Beads

Last night we were invited to an iftar, a Ramadan fast-breaking at sunset. Our hosts were a group of refugees from the mountains to the West of us who arrived in town soon after the bombs started falling in their home area. They fled a couple of months ago, leaving loved ones behind and dodging government checkpoints along the way, arriving in our little town with little more than the clothes on their backs. Over two hundred are here now, thirty or so of which are practically camping on an NGO compound at the base of the mountain. And these were the ones who invited us to share a meal with them. 

Bryan and I arrived a little later than we had planned and food was served only minutes after we got there. Dan and Bryan were ushered to a courtyard with the other men where there were mats laid out for praying and eating. Laura and I stayed behind a woven grass wall in front of a mud hut with several other women where food was brought to us on a round metal tray. While we started into a dish of dates I joined in the conversation but watched out of the corner of my eye as Annabelle (“Hanna”) was bounced from one pair of arms to the next. She was long overdue for a nap and as I monitored her sleep-heavy eyes taking in her new surroundings, I prayed she would be gracious to these kind people. And whether by God’s miraculous grace or her infantile self-absorption, she drank up the attention, flashing a few groggy smiles between kisses and cheek pinches. At one point a stately woman began walking down the path away from us with my baby still in her arms. Dusk was already gently draping itself over us and I could just make out Annabelle’s white head bobbing contently against a black shoulder, moving slowly away from me before disappearing into the dark mouth of a small house. I returned to my food but kept glancing down the path, wondering if I was supposed to follow my child or stay where I was. I knew she was still within ear shot, and though the thought of watching a stranger in America walk away with my daughter into an unfamiliar house makes my stomach churn, it seems somehow perfectly natural in this setting. Minutes passed and then the woman carrying Annabelle reemerged and brought her all the way back to my arms. Annabelle sank into my lap and looked up as me as chuffed as a four month old can be because around her neck was tied a strand of black and white striped beads. “She’s a baby from our mountains now!” the woman declared and everyone laughed in approval. Annabelle was even rechristened “Kaka” for the evening, the name given to firstborn daughters in the Central Mountains. 

We ate together as the world sank into darkness, Khawaja and North African, Muslim and Christian, friends and strangers. And when the table was cleared we sat and talked. These women came from a place where the Arabic is much better than what is spoken here and I struggled to understand everything they said, especially when they were speaking to each other. But they were unbelievably gracious with my fumbling, letting misconjugated verbs and ill-prounounced vocabulary lay where they fell as the conversation moved on. After Laura and I exhausted our small talk about family and food and babies, the women began speaking amongst themselves about their home area. I had heard earlier that the government has started using chemical weapons against the inhabitants of the mountains and had read only that morning that 200,000 people have now been displaced, injured or killed in the conflict. As the women softly talked to and over each other my ears ached with the strain of trying to understand. But it was like someone had held a match to a story in front of me, and I was left snatching singed fragments out of the breeze and trying to piece them together myself. I heard words like, hiding in the mountains, on the radio, antanovs dropping bombs, my people, your people, airplanes…

I was grateful for the dark at this point, as though hiding my face also hid my emptiness of words. Words in any language. All I could find was, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Malesh. Because really what do you say? And if you do say something, what would it mean to those who heard it? What do you say to the fasting refugees who lay their food in front of you and give gifts to your baby even as their homes are being destroyed and their loved ones killed? Do those words even exist? All I could find was thank you and I’m sorry. But I pray they could hear more than that.

Some time later when I rose with my sleeping baby to go, I glanced over the grass fence and saw Bryan huddled around a small computer screen with the other men, their faces lit blue by the screen. On the drive home he told me they were looking at photographs and video footage of the conflict in the Central Mountains. Someone had collected the images and smuggled them out. And amazingly, Bryan had come with a flash drive in his pocket and now, these images were with us too. After we put Annabelle to bed we sat around our own computer screen in the dark of our home and looked through them. I didn’t want to. To be honest I was terrified of what I was going to see. But I felt like it was all I could offer. I can’t protect these people from bombs. I can’t stop planes from flying overhead. I can’t even talk to them deeply in their own language about how they feel or what they think. But I can look at the pictures and see that their pain is real. I can take the singed pieces of story that I have found and show them to others, like you. 

