Confession

For a while I was a bit panicky when I realized how many of my friends were saying goodbye to Facebook. There were days living out here in the boonies that my once-every-three-months binge fest on internet back in East Africa felt like my only thread of connection to college friends, cousins I hardly ever see, random childhood friends etc. and I gobbled it up like a rare luxury whenever I could. But now that we have internet access on our compound out here (at least most of the time) and I can pick up snippets of near strangers’ political opinions, belly pictures, memes of pop cultural references I no longer understand, and albums brimming over with near-identical sepia-tinted portraits of families of four on a quilt in a field laughing gorgeously at someone just beyond the photographer…I am feeling a bit more sympathetic to the droves of people disconnecting from social media. It’s not just the waves of envy and guilt and homesickness that come with the never-ending newsfeed. For me it’s often trying to figure out which version of myself to put out there. Wondering who is seeing what and if their opinions of my opinions are as divergent as mine are of all of theirs.

I know I worry too much about what people think. I worry about what my American friends would think about my opinions of how they let their daughters dress and what my North African friends would think about how I dress on vacation at the beach. I worry about what my liberal friends would think about my opinions on homosexuality, and what my conservative friends would think about my opinions on gay marriage. I worry about what my MusIim friends (and grandparents, come to think of it) would think about my opinions on the occasional glass of merlot over dinner and what my in-laws would think about what I let my children eat off the ground. And if my indy-music loving friends with good taste in everything musical ever find out about what I think about Pentatonix covers of Nicki Minaj songs I am absolutely going to die.

Maybe some of you can relate.

But as an American (from one of the most conservative counties in one of the most conservative States) who has close MusIim friends and who is living in this age of global political polarization, I find it most difficult to talk about working with MusIims.

The people who read this blog, or at least have at one point or another, are from wildly different walks of life. And when I write I am always worried of upsetting at least one of them. Like the relative who posts about how a MusIim could never be a “real” American when he senses just how bigoted, ignorant and downright ungodly I find many of his ideas. Or the best friend from high school, whose husband left his Christian roots to convert to Islam for her when she hears about the masses of people down the road from us who are seeking Jesus (and how happy that makes me). Or the precious old lady back in the States who daily prays for us when she hears me tell of how being asked if I am a MusIim by people here is a question that greatly honors me. Or the MusIim high-school coaches and teachers who I will always love and respect when they hear me talk about how communities I work with have been devastated by the violence and bigotry of a certain brand of Islam.

Sometimes I don’t know which is worse: unintentionally feeding the fears and abusive politics of the culture wars into which my nationality, “religion” and skin color all drag me, or denying the legitimate horrors my friends and neighbors have faced at the hands of their “religion”.  

Yesterday, seven young women walked a couple hours from a neighboring camp and came by our house for a visit. They are members of a tribe of refugees who are predominantly MusIims, but who have also faced some of the most horrific  things imaginable at the hands of their conservative Islamic government and, of their own initiative, have recently started seeking the way of Jesus en masse. Our visit yesterday was lovely. I don’t know them well yet but look forward to getting to know them better and the conversations still ahead. While we sipped mint tea under the Neem tree in front of my house and watched our kids play yesterday, I sat there thinking, I am drinking tea with a woman in a headscarf named Jihad (I am not making that one up) and we are talking about Jesus’ way of love and how we are going to celebrate the upcoming Eid holiday. How the heck am I going to write about this?

So this if how I decided to do it. To just admit that it is hard. And it is going to keep being hard. So please bear with me, however delighted our uncomfortable my thoughts or experiences might make you. Bear with me as I struggle to communicate sometimes. We are all on the same journey. On many days my closets traveling companions are church-going Americans from whom I have much to learn about faith, joy and generosity. But on other days I keep step with my MusIim brothers and sisters who teach me about patience, forgiveness and prayer. A part of what I am doing here, alongside literacy classes, teacher training, and vernacular language development, is to offer Jesus to those who seek him. He has meant too much to me not to share. But that doesn’t always look like or even mean what you might think. And even as I hold him out open-palmed, I am continually surprised by the ways I find him so graciously  extended back to me in ways I have never seen him before, sometimes offered back by people who don’t even know him yet.

