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.

Girls' Trip

Dear Toto,

Sorry, now even I can’t seem to call you anything else. Ever since Bryan married into this family trying his best to impress us all with his fledgling Swahili you have been Toto. Even now to the girls you are just “Toto” (unless Annabelle is feeling especially proper and decides to educate the rest of us: “But her real name is AAA-bigail.”) They occasionally search their little arms for their BCG scars from birth trying to remember who has one on the forearm like Aunt Debo and who has one on their shoulder like Aunt Toto. It is a point of great pride for them to have something that I don’t that makes them so much like their awesome aunts.

How I wished for you last week! Since the UN flights don’t take kids we were looking for a flight out to Uganda for the girls and I for our branch meeting at the end of this month. The best we could find was a full week earlier than we hoped so I left a few days ahead with the girls and Bryan stayed behind to work to the end and catch a UN flight out. A week in Uganda without Bryan is really not a big deal, especially now that we have our own place and teammates two doors down. It is just the required overnight in the ever-lovely city of J that made it less appealing.

Oh, the blessed capital of this troubled country. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I let you fly away from me that summer and spend the weekend there before you flew back to the States! Almost every day I read new reports of more robberies, kidnappings, assaults and who-knows-what-else there and I think of how Mama and Papa would have killed me if anything had happened to you!

But as much as I was not looking forward to that part of the trip, I am so thankful for a husband who undermines his own credibility by somehow finding me endlessly capable. Remember that as you sift through suitors in this season of life. Marry someone who thinks you are perfectly capable of just about anything, whether or not you actually are. Send your wife to spend the night in the capital city of a war-torn country…six months pregnant…with two little kids? Shoot, why not? he says. She’s all over that. And in moments like that, though you may very well be completely freaking out inside, that’s the kind of man you want to spend the rest of your life with, (especially if he also gets up in the middle of the night to bludgeon rats that were keeping only you awake).

So late last week the girls and I were the only passengers aboard a Cessna Caravan that had dropped off a bunch of supplies for a medical organization as we taxied down the dirt airstrip and waved goodbye to a shrinking Bryan waving back up at us as he stood on the ground next to the ATV. The flying time was relatively easy. It was a little over two hours but I was armed with snacks and books and the girls even slept for a while. We landed on tarmac and puttered our way between massive UN aircraft and military helicopters to find a parking space. The charter organization’s Land Cruiser gave us a ride to the terminal (a word that sounds so misleading in this case. Read: “Hot, crowded, exceptionally dirty cement structure that smells like urine) where the bored looking soldier flipped casually through our passports and waved us on through.

Outside was, as expected, chaos.

I drug our wheeled suitcase roughly over dirt holding Annabelle’s sweaty hand who held Mikat’s sweaty hand who held her crotch because our potty break in the ditch back at the edge of our dirt airstrip was too long ago by now, and together in a line we weaseled our way through tall women in kilometers of brightly colored fabric from head to toe, flashy politicians in silky three piece suits, old men with wooden beads, walking sticks and gnarled teeth, teenaged boys selling phone credit and cigarettes, teenaged girls in denim mini-skirts and even more teenaged girls with elaborate facial scarring and traditional cloth tied elegantly over one shoulder, every one of whom was talking, yelling, or laughing exceptionally loudly. Mikat nearly took out a one legged soldier talking on his cell phone in the middle of the walkway, but we eventually ducked into a small space of unoccupied shade and waited for the driver for Christmas Hotel.

Oh yes, if you have not stayed at Christmas than you have not experienced the best that J has to offer! It is a small two story building with an inner courtyard made entirely of uneven tile run by a bunch of Eritrean guys who seem to have a median age of about 22. Nonetheless they offer free airport pickups in their blessedly air-conditioned Pajero and Ethiopian coffee for breakfast so you can’t complain about a whole lots else. Fortunately, the rooms have AC and are sealed up nice and mosquito proof with one small closed window. Unfortunately, there is currently a fuel crisis in the country so the generator for electricity only runs between 10pm and 2am. So we checked into our room and I promptly sprawled my beached whale of a self on the lovely floral bedspread in a sweaty stupor while the girls were enthralled with “the computer on the wall” and watched NatGeo Wild in Arabic.