I was right to be scared of the pictures. They were some of the most awful things I have ever seen. They were of women and children huddled in caves, hiding. They were of men on rope beds with holes torn through their bodies. They were of women lying twisted in the grass, their bloody tobes covering their faces. And there was a picture of children I cannot even bring myself to describe. Small children. With black and white beads around their necks. 

You know that feeling you get when you stub your toe really hard? There is an instant before the pain rushes up your foot that everything tingles and you feel the dread of the pain that is coming. That is how I felt, and still feel. Numb. And waiting for the pain to hit. And in this numbness I find myself wondering when it feels real. It didn’t feel real reading the news in America two years ago. It didn’t feel real hearing stories of what was happening a few hundred miles away from me now every day this week. And it didn’t feel real seeing the pictures of dead neighbors of my dinner hosts last night. When does it feel real? Would it feel real if bombs started falling here and I was running with my baby? Does it feel real for them? Or are they still waiting for the pain to hit too...?

          

stress

It’s funny. So many times I sit down at the computer ready to write about some idea or thought that has been churning in my head for a few days – the experience of motherhood so far, meeting up with a dear friend in Nairobi, the current political situation in our home area now that the South is independent, yada, yada, yada – and yet it takes about two seconds for me to realize that what I thought I was thinking about is not what I was really thinking about at all and what I thought I was going to write about is not what I am going to end up writing about in the end afterall. Motherhood has made time for self-indulgent reflection on a computer screen harder to come by so my blogs may get a little less refined and a little more stream-of-consciousness as I rush to type and hit “publish” before someone wakes up from her increasingly short naps. So my apologies.  

I am stressed. There is no need to go into the details. It’s a lot of things, any one of which I feel like I could handle quite well on its own, maybe even if they showed up in pairs, but the flash mob of political insecurity, new baby, language learning (and re-learning), ever-changing travel-back-to-the-States-for-a-visit plans, temporarily difficult housing situation and the three million bug bites on my torso all together feel like a lot (okay, the last one isn’t really that big a deal but in context it feels far worse). And on top of the frustration of each of these things is the guilt that comes with knowing I chose them, and would choose them all over again in a heartbeat (with the exception of the bug bites). I want to live here in this house with no running water. I want to be in the middle of rebel-held territory in a political tenuous time. I want to learn (and re-learn) Arabic even if my brain occasionally explodes. And God help me, I want this precious baby that seems to be allergic to sleep as long as the sun is out because I love her so much my heart occasionally explodes right along with my brain. I want all these things so badly. So what right do I have to let them all make me want to scream bloody murder some days?

At least that is how I feel. In the rubble of my exploded brain I can still sift out enough logic to question how much sense that really makes. But I have inherited my mother’s superwoman demons and their own twisted logic still works astoundingly well on me. How can you be so weak? How can you be so (heaven forbid!) normal? I thought you were tough. Suck it up. Jog it off. Stuff in down and keep on trucking until things clear up. 

I suppose I should be grateful for opportunities like this where I am gracefully reminded that “superwoman” status for me is about as attainable as ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. I cannot do this on my own, nor should I want to. So really, maybe this season of stress is a blessing.  For one, I know it will soon pass, just like every other stress in life eventually does. But also, it makes me slow down and just concentrate on what is most important. Like being a good mama. And a good wife. Like taking a deep breath and admitting to a friend who has been there once or twice too, that yes, this is freaking hard. Like partly dreading going to visit a neighbor because I know my conversation skills are at the level of a four-year old, but going anyway. Like taking the time to frame a few family pictures and put much-loved books back on the shelf, even if they do get tossed right back in an evacuation bag here in a few weeks. The important stuff. Thank goodness for the stress that makes me see it. 

Happy birthday Bu!

