The Patient Ones

About a week before we evacuated North Africa last month I went to visit a woman named Om Iman in the camp. Her name had confused me for the longest time; it literally means “Mother of Iman (Faith) and I had assumed she had a daughter named Iman and like every other woman I know, was referred to by the name of her firstborn. So I called her “Iman” for the longest time before eventually discovering that when she was born she was named after a woman with a daughter named Iman and was ever-after called “Imam’s mother”.

Om Iman is one of those women who is staggeringly beautiful, at least I think so. I feel like you could plop her down in a mall in suburban America complete with bare feet, traditional facial scars and her fuchsia tobe draped gracefully over her thick braids and she would turn heads admiringly. Her jet black skin is as flawless as obsidian. She is tall and willowy and smiles easily. She is pretty in her home culture – she is tall and strong and has high cheekbones, but I feel like there is something timeless and borderless about her beauty too. At any time or place in the world, in rags or silk, she would be lovely.

This loveliness had also led me to be confused when I heard that she was the first of her husband’s two wives. She seemed so young and pretty, why in the world would her husband have taken a second wife? But I have had to conced that in a world not always as defined by sex and beauty as the one I come from, especially in a time of war, perhaps there are things I just don’t know or understand. Undoubtedly there are.

I didn’t even know Om Iman was pregnant when our mutual friend Laila told me she had miscarried. Laila comes to my house several mornings a week to sweep and help contain my dirty dishes, and this particular morning, as she scrubbed oatmeal off of a white plastic bowl, she told me that Om Iman was very unwell. She said that she had gotten up early in the morning to sweep the blood out of Om Iman’s floor, using gestures that suggested a miscarriage far more serious than I would have imagined from the slight frame of the woman I had seen only two days earlier. I asked Laila if it would be appropriate to visit Om Iman. Our cultures are different, I told her, Does she want to receive visitors right now or should I wait a few days? Laila snorted at my question as though I was being intentionally funny and said, Tomorrow, we will go see her tomorrow.      

Laila, who had come in for half a morning’s work, and Aisha, who is my language tutor, and I started off the next morning in the ATV Bryan only had up and running again for a matter of weeks. It was my first time driving again since the rebels had quasi-graciously returned the vehicle (thank you Division 10), and I was praying it wouldn’t die on me in the middle of the road three miles from home. We careened over potholes and through herds or sheep with our tobes flying out the sides of the vehicle like colorful wings until the red murram road became a dirt track which became a grassy trail which became a clearing under a tree beside a tukul where we parked and got out and walked.  

Om Iman’s friendly husband greeted me warmly and escorted us to the UNHRC tent with pinned open flaps where Om Iman lives. She was sitting on a rope bed in a sleeveless cotton nightgown and she struggled to rise and greet us when we stepped in. We sat down across from her in the hot close air of the tent; Om Iman’s co-wife, a short girl with thick arms and a shy smile brought us a pitcher of water.  

It is in times like these that I feel the limitations of my Arabic. I can talk about sickness and pregnancy and babies and hospital visits quite comfortably, but wading through matters of the heart – grief, anger, disappointment – these things are still difficult. But Om Iman talked more freely than I expected her too. She sat on the rope bed and described the pains that gripped her stomach a few nights earlier and the dead baby she had birthed on the dirt floor, encircling her fingers around the skin just above her wrist with her palm outstretched to show me how big the baby had been. She told me this was her third stillbirth. Dark stains slowly blossomed on her nightgown as she talked, the slow leak of milk for another lost child.

What do you say in those moments? Even in English, to someone I grew up with, my own sister, what would I say? And then how do I say that to a new friend from a world so far from my own, in a language we are both borrowing? I am so sorry. I don’t know why this happened. God loves you and your dead baby. I am so sorry. So, so sorry.

But I tried, somewhat fearfully but immensely grateful for these people that have the uncanny ability to see through words and actions and stuff, straight to the heart. Sometimes this gift makes me nervous, but on this day I was so thankful. We prayed and Om Iman said thank you many times for our visit. Before we rose to go she said, You know, sometimes I just lie in my bed at night and think. I can’t sleep because my head is so full of thoughts. Sometimes I cry as I think about life. But God has another life for us. So we are patient. We must just be patient.

I saw Om Iman once more before we left North Africa, the day before in fact, and she was smiling and seemed happy. Not superficially so, but a genuine happiness, perhaps more noticeably for its contrasting rim of deep sadness.

Patient, was the word she used. We must be patient. This is not a word I know. I am patient in long lines full of crabby people with carts full of soda and tangerines at a supermarket on a Sunday evening. I am patient in the maddening snarls of orderless traffic here in Nairobi, at least most of the time. I am patient when my baby throws her banana on the floor over and over and over again.

But patient when your third baby dies? Patient when you live in a tent because your government is bombing the mud huts in your home village? Patient when you watch fear and instability stalk closer and closer to the life you were rebuilding, threatening the peace you were just beginning to rest into?

