, we got the ATV running again, we’re in the swing of language lessons, we finally got a newsletter out, you even got the diaper bucket taken care of today! We are starting to get on top of things again.” And I think he’s right. Life is starting to feel manageable again. Like maybe instead of just running around trying to survive we can start focusing on thriving.

I’m not sure how much the diaper bucket is going to be a part of my practice of thriving, however. In fact, as pleased as I feel about those clean diapers right now, I am pretty sure come Monday morning the sweet lady who washes our clothes is in for a pay raise.       

Karama

Our Colloquial Arabic - English/ English – Colloquial Arabic, A Concise Dictionary says that a Karama is, “1. Sacrifice to get a blessing (slaughtering of a sheep) 2. Alms Giving 3. Miracle done by holy man or saint.”

Around here a Karama is an event, sometimes big, sometimes small, but never without the slaughtering of an animal. Karamas are most often held after the birth of a child or the acquisition of some great new thing like a car or donkey cart. It is a way to give thanks for God’s generosity, and to reflect that generosity in turn towards one’s neighbors and friends. You invite people over, tell God thank you and then sit around and eat a lot of meat and drink a lot of coffee together.

As our houses neared completion we were inundated with questions of when we were holding the Karama, who all we were inviting, how many goats we would buy. And the whole notion of a Karama started feeling a bit intimidating. For starters, it’s awkward being the richest people your friends know. The thought of flaunting the cinderblock mansions we have just built at a party that seemed a lot like a “Look at this awesome thing God has given me!” kind of party, felt weird, especially when all your guests are refugees who live in tents. And then there was the whole issue of navigating, hosting even, a cultural phenomenon that is still a little fuzzy to our American minds. We have baby showers and house warming parties, not Karamas. How do you do a Karama, and do one well?

Yesterday we found out.

Despite the fact that we had all been sick for well over a week (and when I say “all”, I mean all four Harrisons and three Graves, sick sick) we finally buckled down and decided to muscle our way through the week to hold our Karama on Saturday. Upcoming travels and holidays and funerals of local friends meant that there was no other obvious time to hold a Karama without the opportunity just slipping away completely. We had already sensed a touch of mild confusion or disappointment that we hadn’t held one already. So after we sought out some counsel and a few pointers from our friends, we spent a couple of blurry days doped up on antibiotics and advil, running around and buying mountains of food in the market, borrowing dozens of chairs from our neighbors and handing out hastily-written invitations (and here when I say “we”, I mostly mean Bryan).

The morning of the Karama itself started early. Mahmun and Omar arrived when it was still cool and hazy and led the two nervous sheep and one oblivious goat to the back corner of the compound. With my black-handled Faberware kitchen knife they gently traced a cross in the goat’s forelock and then lightly tapped the taunt throat three times before slicing down and I had to turn away. Annabelle, barefoot and still in pajamas, stood at a modest distance and giggled at the goat’s death throes with callous innocence. As the carcasses were hung on a small tree and carefully skinned and dissected and reassembled into neat piles on broad aluminum platters – meat, fat, liver, intestines – hawks began to circle overhead and their shadows wove patterns across the yard all day.     

The women arrived late, at least two hours past their promise, but came hauling pots and pans, babies, kettles and charcoal stoves. Despite my open door, they settled comfortably into the shade along the side and back of the house, casually arranging stones to encircle cooking fires and greasing the heavy kisra griddles with something grey in a dish, all the while talking and managing babies like an unnoticed extra appendage. The whole compound was filled with the sound of their laughter, the clink of ceramic funjal shuffling for space on a tea tray, the chalky crack of breaking charcoal, the swish of a hababa breathing life into a fire, the steady pulse of coffee being pounded in a worn wooden funduk. Dust began to rise as young men swept dead leaves out from under the Baobab tree and arrange chairs into a wide circle.

As guests began to arrive David and Bryan gathered with the men under the Baobab. Lydia and I naturally fell into hostess duties; she welcomed guests and made sure everyone had a glass of juice or piece of toffee while I followed the directives of my cooking friends and hunted down an extra pan to roast coffee or soap to wash hands. For the first hour or two we flitted about like nervous birds, scurrying to get an important man’s wife a glass of tea or trying to round up another big spoon somewhere. But somewhere along the way, probably far earlier than I was aware of it, the whole day took on a life of its own, and I quickly realized I was not a part of moving anything forward but simply caught up in the warm current of the occasion.  And I found myself sitting on a mat outside my front door with a dozen other women and kids, drinking scalding clove tea, talking about the weather, laughing with my neighbors, hollering half-heartedly at my kids and daydreaming about the food that wafted out of big pots bubbling on open fires nearby.

