And Afterwards, Coffee

Dear Abigail,

It was so wonderful to talk to you a few nights ago! I was so pleased that our connection was clear but laughed at your description of all the crickets sounding like a tambourine in the background. It’s funny the things that you get used to (as well as the things you do not). Sorry about my distraction with the rat there for a moment. Bryan caught him later that night.

It seems like a lot has happened even since we spoke. The security situation is better, (and when I say the security situation, I just meet the host community/refugee crisis of last week), though I wouldn’t say it’s resolved exactly. The market has picked back up and there are no gunshots or people running. But there hasn’t been local leaders wielding loudspeakers calling on refugees to come back to jobs and schools outside the camps without fear, so the secondary school next to us still has no students and the hospital (and several clinics) are severely short of staff who are afraid to return to work just yet. I am wondering if staff shortages has affected the UN food distribution this month too because, for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened yet and people are hungry. And now that the rains have started people’s houses are struggling and there is a huge need for tarps. But you can’t find a single tarp in this whole county. Our guard has taken too sewing old cement bags together as makeshift tarps to patch up his grass roof and as I watch him cheerfully quilting together the grey bags I oscillate from feeling so delighted by his ingenuity to feeling vaguely saddened by it.

But because we live in a local village just outside the camp, our neighbors are moving freely and thankfully, our refugee friends and employees have felt safe enough coming to the compound too. There still seems to be more livestock than normal in the bright green fields surrounding our house, sent here for safe keeping from homesteads closer to areas of tension, and this, ironically, has made for lots of fresh milk for us. Little boys come up to the back fence with dirty old soda bottles full of the most delicious sweet milk they have just coaxed from the udders of cows bellowing nearby. I buy it for pennies, trading out my empty soda bottles from the previous week for these slightly muddy ones and they trot back down the slope to their daddy’s herd thumping the hollow bottles pleasantly in hand as they go. I strain out the stray bugs and let the milk simmer in a pot before filling up a pitcher to stick in the fridge. The girls drink it by the glassful, so much happier with it than the powdered stuff I mix up for them otherwise.

On Friday Bryan and I took a walk through the rolling greenness beyond our house in honor of our ten years together. A sweet friend offered to watch the girls for an hour (and then brought supper along with her!) so Bryan and I strolled off around four in the afternoon without a single daughter with us in what I think may literally be the first time we have been without kids in four months. This first surge of rain has flushed the world green in a way that is almost laughable. Sometimes the world outside my kitchen window looks more like a golf course gone wild then the outskirts of a North African refugee camp. But the grass is still young and innocent, not the wild tall stuff that will swallow us alive here in a few months. So we walked down the black path towards the river watching it curve and dip ahead of us in that beckoning way that makes you just want to take off running. But we didn’t run. We just walked, not even holding hands out of respect the occasional old farmer we would pass with his tools and weapons or woman in a bright tobe with a head stacked with firewood. But it was such a beautiful walk. We didn’t make it all the way to the river but eventually found a shady spot overlooking a small valley and sat in the shade watching the breeze while picking stray ants off of each other’s arms and talking about the last decade. The hour went quickly and when we stood to go I received what may legitimately be one of the greatest small shocks of my life as your crazy brother-in-law got down on one knee, asked me if I would marry him all over again and pulled a beautiful tanzanite ring out of his pocket, right there smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. But of course I shouldn’t have been surprised. He is an endless romantic. And my answer to his question is more resolute than it has ever been before.

On Sunday we ended up walking to church in the camp. Well, strictly speaking we mostly just walked back. The ATV battery has been giving us trouble so we are bipedal creatures once again but on the way in the Faders dropped us off at the turn off by the airstrip and we ran into good friends shuffling past on a donkey cart shortly thereafter who swung our girls up into their laps as they rolled past shouting out whose house nearby we could find them at when we caught up. After church we all gathered back at that friend’s house for coffee and conversation, the men in chairs under a tarp covering, us women on rope beds under the thorny shade of a lalob tree. Annabelle and Mikat ran around with a few other kids, practicing their Arabic, gathering up treasures of sticks, seeds and broken pieces of plastic while Sabrine bounced drowsily from one pair of little girls’ arms to another.