The bush pilot who had flown us out invited us over for supper with his family that night so we rested for a while and then made our way over to their compound where lots of little pilots’ kids were playing on a trampoline. They graciously shared from their stock of cheese from Nairobi to make us all homemade pizza and we even had pumpkin pie leftover from Canadian Thanksgiving. (I would seriously be cool with you marrying bush pilot. They are my heroes.) We had a pleasant evening, but taking serious the pilot’s wife’s caution that we should get back before dark (“I don’t want to scare you but someone was shot a few weeks ago right outside the gate…”) we headed back to Christmas for an early night.

Being the hot, sweaty, pregnant mess that I was by this point I was quite annoyed to discover that the shower pressure in our festive accommodations was about equivalent to Mikat spitting after eating baobab fruit. But we were resourceful and all three of us had quite the little party bathing in the butt-washer hose hanging from the side of the toilet (is it called a bidet?) and while I prayed we weren’t all going to end up with cholera, Annabelle announced in a fit of giggles, “This is the best shower ever!” They never fail to give me perspective.

Ten pm to two am were a few moderately comfortable hours of semi-consciousness while the babies sweated happily beside me, thrilled to be sleeping with mama in one big bed. By eight the next morning though we had wandered out to the street to an outdoor tea shop where I had sweet milky ginger coffee and the girls drank red hibiscus tea while devouring fried zalabia. We stopped for a bottle of water at a little shop and not one but two kind strangers gave the girls chocolates, just because. Our Eritrean friends gave us a ride back to the airport in the coolest 20 minutes of the whole trip and by mid-morning we were back in the throng of the airport.

I let the girls make royal messes of themselves with the chocolate lollipops while I feverishly filled out immigration forms for all of us and a sea of humanity jostled around us. An eight foot soldier sauntered up at one point demanding in broken English that the girls give him their candy, the cliché way so many adults tease kids here, and while Mikat screamed bloody murder Annabelle struck up a conversation and started showing off by counting in Arabic. He was so impressed that he guffawed and gave her a big fist bump before pointing us towards the security line.

You can imagine what a sight a visibly pregnant lady and two little Khawaja kids are in that context and we got a lot of curious looks from the swarms of soldiers, humanitarian workers and journalists, equal mixes of admiration (“Wow, you’re here with your kids!”) and disparagement (“What in the world are you doing here with your kids!”).

One time last year I muttered ungraciously under my breath to Bryan while we waited in line behind people in a shouting match, “This airport is one of Dante’s inner circles of hell.” Not two minutes later an official escorted us to the front of the line past the pandemonium and moments after that a shopkeeper gave the girls a bag of chips as a gift, once again, just because. Since then I have learned to sometimes withhold my judgements about the positionings of heaven and hell. Or at least, in which of the two the angels on this earth choose to reside.

This trip was no different. When it was all said and done we probably by-passed an hour and a half of waiting as people ushered us to the front of lines and the girls collectively accumulated two chocolate bon-bons, two lollipops and four Kit-Kat bars before we finally collapsed into our Kampala house, exhausted and cresting down a massive sugar high but safe and together and with all of our stuff.

I am so proud of you, Bryan said on the phone that night, everything went just fine! And it did. But I didn’t tell him I ate a gallon of ice-cream and slept for nine hours straight afterwards. And it’s true, it all turned out just fine.

But as I contemplate doing this next year with a new baby, I need to talk to you about your plans post nursing school… Any chance you can come visit for the summer? Or for the year? Or longer…? I am sure there are some awesome single bush pilots out here. Just saying.

We need our Aunt Toto.

Praying your OB rotations are going well. Wish Baby and I were your patients! Much, much love to you.

Ba

  

Finally on the plane to Uganda....started out with stickers 

Moved on to our educational reading...

Aaaand...we crashed.

