Kilimanjaro

Tomorrow morning Bryan, Abigail and I start our week long trek up the tallest mountain in Africa. We took these pictures in fleeting moments when she was briefly bold enough to show her face. I am excited and scared out of my mind as I get ready to undertake what I expect will be the hardest physical challenge of my life so far. We welcome your prayers and good-luck thoughts as we set out! And we will be thinking about those of you we wish were with us every step of the way...

Eids-giving

You might be surprised to learn that our own little town in this far-strung corner of the world was full of holiday spirit on Thursday. Stores were closed and children were out of school. Kitchens were stashed with all sorts of good food and roads were full of people traveling to spend the day with their families. Town itself felt deserted but you could feel happy energy buzzing out of almost every home you passed. For the handful of Americans in town, it was fun to bask in the atmosphere of a good home-cooked lazy family holiday provided by all our neighbors and friends who were celebrating Eid.
Despite being very far away from our own families, we managed to pull off a pretty impressive spread ourselves. The organization next door has a few American staff and they had a huge turkey and green apples flown in on one of their supply planes. We bought up all the sweet potatoes and black-eyes peas in town and googled home-made pie crust recipes. Seven of us spent all day in the kitchen cutting, mixing, stirring and improvising while blue-grass music blared out of someone's laptop in the background. We invited friends and co-workers over to share in the feast and when it was all said and done, people from five different nationalities gathered around the table. And it was SO good! In good ol' American fashion we all ate until we couldn't breath and then jumped up and down a couple of times to make room for pie. In fact, I think we all got a little drunk on tryptomene because we all started acting so silly. We had so much fun.
I think it was so good because it caught us all by surprise. No one there was related to each other and the whole premise of Thanksgiving had to be explained to the newbies. The only inclement weather outside was a duststorm and the closest thing to a football game was a world cup qualifying match that might have been playing on a satellite TV several miles away. But it really felt like Thanksgiving. A little in what I imagine was the original way. You know, "We are all just surviving and we are thankful we have each other or we are all going to die" kind of way. But it was mostly the other way. The little bit hokey, warm fuzzy, "We are with the people we love, in a place we love, eating food we love and we're so thankful to God for these blessings" kind of way. Now that's a good Thanksgiving.


Our friend Jarrod was a Thanksgiving first timer and didn't pace himself...

Post Script

So, if you haven't read the blog before this one you might one to do that first. I wrote it a little too soon. An hour into our "quiet" afternoon, another fire came pouring over the hill behind our house (right behind) and we spent another couple of hours lighting other fires to try and save our newly thatched tukul and tent. Once again, we were blessed, but this one left me shaky. Our compound is now surrounded by charred earth on three sides.

Wildfire

Shortly after breakfast this morning I heard what sounded like loud wind heading our way.
This didn't bother me that much as the wind really has been unbelievable lately. It has been blowing through in unexpected gusts, blasting around the side of the mountain like it is running for its life, knocking chairs and kitchen ware off of our porch in it's hurry to get somewhere further away than here. The walls and floor of our tent bulge all around us then buckle violently back out in a way that makes me too nervous to sleep. (Last night I asked Bryan, "Why does this wind scare me so badly?" He answered "Because our house is made out of fabric.")
But the wind never hit our tent this morning. I looked out in the direction of the noise and saw a wave of dark black smoke and realized what I was hearing was fire. Lots and lots of fire. We watched it for a while hoping to see it die down but within half an hour a tsunami of orange flames that would occasionally burst as high as thirty feet in the air was rolling towards our home. Our neighbors (who lost their entire compound to fire last year) had a team of guys out starting smaller fires to try and head the wildfire off. Bryan lit a handful of grass on our camp stove and ran out to join them. I ran inside and started packing go-bags just in case - passports, laptops, my bible and family photos (and if you must know, a little bit of make-up and a favorite bra. In this part of the world that loss would hurt.) The black sky was full of ash and dozens of hawks trying to catch small animals fleeing the heat. It looked and sounded and smelled so awful.
Amazingly, the fire seemed to die down almost as dramatically as it started. Other than the singed hair on Bryan's hands and arms, we were ultimately untouched. The afternoon is now completely still and quiet, and other than the crispy blackness right outside our gate, you wouldn't have even known the fire was here only hours ago.
I expect there will be a time that we will loose things to fire. It seems to just be a part of life here. But this morning I just kept thinking, "Not yet. Please not yet." Some days this place just feels insane! Days are blisteringly hot and dusty while nights can feel freezing. The shockingly intense rain and thunder have been replaced with equally amazing wind and fire. All of it sweeps in so unexpectedly. And all of it seems so extreme. All you can do is pack up your underwear and pray.
And as scary as it can sometimes be, I have to admit, I kinda like it.