I am having to be patient right now too. This isn’t what I wanted either. But my patience involves long runs in quiet neighborhoods with paved roads. It involves a little preschool for my firstborn three days a week. It involves a nice restaurant at least once a week and a church that worships in my heart language. Yes, I have had my fair share of sleepless nights and unexpected floods of tears. But I have not yet learned patience like Om Iman.

If it is true that God draws near to the broken-hearted, if he loves the poor and the abandoned of this world as much as he says he does, than I was in the presence of holiness that day on a rope bed under a hot UNHCR tarp, my feet tipped on a stained dirt floor. I was given the honor of sitting with the treasure of his heart, a favorite of the God of all creation.

If given the opportunity to sit in her presence again I will not take it for granted. She has so much to teach me.  

This is the best picture I could find of Om Iman. She is in the orange and yellow floral tobe towards the left looking off camera. Laila is on the mat in the foreground reaching towards her foot. I will take a better picture of them both when I see them again.

Deja Vu

We didn’t hear a single gunshot up through the day we flew out with the last of the NGOs in our area, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the vaguely sad fireworks over the Nairobi city skyline on New Year’s Eve to have made my heart lurch a bit. But they did. I guess several days of straining my ears even in my sleep, sifting through the rumble of a distant tractor, the beat of an owl’s wings, the slap of children’s bare feet on hard pressed dirt, doesn’t let those muscles relax again quickly.

Trouble had already broken out in the capital when we were due to return from our scheduled R and R in Kenya, and we spent 36 tense hours devouring the news, making long distance phone calls, weighing the options. In the end we flew home for lots of reasons – the hundreds of miles between us and the capital, our travel-weary babies, the supplies our plane carried for our pregnant teammates, simply wanting to be home. We landed on our airstrip on a beautifully clear day, untrustworthy in its perfect, unexpected coolness. Pedestrian traffic still shuffled contentedly past the plane and across the airstrip to market. People smiled and greeted warmly. The capital never seemed so far away.  

But in the five bittersweet days before our evacuation, it started feeling closer. Perhaps having lived through this all once not so long ago, things started feeling uneasy very shortly after we unlocked the front door. We have been the frog in the pot before. This time around we could feel the water warming up.

While Bryan threw himself into crises management mode – gathering info, charging SAT phones, stocking up on food and fuel – I wrapped myself in a warm cocoon of denial and threw myself headfirst into the all-absorbing task of making our first-ever small family Christmas. I obsessed over a tree, interrupting Bryan’s UN update to ask him what nearby plant he thought we could uproot without depriving the neighbors of some medicinal herb or vegetable or unknowingly poison our daughters. I finally drug a huge reed mat out from the store room, cut out a massive triangle, twisted it into a cone, adorned it with a few tacky ornaments from Nairobi and crowned it with a broom angel and called it good. Somehow the menial task of decorating a “tree” felt like the most significant job in the world.

The political crisis escalated far faster than anyone imagined it would. Granted, no one has ever claimed this is the most stable part of the world. I have spent hours thinking through contingency scenarios – where we will usher the girls when robbers bust down the door, where we run if the North loses their mind and decides to bomb the refugees, how sick a baby has to be before we call for a medevac. There are plenty of problems to waste time worrying about around here. But a full-blown rebel movement with genocidal tendencies in force across half the country practically overnight? I so did not see that one coming.

It didn’t take long to realize we were probably leaving, at least for a little while until things cooled down.  It was just a matter of when. I head-butted the days, willing us to get through Christmas and Mary Katherine’s first birthday. Please, please let us just get past the 25^th.

On Saturday night we had a contingency meeting with David and Lydia after the kids went to bed. We sat on our new couch and talked in low voices over ice-cold sodas from our two-day old refrigerator. If it hadn’t been for the topic of conversation, we could have been hosting a house-warming party now that we finally have furniture and curtains and a fat vanilla candle in a clay dish. It felt like home.

But it wasn’t a house warming party.

We talked through trigger points, 24 hour plans, 15 minute plans and the contents of our go-bags. Bryan and I brought baggage and experience from our time across the border. David and Lydia brought healthy senses of humor and deeply God-like spirits. To walk this road with them is such a gift. As reality sank down more and more heavily upon us we began to worry and grieve, and in hushed tones in the stillness of a hot night, to laugh.

On Sunday morning we piled up in the ATV and went to church in the camp. I wavered after breakfast, feeling groggy from a poor night’s sleep and concerned about MaryKat’s cough, savored the temptation of staying in. But something scratched at the back of my heart knowingly and so I packed up my purse anyway. After church we sat around talking to our friends. Everyone was happy and excited about a Christmas Eve vigil and the sheep we would eat the next morning. No one was concerned about “those people” and their problems in the capital. We remarked on the unusual level of air traffic at the airstrip and everyone conceded UNHAS was probably just playing catchup over the weekend because of their earlier cancelled flights. Everyone laughed in the way only refugees can at an orphaned boy who had just traveled from across the border with his grandfather and who darted towards the bushes in terror every time a plane passed overhead. Only weeks ago he was hiding from bombs in an altogether different war.