We did this for hours. 

There was an official program of sorts. Bryan and David each said a few words and a handful of elders also spoke. There was a scripture reading and an Islamic holy man sang a song he played on his robaba. Then the older men all offered prayers and blessings inside each house. But other that we just sat around. And talked. And drank copious amounts of caffeinated hot beverages. And ate.

Food came out on the typical huge circular platter, heavy with mounds of purplish kisra, folded like reams of warm sorghum cloth. There were also chewy circles of bread from town and little piles of ground red pepper and wheels of lime. There were piles of roasted meat and bowls of meat soup and pasta with meat and dishes of liver. Each platter was like a human magnet and we all scooted in shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, hand to hand and filled our bellies to bursting.      

The day ended with me sitting in a chair holding a filthy sleeping baby while two girls wove fat braids into my hair. Behind me women were belching and rewrapping their tobes around their heads and shoulders and in front of me men were unfolding themselves from chairs and making the slow rounds of final handshakes. A slow stream of people were trickling out of our bamboo gate carrying leftovers and children and pots while a bone white moon rose in the dirty lilac dusk overhead.

When everyone was finally gone we all collapsed into bed full and happy, exhausted beyond belief and yet satisfied in both our stomachs and souls. Karamas are a good thing we found. A good way to say thank you, to both God and the people who have helped you along the way. A good way to share in the generosity that has been shown you. A good way to have a party and eat some good food.

We still struggle with the notion of being rich sometimes, and we are working hard to try and understand what it means to be the righteous rich in this time and place. We are rich whether we want to be or not. But we really want to learn how to be righteous too. 

One thing that I think that might mean is to hold really good Karamas. And from the way people smiled and held their stomachs when they left, I think we may have done that. 

The irony or course is in assuming the generosity was ours. We fed a few people, but a fair portion of those people worked all day to make sure there was food prepared for everyone to eat. They swept my yard, poured endless pitchers of juice, handed out platters of food. People who only months ago were sleeping on the ground in the middle of the bush with their only belongings being what they had on their backs spent the day bent over bubbling pots to make sure our guests were honored. People who have lost almost everything so effortlessly gave so much. An Anatnov droned overhead early in the afternoon and everyone turned skyward to watch it pass by on its way to bomb those they left behind. And even then, no one wailed or stomped off and demanded justice or recompense from those of us who have escaped such loss. They just shrugged sadly over the things we will never understand and went back to stirring the soup.

And why did they do all of this? Probably because it is just their way. I’ve never met more hospitable people anywhere, I doubt they exist anywhere on the planet. Probably because it is the unique stamp of God on their hearts. They said it was because we have no people here, and that they are our people now. (And heaven knows you can’t throw a Karama without your people). Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. They are all right here, right across the road to the refugee camp.

On Saturday we celebrated God’s faithfulness and generosity towards our families. But it is abundantly clear that the gift we celebrated was far more than just the walls and ceiling I fall asleep in tonight.

  

Home

Two years ago last month we evacuated from a town about a hundred miles from where I now sit ten minutes before it was bombed. Ever since then, with the exception of six months that we were parked in a friend’s house in Dallas, TX, we have been living out of suitcases. Literally. We’ve stayed in more guest bedrooms and guesthouses than I can count scattered across five different countries. We’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and a few major holidays on the go and had a baby along the way in there somewhere too. During a few visits with relatives and one sweet holiday week in Jinja, Uganda last month Bryan and I shared a room alone, but other than that at least one baby, usually two, has been in our room, sometimes our bed. All our belongings reside in trunks, the sturdy plastic kind you get at Wal-mart, and have a stateside address written in permanent marker fading under the sticky remnants of duct tape. They are a royal pain to get in and out of every time you need a notebook or pair of socks.

As traumatic as the events surrounding our hurried departure from North Africa were two years ago, that experience has been in many ways far easier than the wearing toil of two years of constant travel and homelessness.

We have been in one place (more or less) for the last six months. We have settled in a refugee camp just across the border from where we used to live; it is home now to about 45,000 people, including almost all of our old friends and neighbors. And despite certain realities here that everyone is coming to terms with, it is a good place to be.

On May 23^rd we broke ground on a house and launched into a huge building project. It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of building a simple house here (we are talking cement blocks and tin roof – but granted it has three little bedrooms and an office). The logistics of getting building supplies to a place that does not sell so much as a two-inch nails in the market and whose unpaved rainy season roads have been unpassable for a while still makes my brain hurt. And the volume of cement used to make my new walls so smooth when a single bag costs as much as $45 honestly makes me feel like throwing up a little bit. This has been a difficult, expensive project.