People love that she is named after them – patience, endurance, longsuffering – and they affectionately call her “Sabrine bita laijeen” or “Sabrine of the refugees” (which in actuality is much more endearing than its translation sounds, at least to me). But she has another name too that more and more people are calling her – Tinn Daa. The chief’s old mother, who died years ago but is apparently well remembered, was named Daa and Tinn just means old lady. So in that Africa mix of blessing, humor, irony and mysticism, Sabrine has been endowed with the name of an old loved lady who has passed on. I don’t understand it completely, but I love it when toothless old ladies bounce her and chant “Tinn Daa, Tinn Daa, Tinn Daa!” as though teasing an old friend. 

Somewhere well into hour two of our conversation on Sunday, while ladies were pounding the second batch of roasted coffee beans, Sabrine was sound asleep on the rope bed, and conversation had drifted from Arabic deep enough into their mother tongue that my tired brain was getting a bit drowsy itself, we heard several bombs falls clearly in the distance. Leila, who has most recently been back home, bolted upright within a fraction of a second that my ears registered the sound as though she was about to dive into the nearest foxhole. Everyone else just stopped what they were doing – pestles raised midair, breasts held at an infant’s lips, hair clutched in mid-braid – and then slowly, with each consecutive echo in our chest cavity, began pointing in the general direction of villages where they had probably fallen. We haven’t heard any in almost a month. There were nine on Sunday. 

There was a time when hearing bombs in the distance, I am ashamed to admit, actually left excitement trickling down my spine. And I wouldn’t have lasted a year in these countries if this lifestyle didn’t feed a hungry little adrenaline monster inside of me, so I am thankful God uses all parts of us. But every explosion I hear in the distance these days leaves me feeling less comfortable for longer periods of time and it’s actually hard to explain why. That sound silly I know – their bombs for crying out loud, but believe it or not, it’s a great mystery to me. Am I afraid those bombs will ever directly affect me or my children? No. Do those bombs result in the mass casualty of hundreds of people? Actually, no. (Apparently at least some of those on Sunday fell in fields ready for planting and killed no one). So why do they leave me feeling nauseated all afternoon? Why do they make me feel like gathering up all my girls into the house and spending the afternoon coloring in Disney princess coloring books? Why do they make me cry? The answer is both so obvious and so terribly complex to me. I guess it’s just what they represent. The evil of humanity. The fear of children. The absolute fragility of this life, whether you are living near bombs or thousands of miles away from them.

A man named Isaac had just come back from his home country the day before on the Sunday we heard those bombs and was drinking coffee with Bryan when we heard them. Bryan said he was calm as he listened to them. It’s good to drink coffee, he said. Back home we don’t drink much coffee because the antanovs might see the fires and target them. And coffee takes a while to make, doesn’t it? But the best times, those are right after the planes have passed. The bombs have fallen and we come out of our holes and start our fires. The planes have passed for the day. We roast some beans and make some coffee. And then we drink it. Those are good moments.

So maybe that is what I should start thinking about on those days I stand in my doorway and crane my ears to the Northeast and listen to a far-away destruction while my oblivious children keep playing on their tire swing. Instead of dwelling on the women somewhere in the distance trembling in holes with their toddlers, imagining the fear and the anger and the pain, instead I should think about the coffee. About the hiss of a match, the breath of coals beginning to glow, the rippled pulse of tossed beans and the gurgle of boiling water inside a clay pot. And that first rich slurp from a tiny porcelain cup. I should think about that. And I should focus my thoughts there not of course because the other isn’t true, but because it isn’t the only true thing. And sometimes one truth without the other can make you crazy.

Sabrine bita laijeen. I need to remember why I named her that.

I should go start the charcoal for supper. It’s nice and windy this afternoon so it will be easy to get going today. Keep thinking about a visit later this year and talk to your boy about it. I broke down and friend requested him the other day on Facebook. Hope that’s ok. I figured since there was a picture of you two holding a painting with the word “love” on it floating around in public I should stop Facebook creeping on him (don’t tell him I admitted to that) and actually make steps towards getting to know him. Bring him over to meet us! Don’t worry, Bryan’s totally joking when he talks about having his rebel friends take him for excursions into the bush as they ask questions about his intentions towards “Ibrahim Hassan’s” baby sister-in-law.