Home

While we were back in the States over the past few months several people told us, “It is so good to have you home.” And when we were hugging people goodbye preparing to head back this way, many people said things like, “We are sad to see you go but so happy to know you are going back to your home.” I accept statements like these in the precious spirit out of which they offered - they always make me feel loved. But they never fail to highlight a paradox in my heart, the realization that for many people, home is a specific place or idea, something that can be succinctly articulated by a point on a map, a select handful of people or a specific accumulation of personal belongings.

But for me home is not so neat an idea. It is more like a complex set of muscles that are in a constant state of tension and relaxation. As I move between spaces and places they inhale and exhale, a settled sigh of contentment simultaneous with a subtle bracing. In any one place there is rarely a complete tension, but similarly never a total relaxation, every place various parts familiar and foreign. For me it is always give and take, ebb and flow, the push and pull that moves me down the well-worn paths between my homes.

For instance, in the past three weeks I have been in three places – the American city in which I was born and where my parents now live, the East African city so similar to the place I grew up and where we have a private space to retreat to in times of R and R or evacuations, and my North African home where I have my favorite kitchen stuff and a shelf full of my daughters’ favorite books. Being in these three places in so brief a time has highlighted many of the nuances of home.

An example of one of these is my use of language. Leaving the States is like slipping off the most comfortable house slippers of my mother tongue, American English tinted lightly with the hue of West Texas, lazy “R”s and “ya’ll”s , slipped off and left casually by the front door. Next to them is the pair of sturdy and reliable Birkenstocks I wear most often, the “Airport English” born out of my high school days and used everywhere between West Texas and North Africa. The sharper American edges are worn down into well-worn grooves where my heels regularly tread. East African idioms and British flavored vowels – “For bad luck…”, “I was quite chuffed” and sentences flourished nicely at the end with “isn’t it?”  

And now I strap on my beautiful Arabic sandals, bright beads and delicate straps that pinch a little. At the end of a long day my high arches ache a bit, but the colors make me feel beautiful and happy – vivid green “Mashallah!”s, deep purple “Kalaas”s and the ever useful bright orange code-mixed Harrison-created ejective: “Ya-sa-freaking-laam!” I may still be breaking them in, but this pair is one of my favorites.

After over a week in Kampala - decompressing from our wonderful time in the States, attending some meetings and meeting the doctor who will deliver our baby early next year – we spent all of Friday on an absurdly little plane skirting storms before landing back on our dirt airstrip late in the afternoon. The girls rode home on the donkey cart and Annabelle declared at one point, “Well, this is funner than I remembered!” which seemed to me to be a reference to something bigger and more abstract than just the donkey cart ride, but who knows.

Seeing how gracefully (and effectively) nature begins to reclaim territory you staked out in your five month absence is a humbling thing. Spiders and small rodents have seem astonished by our presence in our own living room, and I am reminded that the battalions of tiny ants that line the walls of the house and window sills are not to be fought off, but merely politely redirected in less obtrusive directions. I could not possibly kill them all.   

And yet even as my creepy-crawly muscles tighten up at the nightly routine of spraying mosquito nets and wiping up every last vestige of food from counter tops within minutes, other muscles are breathing an enormous sigh of relief and relaxing. I love my bedspread and my handmade kitchen curtains that are the colors of all the spices I love to cook with – cumin, cayenne and turmeric. I love the constant purr and cackle of birds overhead and being reminded every time I go to the latrine at night that the Milky Way is not just mythology. I like trading out the rush to meetings with the steady stream of lazy visits. And even though there is a part of me that now tenses up with every unexpected rainstorm, there is another part of me that loves the renewed intimacy with the weather, even as I rush to get clothes off the line or shutter windows closed.

Home. It is a complicated idea to me, made up of lots of little pieces scattered across the globe that could never possible being swept up into one place or time. On some days, I grieve this fact, and envy those who can always regularly return to something so sweet. I have cried a tear or two for a sense of home that I will never have. But on my good days, days like today, I feel absurdly blessed. I gag a little as I sweep up the confetti of ants into a dustpan that had set up camp in the bathroom, and then sit down to a cup of Kenyan tea with my husband in our living room with the sisal rug and while we talk about a new Arabic word we learned or a funny memory from a Jimmy Fallon youtube video that we watched last time we were in Uganda, we watch our girls outside eating green tamarind pods as they climb all over the ATV in their purple dress-up clothes, all while I periodically check my phone to see if the network has come back on so I can text my mom.

Home.

It’s a good place to be.