During these last few months that we have watched foundations being dug and walls slowly go up we have lived in a tukul on our compound, a 4X8 meter mud hut with a grass roof. You have heard me talk about the tukul before. It was charming at first, cozy and unpretentious. But tukuls aren’t designed to be lived in exactly. They are to be slept in. So when I tried cramming all my wal-mart trunks full of crap into it and then tried to make space to cook in it, put my kids down for naps in it, sit at the computer and write a blog in it, so on and so forth, not just because that is what we do in houses where I come from but also because twenty men with wheelbarrows and hacksaws were covering every inch of space outside … I gallantly led my whole family on a slow but very steady descent into insanity.

In the end it was really the rats that did me in. I am a messy person by nature, and the carefully landscaped piles of laundry, books and kitchenware in every bit of livable space was really just a mild irritant on most days (don’t ask Bryan about it). The ants coming up through the floor were not a big deal and two babies a few feet away from us every night was a little bit endearing really. But the rats. Oh my goodness, the rats.

I could write volumes about the rats. About how they learn to nudge the trap to set it off without risking their lives and then eat the bait and anything else they want. About how they sound when the light goes out and what starts as one or two scurries above and behind you becomes a full-blown horror-movie style closing in from every direction. About how the sweet relief of silence is really the shivering of rodent terror broken only by whiskery screams as the snake chases granddaddy rat from behind one of the trunks and just past baby’s pack n’ play. About how when they finally breached the mosquito net fortress I just gave up on sleep all together and waited the 36 hours until the front door was nailed on the new house so I could move in. There were days I eyed the matchbox behind my stove and thought about how much I would love to shoo my family out the front door and then delicately light the whispy edge of my roof and sit perched in a nearby tree with a BB gun and shoot every living thing that came out right between the eyes.

It was not a pretty season.

I tell you all of this not to make you feel sorry for me or reflect on how tough I am or sit astounded by the sheer absurdity of putting oneself in this situation intentionally. I tell you this – all of this – the evacuation, the travel, the tukul and the construction site all because I want you to understand just a taste of how incredibly happy I am right now. To feel just a flicker of the absolute joy and relief I am experiencing.

I am in my new house.

For the past three nights I have slept in a bed with my husband in a room with no children anywhere in site. I have bathed under a roof and between cement walls without frogs hopping on my toes. I have cooked dinner in a kitchen with cement counters and enough room to make about as big a mess as I want to. I have plopped my babies down on a wide empty floor and not worried about them being eaten alive by stinging ants. And when I wake up to animal noises at night it is only the cry of the white owls in the huge baobab tree outside my wide windows. And I just say, Dear God, please let them be eating rats, and then roll over and fall back asleep. 

For the first time since Bryan and I were married we are living in a place we can imagine being in for ten years or more. For the first time in their lives my daughters have their own room. And for the first time in two years, I feel like I can unpack my trunks.

Bryan reminded me tonight not to be devastated when the honeymoon ends and I realize I don’t have any furniture (yet), the house is only partially wired for electricity so far and we are still taking bucket baths and eating lentils. And he’s right. Whatever the reasons, bad days will come again.

But, praise the Lord, they will come in my house. They will come in my house where I have a room to cry in or a kitchen to knead frustrated bread in or a floor to just sit on and love my babies. And after those bad days have barged in my front door, swept through the living room and then slipped out the back door and disappeared off the porch, I will still be here. Here in a place where I can think about what dreams I will dream in these walls, what words I will write, what conversations I will have with my husband. About what things will make me laugh and what things will make me cry. When I leave this house someday in the future, what things about me will be the same and what things will have changed.

A house is not everything. The Important Things have been with me all along, in the airplanes and guesthouses and tukul. And I am more thankful for them than I have ever been before.

A house is not everything. But tonight it feels like so much. 

Brownie Points

Several days ago while the girls were napping, I sat in the kitchen watching skinks trying to sneak in my front door and tried to quantify just exactly how badly I wanted chocolate. And here’s what I decided: I wanted it badly. Bad enough that I would streak to the front gate and back if it meant a huge bowl of M&Ms at the end. Not bad enough that I would make a mad dash just any time. I would only do it at midday when everyone is resting or sleeping inside, but bad enough that I would do it buck-naked. I decided I wanted chocolate badly enough that I would take a sip of the green sludge that sits in tepid pools on the outskirts of the local market. Not bad enough that I would actually swallow it (because that, of course, would just be stupid), but bad enough that I would throw it back and swish it around for a minute before spitting it out, mushy chunks and all, if it meant a Cadbury’s macadamia nut candy bar would promptly be handed over in return.