Sadika

It's so weird to get on Facebook these days and hear people talking about pumpkins and pies and leaves changing colors. Leaves are changing colors here too but that's mostly because there has been no rain for about a month and its so freaking hot that everything is slowly dying. Thankfully the wind is picking up too so even though it is hot, it isn't still. On breezy nights I find that it's quite easy to imagine that you are sleeping in a big boat instead of a big tent. When the wind picks up in the middle of the night I hear green canvas sails creaking overhead and outside my window I see moonlight reflecting on endless grassy currents.
This has been a much better week than last. Though a prideful part of me perhaps hates to admit it, one of the reasons for my renewed optimism is having found a new friend. Heather and her husband moved here from another part of the country last week to continue working with the organization next door to us. She's a little older than me but doesn't have kids yet either. She is a nurse, rides motorcycles, hates snakes, loves the movie "Man From Snowy River" and speaks Kiswahili. Her parents live in the same coutry as mine and she has a little sister back in the States. She even had a pet dik-dik for a little while! Apart from my own sisters, I have never met some one with a life so similar to mine. There is so much she understands about me without me ever having to verbalize. Which is of course why anyone who knows me would immediately suspect that I would hate her guts. I kinda thought I might too. I have always enjoyed being THE girl in most situations; and if not the only girl, than at very least, the only one who rides a motorcylce. And until lately I have been. (I should specify, the only English speaking one. Even if my Arabic was remotely good enough to use in a conversation about culture stress, I'm still not sure how far that would get me). But one trip to the market together with her proved me very wrong. I think I underestimated how much a friend helps in transitions like these. Someone who is shy to try her language too but pushes you to want to try a little harder. Someone who will shield for you when you try on skirts in the market and has tips on how the heck to cook egg-plant. Someone that even lives close enough to shout asking if you are okay when a six inch praying mantis lands on your face and you scream bloody murder (purely hypothetically speaking.) A friend. Who knew that it would be so nice to have one around?

Friday

Thank goodness it's Friday.
Friday means a quiet market, construction workers who leave our compound early, and football matches in the evenings. It means home delivery injera and wat (as in, a guy hops on his motorcycle and brings across the border to our house) and a few episodes of our latest addiction - bootlegged copies of the first few seasons of "Smallville." (I know it's lame, but we are nothing if not easily entertained.)
I'm glad it's Friday too because it's felt like a really long week to me. I've been frustrated a lot. The charms of living on a construction site by day and a campsite by night are wearing a little thin. We can see progress every day so I know I should only be thankful. Our toilet is working so beautifully that sometimes I want to sit in there far longer than is necessary, and our well-fed solar panels are generating lots of bright white light into the tent. Our neighbors across the way are still happy to let us mooch off of their internet which is incredible (though sometimes in order to skype we have to sit with our laptops in the waist-high grass of the field between our two plots - like that guy in the ad they show at the beginning of every British Airways flight.)
But even with all these wonderful things I have felt frazzled all week. When I realized that the curtains for our tent that I had worked so hard to explain in Arabic to the tailor fell off of the back of my motorcycle somewhere on the way home, you would have thought I had just lost the Shroud of Turin. When the pot of lentil sloppy joes I had made for guests came out tasting like lentil dish-water I had an internal melt-down. When the sprung rat trap was dagged half way across the yard and empty two mornings in a row I started just waiting for the maimed rodents to hunt me down. And these are just the "big" things. I have been frustrated over a dozen more little stupid things all week.
So on our night to relax a little, I reflect back on this long week, hope that next week is better and thank all of the people who made this week really not as bad as it seemed some times - the vegetable vedor who bought us a frozen orange drink just for trying to speak Arabic with him; my husband for for going back to look for my lost curtains and for the man on the side of the road who found them for us; the guy who teased me for wearing a rival soccer jersey and all those silly little kids who ran down the road with us on our jog this morning. And lastly, for my three new chickens whose ungraceful panic over grossly exaggerated and misplaced fears makes me cringe and laugh on an almost daily basis.