Broken Down

Dear Lydia,

On Sunday we decided to go as a whole family out to K, the furthest of the camps. We had been pushing hard through the week, especially Bryan, but with a quick trip out planned for the end of this month for branch meetings and then only a short term back in before we are out for several months to wait on baby girl, we have been feeling a constant low-grade anxiety to get as much done as we can while we can. So on Sunday morning I packed up a bag with everything we would need for an all-day adventure with two little ones (and, whom I kidding, one pregnant one) – water, satellite phone, snacks as unobtrusive as possible (dried mango and market biscuits), and a few activities equally low-key (we went with small stickers, a notebook and six crayons). 

Sundays in the camp we live in are actually pretty easy for the girls these days. Remember when we would walk all the way out on Sundays carrying all three kids? With the ATV up and running and the kids being older Sundays are much less draining than they used to be when you were still here. The local kids are completely familiar with them so they aren’t mobbed anymore, and 9 times out of 10 my girls are more interested in the few kernels of roasted sorghum someone kindly offers for them to gnaw on, or simple sticks and dirt and bugs to play with, so I don’t have to stress about pulling out all the flashy Khawaja stuff to entertain my kids who have a harder time than their peers sitting still on a log for three hours. But out in K it’s a different story. Most of the kids there have seen very few Khawajas and maybe no Khawaja kids ever so there is quite a bit more swarming to see what the white-haired little people are doing with those colorful sticky pieces of paper.

Nonetheless we were all excited about the day and in good spirits as we took off down the red murram road out of town that morning. The girls were hiding under pink scarves buckled between Bryan and I in the front; I had on my pink tobe and he had on his black and white checkered shawl wrapped around his face like an Arab truck driver hauling a load of cotton candy. In the back two local friends, an American working with SP and a random German guy we were hosting for the week (story for another day) were all standing braced against the wind. On these million dollar UN roads we can fly in that Polaris, and with no glass to shield us, it honestly felt a bit like zooming down a wide red river in a motorboat somewhere in a dusty Amazonian alternate reality or something. I got hit several times smack in the face by enormous bugs as we whined down the road, thankfully none of them were cognizant enough to sting me.

As we passed through town and then on out in the ghaba, I noticed more soldiers on the road than I expected. Most were heavily armed but alone or in pairs and on foot, so I didn’t think too much about it. I am on that road so rarely these days it’s hard to know what is normal anymore. And even though Bryan is out there much more often and has a better sense of what to expect, the ATV at 40 miles an hour is not conducive to conversation of any sort.

About 45 minutes into our trip there was a loud bang followed by a hideous flapping sound inside the engine and the smell of something burning. The burning smell sent me into immediate flashbacks to the time my skirt caught on fire riding around in that thing, (have I ever told you that story? Remind me to, it’s a good one) but once we eased off the side of the road and stopped we realized that what was burning was not my clothing but one of the belts to the vehicle. We were completely broken down.

The girls immediately wandered off to climb on an ant hill while I settled into the thin shade of a scrub brush and the guys messed around with the ATV. I was just settling myself into the idea of a very long hot walk when a Land Cruiser pulled out of the only compound in sight, an NGO clinic, and stopped to see if we needed help. Within ten minutes, miraculously, the guys had together pushed the ATV easily into the clinic compound (we just happened to die on a slight decline) and we had all piled into the back of the Land Cruiser for a lift back to our side of the county.

As we settled into the bench seats in the back and I passed out dried mango to the girls, the driver shouted back to us, “It’s a good thing actually that you are headed back home. We are just hearing over the radio reports of heavy fighting in L. If they close the roads you would have been stuck out in K for the night.” At that moment I remembered the thunder I had heard that morning, faint and distant but coming from the wrong direction for rain. But at the time it hadn’t seem to register with anyone else as something troubling and we hadn’t heard news that morning of fighting so I ignored it, something I will not do again. Even as we passed back through town on the way home, lorries full of heavily armed soldiers were roaring out of town, fists raised in recognition of the local women trilling shrilly in support as their boys headed out to shoo the rebels further afield.