Love you more than I can say and missing you more than usual.

Love,

Ba    

          

Sand Pits

Dear Lydia,

I just glanced down at my fingernails as I started typing and saw they were black and green. That’s the story of my life these days – cooking with charcoal and finger painting with preschoolers.

It is still hot. Every week or two we will have a storm roll in that brings a day of relief, cooler nights miraculously devoid of bugs. But a couple days later and the sky is white hot and heavy again and every six legged creature on God’s green earth has proliferated in warm soggy patches of dirt and scattered to the corners of my house. Wolf spiders, camel spiders, moths, beetles, scorpions, and something light and fast that scurried the side of my face and length of my arm one night in the dark under our net never to be found again.

But there are still only a few mosquitos and not a single snake. I think I would take a scorpion every day of the week for no snakes.

Speaking of vermin, we had our first mango worm incident this week. I knew this day was coming but I still felt unprepared. Annabelle had a red bump on her little bottom that I was certain was the beginning of a boil. We were watching it closely and doctoring it, but without going into too great of detail, it wasn’t responding the way my extensive experience with boils made me think it should. And it kept getting bigger. The other night after her bath we pulled out the head lamp and took a closer look. Let me just pause right here and say, before we moved overseas we took that basic health care course and even though we didn’t have kids at the time, Bryan and I divvied up all the basic stuff. I took vomit and diarrhea. He took blood and bones. We’ve shared all the basic scraped knees and ice packs on head bumps. But he pricks fingers for malaria tests and I do lots of sideline cheering.  He’s replaced all the dislocated elbows. I’ve mopped up the upchuck. And for ten years we have stuck to this code quite happily. But we never made a call on worms. It was just this disgusting hypothetical we decided to ignore. But thank goodness I was nursing Sabrine at the moment and Bryan rose to the occasion, because as soon as he started squeezing Annabelle’s poor little derrière, out popped a white wiggly maggot. It was one of the most horrifically gratifying moments of my life.

So the moral of the story is, keep an eye on all those itchy red bumps Josh will inevitably get when you get here later this month. You never know what family entertainment might arise from it.

Later this month?! Can you believe I am even typing those words? Does the thought of coming back to visit for a month sound as wonderful, crazy, terrifying, delightful and amazing to you as it does to me? How are you feeling? How can you even begin to answer that question?

I am finding myself so torn about how in the world to help prepare you for this trip back. On minute I am reminiscing on how gracefully you lived in a mud hut with a toddler on a construction site and I think about how coming back to internet, a solar fridge and a tap stand with running water actually on the compound will seem amazing! But the next minute I am muttering under my breath as I strain all the flickering mosquito larvae out of my baby’s bath water before dragging it through the house in a bucket and I think about you pregnant and sweet Rebekah who has never been here before and my heart skips a beat. Can you believe it has been two and a half years? That makes me want to cry for some many different reasons.

Even though he probably doesn’t remember having lived here before, I do think Josh is going to have so much fun being back. There are chickens and cats and goats and mud and trees and swings. Last week the girls and I took a walk in the evening and found the Fader boys playing in a series of pits and dunes where local men harvest sand for construction behind our house. Most were only a gentle slope of five feet or so and the girls had fun running on the paths between them or sliding on the sand. At one point Mikat asked if she could go to where Isaac and Evan were playing with some other boys and I said yes. She disappeared over a ridge but I could still hear her laughing with the other kids. Five minutes later I decided to go check on her and as I got closer noticed her little three year old voice sounded further away than it should and kind of muffled. I crested the ridge only to discover that this particular pit was over 15 feet deep and the helpful boys had assisted her in picking her way down to the bottom where she was delightedly rolling in the cold sand (and we wonder where our kids get the worms…). I was carrying Sabrine so couldn’t join in the fun (or help anyone get back out) but it was a sweet thing to witness the exhilaration of childhood and the joys of dirt and holes and other kids. Josh is going to have a lot of fun with my girls and you and I are going to have a lot of fun watching them together.

That being said, it has been a kinda weird last ten days or so. Bryan, Annabelle and I all took turns being sick last week with a couple of nameless viruses that cycled through the family. We were all laid up in bed miserable for at least a day each. But praise God the two little ones were fine and whatever it was passed. I strode into this week shaking off the bugs of last week, energized and ready to jump into life full swing. I had my homeschooling projects all laid out, plans to start into J language lessons, a meeting with the head woman all lined up to prepare for a women’s literacy program. I was ready to go.