The moral of the story is, I really wanted some chocolate.

It’s not that I am in want of sweet stuff. People here love their sugar and I regularly drink cloying sweet coffee in little cups filled two/thirds full of light brown grains. I am served juice that makes the back of your tonsils burn and I made cookies for Bryan the other day that were mostly sugar held together with a healthy serving of butter. I am not in need of sweet. But chocolate, chocolate, that silky rich delicacy that satisfies something just between my tastebuds and my soul has been severely lacking in my diet lately. Our Nutella stash, our only source of cocoa, ran out weeks ago and we still have a couple weeks before we go out for R and R. And the other day I was starting to get the shakes of deprived junkie.    

When I shared this with my amused husband, who was up to his eyeballs in the logistics of getting a charter plane full of building supplies up from Kenya, he said, “I bet I could get you some M&Ms up here.” I just rolled my eyes at him. If you don’t count the trail mix some UN official has melting in his duffel bad behind razor wire down the road we are probably 700 miles from the closest M&M. Bryan may be able to order a truck load of rebar and Y-6 from a dealer in Nairobi, have it trucked across the country by someone he’s never met and manage export documents and immigration officials to get it on a plane to our dirt airstrip all just by working his magic knock-off Chinese telephone, but I knew better than to believe he could get me chocolate up here within 24 hours. Yeah right, I said. So he shrugged and went back to trying to figure out how many drums of fuel the plane was going to need and I went back to trying to determine if I wanted chocolate badly enough that I might swallow just a tiny bit of the green market sludge.

The next day our family went to the airstrip late in the afternoon to meet the plane. A Cessna caravan earlier in the day had unloaded all of our ceiling boards and two-by-fours and this plane, someone else’s charter, was just carrying a couple mattresses for us. We rode the donkey cart out to the airstrip, (which incidentally, sounded like a better idea that it actually was. I don’t think Ergo babies are tested on rickety carts hauled down dirt roads by hyper donkeys. I thought Mkat and I might both end up with a mouthful of market sludge after all, chocolate or not.) We greeted the pilot, a friend from Nairobi, and the returning neighbors and friends who were coming back in after a couple weeks out. I milled around in the airplane-shaped-shade with the girls while the plane was unloaded and refueled. And after our mattresses were loaded up on the cart and Annabelle loaded up on top of the mattresses, Bryan suddenly said, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and trotted back over to the pilot. The pilot – a married father of five - then smiled and pulled a plastic sack out from under his seat. He winked at Bryan and said, “It’s good to get brownie points sometimes.”

As we started rolling home Bryan handed me the sack with a smile and said, “I told you I could get you some chocolate. Enjoy.”

I thought I might start crying.

From on top of the towering donkey cart he and Annabelle split the little bag of pretzel M&M’s (our pilot friend said even in Nairobi the pickings were a little slim) while I delicately pulled open the glossy brown wrapper of a Snickers bar and devoured the whole thing on a slow walk home delightfully alone. In another life I might have been a little picky about the peanuts, choosing several other kinds of chocolate over this one first. But on this day I savored each crumble of chocolate, each drizzle of caramel and each fluff of nougat like it was literally saving my life. Goats pooped on the path in front of me in the fading light of a North African sunset and old men in white robes mumbled, “Salaam alekum” as they tottered past. And I smiled, my lips stained with melted chocolate I’m sure, as I soaked in the strange and beautiful experience of a Snickers bar in a refugee camp that came not because I streaked or drank market sludge or really did anything other than whine a little bit. But it came just because someone loves me. (And because he has a 

magic telephone with the numbers of bush pilots who love him.)

Bryan and I have been a bit terse with each other lately, bickering with the kind of too-polite silences and too-sharp responses that come from too-few meals alone, too-many hours at the computer, too-many dirty cloth diapers. It’s nothing big. But like Bryan says, when your marriage goes from out-of-this-world-amazing to simply amazing, it’s noticeable. And we still want out-of-this-world. It’s hard to say if it is this crazy stressful season of building and waiting and living in a hut with one-too-many rats or simply seven years or marriage with two very small children and still feeling out our roles and expectations that is starting to get to us. North Africa gets blamed for a fair amount of this stress. But in reality, I suspect that simple parenthood and the kind of getting older that would happen anywhere on the earth are as much at fault.

