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