But instead, Tuesday evening wound to a close with women and children streaming past the house in a slow trot towards the river as gunfire began popping in the distance. Apparently tension at a soccer match spilled over into widespread violence and before you know it refugees and the host community were at each other’s throats again. So instead of language lessons and literacy classes we have spent the last few days holed up on the compound watching the world outside sway between the confused chaos of hundreds of people casually fleeing for safety with everything they can carry, to the unnerving hovering of complete silence.

It is Friday now and things are still quiet tense. I haven’t put anything up on Facebook about all of this yet. You never want to freak people out. What a relief our team Whatsapp group has been! It is such an outlet to me to be able to text all of you guys currently scattered around the globe with hour by hour updates, typing with one thumb while stirring a pot of beans and bouncing a baby in her chair with my left foot as I crane to see the choppy world swirl outside my kitchen window – Keep praying guys. Lots of women and children running past the house. Gunfire from the direction of the market – and to know that the response is exactly what I need in that moment. Everyone has lived through it themselves so no one panics – Wow. We believe you when you say you guys are fine but keep us posted. And everyone has lived through it before so they know what to ask – It is so hard to watch people run. I’m so sorry. How are your girls?

So though our lives remain directly unaffected, it has been an odd and unnerving week of staying close to the house and eating lots of things out of cans. Leila and Ngo haven’t come to work and even though I have been trying to stay on top of dishes and hand washing a few necessities, the house is a little on the gross side. But routine becomes our biggest ally in seasons like this, so Bryan feeds me the latest string of rumors he has collected from neighbors in cheerful Arabic while I keep flashing alphabet cards up for the girls in our little classroom. And tonight is family pizza and movie night so I will get pizza dough rising and coals burning here fairly soon and then we will watch Tangled or The Incredibles or something while we eat from our precious stash of hoarded cheese all snuggled up on the couch shooing flies away and exchanging glances every time we wonder if that was a pop we heard in the distance.

This is going to be a hard trip back for you guys. I hope you know that. And this is going to be an amazing trip back for you guys. I hope you know that I know that too. Every time I start worrying that I haven’t helped remind you of a million different things about life here, or on the other hand, that I’ve said to much in a disproportionate manner, I remember who I am talking to. You, perhaps more than most other women in the world I suspect, are well versed in the art of savoring routine when life becomes difficult. You know a thing or two about riding out a season of bad news and walking through the door of one day on into the next without knowing what will be dramatically different and what will be exactly the same. You know about hard. And you know about beautiful. You know this place is both.

Speaking of beautiful, happy, happy second birthday to Miss Rebekah! We will give her our birthday hugs in person here in a few weeks. Until then kiss her (and Josh) for us. And don’t forget to bring a dose of Albendazole.

Love,

Libby 

Liver and Pudding

Playing dress-up like mama...

Dear Debo,

Well this is ironic.

I started this letter planning to tell you all about how amazing my baby is. After your last message that had that passing reference to your next project being working on making my kids some cousins, I wanted to sweeten that deal by telling you all about my precious Sabrine. How yesterday I plopped her down in the frame of the backdoor where there is a nice breeze and she sat there for 45 minutes cooing in wonder up at the pattern of dark green leaves dappled against the grey sky while I mixed and kneaded an entire batch of bread. She is so relaxed and content to just be that sometimes I actually forget where I have left her in her little chair – out under the clothes line where I had been taking down laundry, or on the back porch where I was trying to get charcoal lit. Or how she will bounce from hand to hand when people come to greet her, bestowing gorgeous leaky wet grins at people regardless of what language in which they are baby talking to her (Angale, leke bati!). Or how at midnight, when she calls out from her pack n-play propped up next to her sisters’ bunkbeds, Bryan groggily fumbles between all the mosquito nets back and forth and nestles her into the warm space between us, and she instinctively finds my breast in the pitch dark and cuddles into me as comfortably as an extension of my own body and we all fall deeply back asleep to the rhythmic gurgle of her tiny swallows. These are some of the most precious moments of my life. Things I will cherish until the day I die.

