Of Kittens and Snakes

Dear Mama,

The girls are napping and Bryan is out at one of the camps down the road so I am going to take advantage of a quiet moment to say hello. I am covered in flour as I write, especially my belly which conveniently bumps into everything these days. I am baking about four dozen of your delicious earth bread rolls in my little charcoal oven for Thanksgiving, which we will celebrate tomorrow. Some SIM friends are slaughtering a sheep in lieu of turkey and in the evening we will all have a big meal together. I made the rolls today and the green mangoes are softening in a hot pot of cinnamon sugar right now for a mock apple pie. Tomorrow I will make the cinnamon rolls.

Bethany and I have had to figure out how to cook four dozen rolls, three dozen cinnamon rolls, three pies and some stuffing between my little charcoal oven (that won’t completely close when my cookie sheet goes in the top) and her big solar cooker. So we started a day early and I think will all have it under control by tomorrow evening. Inshallah.

Oh mama, what an unspeakable blessing it is to have Bethany next door! I didn’t know how long I could have stayed emotionally healthy without the Graves there, and despite the handful of other Khawaja women around to connect with, there is nothing like having another wife and mother within shouting distance. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined God redeeming that specific heartache and loss in this season so perfectly. Most days we are running so busy with homeschooling, cooking, hosting, and our own individual ministries and projects that we don’t get much more than I “Can I borrow some yeast?” asked through a screen window. Life is too crazy here right now for us to catch up sufficiently on the lives we led before our paths crossed. But simply knowing there is someone close enough to call for out loud and who intimately understands, that is an unspeakable gift. Isn’t it crazy that I feel that close to someone whose birthday I don’t even know yet?!

Sometime last week Bethany told me she was hosting a girls’ night on Wednesday and asked if it would be okay for all her guys came and crashed at our place for a couple hours while we all hung out at her house. I was impressed that she was up for hosting when Eli was just getting over a serious bout of malaria and they have been hit with one logistical challenge after another on their team lately.  We have only been back in for three weeks or so and I already feel the wear and tear of daily life nipping at my hems. They have been in for four months and are tired. But that is so Bethany, ever cheerful and eager to pitch in. So girls’ night it was.

I walked all thirty feet from my front door to hers on Wednesday night right at seven, admiring the enormous full moon peeking up over her tin roof and the tea candles blinking in her wide windows. I was surprised to hear voices inside already, expecting to be one of the first, having by far the least distance to walk. I loudly salaamed everyone inside instead of knocking, slipped off my shoes into the pile already outside on the porch and stepped inside to a room full of friends and neighbors all standing to greet me with big smiles. Vaguely confused I then noticed the paper chains hung over the curtain rods and the pinks sign taped overhead that read “We love baby girls!” My first thought was honestly, who else is having a baby girl? I am a pretty suspicious person and I feel like it takes a lot to surprise me. But I have to say, when I finally realized it was a surprise baby shower for me and Sabrine, I was undoubtedly the most shocked I have been in a long time.

It wasn’t your typical baby shower. There was no diaper cake or punch bowl, no pastel wrapping paper or silly celebrity baby name games (and of course it would have felt bizarre if somehow there was). We drank cool Koolaid out of plastic cups and ate charcoal-oven-baked goodies made from everyone’s treasured stock of chocolate while enjoying the soft oscillating exhale of a fan that kept the mosquitoes at bay. The conversation and laughter were sweet, the prayers were precious, the blessings offered were priceless. They were a gift because they were offered up by women – some who are mothers, most who are not – who nonetheless live shoulder to shoulder with me in this beautiful mess of a place and love it and hate it and wouldn’t trade it for anything just like me. Women who again, in one way or another, understand.

What’s more, I realized that this was my first baby shower ever, which made it even more special!  Having all three of these babies in Africa has made traditions like baby showers … impractical, shall we say, though we have never been lacking for anything. In fact, I am pretty sure when I was pregnant with Annabelle some sweet ladies Bible class at a church back in the States actually threw us a shower and sent us boxes overflowing with adorable clothes and burp clothes. But a baby shower in absentia is just not the same thing, and Wednesday night felt so incredibly meaningful to me. I knew you would want to hear about it, to know that there are sweet souls out here who love your baby and your baby’s babies, even the unborn ones. I am so thankful for Bethany.

