Tukul

The mud walls of my tukul are perfectly smooth, like a flat brown beach at low tide after the distant waves have worn it even. In one place a large handprint is textured next to the doorframe, a quasi-permanent reminder of someone who used earth and trees to make my home. Small creatures I have never seen or heard live in the walls, and every day with appreciative guilt I delicately crumble the tiny tunnels of their front-doors that have emerged like coral in the night. The seaside imagery is ironic of course; it is unfathomably hot. The tukul (also mocking irony of a name too if you ask me) tries it’s best to cool off at night and cling to the few degrees it has on the world outside but by early afternoon there is a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia in the complete absence of anywhere cool to go that is hard, yet very important, to keep in check. But blessed evening does eventually come, and the sun that has by now bleached even the sky dead and white, slips below the horizon. We eat outside, we bathe the babies outside, and then we sit outside, me with my skirt hiked up in the modest cover of darkness, and talk under an orange moon. After we have bathed (also outside, but behind matted walls) we join the babies indoors, crawl under our mosquito net and kick the beautiful Kashmiri bedspread that I insisted we bring with us to make our tukul more homey (and it was money well spent) to the floor. If you lie just still enough you can almost will yourself to stop sweating. The tarps under the grass roof breath in and out softly with the night air making it feel almost like sleeping inside a warm, earthy animal. And amazingly or obviously, I’m not always sure which, I rest.

The first few days were really hard. The girls were adjusting to the heat (weren’t we all) and it has taken us a while to get unpacked and settled into our two room hut. There was lizard skin in my wok. You get sun-burned in awkward places if you stay in our roofless latrine for too long at the wrong time of day. My two-year old was running around saying “landmine” (a Danish company is clearing mines in the area; we’ve heard three since we’ve been here). My baby refused to be held by anyone except me for all twelve hours of the day she wasn’t sleeping. It wasn’t fun. Exciting, fulfilling, hilarious…yes; but not fun.      

But around day six that changed. My little gas stove and plastic shelves full of pots and pans are set up and I have made some beautiful bread in the charcoal oven that sits outside under the neem tree. Annabelle, my filthy beautiful Annabelle, is loving being outside 90% of the time and experimenting with words in new languages. We had her second birthday party last week, incidentally the same day we bought a donkey and cart to haul water from the borehole or cargo from the airstrip (as I’ve said before, we’re that ghetto organization that parks their donkey next to the fleet of Land Cruisers…) and I’m pretty sure she is expecting a camel for her third birthday. Mary Katherine, though still a mama’s girl, is now happy to sit in her sweaty sweet fat rolls in her swing for a while. Trips to the market in the slinky folds of my cumbersome tobe are so much fun. People ask where I learned Arabic as I pick through their piles of onions. It’s good to talk. Friends from our years in K who now live in the camp stop by to visit and we catch up as we drink warm juice in the shade. Our guards, Harun and Jafar, two older Rotana men with sinewy arms and deep-set eyes are kind to our children who rummage through the rope they braid out of fan-plants; they teach us words in their language.

A few days ago I gashed my upper arm on the zinc of our front door as I dodged a lizard that I was sure was going to fall on my head as it slipped on the tarps of our ceiling. The cut hurt and will leave a raised scar. But even that is fun to me. To watch my husband patch me up and watch my body heal…that is exciting or interesting or fulfilling or something. To live somewhere where you get dirty every single day. Where you always know how full the moon is or which way the wind is coming from. Where you always have a pitcher or something set aside for the visitor that you don’t know about, who you can be sure will be here before too long. Where you stay up talking about what Arabic word your daughter learned today and what we should name the donkey. Somehow, even as I sweat my eyeballs out, breath curses on the freak-of-nature plant growing up through my cement floor and contort my brain for vocabulary and conjugations I haven’t used in a long time, I am having fun. Which makes me think I must be in the right place.

Back

Some people are such great writers that that make the hum-drum of ordinary life profound and interesting to read about. I feel those are the real writers, the people who can take the everyday and make it fascinating and meaningful.

I am not that kind of writer.

After several month in Kenya, a beautiful and interesting place to be sure, but one where my life takes on the easy flow of nice grocery stores, hot showers and computer office work, my blog has just about flat-lined. (Granted, Annabelle and Mary Katherine are as much to blame as indoor plumbing.)