Seasons

It is hot.
The cold nights full of thunderstorms are long gone. It's almost as if mother nature saw how wet we all were and in an act of over-protective paranoia decided to swaddle us all up in suffocating layers of white hot sky. We're learning to go to be early and wake up early like everyone else, trying to make the most of the cooler hours of the day. It's actually a rhythm of life I'm really beginning to enjoy. Between noon and three everything stops. Shopkeepers pull their rope beds onto the porch and take a nap. Women lay in the shade of big trees and play with their babies. We sit in our tent and read.
People are beginning to harvest a few early crops like sesame. They are also beginning to prepare for the season of wildfires. Along with the coming drier weather and Harmattan winds come grass fires known for consuming entire mountainsides, and people's homes and farms along with it. In order to destroy the dry grass the fires feed on, people are already burning perimeters around their land, creating fire breaks that they can control. Several nights ago the hill behind our house glowed orange all night. Right now I can see several columns of smoke on the horizon with funnels of birds flying above them.
Last week our askari started burning the grass around our compound. It was amazing how fast it spread. Within seconds from the time he touched the fire to the grass the flames had run the width of our fence with a sound like a hundred little kids stomping on bubble wrap. Slender pieces of black ash wafted into our yard and gathered on top of our tent like a light dusting of black snow. It all made me incredibly nervous, but he was watching the direction of the wind and slashed any flames that strayed too far. Minutes later it died out almost as quickly as it had started.
When the rains were here, they brought incredible coolness but they also flooded roads so that it was hard to move around anywhere. The coming dryness brings the threat of fires but the market is now full of goods brought down from Northern towns. Watermelons have been replaced with custard fruits. Bees are pushing out the mosquitoes. We are slipping out of one season and into another. Even though we have been here four months, everything is still very new to me and I hate to think of the nuances of life I may be missing because of that. I'm gulping it all down now; I can't wait to just sip it. I can't wait until the time next year when I will more fully enjoy what I am feeling now because I know it will soon be gone; or, when I will wait expectantly for something that is coming soon because I know this can't last forever.
I can't wait to think, "Oh yes, I remember this."

Inshallah

We made it back! We had a bit of an adventure getting home but three days ago we not only walked in our front gate but did so with all our government paperwork in hand (if you only knew what a miracle that is!) Our trip back started with a late night car ride through the bush to a town several hours away from the southern capitol. We shared the rented car with three students headed home for the weekend who had also missed the last bus out of town. About twenty minutes down the road the kid sitting next to me pulled out a shiny black pistol and casually began loading it. When he saw Bryan and I exchange glances he laughed. “Don’t worry.” He said, “This is just in case someone decides to give us trouble.” I couldn’t imagine what situation could be improved by an eighteen year old with a gun, but thankfully my imagination wasn’t stretched and we made it in late that night, in time to catch a plane heading out at 6:30 the next morning.
Our place feels a little more like home every day. We have some furniture now in our tent bedroom and we are working on installing a beautiful porcelain toilet in our latrine (praise the Lord!). Our “yard” is still a wreck though as we get ready to start building our kitchen and guestroom. With all the piles of grass, stones and cinder blocks lying around it looks like the Big Bad Wolf was last week’s dinner guest.
Several friends have stopped by to say hello since we’ve been back which has made us happy. Today the women who work next door came over to chat, first with me, and then with each other when my Arabic ran out. At one point they poked their heads into our canvas bedroom door and eyed our home approvingly. When they saw our big bed in the corner though they asked me why we only have one bed. Before I could even begin to think of how to answer they continued, “Libby, if you have only one bed, why don’t you have a baby yet?” Sometimes language deficiency is a blessing. All I had to offer in response was a shrug a blush and one word “Inshallah.”

