Filled Up

Yesterday I went to the market to try and round up some water. This is always a little intimidating to me. The water is turned on at four o'clock in the afternoon and dozens of young men and their donkey carts crowd around a small tower where a fat hose pipes out foamy water into their barreled carts. There is always a buzz of adolescent rough housing overlaid with the irritated braying of donkeys as everyone jostles awkwardly for space in the muddy alleyway. Determined not to be easily cowed in such a crowd I walked into the melee more confidently than I felt and asked who could bring a barrel out to my house on the other side of town. I got a lot of "Sorry Lady" looks and a couple of passing "We don't know where you live." When I tried to give directions guys didn't look up and continued their work or just passed me by on the way to sell their water at other people's houses. I persisted for a while but finally, defeated and having exhausted by Arabic, I went on into town for a couple of other errands. I was bugged though.

In town I stopped at the shop of a charming young guy who is sure he is going to marry my youngest sister. His sodas were cold and a Champion eased my frustration about the water situation. However, as I was preparing to pay, a man I have never seen before walked up behind me. I greeted him before realizing that he was in an altered state of mind - either crazy or drunk I wasn't sure. He looked at me harshly and started growling, "You are not welcome here. Go back to your own country Khawaja. We don't want you here!" followed by other words and gestures I didn't understand. I was surprised and unsure of what to say or do when he stepped up on the shop ledge I was standing on and grabbed me roughly by the arm and yanked me closer to him. Startled I stepped back and he let me go but continued muttered unintelligible (to me) angry sounding things. My friend the shopkeeper and a couple of other people nearby looked on with disapproval but didn't do anything. Embarrassed and more shaken than I wanted to be, a stammered a quick goodbye and left. That is the first time in the eight months that we have been here that anything like that has ever happened.

Today I woke up sick. It's just flu like junk but in Bryan's absence and on the heels of a bad day it felt a little worse than it probably is. I stayed in bed reading and sucking throat lozenges most of the morning, willing Thursday afternoon to come quickly. I got a call mid-morning from one of our friends, another shopkeeper in town who has sold us many of our building supplies. He greeted me and told me he was on his way over to check in on me. When he showed up he gave me a phone card (all cell phones are pre-paid here using scratch cards) so that I could fill my phone back up with credit. He said he wanted me to be able to call Bryan whenever I need to. Anything you need, anything at all you just call me, he said. I want to look out for you while he is gone because Bryan is my friend, like this, he said laying his two fingers side by side.

Minutes after I saw our friend off I heard a clanging noise outside. I got back out of bed and went to check on the commotion. A donkey cart, not one I had asked for, was at the gate. He came inside and filled our nearly empty barrel full again.

Home Alone

I feel like I have taken another step this week towards this place actually becoming home to me. Bryan left the day before yesterday to go and pick up our teammates who are flying in to East Africa on Monday. With transportation being as it is in this part of the world he won't be back for ten days, and that's if all goes well. Which puts me here by myself for ten days. Of course, one is never completely by themselves - people are always stopping by to say hello and a guard sleeps on the compound at night - but with both Bryan gone and my good friend Heather out of town for a few weeks too, it feels a lot like "alone".

But, like I said, it feels more like home because it doesn't feel scary to be here by myself. A few months ago I would have been pretty nervous to stay here this long without Bryan. That's not to say I don't still have my moments. The windstorms at night, tracking down water donkeys by day, and managing on-going construction work in Arabic are all still intimidating, but by now they seem a little more natural then they once did. I have my own kitchen, my own bedroom and my own bathroom (now monitor lizard-less) all of which are familiar and comfortable. On top of that Asad (the puppy) and Nimir (the kitten) have been keeping me highly entertained and feeling very loved. Nimir catches massive locusts that fly into the kitchen at night, usually right into my hair and Asad sleeps just outside my tent door so I can hear him all night long snoring or growling at any perceived threats.

So, all that to say, two days in and I am feeling good. We'll just wait and see how I'm feeling by day five...

My ferocious security team

What we recently found in our bathroom...

Re-do

So actually, our puppy's name is now Asad.

We wanted an Arabic name for him and one that was culturally appropriate at that, but after we came up with Zeki, we were told that this was actually the name of a very good and wise man who lived a long time ago and therefore, not a good name for a dog. So we quickly scratched that one and went back to the drawing board. Thankfully, everyone in the neighborhood joined in. I don't know if our Arabic is sad enough that everyone figured we needed a little help, or simply the idea of a Khawaja having a local dog with a local name was funny enough that everyone wanted a part in the process, but everyone from the town carpenter to a guy we just met at the airstrip had a suggestion. People offered to brainstorm overnight and get back to us "with the perfect name" the next day and some were even calling up buddies on the phone for input. It was hilarious. After an increasingly confused nameless puppy and several suggestions of Asad we decided to go with it. "Lion" still seems a little over the top for someone who cries during wind storms but he's working on living up to his name. Stalking our rooster is one of his favorite past-times.