The good news though is that I am now back in North Africa and after only four hours in my senses have been absolutely assaulted. If my daughters will allow it, I am looking forward to more time writing in the months ahead. It certainly won’t always be profound, but I think I undoubtedly live in one of the most fascinating places on the planet and if I don’t write about it I think I will explode.

To say that you live in such a marvelously interesting place though is not to say that you love everything about it. Far from it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I am experiencing a fair amount of culture stress right about now. When we boarded our flight in Entebbe, I had just collapsed into my seat with a sleeping MaryKat attached to me and a ridiculously overstuffed diaper bag and purse shoved to the floorboards when an irritated and heavily accented voice in the aisle a few rows bag grumbled loudly, “Ah, who is causing this jam?” The voice belonged to a slick looking politician type in a suit and pointy shoes, probably the kind of guy that could easily affect whether or not I get to stay in this country, and who clearly meant nothing more than to vent a little. And yet, I spent the first twenty minutes of the flight going over my Arabic verb conjugations for phrases that involved words like “jerkwad” (or their near equivalent anyway).

We landed in the capital city and stepped into what truly must be one of the most hellishly entertaining airports in the world. We hit at rush-hour, something I wasn’t aware that airports even have. Along with about three hundred other people (literally) we were pushed through a single door and into a crush of people that vaguely resembled clumpy lines all melted together. Long air-conditioners looked down at us from the walls like a practical joke. UN officials, aspiring politicians, soldiers and one other family with little kids (turned out to some South Africans working for the local brewery) all shuffled forward patiently, cheerfully even, in the passport waving chaos. Mark Katherine strained her sweaty head out of the ergo baby to gaze up at tall faces towering over her. Annabelle nestled comfortably in the undergrowth of humanity, eating her fruit snacks and following her Papa’s shoes.

When we made into out into the open-air of the airport parking lot, and old Eritrean woman who had been on the plane with us came up and patted MaryKat’s pudgy led pitifully. She then shook her head and said, “The heat…?” followed by “And the mosquitoes…?” I smiled and shrugged, to which she raised her hands upwards and said, “Allah.”

My thoughts exactly.

Before we got to the guesthouse where we are overnighting before heading up to the camp where we live tomorrow on the bush plane, we stopped to change some US dollars into local currency. Our skinny taxi driver with scarred arms eased the van onto the side of the road near the market and we were immediately besieged by a dozen guys with shiny watches or ivory bracelets and bockets bulging with bank notes. The taxi driver casually told us to lock all the doors then started passing wads of cash between the driver’s window and backseat while Annabelle made faces at the crowd pressing their faces up to the glass to see her. After the adrenaline rush of the black market, we only stopped once more, this time for the driver to sample and try out some vibrating, blinking car freshener the dashboard from a street vendor (he bought two of them).

After offloading our stuff we walked down the road to a local restaurant to grab a quick bite to eat. We crossed a busy street full of as many women as men, some dressed in leggings and denim and loping down the road in flocks like dark supermodels, others were swathed in the sheer folds of their tobes, like memories of another era. Dinner was nostalgic for me, bringing back memories of eating on the street in a northern town when we lived across the border. We ate bread and grilled chicken. A platter of sliced fruit was blended into juice as thick and sweet as pudding. And for dessert we picked at the cloyingly sweet folds of basta peppered with nuts that we selected from a glass case full of delicacies. Smoke clouded the room and pleasantly burned our eyes; Rihanna and an Arab voice nextdoor competed for prominence in our eardrums. The girls soaked it all up like this was as normal a dinner as any other for them. Which in some ways maybe it was.

I am writing from the mosquitoey porch of the guesthouse now and should close before the generator goes off. We fly “home” tomorrow and I am full of mixed emotions. I am more exhausted than I hoped to be going into life in a mud hut at the peak of dry season and that intimidates me a little bit. This is going to be hard. But I’ve realized that in life, you really just get to pick your stresses, not whether or not you are going to have them. And at this point, I will take the stress of a mud hut over the stress of floating through life in other people’s houses hands down. It feels like time to be back. The honeymoon high I feel at being back tonight (and I do feel it if I didn’t make that very clear..) is sure to burst in a week or two, no doubt. But when it does it will be replaced by the intimate frustrations of living in a place that drives you out of your mind but that, on most days, you wouldn’t leave for the world.   

It’s good to be back.