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.