On another happy note we have more good news. Our ATV arrived on the plane yesterday! As much as I have loved riding our motorcycles around, I am really, really excited to have a form of transportation that can haul more than a kilo of tomatoes back from the market at a time. It's somewhere between a really small car and a four wheeler and we turned quite a few grinning heads when we rode into town yesterday - but it will be perfect for the rough roads around here. So when you guys come and visit you won't have to cling to the back of a motorcycle on the way back from the airstrip but will get to cruise to our house in style! (:

And finally, for those of curious about our Valentines Day...We had a happy quiet day at home during which time I convinced Bryan to watch some cheesy chick flicks with me. We contented ourselves with homemade cards (I loved it - it felt like kindergarten again!) and he even surprised me with a plastic heart shaped box full of melty chocolate that he found in the market. But I experienced the full extent of his precious love last night when we ordered a couple of sodas in town. Mine came out fairly cool but his was ice-cold. It was the coldest thing I have ever felt here. My sweet husband took one sip of it and handed it over to me! I never knew brain-freeze could be so romantic. That my friends, is true love!

Zeki

So we bypassed the suggested "Obama"s and "Barut"s (which means something along the lines of "Hunter") and went with "Zeki" which means "clever." We've yet to see if he will live up to his name or not but in the mean time, he's been pretty stinking adorable. Yes, he cried all night last night and yes, he is still working on figuring out where it is appropriate to pee, but even so, I have to admit that he is so much easier to take care of than a dik dik!

Things that made me happy this week...

An ice-cold bottle of "Champion" (a fruity malt beverage) - my favorite local drink! (My favorite flavor is pear)...

Some home-made beads I found in the market which had already been strung into necklaces...

The nine eggs our hen has laid and is now diligently sitting on...
The new loofah for my bath which I picked off this tree near our house...

And finally, the new puppy we got today! He doesn't exactly have pedigree, but he is precious all the same. He wasn't very fond of his first bath but is much more cuddle-able now that the fleas are gone. More pictures to come!

Night

Last night after supper and a bath, Bryan and I pulled one of the rope beds out of the guest room and set it in the space behind our tent, on the side of the compound closest to the big hill. One blessing of this time of the year is the absence of mosquitoes, so we laid outside in our pajamas for a long time enjoying that rare, almost daring feeling of bare skin against night-time air. The moon was full just a few nights ago, but it has been rising well after we are in bed lately so the night sky was still deep and dark. If it weren't for the glow of the UN camp on one edge of the sky's hem and the dying embers of a grass fire against the other, it could have been hard to tell where the horizon neatly divided earth and sky. But even with those lights, the stars were breathtaking. I'm wondering if there was a meteor shower too, or if we were just lucky because we ended up seeing several falling stars burn across the sky before we finally just couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. It was so beautiful. We could even hear our owl up in a tree somewhere on the hill for a while, but I feel like whenever I try to figure out where it roosts it falls completely silent.
I confess, day to day life has a way of wearing the charm off this place very easily. But believe it or not, it is also the day to day living that sometimes catches you off guard and feels every bit as romanticized and it might have once looked from far away.

In the Heat of the Moment

It is so freaking hot. I could smack the guy next door who just told me, "Come on, It's not that bad. It was only 110 today."

You know that wind I was complaining about? Well, I take it all back because along with the dust and sleepless nights that wind brought, it also toted around some relief from the unbearable heat. We sweat so much in the night now that I almost have to drink oral re-hydration solution with my breakfast tea just to start the day out healthy. (You think I'm kidding...) I have never sweated this much in my life. Between one and three I feel like I am hardly conscious. I was apologizing for being so unproductive today, telling Bryan I felt like I hardly got anything done. "Done?" he said, panting over his fourteenth bottle of water. "You survived!" he said. "If you are alive at the end of the day, you have been very productive." Really, it is my husband's sense of humor that gets me through on some days.

Another by product of the heat has been lots of dehydrated critters crawling into our spaces to find some relief themselves (at least those that are still alive). This week alone we have found a scorpion in the toilet, a rat in the kitchen, a snake in the shower (a very small one) and a lizard in our tent (a very big one). Nothing major but enough to make me hesitate in those moments before your eyes fully adjust to the inside shade.

Hot, hot, hot. It is very hot. I feel like a Dr. Seuss book. It is hot a lot. Like it I do not. All I see is spots. I think it's gotten to my head at this point. That's what I get for writing this mid-afternoon.

At least we know if we can hang on until April the rains will start up again. And then we have six months of wet coolness. I'm so glad we came here when we did. Starting out in this heat would have been a whole different ball game. What a shock to the system!

Of course, our teammates just bought plane tickets for the beginning of March...Uh, Don't worry guys, I'm just kidding. It's really not that bad.