By the time we tumbled back out of the Land Cruiser and walked the last little way back to our house I was feeling absolutely flooded with gratitude. When the car died we were within ten kilometers of the fighting as the crow flies (though not necessarily driving closer to it, just passing it). And while I still don’t feel like we missed certain death by a hair’s breadth by any stretch of the imagination, spending the night out in K pregnant with two little ones as we wait for security to improve so we could get home would have been pretty miserable too. As it is, we broke down in maybe the single most convenient spot in an hour and a half drive’s worth of possibilities, with a secure place to leave the car until we could come back to get it and a vehicle happy to give us a lift back.

Just the other day Bethany and I were sitting on my back porch in the evening waiting for our bread to bake in the charcoal oven that we had overfilled with pans of dough. Our husbands were off retrieving the ATV (security had cleared up by then and Bryan had all the spare parts on hand) and who knows where the kids were exactly, somewhere within ear shot. And we sat and talked about what it is exactly that makes this place so hard for women like you and me and her. On one hand it may seem obvious to people from the outside – my gosh, all you talk about is rats and hearing artillery in the distance, are you really asking why it is hard? But I really am. Because I really don’t think it is those things, or not those things alone anyway. I have a bush house that is pretty basic, but it is a really comfortable house that genuinely feels like home to me. The work that I devote my mind and heart to on top of the work of raising a family is work that even on my worst days feels like my dream job. I love it. And on the days that we hear the worst rumors of terrible political turmoil, one of the things that I feel – to my utter shame and regret – is excitement. My most base instinctive self likes the adrenaline of this place.

Many, if not most days, are the happiness of feeling worn out at the end of a long day of meaningful work, listening to my girls scream with delight as my husband swings them from the neem tree as I set our supper made from scratch while my baby kicks inside my big belly and James Taylor plays softly in the background. I may be sick of hauling buckets of water or hearing people talk about where the rebels are today, but still, we're talking really good days. But other days I am leaning over the lemon bars that taste like diesel because I couldn’t get my charcoal to light so I cheated and used fuel to start it and now I am crying my pretty little head right off. Why? Not because of the ruined dessert surely. Why do I cry so much here? (And I don’t mean just since I have been pregnant…)

I don’t know the answer. Maybe the rats and rebels play into that low-grade constant anxiety and I just don’t give it nearly enough credit. But I think maybe it has something to do with that same kind of feeling I had last Sunday as we drove home and passed soldiers going to the front and civilians streaming in from outlying villages to the safety of town. It is the immense relief and gratitude of being spared a significant inconvenience right as you pass by all the people for whom those inconveniences may cost their life, if not in actually fact, than at least in a thousand other true ways. Simply living this close to suffering day in and day out, even on the days when it hardly ripples the surface of my comings and goings, is hard.

At least that is all Bethany and I came up with before our bread was finished baking. You would like her a lot. She reminds me of you in many ways. And while I will never stop missing you being in your house, her presence there is balm on a wound. I have told God that a scenario in which she leaves and yet you are not back yet is not acceptable to me in any way whatsoever, but he has only told me to take one day at a time and not worry about tomorrow today which I am begrudgingly attempting to do. I trust his goodness and holiness and wisdom in all things. I just don’t trust him one little bit not to escort us through incredibly difficult things that make us grow in some way or another. He has proved to be faithful to both of those things in my experience.

Sorry for going on and on about things that probably stir up lots of mixed emotions in you too. I need to sit and talk to you about all this. Something tells me you can speak to many sides of those emotions, feeling miraculously spared and also so deeply hurt. Thank you for letting me use our distance to process my own thoughts on this journey. I smiled all day when I saw that picture of sweet Rebekah being fitted for her stander on Facebook the other day. Was it just me reading into the photo or did she look so incredibly happy? She is so beautiful.

Kiss her and Josh for us. We are getting so excited about seeing David in just a matter of weeks now.

Much love to you my friend.