In fact, in this stressful season for her, I can only hope that living next door to someone who understands means as much to her as it does to me, because I sometimes feel like a pretty crummy friend. Juggling nonstop guests (we have calculated that by December 9^th, we will have had guests with us 47 of the previous 50 nights), this literacy training course, homeschooling and all regular life and work stuff, I have not been much help shouldering any of her burdens. This has been a good week for me and I have felt incredibly encouraged about life in general, but a couple weeks ago, when I was hiding from my children in the latrine bawling and having something akin to a panic attack, I know her presence on the compound was a subtle, but very real, comfort to me.

A few days ago their sweet little kitten Oreo got bit by a small snake one night or ate some neighbor’s rat poison or something equally dreadful and started into a slow and miserable demise that was just heartbreaking to witness. Every morning I would quietly ask, “Is she gone yet?” and be horrified to hear that she was steadily shutting down, completely paralyzed and unresponsive, but still breathing. It made me think of that blasted, precious baby dik-dik I had when we were still up North across the border and his sad end. In this place where there isn’t enough mercy to go around for all the human beings that need it, it can feel so confusing to grieve for animals, and yet at the same time, crying over anything that is suffering always seems worthwhile to me. And frankly, after all the other losses the Faders have had to endure in the past year, losing a kitten so painfully just seemed like such a low blow. I kept praying that God would let it die quickly, which didn’t seem like that big of a request really, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.

Yesterday the whole Fader family was out in the afternoon and I had the sudden passing thought perhaps I should help nudge the poor thing across the line it was hovering on, though the thought terrified me. I ultimately didn’t, mostly because I was afraid of the Faders coming home and their three boys finding Aunt Libby having snuck into their house and in the middle of smothering their sick cat and not only emotionally scarring them for the rest of their lives but also ensuring that they move away forever. But later that night, when Bethany was coming over to put something in our fridge and said in sadness and utter relief that the poor thing had finally died, I admitted to her my very real temptation from earlier in the day and we laughed with tears in our eyes. Because really, what else can you do?

Anyway, the point of that sorry tale is that she is that kind of person. I wouldn’t put a kitten out of its misery for just anybody. But I would do it for her in a heartbeat.

I meant to tell you all about how the literacy training is going but I will save that for another day. I should close for now. I hope you guys had a good Thanksgiving all together. Abigail’s messages about Thai food and ice storms made me feel very far away but somehow happy too imagining you together and warm with curry and fireplaces. Bits and pieces of news also sifted through poor internet connections and patchy cell networks about the Roaches daughter dying in the car accident and Deb and Josh’s puppy getting loose and being hit by a car. The thanksgiving and the grief always seem to go hand in hand don’t they? Different colors bleeding into the same sunset.

My prayer is that those whose hearts are hurting - bruised or completely shattered, whether from the loss of a small animal or from the loss of an only sister - may they sit in the company of someone who understands. I am pretty sure that is God’s greatest gift to us in this fragile life. People who ultimately can’t fix anything, but who know intimately the texture and feel of your deepest griefs and joys. I’m not sure what else to hope for on this side of that line.

I will write more soon. Your grandbabies, filthy and running around the yard with three little boys they have come to adore, send their love. I need to take bread out of the oven.

Love you so much.

Elizabeth 

My surprise shower with precious ladies! (Bethany is behind me on the right)

Baobabs

Dear Melinda,

Your last email made me laugh. Sorry that as you get ready to head back to this side of the world you get stuck carting Dominion, one of those world-conquering board games that you so thoroughly despise. But I was really desperate for a Christmas present for Bryan! Thanks for playing Santa. I’m glad that you were at least amused by the fact that David Graves, world-conquering board game player extraordinaire and brilliant introverted nerd got stuck hauling in his bag a nursing bra sized by letter combinations my four year old hasn’t even learned in pre-school yet. Because he was getting here well before you, he got the short end of the stick. As this child in my womb grows we were getting pretty desperate in that department out here several thousand miles away from the closest Target. My bosom and belly have together conspired against me and created this perfect little cavity right at my sternum that is a beacon for all way-faring flying insects, (especially sitting around the dinner table with male guests it seems). Feeling six legs and four wings panic inside my shirts is getting really old. Anyway, all that to say, thanks for being one of the many people that have been willing to stuff all sorts of random things into their suitcases for us.