As we loaded up the ATV and started down the jutting ribs of the underfed road that leads home we got the call. Our closest neighbors and friends in alike-minded organization were heading out in the morning. We had decided days earlier that when they went so would we. And just like that, it was time to go.

The night before a planned evac is always such an incredible disarray in my experience. A disarray of emotions, a disarray of the house, a disarray of thoughts and kitchenware and words and clothing. When you should be packing you are sorting silverware. When you should be contacting organizational leadership you are reading news that no longer has a bearing on your decision. When you should be washing dishes you are eating stale pretzels even though it’s two in the morning and you are not remotely hungry. You are griefstruck and relieved, frantic and calm, focused and confused. And very very tired.

We made the decision to let the girls open Christmas presents even though they wouldn’t be going with us. Sixty-six pounds for a family of four doesn’t leave a lot of room for stocking stuffers. Thankfully, the fantastic mess of newness was a wonderful distraction in the middle of the living room; they seemed oblivious to their dazed parents weaving through the house tacking mats over windows, packing food into trunks and weighing and reweighing small bags to go.

The speed of the decision to go and our family culture of chaotic chronic last-minuteness serves me well in times like this. There was hardly time for farewells to anyone much less long emotional ones. I left my much-treasured eggs and potatoes with our guards as well as two of my tobes for Aisha and Leila, two of my dearest friends. And the whole way to the airstrip I worried over how they would receive them when they heard we had left. Would it communicate my love for them? Or a finality that I dared not even let my mind consider…Should I have left more, less?

We were a somber group walking to the airstrip. Our friends in our neighboring organization were as grieved and frazzled by the evacuation as we were. There were many tears and confused hugs from the people who live around us whom we have all grown to love so much. Comprehension and the cold trickle of fear was beginning to settle across the entire town as a final line of khawajas made their way towards the plane with only what they could carry. People still shuffled across the airstrip on their way to the market. But the day was already hot and people weren’t smiling. Just watching nervously.

The plane landed and the pilot, the friend who had flown us in four days earlier, told us that fighting had just broken out in our state capital and one of their planes had been turned away from picking up people on the ground there. It was time to go. As the bags were being shoved into the cargo bay and I was waiting my turn to board the plane I felt a hand at my elbow. I turned to see my friend Leila. I wish I had time to write about her tonight, to tell you more of her story and paint you a picture of her spirit. Another day I will do that. Just know that this is a woman who is almost always smiling, who has arms of thick brawn and is known for being a snake killer. She lost her first baby a few days after he was born, fled a war on foot and now lives in a refugee camp, but I have never seen her cry. But on this day she stood before me with tears pouring out of her eyes. We held each other and wept. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know all the nuances of her tears. And then she asked me, “Why are you crying?” Even now I am curious to know what things were a part of her question. Did she wonder why I was crying if I was the one about to get on the plane to safety? Did she wonder why I was crying when I saw her specifically? Did she wonder if I knew something terrible that she didn’t yet know, something that would send me and my family fleeing to Kenya leaving her and hers behind?

I told her the truth. “I’m crying because I love you and I love your people and I really don’t want to leave. I want to live here and I don’t want to leave. I really don’t want to leave.” I don’t know what my words meant to her. But she nodded and wiped tears away with the back of her hand. Then we cried and hugged a moment more before she turned rather abruptly and walked away.

I shuffled on to the plane awkwardly with Mary Katherine strapped to my chest. Annabelle settled into the seat next to her Papa and kept asking me why I was crying. The pilot said a quick prayer and then we were taxying down the airstrip and hurtling into the air. I could see Leila walking back towards the camp. She walked a few feet and then sat down at the ditch at the edge of the airstrip and glared at the distance, not looking at the plane or the friend who waited patiently behind her. I watched her sit there until we were too high to see anything anymore except the sprawling mass of the camp from the air, its rim flecked with herds of animals.   

And that was it. We took down the swing, locked the front door, left money for our guard’s salaries and flew away.

At the time in felt nauseatingly familiar and Bryan almost had to shake me into remembering that this wasn’t the same thing happening all over again. We will be back. This isn’t the end.

Oh dear God, please let that be true.

After a week of hot showers, a few runs and time to just be quiet I feel much more peace then I did that day, two days before Christmas and my baby’s birthday. Community has helped. We are surrounded by people who have just had to go through the same thing we did, and worse. They understand. That helps more than anything.

There is hope.

There is a lot of fear still too.

But there is real hope.

But for now, in this sea of unknowns, in a peace-filled place so far from where I really want to be, we wait patiently. More patiently on some days than others, but nonetheless we wait.

And pray.