But, those moments are not this moment.

In this current moment Sabrine is refusing to sleep in the heat of the afternoon although she hasn’t slept all morning and both of her sisters have passed out. She can’t sleep without being swaddled but once swaddled she is miserable in her sweat and every time she finally dozes off an accursed fly will land on her left nostril and she wakes up enraged all over again. So here we are, me passive aggressively rocking her little chair with my left foot while humming an exhausted lullaby and trying to type while she resentfully frowny sleeps into the blast of a fan sucking away at the solar batteries. Motherhood someday may not look exactly like this for you, but there will be days it will be just as maddening.

Otherwise though, your newest niece is pretty amazing. She is happiest in the mornings which works out well since that is when I homeschool her big sisters. We have taken to doing school outside most days this week because the rains have been teasing us, and it is cooler outside under the thick grey blanket of clouds than inside under the tin roof that pops and growls as it heats up. I sit on a rope stool while Annabelle and Mikat sit at their little plastic tables and chairs and we read Little House in The Big Woods and color in matching pairs of animal mamas and their babies and trace jittery letters and numbers and glue absurd amounts of construction paper together to make all manner of things. I know your teaching forte is kids older than mine, but I can’t help but think of what an amazing job you would do with these little preschoolers. Between growing up in a world not so different from theirs and all your boundless creative energy, you would have so much fun with them, and they with you.

As much as they grieved leaving behind their sweet little school of five months in Kampala, I think they are genuinely happy here, maybe even happier. This week they have seemed a little bit high on the freedom that comes with life out in the middle of nowhere. They are rediscovering all the joys of cooking up feasts in the sand pile, climbing dangerously up the tall mast of a Neem tree, painting pocketfuls of rocks outlandish colors and then throwing the leftover painted water at white chickens, finding dead chameleons, experimenting with which plants on the compound are edible (and the nuances differences between “edible” and “desirable”).

Last Saturday we went out to one of the further camps in the county. I was a bit dubious about the whole thing considering we were leaving at one in the afternoon, interrupting naps to venture out at the hottest part of the day. The girls managed alright through the community meeting we attended although they were a bit bored by the grownups’ long conversations under a rakoba outside of the camp market with only a handful of curious kids hanging nearby. But with some dried pineapple and a nearby ant hill they managed alright. But we had been invited to a friend’s house afterwards and I confess to an impeding sense of doom as we made our way through close tarp walls and into a clustering of huts inside a compound at 4:30 in the afternoon, all three of my girls wilting by the minute.

We stepped inside though and immediately realized we had been invited to a wedding. Hundreds of women in exquisite tobes were daubed like garish paint across the earth toned canvas, making me feel shabby in the cotton tobe I had thrown on as we left the house, old and cool over a baby. Huge trays heavy with food were weaving overhead between the thick clusters of people, each making their way towards men in turbans sitting on mats or old women behind mud walls. Conversation hummed around us while little children dressed like miniature versions of the parents scattered between all the legs and baby goats butted heads in a rusty wheelbarrow. We were ushered to rope beds covered in velvety gold cloth and offered water in blue glass goblets, all delightfully opulent against the dirt and tarps and extravagant poverty.

We were greeted by a stream of happy people, including the groom and his brother, each almost playfully somber and wielding long swords braided out of grass and flowers. Eventually we Khawajias (Bryan, Eli and the boys were somewhere out of sight with the men) were escorted to a quieter yard where the throngs of children were forbidden to follow and we were served rice and meat, bread and rice pudding a rather alarming shade of yellow. The daughters I thought would be melting were instead mesmerized by the whole affair and gobbled up a whole plate of food themselves. In fact, to my embarrassment and pride, they couldn’t get enough of the fried pieces of liver and loudly asked for more in a tone that transcended all language barriers. Our gracious hosts (and a seemingly thankful Bethany) shoveled more liver onto my little girls’ plate which they ate until they could eat no more.   