I am so sorry that your hometown in this country is still such a mess. Your line about feeling sick to your stomach every time you look at your suitcases waiting to be packed filled me with such bittersweet empathy. I know what it feels like to be on that side of the ocean getting ready to come back over and not knowing exactly what you are coming back to. I know you already know this, but please know again that it really will all be okay. Really. Especially if you have an open-minded perspective on the definition of okay. Bryan tells me this all the time and somehow, inexplicably, it does make me feel better.

Either way, I’m really ready for you to be closer.

So I have thought of you a lot this week as I get ready to kick off my first literacy teacher training event. Woohooo! I am incredibly excited. And intimidated out of my gourd…. But mostly excited. The whole thing will be a bit less traditional than the standard “workshop” approach. We presented the literacy materials to the Sheikhs of the community and asked them to each select three individuals that they think would make good mother tongue literacy teachers. After lots of running around the camps to meet with people, wait around on people, try to actually find people, etc. etc we have rounded up a group of ten individuals, most of whom I think will make great learners and teachers. I am excited to see how they will carry this work forward with their community, even while we are out to have Baby Girl.

In fact, as I was leaving the last meeting with the Sheikhs and prospective teachers on Friday morning, a woman ran out of a nearby hut and began to speak in her language rapidly and earnestly to the Sheikh escorting me back to the ATV, and to Abraham, my local literacy counterpart. She had been hanging in the background during our meeting, taking care of a slew of toddlers, hauling water, bending over a cooking fire. Unlike the (relatively) well-educated women who had been selected for the training who were dressed in nice tobes and occasionally checking their Nokia phones, she was dressed in a dirty cotton slip, her neck and arms full of traditional beads. I have no idea if she has ever been to school a day in her life.  I couldn’t understand her words as she spoke, but her eyes and gestures communicated clearly. Please, please can I be one of the ones to learn to read my language. After they spoke for a minute Abraham turned towards me with a shrug, “There are others who aren’t committed to coming and she is begging to come to the training. Can we take one more?”

I said yes. How could I not? Maybe she will turn out to be the brightest one in the group. She has certainly shown the most passion. And that goes a long way in my books.

So starting Monday morning I will be meeting with a group under our baobab tree. We have a chalkboard and some rope beds to sit on. I don’t suppose we need much else. It is interesting to be doing a literacy teacher training event that is also just a good old fashioned literacy class. This language was written down for the first time just a matter of months ago. So I have to teach people to read it themselves first before I teach them how to teach other people to read it.

I am really excited.       

It’s hard to believe that it was not quite a year ago that you were here up North with us. The seasons are passing each other at the doorway and the weather is starting to remind me of when you were here. That last stray shower we all wondered about weeks ago we now know for certain was the last rain of the season. It is so dry the air feels brittle, but the bugs are all out in their final death throes before they wither up and die like the grass. The rim of the sky is bleaching slowly, the ashy whiteness bleeding higher and higher into the cloudless blue with each passing day. Ash flutters from above in solitary flakes almost every afternoon as grass fires crackle beyond the fence line. I usually can’t see them during the day, only the plumes of smoke they send up from the fields, but at night, when I go outside to fill up a bucket for baths or scrape a dinner pot into the trash barrel I can see orange flames rippling casually in the near distance, unsettling and beautiful at the same time. But the nights are still cool, dusty and sharp, but blessedly cool.

While every other plant is curling into itself and dying, the baobabs are heavy with fruit, their olive green pods fat and fuzzy on all the sprawled branches. At seven months pregnant I feel a great fondness for these great trees, all confidence and beauty in their corpulence and blatant fertility. Boys clamor up them to staggering heights and knock the pods down. Even as I write this the Fader boys are loping back on to the compound with sacks overflowing with gongolez and are squatting down to crack them open with rocks. The seeds inside are as white as the sky today, the cracks of pod against stone ringing out pleasantly into the afternoon.

