Phases of the Moon

Dear Bethany,

Of all things to be doing on our last day here, blogging seems like one of the least productive ways to spend my time. But the ETA for the plane keeps getting pushed back, and the last time Bryan called on the sat phone (cell network is down again) they said the plane is still on the ground in the deep South doing immigration so we still have an hour or so to kill before we head to the airstrip. Amazingly, our bags are packed, breakfast dishes are washed, trash is burned, the house is more-or-less rat-proofed, and the slew of guests popping in to say goodbye over the past couple of days has tapered off as everyone heard we were leaving early this morning. So, somehow I find myself in the highly unfamiliar position of feeling packed and ready with time to kill before we go catch a plane. It’s a Christmas miracle!

Leaving this time is so much more bitter-sweet than I anticipated, which is in and of itself a gift. To be honest, I was expecting to feel completed fried at this point after weeks of guests and blowing through projects and goals full-steam ahead knowing we had only a short window of time before heading out to have a baby. But I am actually quite sad to be leaving for another period of time measured in months, not days or weeks, thinking not so much of hot showers and fresh vegetables and ice-cream, but of time away from the house and people that have come to feel like home. The girls are even a bit weepy about the goodbyes, which amazes me considering how much they have missed having your boys around this last week. I thought for sure they would be ready to get out of dodge and back to Kampala where there are Christmas trees and other little cultural peers to play with in English. But even though the thought of Christmas and a new baby sister is exciting to them, Mikat keeps asking why we always have to go places. Any of these places is fine, why can’t we just pick one and stay put? But what a gift it is to be already so eager to come back, to realize how much of our hearts are embedded in the soil and walls and flesh of this place. I often fear the alternative. So I am thankful to be sad today.

The weather this week has been bizarrely cold. Even colder than when you left. This morning we must have woken up in the 50s. It is so odd to put the girls to bed at night in fleece pants and to tuck their curtain into the rebar frames of their windows to keep out the chill. And it is so dry. My skin feels brittle, like I’ll shatter if I move too suddenly. The girls and I have taken to rubbing pure shea butter into our skin after baths at night, leaving us as shiny as our North African neighbors who have been oiling themselves down too as protection from the air. And my feet! Mercy, they are disgusting. It has gotten to the point they actually snag on the mosquito net at night. Forget the Pediegg that promised miracles. I need some industrial grade sandpaper. I can’t wait to get a pedicure in Kampala! I sometimes think about the Kenyan beautician who responded to my apology for the state of my feet with, “Oh this is nothing. You should see the feet of the humantitarian workers who come in from Somalia.” But I fear that these days workers from The Horn may be rising in the ranks all thanks to the input of my soles…

You haven’t missed out on too much this week. On Friday we had our closing ceremony for the literacy teachers, which went well. The rebels across the border are still doing heavy “recruitment” throughout the camps so some of the community leaders were unable to attend as they dealt with that, but we had a good group and the top students showed off their new skills by reading stories out loud for everyone. I am admittedly a little nervous about leaving all of this hanging while we take off to have a baby. Abraham is still so new to mother tongue literacy to be taking on following up with new groups and leading his own teacher training out in K camp. But maybe exactly what needs to happen is to get Bryan and I out the way for a little while and see how things go. I am excited to get back and see for myself.

Earlier in the week we had just sat down to dinner as a family when a distant roar of cheering and crying went up in the camps. It was too late for a soccer match, too disorganized and widespread for any kind of political rally, too happy for a funeral, too un-musical for a wedding. It went on for quite a while before we realized that it was the first night after the new moon and the thinnest crescent had just appeared in the sky. Have you heard people talk about this? Apparently if the first crescent moon of the month is rocked open-mouthed towards the North, the rebels back across the border will have a great victory. If it is rocked towards the South then the Northern government will have victory. As we enter dry-season it seems that everyone is gearing up for fighting again so the night sky seemed more significant than usual. The moon followed in the wake of the sunset so quickly that I didn’t see it the night we heard the outcry, but the following night I saw it and thought it seemed perfectly balanced in the web of stars. I was pretty sure someone said that meant that neither side would have victory and everyone should prepare for long bloody months ahead. But I am new to reading signs in the sky so who knows.      

Along those lines, security has still been good, though a few anemic rumors have bubbled to the surface this week. In fact, several people have told us that around 4am a few nights ago an Antanov flew over the camp and the surrounding areas slowly and with a light shining down as though it was looking for someone or something. Sultan himself is supposedly back in the in the area so I am sure the plane was just gathering intel, but still. The thought of Antanov poking around in the middle of the night gives me the creeps and has revived old curiosities I haven’t visited in a while, like what a bomb up close really sounds like up close. But otherwise, all has been quiet, the only man-made sounds in the night and early morning those of local churches celebrating the approach of Christmas.

Speaking of security issues, we are praying for you as you travel to Burundi for your holidays with loved ones! I pray that you will be able to relax in the lush countryside far away from the chaos of big cities. I don’t know whether the never-ending uncertainty of contexts like the ones where you and I are raising our kids make us more adept at relaxing in political crises or more in need of good ol’ boring, but I pray that whatever it is you need, you will find in abundance this Christmas.