As I walked home from the airstrip at sunset yesterday, savoring my last bite of chocolate I felt deeply, disproportionately satisfied. And all I could think was, I have a really good husband.   

Naked

Bryan and I have started bathing outside.

After the girls go to bed and while the kettle is purring on the blue flame in the dark kitchen, we sit outside slathered in mosquito repellant and watch fireflies pretend to be falling stars. We drink hot tea with ridiculous amounts of creamy powdered milk and sugar and talk about the day. The coals from our guards’ canoon glow like something alive down by the gate and distant lightning shimmers someone else’s storm far away, but with the Eid new moon and thick banks of clouds the nights have been deep and dark.

This is partly why I came up with idea of bathing outside to begin with. It was raining and pitch black and the thought of hauling our buckets and towel and bin of toiletries all the way across the compound to our “temporary” mat-wall shower (the one that is threatening to fall down just weeks before our houses are finished) that has been used by twenty construction workers and two dozen frogs in 12 hours and smells not-so-faintly of a fish tank felt like just too much. So that night I suggested just stepping out the front door naked and lathering up in the rain (and, let me reiterate, pitch darkness). My husband just gave me a surprised and very happy grin and started stripping down.

Another reason for my new bold streak is thieves (which, if you saw the state of our matted shower walls you would realize I am being more lazy than bold. Motherhood and Africa have made my comfort level with “functional nakedness” – nursing in public, peeing behind a bush, bathing outside – much, much higher than it used to be). Our neighborhood has seen a ridiculous amount of theft lately, petty, but frustrating nonetheless. And the thought of leaving our solar panels and computer alone in a mud hut with our sleeping daughters while we are all the way across the yard stark naked just makes me a little nervous these days.

The first time we were hit was a couple months ago on a bright moonlit night. I woke up to soft footfalls and clinking metal outside in the middle of the night. I sat up in bed and peered through the mesh gap between the grass roof and mud walls in time to see three or four silhouettes dipping through a cut in our fence, heads laden with buckets, plastic chairs and one of our solar panels. Bryan staggered out of bed with a flashlight and stumbled outside yelling but the thieves had disappeared into the deep bush stretching behind our house before he got out the front door. I stayed curled up under the safety of our mosquito net with my heart thumping and listened to our guard Musa, who had also stumbled up to the scene, and Bryan quickly discussing the issue. But after a few minutes the night outside grew quiet again and I found myself straining to hear the men’s voices. Silence. I sat up and bed and peered out the window. Darkness. Eventually I put on a robe and slipped outside only to find a gaping hole in our back fence and absolutely no sign of my husband or Musa. Little did I know that my shirtless husband was at that moment a quarter of a kilometer away, sprinting down a moonlit path behind our shirtless guard, pausing every few moments to listen to footfalls ahead or the bark or roused dogs in the distance. They came home before I got too worried, empty-handed except for the dropped lid to my teapot and an interesting story about how local villagers respond to unexpected guests at 4am, but our solar panel was never found.

Our neighbors have had solar equipment stolen too, plus a string of petty theft that seems to have come several times a week. And it’s not just khawajas that have been robbed. We have friends that have lost their goats, their crops, their jerry cans. Just a couple weeks ago someone broke in and stole our clothes off the line. Though the physical loss was negligible compared to solar equipment, I was much more upset this time. My sense of security was assaulted. The part of me that sleeps peacefully through most noises outside at night and that leaves her shoes on the front step was kicked in the gut. And, to be honest, I was just plum ticked off. Some days I feel like I am barely holding on as it is and then someone come and takes my damp clothes off the line?! (And not that it matters one iota but some of those even still smelled just a little bit like America!) I unloaded on Bryan the morning we discovered the empty clothes lines and clothes pins scattered in the dirt. Don’t they have any dignity? I blustered while slamming soapy cups down into the rinse water. Actually, dignity is probably a big part of this, he responded and it took me a minute to think about what he meant.  

I don’t know who stole our clothes or our solar panels. It could have been anybody. But the chances are they were somebody who doesn’t have a clue how a solar panel works but can get a pocketful of change when they hand it off to someone who does. Chances are they are somebody who lives in a tent in close proximity to ten thousand other people in tents and who relies on food to be handed to him from someone in a blue vest at the end of every month. Chances are he isn’t allowed to cut down his own firewood (you can’t have a “weapon”), grow his own crops (the land belongs to the host community) or raise his own livestock all because a war has forced him to live in a place where dignity, especially in ways that he once knew it, is really hard to come by.