On the Banks of the Big River

We've been here in the big city of the south for only a few days now, but it has been long enough for me to begin suspecting that those first 30 minutes in the airport were moments spent in a microcosm of the city itself. We stepped off the plane and melted into the crowd swarming around the travel documents desk. Young development workers were exchanging their North Face jackets for aviator sunglasses. A local politician in pointed leather shoes was greeted by children in indigo school uniforms, singing and holding out a lei of tinsel flowers. Tall dark girls in denim and faux Dolce and Gabbana purses mingled against a wall adorned with anti-corruption posters while soldiers representing at least three different branches of the military smoked cigarettes up against another. Air conditioners blasted moderately cool air into the one-room terminal, patiently fighting a losing battle against the billows of dusty heat coming in from half a dozen open windows and doors.
Most of our days have been spent in the car, driving from one air-conditioned container-turned-office to another. We join the fleets of UN trucks, public transport vans and motorcycle taxis fighting for space on either incredibly nice paved roads or horrifically bad dirt ones. Piles of red and blue plastic bottles on the side of the road break up the colorless glare of glass-fronted banks. Men sell cut stalks of sugar cane in front of signs advertising "Snow Ball Ice Cream"(which I really want to look into). Herds of cattle with horns so long it seems that holding the weight of their own heads should be impossible push shiny black hummers to the side of the road. Our friend jokes that they are probably the ones cattle rustlers stole from his neighbors last night. He couldn't sleep because of the gun shots.
Although the registration process is quite daunting and more than a little time consuming, almost everyone in the many legal, governmental, political and developmental departments has been very professional and helpful. We're hoping the whole process won't take too long. We are anxious to get home. It's nice to have a pleasant place to come back to in the evenings though. Our hotel feels like the kind of place that was built by someone who realized they could make a fortune it they acted now. Everything from the prefab walls to the showerheads have company names like "Chang Hong" on them and our bedsheets are a lovely shade of bright eggplant. The water from the shower is pumped straight out of the big river itself and pools at your feet in a color that makes you feel a little less clean than you thought. But the view of the big river from the hotel is so beautiful it almost makes you feel proud to have bathed in it. On top of that, there is a quasi-tame vervet monkey named Kakule that has a pleasantly unnerving habit of hiding under the metal stairs and grabbing your ankles as you walk down. Why would we want to be anywhere else?

Mud

The airstrip in our area is many miles outside of town and well out of cell-phone reception so when you "go to the airstrip" you are there until you leave on your plane or with your guests. We didn't know just what that would mean for us on Thursday when we flew out. The cargo plane taking us out was scheduled to land at 10am although it didn't appear on the horizon until closer to 10:30. This was the biggest plane I have yet seen on our little dirt airstrip and I was almost surprised it managed at all. Usually the planes land, taxi all the way down the 800 meter strip, turn around and then make their way back to where people and Land Cruisers wait to unload the cargo. However after the plane landed this time, someone with a sat phone got a call from the pilot saying we would have to meet the plane down at the far end of the airstrip. We all thought this was a little odd, but attributed it to the plane's size, thinking it would need the entire length of the airstrip on the way out. But when we got down to the end of the strip we saw the real cause of the problem. The huge gray plane full of five tons of cargo was tilting eerily to one side, with one wing slanting on a skyward trajectory and the other dipping behind the tall elephant grass beyond the edge of the airstrip. Apparently the pilot had been unable to turn the plane around on the little runway successfully, and as a result, the right wheel and landing gear had slipped off of the raised airstrip and deep into a muddy ditch on the side.
Over the next five hours tractors, Land Cruisers, man power, shovels, and lumber were all used to try to pull the plane out. The whole ordeal varied between extreme excitement and sweltering boredom. One minute everyone was up and ready to scatter as other smaller planes buzzed overhead, trying to land on the airstrip despite our lumbering presence, or when massive UN tractors chained themselves to the plane and tried to wrench her out. But most of the time those of us who weren't digging were just sitting in the shade of the plane's belly, swatting away sweat bees and flies. Every once in a while the pilots would turn on an engine to try and give her more power to get out, but, being so far from our destination, fuel conservation was a serious consideration. So we all shared around our cookies and water bottles, put on sunscreen, took a few pictures and waited.
Finally, with the help of a second tractor the plane wiggled free. Knowing that some of us had a connecting flight we were within five minutes of missing, the muddy pilots hustled us all into the plane as soon as she was loose, and within minutes we were airborne. A few hours later, as we made our descent, we all looked out the porthole windows a little nervously as the mud and grass caked landing gear creaked down for landing. But she pulled it off perfectly and we were able to sprint happily across the (tarmac) runway and into the open doors of our next waiting flight.
The craziest part of it all though is that the day which started out in a tent and centered around a mud-stuck cargo plane, ended up with Java House milkshakes, deep hot baths and a big clean bed!