Libby

Priests, Kisses and Witchdoctors

Dear Mama,

I have thought of you a thousand times this week and wished I could blink you here. In some ways, I can’t believe you have never set foot in my home here! In other ways, given all the different circumstances it only makes sense. Some days I can hardly believe I am here. But I am hungry for you to at least be able to imagine exactly where I am sitting when I send you a Whatsapp message, what I might be hearing or smelling. For what it is worth, I am usually on the half wall of my back porch in the mild back-lit blue light in the hour or so before sunset. Usually my phone is in one hand while the other absently fans charcoal to life for something I am baking for dinner in the little oven by the back door. It glows and crackles like chalk while I type a tagline to some picture of the girls with my thumb to send to you. Sometimes I am on my dark brown couch in the living room, other times, if I am especially hot or tired, on my bed in front of the fan in my room with the door closed. But usually I am outside. That time of day, when your morning is just kicking off on the other side of the world, is so pleasant here. There is a feeling akin to relief most days as we crest the hump of noon and slip steadily towards evening and I know you are awake somewhere in the world.

I reminded myself of you this week playing hostess. We invited two of our good friends over for dinner, two Spanish Jesuit priests who are doing relief work here with refugees. Honestly, for reasons I can’t quite articulate even to myself, they are some of my favorite people in the world, even though I don’t know them all that well. They are Catalonian for one, minorities in their own right with their own language, culture, and subversive resistance movement to their name, which – clearly since I am where I am in the world – means something to me. They are barefoot for another. Always. Barefoot. I haven’t actually asked them why. I am assuming it is a vow of some sort and honestly, it is less conspicuous than you might expect. But seeing them walk around with both throngs of refugee kids, and UN officials in exactly the same state of pedicle undress, though mysterious and a little weird, just makes me happy. They are warm and funny and very honest. And, maybe more than anything, they are frightfully skinny. And the older I get the more obsessive my need to feed hungry-looking things, so our friendship works out well for all of us.

When they showed up the other night (Pau was actually sick with malaria and couldn’t make it, but Alvar came with Davide, a brand new brother from Italy only two days off the plane. He didn’t look so hungry yet,) we went out to greet them at the gate and welcome them in. I hadn’t seen Alvar since we had been back and he greeted me warmly with an embrace and two big air kisses over each cheek. He then handed us a package of cured ham, a kind of Spanish prosciutto, from what surely is a prized private stash on their compound. It tastes amazing.

And if you can brag to anyone you can brag to your mother, so you should know that I have inherited your gift for minor culinary miracles with limited resources at hand, as well as your skill in covering kitchen mishaps with gorgeous glazes and garnishes or something absurd like roses woven out of tomato skins. So when I served up a marbled chocolate cake with almond icing, Alvar was effusive in his praise, even though the icing hid the charred bits that my oven consumed and the marbling disguised the parts that against all odds would still not bake all the way through. “You won’t find a cake like this for hundreds of miles!” he told Davide, (who was incredibly polite considering his dinner last week was in Rome).

Most days I am raving about the craziness of the world in a way that makes my stomach churn. But sometimes the craziness of the world can just make my day. Who knew that the spiritual highlight of my week would be feeding chocolate cake to a skinny Catalonian? And who knew that in this refugee camp in North Africa, both my first public kisses from a man here (unless our guards are more observant than Bryan and I give them credit for), as well as the first pork I think I have ever eaten here were delivered at the hands of a barefoot Jesuit Priest.

The world is just too ridiculously wonderful.  

Other than cooking and home schooling this week I have spent the rest of my time putting the finishing touches on the J alphabet book and primer so we can get them sent off to a printer in Kampala. I have had fun testing the materials a couple times with groups in the community – once with a handful of women in a dim hut because it was raining outside, another time on mats in the splayed shade of a lalob tree that we kept rotating to follow as the sun moved across the sky. Since no one can read their language yet (one of those by-products of it having just been written down for the first time) one of the main things I am looking for in the alphabet book is that the pictures actually communicate a specific thing that can be connected with a specific sound in their alphabet. For instance, when they see the picture of the hyena do they say, “That’s a hyena!” or do they say “That’s a wild dog!”