Not that that’s an excuse of course. There are many, many refugees who are working, and thriving, and giving back all around me. But for someone who cried her pious eyeballs out when the priest gave Valjean back those beautiful silver candlesticks, I was awfully ready to scratch someone’s eyes out for snitching a few t-shirts and cotton skirts the other day.

Tonight after our tea, we will brush our teeth outside in the dark and spit white foam on the dirt. We will top of buckets of water with water from the kettle and then cup the steaming goodness over ourselves while we balance in big basins in the open night air – Bryan in an orange one, me in a purple one. I will lather up a wilting loofah with the last delicious drops of Bath and Body Works bath wash my mother-in-law sent me (Midnight Pomegranate) while fruit bats whirl overhead. We’ve been doing this for a couple weeks now, and it still makes me feel giggly. In flip-flops and towels we will eventually shuffle back inside the tukul to get away from the mosquitoes, and we will pull all our plastic chairs and basins and my awkward charcoal oven in after us. And then we will crawl in bed clean.

There are still days I want to punch someone in the face for stealing my good rain boots or our friend Isa’s goats. This nonsense really does have to stop sometime soon. But on these dark nights, especially the rainy ones, when the water is hot and the fireflies are out and my perspective about the world and my place in it are all in the right spot, I feel just a little bit happy about the thieves. Not that they are around and that they have caused us all so much trouble. But that they remind me to hold to things loosely. And that because of them I am bathing outside.

Things Left Unwritten:

Things like walking to the market after a day of rain. The path is as slick as the ice it can’t even imagine, but the grass to the sides disguises deep mud that swallows my boots whole and only let go with a loud suck of protest. In a day or two the path will be damp and cracked and give softly like an old woman’s belly when I walk over it. But for now I only get my flour and sugar home with a fight.

Things like my firstborn laughing crazily on top of the construction sand pile first thing in the morning. She is wearing fairy band-aids on both knees, one Hello Kitty rainboot and a purple nighty that says “Mommy’s Wild Child.” She has sand in her hair.

Things like walking through the rooms of our unfinished house. The walls are grey checkered cement blocks, not yet plastered. I wonder where we will put the Christmas tree. And what we will make it out of.

Things like reading emails outside at night as I swat bugs away from the computer screen. I am crying because they are from friends, sisters, who live eight thousand miles away and who work in law firms, hospitals and carpeted living rooms and yet who also, inexplicably, understand.

Things like long walks in the afternoon with the girls. Under a huge tree we inspect the mossy headstones of missionaries who are buried here – a couple in the forties when Italians bombed a British outpost, and a doctor in 2009 who grew sick and died overnight. Annabelle tries to catch frogs while Mary Katherine dozes.

Things like tiny glasses of mint tea on a tin platter under a tree with friends who stopped by because they heard I was unwell and wanted me to know they were praying. We talk, with varying degrees of ineptitude, in three languages about rain and babies and language.

Things like the black and brown striped piglet who gets in the yard several times a day and who knows I throw rocks like a girl and won’t budge unless I run after him yelling with a stick at which point he will shuffle begrudgingly back under the fence with a grunt of annoyance (or amusement, I am not sure which).

Things like the feel and smell of my bread dough, yeasty and warm on my floury board. It is heavy like a baby in my hands. I knead into it all the frustrations and fears and deep contentment of the day and it grows tougher and firmer in my grip. Later I fan black lumps of charcoal until they glow and turn my dough into crusty golden brown bread.

Things like the swarms of termites that pour out of the ground after a heavy rain like a thousand different moments and stories. Like the kids that grab them out of the sky and pop them into their mouths, I snatch a few from time to time. But the rest all flutter by and fan out into the cloudy sky only to lose their wings after a night and fall back to the earth.

Eliza

A few weeks back I dreamed about a man names Ahmed Haroun. He was the local carpenter in the town we lived in just across the border, before we evacuated; he built all the doors and windows in our house as well as a rough island just the right height for kneading bread in my kitchen. He was also our good friend. We visited each other’s homes on holidays and laughed over the kind of jokes that transcend language barriers. He is a stout man with a beard. For some weird reason I always thought he looked like a dark North African version of one of those traditional of St. Nicolas’ - stern and a little bit intimidating but undeniable kind. When we evacuated, our families each had baby girls just a few months apart. His was named Eliza, after me.

The night we evacuated, in the early hours of the morning when we were calling friends between packing and cleaning, we called Ahmed Haroun. He was in a town further North, a touchy place to be considering his open affiliation with the rebel movement. When Bryan called, his wife answered the phone. She said she was holed up in their house with the children listening to gunshots outside. She didn’t know where Ahmed Haroun was. Hours later we flew out and left everything, and everyone, behind.