Sad Day

I don't have long to write as we are packing up to fly out of town for a week or two tomorrow. Being off our land by 6:30 every morning has become a royal pain so we are jumping on a cargo plane out in the morning (which should be interesting) and heading off to get some government paperwork done in another part of the country. Hopefully when we get home our land will be land-mine and UN free.
I had to write though to tell you about Jena. When we got home from dinner with friends last night our askari (night watch-man) began animatedly talking to us, though we were having a hard time following what he was saying. I had a sick feeling in my heart when we directed us into his hut and pointed under his bed. Jena was cowered in a corner with a badly broken body. Apparently, a stray dog had wandered in through the huge whole in our fence left by the UN and found her. The askari had brought her into his house to keep her safe until we got home. She didn't appear to be in much pain and still licked our hands when we held her but it was clear from the way she tried to drag herself to a hiding place that she knew she was dying. It was so, so awful.
We buried her by lamp-light in the corner of our yard and there was something oddly comforting in the familiarity of the scenario. I know that sounds weird, but I felt like a little girl again, which isn't always a bad thing. It made me think of the many tears over various puppies, water-bottle birds, field mice and who-knows-what-else buried in graves marked with pop-sickle stick crosses under the kunazi tree in our back-yard in Malindi (and the very patient men who helped us do it - thank you Papa and Bryan).
Over dinner last night several people there were telling horrific stories of their experiences during the war here, of the schools full of children they saw bombed and the people lying dead in a once-busy market. I think in some ways my flood of tears last night were for more than just Jena. Violence in any form is always heart-wrenching, and though I reserve some saddness for the death of a well-loved animal, I pray that most of my grief will be for the suffering of people. I don't know if I will ever seen the kind of suffering I heard about last night with my own eyes. Right now this place seems so beautiful and full of life that it is hard to imagine the stories I heard took place in the very recent lives of almost everyone around me. But witnessing death in even the smallest of ways last night turned my heart just a little bit closer to something I know I will never understand.
It's been a sad day.

Five Thousand Words

Thank goodness for Katadyn water filters, (I promise you'd never know that's how your drinking water started!)


What happens when you don't get a well-hydrated dik dik off your porch fast enough...



More crazy storms...


Bryan enjoying a watermelon.


Our host and hostess for an Eid meal.

Enjoying an Eid feast with friends.