I’ll close with the cobra story. It’s a truly terrible way to end a letter but I forgot about it until just now and I have to tell you. Last week I was going into our bedroom to get the girls towels after bath. I knew exactly where they were and didn’t bother turning on the light. But as I grabbed them up I heard a suspicious sound in the corner under the table – not the fast scurrying of a rat, or even the scaly rustle of a lizard. This sounded legless. And big. I froze and hollered for Bryan who came and immediately switched on the light (genius). Sure enough, a big black snake writhed in the shadows under the table. We didn’t have a weapon immediately on hand so he kept an eye on it so we wouldn’t lose it while I ran to the front door and yelled for the guard, scooting dangerously curious little girls back out into the living room and up on furniture. Beleil was there in two seconds with a big stick and killed it easily enough once they found it hiding behind my blue suitcase. It turned out to be a cobra, just under four feet long.

In my bedroom.

Needless to say I was thoroughly freaked out for a couple days and propped pillows up against the gap under the front door every night before we went to bed (because that is the only way I can think that it got in) and drilled the girls on what to scream in Arabic if they see a snake (Arabic because heaven knows I am no help, I would rather Beleil come running). But eventually I decided that just thanking God that it was in my room and not the girls’ room and then getting over it and going back to sleeping deeply at night was a better long term plan. So that is where I am at now. And as long as there are no more cobras I think it is a plan that will work out just fine.

Actually someone told me the other day that pregnant women apparently have snake powers and can freeze snakes to the spot with an intense stare. That’s a pretty cool super power actually. I’ve got a couple more months to test that one out. Hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is, I will be ready with my big belly for a stare down for any reptile who wants to take me on.

I will let you go now. Kiss the grandbabies for us. And even as you grieve telling them goodbye in the week ahead, be consoled knowing there are two (soon three!) little girls, and their mama, excited about seeing you again on this side!

Blessings in the days ahead. It will all be okay. Somehow.

Much love,

Libby

Is this really the only picture of us in tobes? Get back up here so we can rock them together again!

Sabrine

Dear Sabrine,

I dreamed about you again last night.

In this dream you came relatively easily into the world. You were silent and big-eyed as you took in your new surroundings. My mama held you for a long time and when you began to cry I gathered you into my arms and nursed you. When I woke up this morning you were tossing and turning in my womb as though the dream had woken you too.

You have been so active lately. Even though the space you inhabit has been occupied twice before, feeling - and often seeing - another human jostle inside of me never fails to take my breath away. There have been times I have called near-stranger’s attention to my taunt belly, pointing out your tiny knuckles and heels as they arch across my skin. I am already so proud of you and hungry to show you off.

Earlier this week you even woke your Papa up in the night. It has still been cool enough that I don’t mind him sleeping close and apparently your kicks to his ribs were enough to wake him. He tells me he poked you back and the two of you spent some time conversing in this strange morse code while I slept. It’s odd to think of you two sharing moments like this while I sleep. He is also good at finding your heartbeat, one of the advantages you have in being the third occupant of my womb. He rests his ear on my stomach at night before we go to sleep and then taps out the rhythm he hears on my side.

He and I call you by the name we have chosen for you, Sabrine Elizabeth, though often still privately. Mikat insists you should be named “Alinda” a variation of a good friend’s name, and while Annabelle cycles through various names with vaguely royal implications, she most often calls you simply “Talata”, number three.

Your name has stayed with us for a long time, long before we saw that unexpected pink line on the white stick announcing your existence. It comes from the Arabic word sabur, which you will learn means patience. In the past few years we have heard our North African friends use this word over and over again as they face trial after trial. But we must have patience, they say. God has asked us to be patient.

And they are. Endlessly, beautifully, heartbreakingly patient.

Your name ties us to a people and a place that has become a part of our very hearts. It calls us to a gentle strength that we have witnessed again and again and that we want to own in our own lives and that we pray you will own in yours as well. You are named for the resilient beauty we believe God calls us all to.

The name Sabrine translates wonderfully across cultures too. Variations show up in poems about ancient Scottish princesses and modern-day magazine articles about Egyptian movie stars. From France to the Phillipines to Brazil, the name Sabrine represents something that can be transmitted across languages and cultures with an easy fluidity, while simultaneously retaining a subtle exotic foreignness, at least in most places I suspect. This is also something I hope will be true for you too, that you will be a citizen of the world, able to identify and connect with all manner of people and places with relative ease, yet without ever becoming so melded into any one of them that you lose distinctiveness. This is not an easy blessing to bestow on your unborn child, but if you can learn to carry it well, it will bless your life in immeasurable ways. And I trust that you will bear this gift with incredible grace.     