In the months that moved into a year after we left North Africa, Ahmed Haroun was one of the few people we couldn’t make contact with. We made a few trips back and then in April finally moved back and started setting up our lives again. In all that time we heard rumors that he was alive and that his family were well, but we hadn’t seen him with our own eyes.  

In my dream he just walked in our front gate, calmly, like he had done dozens of times before. The dream was significant enough that I mentioned it to Bryan the next morning, but all in all I didn’t think much of it. But two or three days later that is exactly what happened. I looked up to see a man walk through our gate. I turned to Bryan and said without thinking, “If I didn’t know better I would think that was a thinner version of Ahmed Haroun.” And lo and behold it was. 

We sat and talked for a couple hours over tea. We talked about how his family got to safety and about his now-pregnant wife. We talked about the furniture we will need built for our new house. We talked about politics and laughed a little about the things we all left behind. And somewhere in the course of the conversation, much later than we should have, we asked about his baby. And with calm sadness, he told us how Eliza had died.  

A few nights ago my little sister Abigail (who is here for a visit!) and I were watching the Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe in it. At some point in the film all the women and children and old people of Nottingham are rounded up and hustled into a wooden building that is set alight. There are several tense minutes of smoke rising through the floorboards and people screaming as the heroes rush to save the townsfolk. They do, of course, eventually save everyone; but before that moment comes when everyone stumbles out happily safe and alive, one of the women in the burning building frantically shuffles her little baby through a gap in the boards into the hands of a stranger in an attempt to save his life. The scene is brief and peripheral to the larger narrative. But when that moment came, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breath. I literally had to turn away from the screen and concentrate on some trivial object on the table while I tried to choke down the sob in my chest. Even my incredibly tender-hearted sister had a understandable giggle at my overreaction. My emotion caught me completely off-guard, but I went to bed that night with a sick feeling in my heart. I couldn’t stop thinking about that baby, and his mother who thought she was about to die. 

I don’t claim to have ever lived through great trauma in my life. I want to give the griefs and loss I have known their proper due, and I think I do that, but an honest look at my life shows no great violence committed against me or someone in my immediate family. My parents, siblings and children are all alive. I haven’t even been in a car wreck, for goodness sake.

And yet, I am living shoulder-to-shoulder with many, many people who have been through trauma, who have been hurt, who have lost children...and I think I am realizing that some of that pain rubs off on me whether I realize it or not. There is a slow motion, slow-growing, slow-accumulation of hurt that collects in the hollows of my heart while I am not paying attention. While I happily change the diapers of fat babies, or laugh over a joke with a friend, or cook supper for a hungry husband, sadness trickles into me without me ever feeling it. I don’t even know it’s there until I sit down with a bowl of popcorn to watch Russell Crowe shoot a few arrows and suddenly I am fighting off a panic attack.  

My friend Leah is a counsellor and has taken part in several trauma healing workshops in this part of the world. When I saw her last she mentioned how she is learning more and more about the spiritual discipline of grief. She only mentioned it in passing, and at the time I wasn’t in a place to engage the thought fully. But I have been chewing on it for a while now. And the thought that maybe there is something godly about grieving things worthy of great sorrow intrigues me. It comforts me. And scares me a little too. 

I don’t really know how to end this blog. I have been staring at the screen for a while now, trying to think of some profound or at least tidy way to close this up. But I’ve got nothing. I could say something heart-wrenching about a dead baby named after me, but the truth is I only held her once I think. I didn’t really know her. I could say something about the tragic lives of refugees in war-torn Africa, but that rings vaguely off to me too. There are tragedies everywhere - yes, here more than many places - but I am constantly fearful of painting over the beauty that is here, or ignoring the pain somewhere else. I’m not sure what all this is about tonight. Just a story I wanted to tell, I guess. Ahmed Haroun’s and a thousand others’ like him.

And to be honest, it’s partly mine too. 

Maybe more than anything tonight I am just realizing that these things don’t go away. These stories that aren’t mine claim me, and these memories I don’t remember play in my mind over and over again. And even as I grow desensitized to story after heartbreaking story, something inside me is rawer than I realized.