Blessed Inconvenience

I had planned on writing earlier but the internet has been acting up and (like the rest of you I'm sure) we have been so busy. I wanted to describe the amazing food we have had over Eid meals with friends, how watermelon season is saving our lives in this heat and how fat and sweet Jena has gotten, but those things will have to wait for another day. Right now the only thing that we are thinking about is our new home. We (finally!) moved over to our new compound on Wednesday! It took two full days of hard work to get our monster tent up, water tanks filled and showers ready for use. But on Wednesday night, for the first time in almost three months we got to sleep in our own beds (which really just meant we took the plastic covers off of our mattresses and slept with Granny's quilt instead of in sleeping bags.) Yes, we are now cooking on a gas camp stove but we get to cook whatever we want with our own kitchen stuff! Yes, we are taking bucket baths but we have our own shower that we can leave our shampoo and soap in every night. Yes, we are sleeping in a tent but it isn't a haven for rats and you can see stars outside of the windows all around you at night before you fall asleep. I know the day is coming when I am going to get really sick of a lot of this stuff (though we are continuing to work on making everything even better for the long run), but right now, finally getting to set up our own home feels so very wonderful. As an old man who has become our friend said in his limited English: "I think maybe you can say that house is fabulous."
Our joy at finally getting to stop living out of a suitcase has been shortlived though. The UN guys came by yesterday to inform us that they had finally received orders to go ahead and sweep our plot for mines. This was a huge answer to prayer, however, it is a mixed blessing. What we didn't know is that this means they will have to cut a huge hole in our bamboo fence to work through and no one (absolutely no one) is allowed within one hundred meters of our compound between 6:30 am and 1pm while they work for two weeks! Holy cow. So "settlin in" has been delayed once again. We are still working out what this means for us. We have been needing to get officially registered with the government in another part of the country anyways, as well as work on getting our ATV up from our neighbors in the south, so we may leave again to get these things done while the UN works. It is discouraging though to have to hit the road again when we were just beginning to feel the roots sprout out of our toes. Nonetheless, we are grateful that they are keeping everyone safe (even if it's a month later than they said). When my American side kicks in and starts to complain about the inconvenience of so many aspects of life here, I have to bite my tongue. The forty year old man that sold us our broom yesterday was proud to tell us he is now in fifth grade, finishing his education cut short by the war years ago. Of the five women my age, or younger, who work next door, only one has a father still living. When our old friend saw our pile of "basic necessities" piled in trunks outside our tent as we moved in he asked wided-eyed, "What is all that stuff?" Inconvenience is something I have no right to talk about here.

Eid Shopping

Last night Jena fell asleep in our room after eating and I convinced Bryan to let her stay there for the night (I am so worried about stray dogs catching her outside!) She slept soundly until about three in the morning when we woke up to the sound of tiny hooves on the cement floor and dissatisfied baby grunts. Bryan got up and took her back out to her bush where she slept more comfortably the rest of the night. I have the best husband in the world! I am going to be spoiled when we have babies of our own.
We went into town today to get a few things for the construction on our plot (to which we will hopefully be moving in a few days) and found that the market was unusually busy. We realized with the coming of Eid on Sunday, everyone was out doing their holiday shopping. The good thing about living in a town with a dominant religion different than your own is that you get twice as many reasons to celebrate, so we joined in the fun and did a bit of shopping too. I found a skirt a little on the gaudy side that I love. We found a baby bottle for Jena that has made the whole feeding process SO much easier! We picked out a watermelon from the small mountain on the ground and that we ate so fast when we got home that my stomach still hurts. We were eyeing some fresh limes that were being rebundled for sale, but the vendor had so many dozens of bushels full of them that he just tossed us an armful for free. But my personal favorite Eid purchase are our new sunglasses. Bryan is now the proud owner of a pair of "Adidds" while I love my new "POLIOES." I kid you not. Polioes. Don't be jealous. Maybe we'll bring you back a designer pair. Happy Eid everyone!

Storms

Yesterday a huge storm blew through. I always thought I loved storms, but moving here has made me reconsider this position. Whether it's their sheer magnitude or merely sitting through one under a roof made of grass, something about the experience in this place has introduced an unease that, until now, was only the stuff of children's stories and patronized friends in my life. I had initially pulled a chair out onto the porch to watch the show, but within fifteen minutes, water was swirling an inch deep under my chair as rain washed horizontally through the door. Marbles sized hailstones (hailstones?!) were clattering off of the tin roof of the kitchen and wind was bowing saplings over to touch the ground. For a few minutes I looked like a character at the climax of a sappy Disney family adventure movie as I ran through the lightning flashes to get a shell-shocked baby dikdik out of the bushes and to haul her and several of our trunks of books and tools off of the porch and into the relative dryness of the hut. (It hit so quickly that Bryan was stuck in another hut further away.) It reminded me of the first night we were here, when a similar storm hit. I was so shocked by the intensity of that one that I messed around with trying to describe it the next day, just for my own amusement. You can never describe something like that, but this is a little what it felt like to me:

