The Patient Ones

About a week before we evacuated North Africa last month I went to visit a woman named Om Iman in the camp. Her name had confused me for the longest time; it literally means “Mother of Iman (Faith) and I had assumed she had a daughter named Iman and like every other woman I know, was referred to by the name of her firstborn. So I called her “Iman” for the longest time before eventually discovering that when she was born she was named after a woman with a daughter named Iman and was ever-after called “Imam’s mother”.

Om Iman is one of those women who is staggeringly beautiful, at least I think so. I feel like you could plop her down in a mall in suburban America complete with bare feet, traditional facial scars and her fuchsia tobe draped gracefully over her thick braids and she would turn heads admiringly. Her jet black skin is as flawless as obsidian. She is tall and willowy and smiles easily. She is pretty in her home culture – she is tall and strong and has high cheekbones, but I feel like there is something timeless and borderless about her beauty too. At any time or place in the world, in rags or silk, she would be lovely.

This loveliness had also led me to be confused when I heard that she was the first of her husband’s two wives. She seemed so young and pretty, why in the world would her husband have taken a second wife? But I have had to conced that in a world not always as defined by sex and beauty as the one I come from, especially in a time of war, perhaps there are things I just don’t know or understand. Undoubtedly there are.

I didn’t even know Om Iman was pregnant when our mutual friend Laila told me she had miscarried. Laila comes to my house several mornings a week to sweep and help contain my dirty dishes, and this particular morning, as she scrubbed oatmeal off of a white plastic bowl, she told me that Om Iman was very unwell. She said that she had gotten up early in the morning to sweep the blood out of Om Iman’s floor, using gestures that suggested a miscarriage far more serious than I would have imagined from the slight frame of the woman I had seen only two days earlier. I asked Laila if it would be appropriate to visit Om Iman. Our cultures are different, I told her, Does she want to receive visitors right now or should I wait a few days? Laila snorted at my question as though I was being intentionally funny and said, Tomorrow, we will go see her tomorrow.      

Laila, who had come in for half a morning’s work, and Aisha, who is my language tutor, and I started off the next morning in the ATV Bryan only had up and running again for a matter of weeks. It was my first time driving again since the rebels had quasi-graciously returned the vehicle (thank you Division 10), and I was praying it wouldn’t die on me in the middle of the road three miles from home. We careened over potholes and through herds or sheep with our tobes flying out the sides of the vehicle like colorful wings until the red murram road became a dirt track which became a grassy trail which became a clearing under a tree beside a tukul where we parked and got out and walked.  

Om Iman’s friendly husband greeted me warmly and escorted us to the UNHRC tent with pinned open flaps where Om Iman lives. She was sitting on a rope bed in a sleeveless cotton nightgown and she struggled to rise and greet us when we stepped in. We sat down across from her in the hot close air of the tent; Om Iman’s co-wife, a short girl with thick arms and a shy smile brought us a pitcher of water.  

It is in times like these that I feel the limitations of my Arabic. I can talk about sickness and pregnancy and babies and hospital visits quite comfortably, but wading through matters of the heart – grief, anger, disappointment – these things are still difficult. But Om Iman talked more freely than I expected her too. She sat on the rope bed and described the pains that gripped her stomach a few nights earlier and the dead baby she had birthed on the dirt floor, encircling her fingers around the skin just above her wrist with her palm outstretched to show me how big the baby had been. She told me this was her third stillbirth. Dark stains slowly blossomed on her nightgown as she talked, the slow leak of milk for another lost child.

What do you say in those moments? Even in English, to someone I grew up with, my own sister, what would I say? And then how do I say that to a new friend from a world so far from my own, in a language we are both borrowing? I am so sorry. I don’t know why this happened. God loves you and your dead baby. I am so sorry. So, so sorry.

But I tried, somewhat fearfully but immensely grateful for these people that have the uncanny ability to see through words and actions and stuff, straight to the heart. Sometimes this gift makes me nervous, but on this day I was so thankful. We prayed and Om Iman said thank you many times for our visit. Before we rose to go she said, You know, sometimes I just lie in my bed at night and think. I can’t sleep because my head is so full of thoughts. Sometimes I cry as I think about life. But God has another life for us. So we are patient. We must just be patient.

I saw Om Iman once more before we left North Africa, the day before in fact, and she was smiling and seemed happy. Not superficially so, but a genuine happiness, perhaps more noticeably for its contrasting rim of deep sadness.

Patient, was the word she used. We must be patient. This is not a word I know. I am patient in long lines full of crabby people with carts full of soda and tangerines at a supermarket on a Sunday evening. I am patient in the maddening snarls of orderless traffic here in Nairobi, at least most of the time. I am patient when my baby throws her banana on the floor over and over and over again.

But patient when your third baby dies? Patient when you live in a tent because your government is bombing the mud huts in your home village? Patient when you watch fear and instability stalk closer and closer to the life you were rebuilding, threatening the peace you were just beginning to rest into?

I am having to be patient right now too. This isn’t what I wanted either. But my patience involves long runs in quiet neighborhoods with paved roads. It involves a little preschool for my firstborn three days a week. It involves a nice restaurant at least once a week and a church that worships in my heart language. Yes, I have had my fair share of sleepless nights and unexpected floods of tears. But I have not yet learned patience like Om Iman.

If it is true that God draws near to the broken-hearted, if he loves the poor and the abandoned of this world as much as he says he does, than I was in the presence of holiness that day on a rope bed under a hot UNHCR tarp, my feet tipped on a stained dirt floor. I was given the honor of sitting with the treasure of his heart, a favorite of the God of all creation.

If given the opportunity to sit in her presence again I will not take it for granted. She has so much to teach me.  

This is the best picture I could find of Om Iman. She is in the orange and yellow floral tobe towards the left looking off camera. Laila is on the mat in the foreground reaching towards her foot. I will take a better picture of them both when I see them again.