Lucky Day

A couple weeks ago my new neighbor offered to take me downtown to buy some fabric for curtains in our new home. I wanted a local design at a local price, but not yet knowing the local language, markets or public transportation systems, my new friend Martha, who was born and raised in the city, kindly offered to run around with me on a Tuesday morning. We walked down the dirt alley in front of our adjoined houses, past a nursery school and all the ramshackle stalls overflowing with papaya and avocado to the nearest matatu stage. We ducked into the 14 passenger van revving its engine along the side of the narrow road and waited for it to fill up. Once all seventeen of us had squeezed in we pushed off and headed into town.

We were only a couple of minutes down the road when the engine started sounded funny. The van lurched a few times and we began losing speed. The thick traffic behind us honked and jerked past on the busy road. The van sounded like it was drowning, coughing and staggering up a long hill while the driver fiddled with pedals and gears out of my sight. It quickly became evident that we were almost completely out of gas. We inched our way miserably up the hill, all of our heads jerking in unison with every jolt forward. This went on painfully for several kilometers.

We finally crested the hill and eased our way into one of the busiest intersections in Kampala, four huge roads spilling into a massive roundabout where traffic swirls around a singular patch of grass housing an ugly monument to something or other. There, we made our way slowly into the very heart of the chaos… and promptly stopped.

The car died.

The driver turned the ignition.

Nothing.

Outside thousands of tons of metal and glass turned to some strange viscous liquid and pooled around us like we were a mere rock in a stream. Hugs buses, Land Cruisers and pickups and thousands of motorcycles carrying their loads of mattresses, beer-crates, chickens or women in folds of diaphanous cloth all bled past us like some strange school of fish on their way downstream. Outside was the cacophony of organized chaos.

Inside was surprisingly silent. The woman in front of me scratched the skin between her braids with a long red fingernail and glanced at her watch. The tout fiddled with the wad of small bills interlacing his fingers. Someone behind be uttered a single loud cluck of indeterminate meaning, tongue rapping loudly on the soft palate of his mouth. Martha and I sat there side by side, the skin of our bare arms sweating into each other, an odd intimacy shared with a near-stranger.

We probably only sat there three minutes, maybe less, but it felt much longer. Eventually the driver turned the key once more and the van took a final gasp. It was just enough to propel us forward one last time and we wove impossibly through the masses and then coasted lifelessly down the other side of the long hill and into the waiting arms of a petrol station.

While the van filled with the smell of gasoline Martha beside me started to laugh, her huge breasts jiggling as she wiped sweat from her face with a fold of cloth. “We made it,” she said and gave me a little nudge with her elbow, “Today we are lucky, eh? Yes, this is our lucky day.”

That perspective is one of favorite things about Africa and one of the things I am most blessed to have been immersed in for about twenty of my thirty-one years. On some days it strikes me as sheer optimism with a pretty strong aftertaste of fatalism, but usually I recognize it for what it is - the eyes to see all the blessings that are strewn haphazardly all over our paths. Those inconvenient gifts that have a tendency to get underfoot and trip us up if we aren’t paying close enough attention to them.

I think of the time several years, three houses and two evacuations ago when Bryan was moving a huge water tank to better position it under a rain gutter. He had scooted it a few feet across the damp dirt just off our back porch when we discovered millions of carpenter ants pouring out of the earth he had disturbed and flooding across the yard. While Bryan and I rushed to get cans of bug spray to kill the hoard advancing towards the kitchen, our guard Ahmed broke into a huge grin and shouted, “No, no, don’t poison them. It’s a blessing. It is food for the chickens!” Then he trotted off towards the chicken coop whistling to our tribe of hungry hens.

I may have lived on this continent for most of my life, but I sometimes remain so blind to the blessings those around me seem to see so clearly. These past few weeks I have felt stripped down. Breaking my dang foot has probably been a big part of this. (It was a silly accident on a very aggressive flight of stairs, a fairly uninteresting story for another day – I will be fine.) Life circumstances have just left me feeling so incapable of doing what I want to do. Like I am still stuck in that matatu in the middle of the intersection unable to get the car moving at all much less in the right direction.

Tonight after supper while I was washing dishes on one foot (I insisted. Bryan has been doing everything else and I was determined to be a little helpful) I heard the sound of insanity in the living room. I hopped in with my soapy hands and found my crazy little family had moved the furniture out of their way and was dancing their hearts out to Andrew Peterson's ridiculous songs. I leaned against the doorframe for a minute and watched them leap about like maniacs, the girls laughing hysterically while Bryan swung them in circles through the air. And this time instead of hollering at them to be careful or to keep it down a little so the neighbors don’t think we are being robbed or something, I put down my crutches and decided to join in.

Cheap furniture is easy to move around. A still somewhat-empty house is great for acoustics. New rhythms of life mean that work and play have clearer distinctions now, making family nights more fulfilling than they have ever been. And, as it turns out, a broken foot dance to the lyrics of “Ten Piggy Little Toes” is good for try-not-to-pee-in-your-pants laughter.

Lucky. Blessed. It is something I am, whether or not I always see it that way in the moment. Sometimes I am still rushing to poison the very thing that is going to feed my heart. In this season of lingering uncertainty, growing understanding of the loss and new beginnings not quite off the ground yet, I am learning from the example of those around me - to open my eyes a little wider and looker a little closer. This is my lucky day.