When our plane landed on the dirt airstrip outside of this town, the sky was wide and blindingly blue. The rocky green hills arched like cats under the empty sky, stretching taller than usual, enjoying the extra room. But last night was very different. Like the friend that forgot to come to the airport but tried to make up for it with an embarrassingly over-the-top surprise party, the storm rolled in with flashy extravagance. I was too tired to hear the rumbling whispers behind the door or to catch a glimpse of the "welcome home" banner briefly lighting up horizon. I was a good guest of honor in this regard. I didn't have to fake my surprise. It was the white brilliance of shattering stars burning through my closed eyelids that first jerked me roughly out of a dream. In the eternal heartbeat when everything becomes suddenly visible, the geckos on the mud walls and I shared a frozen wide-eyed gaze, like we were surprised to see each other, (though we weren't). But when the darkness had descended again, what fully woke me was the pain in my ribs as crumbling pieces of night sky plummeted to the earth and exploded into the muddy ground outside the hut. My senses ached with each new proof that they were inadequate to soak up the storm. Like dish-towels being used to mop up the ocean, my eyes and ears were drenched through and through yet the wet world outside was more full than I could feel. It was the first time in a very long time that I could remember being scared of a thunderstorm. It went on like this for the better part of an hour. From under the mosquito net I calculated distances to the laptop and the bag with our passports and shot records, trying to decide which one to grab when the roof was either torn off by the wind or burned off by the lighting. But eventually she wore herself out and stumbled slowly away to wherever storms go to sleep off their hangovers. In the morning, leaves were strewn about like green confetti. I almost expected to find shards of starlight still in the puddles.

Jena Bita Ana

Yesterday we went to church in town. It is a fairly big church made up of one of the dominant ethnic groups in this area (not the people group we will be doing language development with). We got to church a little late and when we walked into the front of the mud building, the closest seat I could find on the women's side was on the front bamboo bench row. It wasn't until I sat down that I noticed I was the only woman on the row who wasn't holding a baby under two weeks old. It turned out to be baby blessing day, and all the mothers and new babies were taken in front of the church, named, blessed and prayed for. The mothers were wrapped from head to toe in their beautiful tobes of bright reds, blues and yellows while the babies, most still pink and wrinkled themselves, were swaddled a shocking number of times in crocheted blankets. The pastor read Mark 10:13, and I was again amazed at how God asks us to become more like those precious sweating little bundles in their mother's arms.
As much as I love babies, and have felt early twinges of the baby bug since we have been here, I think those urges have been temporarily allayed by our new pet dikdik. We have named her Jena which literally means "little bird" in Arabic, but is used locally to mean "baby" (I was really pushing for "Spike" but Bryan insisted that Jena was much more suitable.) We realized she was even younger than we originally thought, and therefore probably not weaned, after we found a little umbelican cord still attatched to her the other day. So we have been feeding her milk with a syringe which she fights like mad with all four (sharp) little hooves for the first ten minutes every time, until she realizes she's hungry and it tastes good. The food then gives her enough energy to romp around making an incessant little cry somewhere between a goat's bleat and a bird's caw. If she wasn't so cute doing it it would be pretty annoying. She naps mostly during the day but then roams around all night fussy and curious. Sometimes she wanders back into our room but mostly she explores the yard and I'm terrified that a dog is going to catch her. But we've been told that baby dik diks don't have a smell until they are a month old so maybe that will keep her safe for a while (if she can learn to keep quiet!)
Last night she didn't come back to her favorite bush in the morning like usual and I was so worried, annoyed, guilty and relieved (which made me feel more guilty). I asked the night guard if he has seen her and he went off in a stream of Arabic that I couldn't follow but I caught "Jena bita dikdik" (the baby of the dikdik) and lots of exaggerated squwaks and loud sighs which I loosely translated as "she drove me crazy last night." I eventually found her wet and hungry and scared but even so, she complained loudly the whole way home.
Of course all the locals (and even the not-so-local I am married to) get a kick out of me trying to take care of her, but nontheless, people have been so sweet to try and help. Some guys working on the compoud looked under every bush trying to help me find her and another man is trying to track down some goat's milk which he thinks will be easier on her tummy. The women that wash the clothes laugh whenever they hear her squawk and they tell me, "Libby, your baby is crying." Yes, thank you, I'm sure she is.
I don't know how long this will work, for her or us. But just when I think she is about to send me over the edge she will walk in the door of our hut and nuzzle up to my hand and melt me right to the floor. Even Bryan likes her, though he has his moments too. Last night I leaned over to kiss him and he looked at me and said, "You smell like milk and dikdik." But when I asked him: "After three years of marriage, did you ever think we would be living in a hut in this country with a baby dikdik on our porch?" his answer made me happy. He said, "You know, I kinda did."

