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