Before we left in order to get home before dark, we were invited to watch the very beginning of some traditional dancing. An old man in a white jalabiya and vest was plucking on the biggest robaba I have ever seen with a leather cover so worn it had to have been carried out from their country when the war started. Old women were ringed around him and shuffled their feet while sing-chanting kicking up curling clouds of dust into the evening air. How desperately I wish I could have gotten a picture of my Annabelle, Hana, in her bright blue headscarf pushed to the inner circle and concentrating on the rhythm of the feet around her, stamping her bright pink crocks in imitation. But I didn’t, because my phone was somewhere in my bag which was somewhere with a girl who had kindly offered to carry it somewhere back to the car for me and who had disappeared somewhere into the crowd. Furthermore, a bawling Sabrine who had been passed from hand to hand for the past hour was now offered back into my arms smelling like an Arabian bride from the homemade perfume that had been dabbed gently onto her forehead and the sweaty rolls of her arms.

Drill Sergeant Mary Katherine and her foot soldiers

We fell into bed late that night, too full of rice pudding and liver to even eat supper. The girls did eventually start to melt into emotional trainwrecks, but miraculously, that wasn’t until they were already bathed and in jammies and required little more attention that simply turning out the light. I fell asleep shortly after, pretty tired myself, but so thankful for these troopers. In the same way that I don’t mind that all their playmates are boys and that they spend much of their time in trees or playing army, because at the end of the day, for better or worse, they are obsessed with the color pink, refuse to wear anything but dresses and fight over the “Elsa and Anna” plate at supper time, I similarly am grateful for every moment they spend in places like traditional weddings in a North African refugee camp eating liver and petting baby goats. They are American little girls and at the end of the day, they are still going to grow up with occasional trip to Disney World, too much stuff at Christmas and an opportunity to go to college. When we first got back I had a couple of heart pangs when they would cry for their school in Uganda, questioning again all the things they are missing out on. But this week I feel better about it all. That image of Annabelle gazing up at the old man playing the robaba as she tried to dance with the women around him is emblazoned in my mind. They are missing out on some things. But they are cashing in on a whole lot more.

Gotta run. Sabriney Beanie is waking up with a big old grin ready to hang out. Love you bunches. Get to work on those cousins! Love you,

Liz       

Coming Back

Dear Mama,

The thought that only three months ago – almost to the day – you were holding my week old baby in Uganda is hardly conceivable to me. That already seems like a life time ago, doesn’t it? Life rolled on without you fixing our breakfast or walking girls to school or taking laundry off the line for three whole months and we got used to being a family of five, to less sleep and the constant bobbing about with a baby in our arms. It was a pleasant, healing season. And now, I am writing you from my North African living room, feeling even further away from you than I did in Uganda. The big girls are napping (Mary Katherine is sacked out spread eagle on her bottom bunk, Annabelle is quietly sounding out words from the stacks of books spread around her on the top bunk). Sabrine is semi-swaddled on my bed, soaking up the fan diligently pushing the muggy afternoon off of her.

We flew in a week ago. The Ugandan government had taken Al Shabaab’s threat to bomb the Entebbe airport seriously enough that soldiers were stationed at every corner and jets went screaming protectively over the city at all hours (because that made us all feel safer, of course….). So we decided that flying out of Entebbe the day of the threatened attack as we had scheduled wasn’t our most prudent move ever, and instead drove nine hours to a border town. We slept there one night and woke up early the next morning and all climbed sleepily into the plane full of little girls’ bikes, blackboards for literacy classes, brooms, buckets and six months’ worth of margarine, canned fruit and size 4 diapers and set out for home.

It never fails to amuse me by how nonchalant our girls are on trips like this. The fact that they can be bored by a ride on a bush plane that refuels next to UN helicopters kicking up dust storms or that soars over rebel territory where suspicious planes are sitting on abandoned airstrips in the middle of the bush is ridiculous. But it’s all no big deal to them and so they just nap or scratch away in activity books and ask me 50 million times if we are there yet while clouds graze the windows they press their noses against. Sabrine did great too. Really as long as she is somehow touching me she is pretty much game for whatever.

As we banked over the camp and glided down towards our airstrip I saw Bethany and the boys standing on a huge dirt mound waving up at us and it made me cry happy tears. A few minutes later we lurched to a stop and they drove their truck in past the peacekeepers and prepared to load all our stuff into it. Even before we could pry ourselves loose from our shoulder harnesses, arms were reaching up into the plane to take Sabrine and she bobbed sleepily from arm to arm in the plane-shaped shade.

