Balcony

The walls are somewhere between mint green and sea-foam. The kitchen is tiny and has no drawers, but the little fridge and gas stove we bought used at a bargain fit in just perfectly. The calendar full of family pictures that my sister made me months ago finally has a place to hang. It’s one of the first things I put up.

We don’t have any furniture yet so we are just eating on a trunk and sitting on a bunch of colorful mats, but the carpenters who work on the side of Ggaba road say the beds, couch, table and chairs should be here by Monday. (Inshallah, I say to myself, just in case.)

The hot water heater works brilliantly and the electricity hasn’t been off once since we have been here, even with a couple of thunderstorms. The bathroom in the master bathroom is a little on the tacky side, a chrome modern look that wasn’t quite pulled off. But the house has lots of windows, and despite being full of nooks and odd tucked away spaces, it feels bright and airy and open. There is a guest room that is currently functioning as my private gym, the first space in months that is big enough for me to do my “Ten Minutes Pilates Solutions” by Laura Hudson without kicking over a suitcase or Pack N’Play. Oh Laura…She has literally, literally been about the only constant thing in my life beside Bryan these past five years. The places she and I have been….

My favorite place in this house is the upstairs balcony. It overlooks our small patch of private green grass and some of our neighbor’s grass too, a quiet and incredibly friendly Canadian family with shy little boys. (They have probably never heard so much screaming wafting over the wall in all their lives.) From here I can see out over our crumbly little urban neighborhood here in the heart of Kampala – potholed dirt roads winding between the columned houses with tall gates rimmed with razor-wire and the rusting tin dukas selling tomatoes and stale biscuits through cut-out windows. Several houses are unfinished and on the grey half-walls of one, a graffiti artist has painted portraits of Nelson Mandela, Tupak Shakur, Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and the words, “One Love.”

Beyond our neighborhood there is only the rolling skyline of Kampala, deep green pushing up between slabs of cement and glass, roads, buildings, markets and slums, life teeming under the weight of the city, bursting out of every breathable crack. In the warm breeze that brushes past me I hear the hum of all great African cities – the purr of a thousand motors perforated with the screech of car horns, whistling and hammering intermingling at a nearby construction site, the wail of a street preacher undercut by a mournful call to prayer, chickens, dogs, goats and ducks all competing with the thump of an R and B artist’s song tumbling out of a passing bus. And most prominent of all simply because he is right outside the front gate, the nasal ebb and flow of a knife-sharpener’s cry accentuated by the chime of his bell and clatter of his tools on the stony road. All of these sounds blend together and soften each other’s edges creating an almost constant buzz that I find inexplicably soothing.

From the balcony I can see a cell tower about half a kilometer away. Every evening two or three figures are perched at different heights on the angled rails, some of them dizzyingly high. At first I thought they were maintenance workers or repairmen. But they are there every evening, different people at different spots, and I have come to realize they are just people enjoying the time of day and a bird’s eye view of the city too. I like that. I wonder what they think about up there, if they are the same kind of things I think about up here.

After eight months of living in guesthouses and other people’s homes, we are finally unpacking our bags. When Bryan came out of North Africa this last time, something inside me broke a little and I knew I needed rest, the kind that only comes from living in a space where you can cook and laugh and yell at your kids and make love and cry and wrestle with your babies and dream out loud as loudly or quietly or happily or sadly as you need to. I wanted that place to be North Africa. I still do. And I am still holding out hope that it will be.

But until it is, this is where I will be. In a little green house in Kampala cooking in a tiny kitchen and praying on a pleasant balcony. We are hoping it will just be the home we can rest in when we can’t be up North, the place with familiar sheets and our brand of tea in the kitchen cabinet where we can plug into life and work and community when gunshots or rumors force us away from the home we most want to be in. A place that keeps us safe and sane, and yet close by, watching and waiting for that door to crack open again so we can shove our foot back in it. A place that keeps us grounded and thankful.

Of course, it isn’t exactly that right now.

The new sheets aren’t in fact familiar and I have yet to find my favorite brand of tea here. I can never remember which light switches go to which lights and I haven’t learned to subconsciously maneuver around the trashcan just inside the kitchen door so I won’t knock into it every time I step inside. When I wake up in the middle of the night starring at a high white ceiling from my mattress on the floor in takes me a minute to remember where the junk I am (and I am talking, like, which country we are in, not what part of the house).

It isn’t home yet.

But as I wash new cups in the sink after breakfast I think about how we picked out these cups by ourselves, plastic and cheap though they may be. They are ours. I think about how I chose the brand of dishwashing soap and the crust I am scraping off of the bottom of that pan is from a meal I cooked and served my hungry family as we ate it together alone.

And all of that, silly though it may be, makes me think that though it isn’t exactly home yet, hopefully it will be soon. Maybe my secondary home, maybe not. Who knows. Only time will tell. But a home nonetheless. And though it may not be the most familiar place to me now, it has given me the gift of shallow roots and a sense of gratitude.

It is with both fear and hope that I suspect that everything else will follow in good time.      

My loves eating supper in our current dining room