Scorpions

You know those people who are so stinking nice, who are always incredibly cheerful and eternally optimistic that you just feel perpetually guilty around them because they kinda just make you want to slap them in the face just to see how they would react (except you know they would just respond with more unnecessary kindness so you stick to your simmering irritated guilt)? Or is that just me who occasionally feels this way…? Sometimes I wonder if the things that I write here might nudge me a little closer to coming across as that kind of person than I want to be (though I know that those of you who know me best are laughing hysterically). But when I write about the incredible life I have been given in an amazing place and how much fun I am having living it, bugs and all, I never want that to overwhelm the voice of the bad days. The voice of the days that you just want to scream and throw the mildewed towel in. The voice of the days that make you think you really are out of your mind for trying to pull this thing off after all. The voice of the days that make you say, I don’t think I can do this.

I do have an incredible life in an amazing place and I am having so much fun living it. But oh my friends, the bad days are real. 

The weird thing is, I am not sure what made this particular day so bad. We are all still healthy. The rain has cooled everything off. Language lessons are going great. It was the day before Bryan’s birthday and I was trying to pull off our customary cinnamon rolls in a charcoal oven which, in retrospect, was probably a little bit selfish as I am pretty sure he would have preferred birthday oatmeal and a happy wife to the dubious delicacies I grumpily served up with flour in my hair over the din of screaming babies. But that is neither here nor there.

There were more bugs that usual that night. Scorpions were evacuating our grass roof en masse and I had echoes of a story I recently heard about a baby in the camp who died of a scorpion sting as I stepped on and barely bruised the forth one of the night. The girls were in atypical cohesion as they both resisted sleep with every fiber of their being, one flopping and singing rebelliously under her mosquito net while the other kicked and squirmed in my arms under our net. The night just felt like a weight that kept getting heavier and heavier until finally, before I knew what was happening I was throwing a pillow across the room and screaming a word I would have been soundly spanked for saying growing up. A startled Bryan took my even more startled baby outside to swing in the hammock in the dark while I laid in bed and bawled for the child that was surely now going to die of cerebral malaria because her mother was having a fit inside.

It wasn’t pretty.

It was close to midnight before everyone was finally asleep and calmed down. Bryan and I sat on our plastic chairs in the dark. He asked if I was ok. I said I wasn’t sure. I think he was probably looking for the thing that had upset me, the emotion I was feeling, the reason for my outburst. And a significant part of my frustration is that I didn’t really have one answer. It was everything. It was nothing. It was things too small to mention. It was things too big to talk about.

The scorpions in my house drive me crazy. The utter lack of space for a family of four in a mud hut drives me crazy. Spending all evening rushing babies from supper to baths to mosquito nets before the mosquitoes come out and obsessively checking my daughters’ temperatures drives me crazy. Eating lentils four times a week drives me crazy.

But that is nothing compared to the give in my heart when my dear friend, a mother of three (it used to be four) whose UNHCR-issued tent fell down in the first rainstorm, tells me with genuine kindness how big and nice my house is. It is nothing compared to the way I feel when I hear that the young man making blocks for our (even-bigger) house couldn’t make it to work on Monday because his ten-month old baby boy died of diarrhea over the weekend. It’s nothing compared to looking over the pile of wrinkly mangoes I am buying at the market and seeing thousands and thousands of people lined up in the blazing heat to receive their sacks of grain to last them to the end of the month.  

I feel like I am having to tough it out to survive in a house that every single one of my neighbors would kill to live in. I stress over the health of my vaccinated children when I have every precaution and safety measure available at the tip of my fingers. I get bored with foods that people around me savor once in a blue moon, if ever.

The scorpions are a nuisance, but it is these opposing truths that split my mind wide open sometimes. They sit heavily on my heart, scrabbling for dominance over each other and kicking the wind out of my chest. It’s a claustrophobic feeling, like there is no way to escape the crush of reality.

(And then, to be honest, some days I really am just crying over the stupid bugs, not all the dead babies I should be weeping for, and that makes me feel crazy too.)

Earlier in the week I was telling Aisha, my closest friend from our years across the Northern border, about the scorpion I found in our bed, a few inches from Mary Katherine’s head. I don’t know what I expected her response to be. Horror, perhaps. Or empathy. Goodness knows she has probably had scorpions near her baby’s head in the camp. Maybe I was even looking for outright disinterest, as though I needed the assurance that it really wasn’t a big deal. Aisha’s life has bigger problems than stinging insects. But I didn’t get any of those things. She listened to my story and shuddered in distaste. But then she shrugged and said, “But God sees.” And that was it.

My horrible night is over and the claustrophobia has passed. Like it always does, a good cry and a few hours of deep sleep soothes the heart. But I know it will be back again at some point. And when it does, I will remember my friend’s words. Whether with comfort or trepidation, I’m not sure, but I will remember what she said. He does see.