You looked so pretty in those whatsapp pictures you sent me from Nairobi! It makes me realize how I never see you with your hair down. Mine is permanently braided or wadded on top of my head here, especially now that I can’t bend over to soak it in a bucket of water to get it wet for washing. I just end up feeling guilty for using so much water simply dumping it over my head three times for a soaking and two rinses of shampoo and conditioner, instead of recycling it. I actually had Bryan help me wash my hair the other night, since bucket baths in general are getting less convenient at this point in my pregnancy. It wasn’t exactly the scene from “Out of Africa”, but there is something romantic about a man who is willing to soak, lather and rinse a woman’s hair with a bucket and a cup, even if she is 32 weeks pregnant, and swatting at mosquitoes while complaining about heartburn. He is a good man.

The VHF radio is crackling to life on the table as the voices of pilots flying the planes I can hear landing just beyond the bush behind our house announce their descent. I have only heard European and East African accents so far, none of the North American voices that usually announce the planes that carry us in and out, but still, they will probably be here soon so I should close.

Give all your boys our love. Annabelle has a running list of all the things she needs to tell Josh when she seems him again so I hope he is duly prepared. I can hardly believe I believe I will have joined your ranks as a mother of three the next time I see you! Forgive me if I am a blubbering, sleep deprived mess.

Merry, merry Christmas to you and yours, dear friend. May this be a season of peace for us all.

Love,

Libby

My traveling gooses...

In a Perfect World...

Dear Lydia,

Oh friend, the number of times I have started writing to you in the past week or so and been cut short by one of a million things are too many to count! Bryan is with David at the airstrip as we speak. They are probably having tea in a little shop by the side of the strip as they wait for his plane to land. As is usually the case, I was caught off guard by the goodbyes. Even having known for the whole two weeks he was here when exactly he was leaving, the flurry of packing up and going to the airstrip, prayers and one hug for him and lots more for you and the kids felt rushed.

His visit here has been so good and we have been so grateful for all his help with the translation team. Thank you for being so cheerfully willing to play single parent for over two weeks while he travelled the globe to come pitch in on this side again for a while! That is no small thing. Bryan and I have felt so encouraged about where things stand this week workwise. It turns out that despite everything - all the wars and evacuations, obstacles, challenges and setbacks, it is happening. Somehow – creatively and imperfectly, but steadily – it is happening. Thank you for the part you have and are playing in that.   

I have wished for you these past few weeks as I have been doing this literacy teacher training course. In a perfect world you would have been there with me, lending your experience from Tanzania and thoughtful, thorough personality, to my experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, creative messiness. We would have made quite the team! We will still, I think. Until then though, it has been good for me to gain a little experience in all of this on my own too. Because, we don’t live in a perfect world do we? And you have to start somewhere.

This particular thing has started under a tree in our front yard. Every morning one of the earliest participants sweeps the sprinkling of yellow neem leaves that have fallen in the night from the shady expanse of smooth dirt that is our classroom. When class starts and we are busy parsing syllables on the rippled blackboard hanging  by a piece of red string and a nail from the broad scarred trunk of the baobab, the guard’s hoard of scatter-brained chickens bob around our feet and women fill jerry cans loudly from the masura nearby.  Our chalk pieces and duster get stored between drills in the battered wheelbarrow propped against a bumpy root.

The trickiest thing about this training to me has been trying to find the perfect balance between focusing on training teachers (here is the methodology behind the primer, switch up drills to keep your class engaged, talk through what you are doing as you do it blah, blah, blah) and focusing on actually teaching this group to read (ḍ is for ḍulak, let’s pair it with the vowels we’ve learned - ḍä, ḍa, ḍu,ḍi, ḍï, ḍo, de, ḍü; nope, other way, remember we actually read left to right in your language, and so on). It is a teacher training course.

But until three weeks ago they had never seen their language written down.

So, understandably, it’s been a bit tricky.

Thankfully, about half the group was already quite literate in English because they are attending local secondary schools (they can’t speak a word of English but they are familiar with the Roman orthography) and they have picked this up fast. Yassir volunteers for everything, grinning like a kid while he reads with gusto through the story of the giraffe and bull fighting over the milk. They have been practicing actually teaching lessons this week, and he is a natural, confidently walking us through the drills and the story, feeling free to tweak what it is the primer to better fit whatever the reality of the class at the moment.

Then I have a several that I am pleased will just be finishing up knowing how to pick their way through a sentence. Mostly that’s Zahia. She’s older than the other two women in the class. She dresses nicely and has a Nokia phone. But mercy, she can’t read worth a flip. Which isn’t really what bothers me as much as her refusal to try. She can memorize a six sentence story having heard it just once so at first I thought she was a fantastic reader, that is, until I saw that her finger was off by about three words the entire time she “read” a story. Whenever she is asked to come do something at the blackboard she takes her sweet time flipping her sky blue tobe over her shoulder and dragging her flipflops loudly as she makes her way to the front. And instead of trying to actually sound anything out she guesses – brilliantly - but almost always a guess. And if she is wrong she throws her head back and laughs a gorgeous, carefree maddening laugh before handing the chalk to someone else.