For the most part the pictures have been great. We have access to hundreds of stock photos from a partnering organization with great artwork that is appropriate for this part of the world. And we have worked with a local “artist” to sketch a few tools and plants or whatever that make great key words that are specific to this context. But now we are sanding down those last few rough edges and I have been chewing on very specific little problems. For instance, “Y” for “Yukchan” didn’t illicit the word “fish” (although the picture looked like a perfectly good generic fish to me) but was clearly a mudfish to everyone who saw it, which doesn’t start with a letter anything like “Y”. And the picture under W for Wäl didn’t make sense to anyone because everyone knows that Wäls don’t have necks but are merely round. And as much as I suggested that “elbow” seems like a vastly preferable key word at least socio-linguistically to “witch doctor” for the letter “Ṭ”, I was outvoted.

So this week, because our local artist declined the task at hand and we have to get these files to the printer ASAP, I have been channelling my inner graphic artist that surely lies latent in me somewhere from the genes you contributed and have been trying to draw pictures of old men with feather headdresses, children hopping like frogs, and gourds with no necks to satisfy our literacy team. At one point I had a photo-copied page from a bird book on top of one of my glass baking pans balanced up against a sunny window trying to trace a picture of a knob-billed duck on my makeshift light-table and thought how thoroughly amused and proud you would be. Thankfully, I seem to have inherited your creativity but not your perfectionism so, though much less impressive than they would be if you were doing them, the books are at least getting done and I am even getting sleep in the process. (Now let’s just hope people can actually learn to read using them.)     

Bryan is out in one of the Western camps this afternoon and I am home with the girls. The network is down, which I wish it wasn’t, but he went with the Sat phone and all the latest chatter has been good, or at least neutral so I am not worried. In that department it has been a quiet week. I tried to get this knocked out while the pickles were napping but they are up now and have been asking for me to set them up with old t-shirts and paint for a while so I should probably close. You should see the things they paint. I think the artistic gene must skip a generation.

Tell Papa that talking to him on the phone the other day was balm for my soul. It was his birthday but I was the one who talked so much! Isn’t that always the case though. Thank you both for that. I hope you guys had a good day.

Love you so much. Let’s start making plans for a trip over here after littlest is born! Love and kisses all around.

Elizabeth   

P.S. - The network just flicked back on and Bryan texted to say he is almost home. So I am going to run and throw on some lip gloss and a splash of perfume - one more thing I learned from you!

Drums in the Distance

Dear Lydia,

It seems painfully cliché to start this with a reference to the weather, but I feel like you should know it is hot and muggy right now, a bit overcast outside where yesterday’s laundry is hanging limply on its second chance to dry. I scrambled to get it down yesterday when thunder started rumbling and the wind pushed in heavy black clouds over the rim of the horizon. But I should have known better because the storm rolled in from the South-West so ended up being all talk and nothing more. It’s the ones from the North-East that get me every time. No matter how mild-mannered they look and sound, they sometimes make me wonder if they are going to take the roof off when it’s all said and done.

We had one like that a few days ago. Bryan and the girls had taken Eli and his boys up on an invitation to walk down to the river in the afternoon while it was hot and bright outside (I was up to my elbows in flour). Ten minutes after they left I heard the first growl of thunder. Thirty minutes later the sky had split open and was pouring down so thick it was hard to see through. Bryan called in the midst of the deluge saying that it hasn’t quite let down on them by the river just yet but looked like it was about to and would I possibly be up for an adventure? I was, so I abandoned my baking project, threw on a raincoat and jumped in the ATV. At one point, when the grass was closing in over the top of the vehicle on the overgrown path and I was levelling small saplings as I crashed through the undergrowth, I seriously almost turned around and just let the guys carry my two whiney girls back home in the rain (I was pretty confident the two little ones and the adults who had to carry them were the only ones who were really at all interested in avoiding a long hike in the storm). But eventually the path opened up a bit and I found the soggy group surrounded by half a dozen local kids, all of whom piled in the back for the ride home. In the end, they all got home just as wet as they probably would have been otherwise in the bed if the ATV, but a little bit faster, and we did so with a fun story to boot.

Honestly, the thunder has been a welcome, even if sometimes unnerving sound these days. After bragging to my mom about how incredibly peaceful it has been here lately – no looming security rumours or urgent need to keep go bags ever ready – (and I wasn’t lying to her!), I’ve had to resort to being a bit more selective in what snippets of daily life I throw in a text message or email. You know how that goes, the necessary silence to avoid panicked rumors back home. That is one of the hardest things about life here to me, throwing up a Facebook post about bugs in my flour when really I want to say something more along the lines of “Oh my Gosh, you would never believe what we are hearing right now…!” But I understand the reasons why that’s important.

