Brownie Points

Several days ago while the girls were napping, I sat in the kitchen watching skinks trying to sneak in my front door and tried to quantify just exactly how badly I wanted chocolate. And here’s what I decided: I wanted it badly. Bad enough that I would streak to the front gate and back if it meant a huge bowl of M&Ms at the end. Not bad enough that I would make a mad dash just any time. I would only do it at midday when everyone is resting or sleeping inside, but bad enough that I would do it buck-naked. I decided I wanted chocolate badly enough that I would take a sip of the green sludge that sits in tepid pools on the outskirts of the local market. Not bad enough that I would actually swallow it (because that, of course, would just be stupid), but bad enough that I would throw it back and swish it around for a minute before spitting it out, mushy chunks and all, if it meant a Cadbury’s macadamia nut candy bar would promptly be handed over in return.

The moral of the story is, I really wanted some chocolate.

It’s not that I am in want of sweet stuff. People here love their sugar and I regularly drink cloying sweet coffee in little cups filled two/thirds full of light brown grains. I am served juice that makes the back of your tonsils burn and I made cookies for Bryan the other day that were mostly sugar held together with a healthy serving of butter. I am not in need of sweet. But chocolate, chocolate, that silky rich delicacy that satisfies something just between my tastebuds and my soul has been severely lacking in my diet lately. Our Nutella stash, our only source of cocoa, ran out weeks ago and we still have a couple weeks before we go out for R and R. And the other day I was starting to get the shakes of deprived junkie.    

When I shared this with my amused husband, who was up to his eyeballs in the logistics of getting a charter plane full of building supplies up from Kenya, he said, “I bet I could get you some M&Ms up here.” I just rolled my eyes at him. If you don’t count the trail mix some UN official has melting in his duffel bad behind razor wire down the road we are probably 700 miles from the closest M&M. Bryan may be able to order a truck load of rebar and Y-6 from a dealer in Nairobi, have it trucked across the country by someone he’s never met and manage export documents and immigration officials to get it on a plane to our dirt airstrip all just by working his magic knock-off Chinese telephone, but I knew better than to believe he could get me chocolate up here within 24 hours. Yeah right, I said. So he shrugged and went back to trying to figure out how many drums of fuel the plane was going to need and I went back to trying to determine if I wanted chocolate badly enough that I might swallow just a tiny bit of the green market sludge.

The next day our family went to the airstrip late in the afternoon to meet the plane. A Cessna caravan earlier in the day had unloaded all of our ceiling boards and two-by-fours and this plane, someone else’s charter, was just carrying a couple mattresses for us. We rode the donkey cart out to the airstrip, (which incidentally, sounded like a better idea that it actually was. I don’t think Ergo babies are tested on rickety carts hauled down dirt roads by hyper donkeys. I thought Mkat and I might both end up with a mouthful of market sludge after all, chocolate or not.) We greeted the pilot, a friend from Nairobi, and the returning neighbors and friends who were coming back in after a couple weeks out. I milled around in the airplane-shaped-shade with the girls while the plane was unloaded and refueled. And after our mattresses were loaded up on the cart and Annabelle loaded up on top of the mattresses, Bryan suddenly said, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and trotted back over to the pilot. The pilot – a married father of five - then smiled and pulled a plastic sack out from under his seat. He winked at Bryan and said, “It’s good to get brownie points sometimes.”

As we started rolling home Bryan handed me the sack with a smile and said, “I told you I could get you some chocolate. Enjoy.”

I thought I might start crying.

From on top of the towering donkey cart he and Annabelle split the little bag of pretzel M&M’s (our pilot friend said even in Nairobi the pickings were a little slim) while I delicately pulled open the glossy brown wrapper of a Snickers bar and devoured the whole thing on a slow walk home delightfully alone. In another life I might have been a little picky about the peanuts, choosing several other kinds of chocolate over this one first. But on this day I savored each crumble of chocolate, each drizzle of caramel and each fluff of nougat like it was literally saving my life. Goats pooped on the path in front of me in the fading light of a North African sunset and old men in white robes mumbled, “Salaam alekum” as they tottered past. And I smiled, my lips stained with melted chocolate I’m sure, as I soaked in the strange and beautiful experience of a Snickers bar in a refugee camp that came not because I streaked or drank market sludge or really did anything other than whine a little bit. But it came just because someone loves me. (And because he has a 

magic telephone with the numbers of bush pilots who love him.)

Bryan and I have been a bit terse with each other lately, bickering with the kind of too-polite silences and too-sharp responses that come from too-few meals alone, too-many hours at the computer, too-many dirty cloth diapers. It’s nothing big. But like Bryan says, when your marriage goes from out-of-this-world-amazing to simply amazing, it’s noticeable. And we still want out-of-this-world. It’s hard to say if it is this crazy stressful season of building and waiting and living in a hut with one-too-many rats or simply seven years or marriage with two very small children and still feeling out our roles and expectations that is starting to get to us. North Africa gets blamed for a fair amount of this stress. But in reality, I suspect that simple parenthood and the kind of getting older that would happen anywhere on the earth are as much at fault.

As I walked home from the airstrip at sunset yesterday, savoring my last bite of chocolate I felt deeply, disproportionately satisfied. And all I could think was, I have a really good husband.