The gender divide is more distinct than I hoped it would be. Even Mariam and Khadija, the other two women in the training, are soft-spoken and easily overrun by others. It almost makes me appreciate Zahia’s fearless sass. But Mariam and Khadija try, and though they are quiet, I see them sounding out words to themselves as their fingers move across a page and my heart swells. They may not be standing in front of a class of 30 other people anytime soon, but I bet they will teach their kids to read their language. And that is enough for me.  

We are all learners together. Some of us are learning how to sound out a few letters while others are learning how to explain the reading process to others. I am learning all sorts of new Arabic vocab as I stretch the limits of my language, shuffling through my Arabic dictionary as I try to remember the words for vowel or confidence. Similarly they are expanding their language as they practice teaching in their mother tongue and come up with words that haven’t really existed before. Words like syllable, comma, page. I love what I hear. A story is something like “Fox thing” because traditional stories are often about (told by?) foxes. A book is something like “spider web” because when books were first introduced to their community in years past people thought the white paper looked like spider webs. All the boxes for drills in the primer have been dubbed “houses” so we practice syllable drills in “the big house”. It’s absolutely fantastic.

But I think the best thing that maybe any of us have learned in the past three weeks is that it turns out I actually love teaching literacy. I love it. That should be obvious enough. But after years of spending the bulk of my time focusing on learning language(s), building a house(s), growing and feeding a baby(ies) etc. etc. and then facing the terrifying inertia of actually getting started, it is an immense relief to me to realize I did not in fact miss my calling. I was made for this. I may be making a mess of it all now as I wade through the necessary mistakes and learning curve of all the things I now know not to do next time, but I like it. It feels important. And I think someday, I will be good at it too.  

The other day Aisha and I had a conversation while I was kneading bread and she was washing the dishes. I know she would love to be sitting in on this class, and would quite frankly, be one of the best learners in the group, but as a single mom with a job it just didn’t work for her to be in on it this time. But I feel bad sometimes when I see her sweeping the porch out of the corner of my eye, straining to listen in as we read as a group. As we worked in the kitchen together yesterday and talked about the literacy class she said something that meant the world to me and that will sustain me on the days I feel like I’ve completely blown it. She said, “Thank you for this work you are doing. It is giving us patience.” It was that sabur word again, the one that has meant so much to me in my years here that I am naming my daughter after it. Patience. Endurance. Sabur. This work is giving sabur. To think that anything I am doing is bringing about that, fumbling and bumbling under a baobab tree with a warped chalk board in this imperfect world, well, that’s enough for me.

You are a part of that gift of sabur too. And I hope you receive it back as I do, in your own ways and time. May God continue to give us all sabur.

Other than all that literacy chatter I have no big news. Life here has been so delightfully quiet lately that the UN cancelled their weekly security meeting last week. I haven’t heard a single gunshot in the night this week and no one has cut through the fence line looking for something to snatch in weeks. But it is still never boring. There is an endless supply of random happenings spattered throughout the week that keep me just the right amount on our toes.

A couple days ago an adolescent chicken plum fell right out of the sky a few feet from where Bethany and I sat entertaining guests. A hawk had snatched it from the yard then lost its grip when it tried to settle in a tree overhead. One of the ladies plucked it up, tossed it on the hot charcoal heating water for coffee and proceeded to casually turn it every few minutes, occasionally removing tufts of charred feathers or innards as the skinny bird cooked. Eventually she pulled it off the fire barehanded and tore it into bits and handed it out kindly to the kids who clamoured for some roasted meat, my daughters the greediest among them. They noisily ate the unexpected manna from heaven that had been bobbing around our yard literally minutes before   

Another day a Land Cruiser full of Rwandan UN Peace Keepers pulled into the compound, all heavily armed and weighted down with blue helmets and flak jackets. They were a brand new battalion, and having heard of a number of robberies at NGO compounds, elected to familiarize themselves with the area. When they had called ahead of time to say they were “sending someone” to get the GPS coordinates of our home we were imagining an individual turning up. Instead the truck roared in right up between the two houses and a dozen soldiers (who could speak neither Arabic nor English) leapt out and fanned out across the yard, from the latrine to the guard hut to the tire swing, standing at attention and hardly averting their eyes from who knows what in the distance even when Bethany offered them glasses of water. It was bizarre. Thanks again UN. I feel so much safer now that there are twelve AK-47s and several grenades within feet of my children. But they didn’t stay long and I shouldn’t complain. Like I said, we haven’t had a petty break in in a while.

I will let you go. We are praying for your sweet reunions with David very soon! He is coming with lots of love and hugs from all of us here. Hope you are gearing up for a very merry Christmas.

Much love,

Libby (or Lïbï)