It was Friday evening and I was outside with Mikat wondering whether I should go look for Annabelle who had wandered off on an adventure with Josh when I heard it – that thrilling, terrible sound in the distance that could be a hallow jerry can being thumped from somewhere quite close, but just isn’t, or that might be thunder, but is just too even-toned and man-made. At that very moment Bryan walked in the gate from a UN security meeting that had gone unusually long and I was bummed to see from his face that the meeting wasn’t long just because some long-winded and overly sentimental expat was blabbing on melodramatically at the end of his six-month term. Thankfully, Annabelle and Josh wandered in just moments behind him, seemingly oblivious to the continued percussion the background as they showed us their skewers of captured grasshoppers.

We stayed close to the compound over the weekend, but other than that day, we’ve heard nothing more than the occasional round popped off by a drunk soldier or hunter and everyone is moving freely once again and without much fear. Those who came too close were apparently scattered and no longer much of a threat. Though, from what we hear, they were moving through with their women and kids and herds, apparently just trying to get further North without a fight. That means that after Friday night, many of the local hospital beds are full of women and kids, and I shudder to think of who all is still “scattered” in the bush.

Anyway, the incident, as far as it relates to most of us, is over. But it has meant that we are now all listening again. I forgot how exhausting it is to always be listening.

The days feel long but the weeks are flying by. We have started homeschooling the girls now, so most of my mornings are spent with them reading stories and praising pages printed with wobbly capital letters and paintings that draw much more on the use of colour than any discernible forms. But I love it. I really, really love it. And so do they. It has lent a stability and routine to our lives that we were all sorely needing.

A couple mornings a week Bryan will take over school and I will work on literacy stuff. I am so encouraged about how close we are to a big literacy push. In the next month or so I think we will have the primer, alphabet book and maybe even a song book and story book ready to print. I’m going to spend some time in the camp tomorrow testing the primer. On Saturday Bryan sat with a group and read Genesis Chapter one with them in their language for the first time ever. Moving doesn’t even begin to describe what that felt like.

I am feeling Baby Girl move more and more every day. I am a few weeks past the half-way point in this pregnancy now, right about the point where I transition from thinking, “Wow, this is going by so fast!” to the terrifying curiosity “How will this child possibly continue to fit inside my body for four more months...” I am ashamed to say I was a bit nervous about coming back pregnant after four months in America to a refugee camp. I mean, the typical African comment after you have been away of “Welcome back, you are so gorgeous and fat!” is one thing. But coming back after Mama’s cooking and pregnant to people whose UN food rations have been cut by several hundred calories a day is just cruel. I was smugly relieved the first time I was back around a bunch of women to hear one comment that my belly seemed small for this point in a pregnancy (A. Not true. B. Why do I still have to be so blasted American about this stuff?!). But good old Aisha, my oldest and dearest North African friend quickly stood up for me. “Well of course her belly looks small. Women with big butts always have small bellies.” Aaaand there it is. Welcome back.

The girls send Josh their love. They are learning more about interacting with boys than they ever have before in their lives now that there are three of them are living in your old house. This week alone I have heard Annabelle utter things I have never heard her say before, things like “We gave it a quick death,” or “It looked like thick green infected blood.” Though in all fairness, she answered the boys at the door the other day with a baby doll stuffed under her shirt, saying dramatically between pant breaths: “My tummy hurts. I think the baby is coming. You need to take me to the hospital!” So no telling what new things their parents are hearing from them around the dinner table at night.

In fact, as I write this I see the three little ones outside squatting in a circle around something on the ground and Annabelle is joyfully shrieking, “Step on it!” so I better close for now and go check on them. Give David and your babies our love. As always, you are greeted by many here.

Love,

Libby

Obligatory belly picture. (As we have determined, I am an American woman deep down after all.)

Art class in our little homeschool classroom...