Oh Deer!

Today turned out to be a great day to go to the market! We went intending just to get some bread and fruit but found so many other surprises to put in our basket. We bought a big yellow squash which Bryan wants to boil and mash with salt and pepper for supper. We bought some Baobab fruits which supposedly are good cooked with sugar and water for a tangy drink. There were even some tiny melons that we were told are best eaten with salt and hot peppers (we'll let you know if that is true or not later). But the biggest surprise we brought home from our trip to the market was a baby dik dik! I must have "sucker for baby animals" written all over me because the man holding it walked straight up to us and asked if we wanted to buy it, and one look at my face must have told him to stick with his starting price. I am now thoroughly sunburned because I was too scared to carry her home on the motorcycle and walked her all the way back to the compound in my arms. Imagine peoples reactions to seeing the only white woman in town walking a baby deer home. (They think Bryan is a lucky man to have a wife that will cook him such delicacies!) She is the most precious thing you have ever seen! She has hid in the bushes most of the afternoon but is walking around the yard with Bryan now. She was terrified at first but has warmed up enough to lick my hand when I pet her now. I think she looks like a "Lilly" but Bryan wants to name her "Spike" so we need you creative people to help us come up with a good name. Any ideas?

P.S. - And just in case you were wondering no, we are NOT going to cook her!

Running

My dearly beloved has it in his head that we are going to climb Kili in December which has put the fear of the Lord in me. Whether or not we actually will, the hope/fear is strong enough that I got up early this morning and went for a run. I went just as the sun was coming up, hoping fewer people would see me, both for modesty reasons and personal pride (I haven't run in months!). The mountains to the East of us block the early morning sun well after it is up and everything was cool and hazy. The recently muddy roads have been baked into contorted ravines and potholes making even slow jogging a bit like working your way through an obstacle course. I greeted a couple of older men with hoes slung over their shoulders who were walking out to their farms. I had to stop once for a very upset donkey that barreled across the road in front of me, bawling his head off. But other than that everything was still sleepy and quiet.
Early morning running has always been the crazy past time of other women in my life - my mother, sister-in-law, roommates - not me. I thought about them this morning while I tiptoed through the stillness. Maybe they are on to something...

Home Again, Home Again Jiggity-Jog

We got back into town yesterday. We took the scenic route home as the DC-3 made five stops to off-load supplies all across the country (one of which was overnight) before we landed on our own dirt airstrip. I was nervous about how it would feel to be back after having been gone for a few weeks but everything was hot and green and almost as happy to see us as we were to see it. We even had a big "Welcome Home" thunder storm that evening.
It must have rained a lot while we were gone. The hill behind our plot now has grass taller than me growing all over it that makes it look like a fuzzy something right out of a Dr. Seuss book. The wind blows the grass all different directions so it wakes up with hair a little like Bryan's in the morning.
Our compound now has a cement latrine and shower built so we are hoping to be able to move over in the next few weeks. I can't tell you how ready I am to be on our own place! But, there is still plenty to be done before that will happen - you know bathroom doors, water storage, charcoal oven - just the luxuries really. (: It's probably good though because this gives us something to look forward to and work towards. I can't wait to get a home set up for some of you to come see! - L