You are getting bigger by the day, which means so am I. We plan on going to Kampala just before Christmas to wait for your arrival, and by then I suspect I will be huge and tired and sweaty most of the time. It hasn’t been unbearably hot here recently, but I feel each of the hauled buckets of water and ovens full of white-hot charcoal by the end of the day. Even so, I am so grateful to be pregnant here among people that see my swollen ankles as such a gift. In America dear friends responded to our announcement of your impending arrival with, “Number three? Whew, better you than me, girl!” as though they feel a little bit sorry for my bad luck. While here women say, “Mashallah, you are getting so big. God’s work is such a blessing!” as though my current state is worthy of great envy. I like being around people like that. People who talk about how good it is to have your daughters first so they can help with later babies, instead of which maternity clothes are the most flattering.

Of course, there are two sides to that coin. Almost every single woman here in North Africa has answered my question, “How many children do you have?” with two numbers. The first number is higher – 5, 7, even 10 - the number of “stomachs” she has had, pregnancies or babies born alive. The second number is always lower, sometimes much lower – 5, 3, 1 -  the number of children in her home currently alive. In this world babies aren’t named for weeks or even months after they are born, maybe similarly to how in the West rarely name a baby as soon as we get that initial positive pregnancy test, rather waiting at least until the end of that first tenuous first trimester. And yet named or not, mothers always give that first number, including every life, however short it may have been, I am a mother of ten. I have four children living at home.

Sometimes the realities of this world pressing in around me like a swaddle get to me and I begin thinking too much about whether or not the mosquito that just bit my ankle is carrying malaria, whether the bush hospital down the road has oxygen for preemies, how I’m not even sure yet if the hospital in Kampala will let your father in the delivery room with me or not. I am so much less fearful with you than I ever was with your sisters, and yet even so I have moments of anxiety.

But your sweet kicks and rolls and the precious moments of hearing your name spoken out loud and finding it lovely give me such peace. You seem so healthy to me, and despite the growing aches and Braxton hicks, I feel so healthy too. God has been so absurdly good to us. There is even a peace in remembering that no matter the circumstances surrounding your birth and the days and weeks on either side of it, you and I have little to no control one way or the other. So we ride these last few weeks out together, savoring the sweetness and knowing that the aches along the way are passing.

I am so excited to meet you sweet one. Keep following God’s instructions as you grow and stretch, as you practice blinking and sucking and dreaming. We are waiting for you patiently one the other side, sweet Sabrine.   

Much love and anticipation,

Your mama

P.S. – It bears mentioning that your father, though absolutely thrilled at the prospect of being the father of three daughters, was not completely convinced by the grainy images at the last ultrasound a couple months back. While I am confident beyond a doubt that you are my baby girl, if circa February 6^th, 2016, we find out that you are in fact my little boy, I promise to rewrite this letter more appropriately. And I love you forever no matter what.   

Psalm 24

It is all his anyways,

all it holds and hides and lays bare.

Every anthill and tamarind tree, every gushing river and heart beating under fur or scales or skin.

We are all his, every person on the face of the planet.

Not someday. Not hopefully.

Now.

Every one of us.

We belong to him.

Because, in the beginning

he pressed down the reared head of the foaming sea

and told it to be still.

And on its bound limbs he built beauty and pattern and purpose.

Over the fathomless depths of chaos,

he built a world of teeming, towering life.

Who dares look into the eyes of the ones who did that?

Who could possibly reach out to grasp those hands?

And yet…

We are invited to be so bold.

Are you deeply aware of your place in this existence?

Can you distinguish truth from its cheap, glistening imitations?

And are you willing to give up everything else in pursuit of it?

Are you honest and humble and kind?

Then grasp those hands with confidence.

And when you are plagued by doubt and dark memories,

remember the name he has chosen for himself.

I am of Jacob, he says.

Jacob.

Lying, scheming Jacob

who nonetheless saw truth one dark night

and wrenched loose his bones to grasp it.

Take heart.

That is the name he chooses to wear.

Look into his eyes without fear.

Ancient doorways and passageways, rusted and corroded shut for centuries are now creaking open.

Those same hands that balanced creation on chaos are now prying open ways long shut.

Who are you? the spaces and and souls within quiver in anticipation. Who are you?

He is the master craftsman here to reclaim his masterpiece.

He is powerful, and hungry to bless.

He is the King of glory.