Drums

I am propped up in bed with the computer on my lap, enjoying the comforting security of a wide mosquito net. My sick baby sleeps within arm’s reach under her own net and the last time I checked her fever was still down. Bryan reads Chinua Achebe next to me, the light of his Kindle helping to divert the tiny bugs that can still fit through the mesh from my screen to his. Outside, like every night that we have been here, drums beat wildly under a full yellow moon, as exotic and other-worldly as a cliché scene in a movie I would ridicule. I am so curious about them. Who is drumming and why? What do the words to their songs mean?

In some ways I wonder what in the world we have done this week and in other ways I wonder how we did everything we did. The logistics of getting building supplies in this place is a never ending nightmare which has kept Bryan fully occupied and simple living has kept me busy. I made cornbread on the stove top the other day which felt like a huge accomplishment; I washed a couple loads of laundry by hand and have kept the house relatively clean. I kept my panic under control when the first night adder sashayed into the house and almost worked up the courage to kill the second one myself in the kitchen. (I let Bryan do the dirty work both times.) The third one that dares enter my house has it coming for him.    

On Thursday we went into the camp to greet some old friends. Many men have come by the house to say hello or have crossed our paths in the market. But most of the women I once knew are as home-bound as I am and I was excited about getting out to see them, even with the long walk.

The camp feels like a camp. There is space between the homes and people come and go freely. Little kids walk back from the pond with mudfish slung over their shoulders on home-made poles. But UNHCR tarps drape over almost every roof. Men sit in threadbare patches of shade as though waiting for something. Some are working metal or leading tired donkeys down the road. But there is a lot of waiting. Or at least the feeling of it.

I had a sweet reunion with my dear friend Aisha. She was one of the last people I saw on Thursday. I had already had time to cry behind my big sunglasses as we were swarmed by throngs of children who were shooed away by old men and women with babies on their hips, each soul pressing around us holding more stories than I could imagine. And all somehow happy. I was happy too. By the time I saw Aisha I was able to keep it together, which seemed somehow culturally appropriate. But she threw her arms around me in a long giggly hug which didn’t really seem that culturally appropriate at all, so maybe in the end it would have been okay to just cry in her shoulder. It was so sweet to hug her neck.

She has a new baby, a fat little girl named Khajija. I did the rough math while I bounced her on my knee and realize Aisha was at least four months pregnant when she fled her home, carrying small children for days on end. She looks good, isn’t much thinner than when I last saw her and her kids seems healthy. Her UNHCR tent is pitched in a shaded area with a wide sweep of clean-swept earth in front of it. But when I asked about her oldest child, a girl who was living with her grandmother in another town when war broke out, Aisha looked calmly away and said someone called her a few months back to say the girl had died in another camp in Ethiopia. She was eight years old.

On Sunday afternoon Bryan played ultimate Frisbee with some other khawajas on one end of the airstrip (the end with the wreckage of an old airplane). I sat on a mound of dirt and watched while Annabelle played with a bunch of kids nearby. A couple of little boys batted iridescent dragonflies out of the sky and brought them to her patiently even though she would end up letting them slip through her chubby fingers and back into the sky almost every time. I sat and watched and thought about a lot of things.   

I’ve had moments of feeling overwhelmed by the refugee context, of the sobering reality of what living here will mean. I have lots of questions about how all this is going to play out still. I sit with Aisha for half an hour under a tree and my heart constricts in longing for a time when we both still had houses to serve tea in and her daughter was still alive. With a pang of guilt I often think, this is not what I wanted. I wanted a place where people were settled and in a place that felt like home to them, even if it didn’t always to me. I wanted a place where I might have to work through what it means to have a friend who struggles to pay her kids school fees, but not what it means to help her keep them alive. I wanted a place where I would have to live simply and adjust to roughing it from time to time, not a place where I would have to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a prefab house with no plumbing that you can’t get to by even a really crappy road. I was ready for complicated. But why does it have to be this complicated? I have thought this so many times this week.

I hear the irony in my voice when I say these things. I know if questions were visible, my own would be one among thousands tonight blocking out the moon and stars overhead with their number. Why does it have to be like this? Why? I am not the only one thinking this.

I can’t answer these questions for myself, much less for Aisha and the thousands of people that live in the camps with her. But in those moments of conflicting emotions, when I sit thoughtfully in the dirt and watch my joyful daughter receive generosity from refugee children, I find myself returning to a couple of things that I know to be true. Things that help center me.  

I know that the one I live for has asked his followers to live helping people who have a lot less than they do. That is unarguable, (believe me, I’ve tried). And I know that the people I am living next to right now fit the bill better than just about anyone I can imagine. There are few people more deserving of a bit of a break, a bit of justice than people like Aisha. That is undeniable.

So if this life we have chosen and this work we are stubbornly fighting for a chance to just try is messy, if it is hard, even if it turns out to be one big failure, it is still worthwhile. Or at least it seems that way to me when I sit and think about it for a little while. This is the kind of thing, the kind of place, the kind of people worth using up one’s life out on. God knows it’s a mess. But despite my fears and grief and an occasional sense of deep loss - none of which will go away soon I feel - I cannot shake, cannot pull off, cannot dig out of the sinews of my heart the burning sensation that this is right.

So here we are.

I just got up and checked on Annabelle. Her fever is back so I gave her some ibuprofen and watched her suck it down and then nestle cozily back into her Graco pack n play. I breathed a prayer of bare-bone thanks and then crawled back into bed next to my sleeping husband. The drums are still pounding out in the darkness. Maybe tomorrow I will find out what they mean.