My little sister Abigail turned nineteen yesterday. Nineteen. I can hardly believe it. I was almost ten years old when she was born so she has always been my baby sister. But a few months ago she finished up her first year in college as a pre-med student. And we were honored that she spent her first summer break with us in North Africa. Honestly, I don’t think there is a single other person in the world that could have lived with us for two months without either driving us crazy in the end, or, as is far more likely, gone stark raving mad themselves. As it turns out, Abigail did neither. She was an enormous help to me as a new mother, arriving at about the height or my new parent psychosis, and yet never once mocking my bipolar tendency to bemoan my daughter’s stubborn refusal to sleep followed immediately by my supreme gloating over her absolute perfection in every way, repeated three or four times in the course of an hour. She was the perfect nanny-aunt spending hours bouncing Annabelle while I cooked, or feeding her while I studied language. She was a fabulous sister, listening to me pour out the two years of backlogged thoughts and emotions that come with sisterlessness. She slept in a leaking mud hut with a hedgehog for a roommate and listened patiently while we negotiated her bride price with our good friend Ahmed. She ate sorghum and okra, covered her head and learned to ride a motorcycle. She gracefully received advice about where to hide if planes started dropping bombs and didn’t panic when she learned that the hospital where she was working would be a likely target. She took in everything with delight, curiosity, amusement and amazement and made me see my world through her eyes all over again too.

I asked Abigail to make a guest appearance on my blog and write about her experience shadowing the one doctor at the local hospital, but, sadly, she declined. I wish she would have though because I think her firsthand account of the things she saw at that hospital needs to be told to as wide an audience as possible. She would come home every day from her time there with the most outrageous stories (and pictures!) of the surgeries she had watched, the pregnant tummies she had palpated and the diseases she had seen firsthand. She saw a woman whose foot had been blown off when she dropped a heavy load of firewood on a landmine. She watched an abdominal surgery on a conscious two-week old baby. She scrubbed up and stood inches away from dozens of hemorrhoid, goiter and hydrocele surgeries (if you don’t know what that last one is, look it up. I promise it’s worth your time) and every day she came home more and more interested in what she was seeing and hearing and learning.

The most touching story Abigail told me was of the day she spent in the maternity ward. Two women were in labor simultaneously and the room was crowded with family members, traditional midwives and hospital staff. Abigail was asked to take her shoes off before she entered the dim room and place them next to the pile of muddy sandals. She hedged around the splatters of blood on the floor but stepped in something she said looked like porridge; she prayed it was. One woman was having a difficult breech delivery and the doctor had been called in to help. He was sitting on a stool, straining to twist and pull the two tiny limp legs that hung outside her body. Despite the midwives scolding her to be quiet, the woman writhed in pain and at one point, reached out and clung to Abigail’s hand while she stood by and watched helplessly. Abigail said the breech delivery was so horrifically fascinating that she hardly noticed the woman behind her, silently laboring to deliver her own child. Both babies were eventually pulled and pushed into the world and both were immediately rushed to a table for intensive care.  With some oxygen and stimulation the breech baby survived and was returned to his mother to nurse. The second baby however, died shortly his birth, despite everything that could be done under the circumstances. Abigail said the young mother received the news without response. Neither bereaved nor stoic, she accepted the news with an air of nonchalance. “I seemed more upset than she did,” Abigail said. And we wondered how many times a day that story is repeated in that little hospital.

I was amazed by Abigail this summer. After sitting through my first hydrocele surgery I would have been sending in my applications for law school as fast I could. And watching a mother receive news that her baby has just died while she sits in her bodily fluids next to a woman cradling her squalling new child…well, I’m not sure how I would have handled that. But Abigail handled it all, with strength and empathy. And after this summer, she’s no longer just interested in becoming a doctor, but now, maybe a surgeon. In a place where there are landmines. In a hospital with no running water or electricity. And I can’t help but think, Great. What have we done? The thought of my baby sister working in a hospital in some war-torn country makes my stomach turn, but honestly, it’s with both fear and pride. I am so grateful for the time we got to spend with Abigail this summer. I could write fourteen posts about the things we did together and remembered together and what they made me think about. But on her birthday I just wanted to say how thankful I am for Abigail, how proud I am to be her big sister and how much we miss you already. Thank goodness you have three more summers before med school. (: Happy birthday, Bu.     

Showing Bryan photos from a hydrocele surgery (you know you're curious...)