This has been our easiest homecoming yet. People were in and out of our house while we were gone so the rats were never able to completly reclaim lost territory in our ongoing border wars. And the blessed Faders did more than I will probably ever even know to clean the house so the asthma attacks and general gag-factor has been significantly reduced.

Still, coming back is always hard. I have felt a bit paralyzed trying to remember how I ever created variety out of lentils and rice, and hauling water for three little bucket baths before everyone gets carried away by mosquitoes at night suddenly feels overwhelming. I forgot that you can’t leave out sticky rat traps during the day because they get filled up with lizards which only have about a 50/50 chance of surviving the destickification process, and the pretty purple quilt I brought up for Sabrine’s pack n’ play isn’t practical because I can’t see scorpions hiding in the pattern.  

But all that hard stuff fades in a week or so. I tell myself I am not allowed to panic about that kind of stuff until a week in, and at six days later I am already feeling mostly over it. My body is remembering the rhythms of life here.

But I let my guard down about the other things.

As we were unloading boxes of our stuff into the house the day we got back I heard three consecutive tremors in the distance. The far-away rumble that you really want to be thunder but know isn’t because its coming from the wrong direction and is too precisely defined.

I forgot what it feels like to hear bombs.

Apparently the bombing across the border has been intense lately and lots of people have stories about it. For reasons I suspect I will never really understand, many refugees still continue to travel home for months at a time. Sometimes it is to check on an elderly parent who stayed behind. Sometimes to give birth to a baby so it will be “at home”. Sometimes it’s to check on a grove of mango trees that are bearing fruit. Sometimes I think it is just to connect with one’s roots, to remember where they come from. But that this would be happening when the Antanovs are coming night and day is beyond me. That people would walk for two days through the bush to a place with no medicine if you get sick, where you can’t start a fire at night because the planes will target it, amazes me. But people do.

Last week Jafar, an old man who works as a guard on our compound, had a nephew who was hit by a bomb. Two actually. He was tending Jafar’s herd of cows that stayed behind when the plane came. He knew what to do and laid down in a low place. The explosion always goes up and outward. If you are on the ground you have a very good chance of escaping unscathed. Everyone knows this. Even me. But he was unlucky. The bomb fell so close that it hit his arm, splitting his hand and wrist. In pain and terror the boy got up and ran, only to be hit a second time. This time his lower leg was severed.

The kid miraculously survived and was carried out to the hospital a few kilometers down the road from us. So soon after we got back Jaraf asked for some of his salary so that he could go care for his relative.

The one who was in a bush hospital.

Because he got hit by a bomb.

Twice.

That’s the kind of stuff that has been hard this week. I forgot what it feels like to live in community with people who directly experience war.

The first couple of nights we were here I slept lightly, not because I was anxious but more because I was excited. The nights are deep and dark and full of the liquid swoop and chirp of a thousand different living invisible things. It’s beautiful. But now Bryan and I can sleep for nine hours and still wake up feeling like we have been hit by a truck. Our bodies are remembering how to live here. Our hearts are still catching up, I think.

But I don’t mean to make it out that we have been sad or depressed. Sobered is a better word for it. Sometimes I am tempted to wonder if I overly dramatize life here, making both the good and the bad so much more extreme than they actually are. But as soon I get back I laugh at that fear. I am reminded that, more often than not, it’s actually quite hard to dramatize it enough.

Which is why you should know how beautiful so many of the moments are. I will write more soon and tell you about our first trip back to the camp, receiving many visitors thrilled to meet the new baby named after them, the girls first week running around with the boys and getting back into homeschooling, how fabulously I can cook with charcoal! : ) But for now I leave you with this image to savor knowing your babies are all well and exactly where they long to be. Many nights Annabelle, the more jumpy of our girls (aren’t we firstborns always?) likes to crawl in bed with Mikat. Sabrine, my precious, easy baby, falls asleep in her pack n-play in the room with them. Their bedroom door is open and their mosquito nets blow lightly in the rainy season breeze. Bryan and I sit on our comfortable couch drinking hot rooibos tea while he plays Papa’s old guitar and we sing the girls to sleep. This is most nights. And it is always precious.

I love you so much. I will write more soon.

Love,

Elizabeth