Dear Lydia - Dreams

Dear Lydia,

The water around our house is drying up quickly now. Soggy islands have reclaimed more marshland every morning and the children have been forced to wade further out to find brown pools deep enough to splash in. But the water birds are still flocking in and they cackle in huge numbers over the surface of the shallow water in the early morning. Blinding white Ibis settle over distant trees looking like they are posing for a poet. The UN helicopters spook them and they silently lift off the trees like a cloud of flowers that have suddenly tired of the view from their branches. The only downside to the receding waters is the shrinking fecal matter to brackish water ratio that leaves an unpleasant perfume by midday.

I have meant to sit down and write you many times this week, and have even jotted down some thoughts in little notebooks scattered around the house. But it seems like every day the mood of the week has shifted, both mine and the mood at large, and it has been hard to know what to say exactly. Rumor and truth remain inextricably tied and the network has been down for days making it even harder to understand reality. But the rebels from the South that have moved closer and then retreated again several times already are currently on their side of whatever line has been drawn up, so people are a bit more relaxed right now. One day I am emotionally preparing for the slew of hurried goodbyes and rushed exits, the next day I am confident we will be here until our planned R and R and back shortly thereafter. You know the game. We are ever riding the swells and dips that seem to never end. But the swell of the moment is a good one so we will enjoy it as long as we can.

I don’t have anything terribly interesting to report. My days continue to be filled with kneading bread, emptying purple potties into the latrine, washing out lentils, pouring mint tea for unexpected guests, hand selecting tomatoes from a salesman’s mat in the market, singing babies to sleep, chopping onions, making yoghurt. I have turned out to be so much more traditional then I ever expected and barefoot in the kitchen (and the answer to that question is no, I am not) has turned out to be a place I have laid claim to far more than I, or Bryan, ever expected. It is a preference conducive to a traditional place and people, and though I deeply delight in shaking things up a bit by driving the ATV like a mad woman, or publicly bantering with Bryan about something or the other, at the end of the day keeping our family clean and fed is a priority I enjoy.

That being said, I have had several dreams this week that are subtle reminders of the tensions at play within me. In one of them I was taking an art class and was walking around the classroom at the end of the day inspecting all my classmates’ work. I was so impressed by everyone’s paintings. They all seemed so layered and profound, thoughtful and multi-faceted. Then I got to my work and realized with growing horror that I was looking at pages and pages of beautifully colored Sesame Street pictures roughly pulled out of my children’s coloring books.

I am not making this up.

Clearly it wouldn’t take someone with a doctorate in Freudian studies to pin a few hypothesis to the meaning of my dreams, (in another I was trying to make some comment to a visiting famous writer only he couldn’t hear whatever I had to say over the screams of my children). I guess I just wonder if the tension between the things we love the most – the ways we always dreamed we would spend our time and the ways we actually spend our time – is a tension normal to all young mothers. Or is it those of us who work in incredibly high needs places? Maybe it is just a human problem. I don’t know. I do know however that I am shocked sometimes by how one day I can feel so immensely proud of all I have achieved in a day, whether through a language lesson, thoughtful conversation with a refugee friend or simply an engaging round of Disney Princess Candy Land with two little girls in green toenail polish, and then the next day feel crippled under the weight of guilt and insecurity over all the things I haven’t done or should be able to do so much better.

With a new high-needs baby and a greater geographical distance between you and the work you thought you would be doing right now, I wonder if you sometimes feel the strain of these tensions too. I hope you don’t. I sometimes kid myself that if you were here we would have literacy classes lined up every day of the week followed by amazing writer’s workshops and women’s Bible studies and language lessons in two different languages. We would be literacy specialist-mamas-extraordinaire! I of course know the reality is that we would actually still be wrestling out all our roles and battling guilt and pride and hope and fear all at once. But at least we would be doing it together, often over long conversations in the evening under the Neem tree outside my front door while our kids squabble over the swing. I miss you most in that lull right before dinner when we used to sit outside and let the kids run around, those final moments of the day when the sun is just setting and the sky looks its biggest.

The good thing about these sparring emotions within me is that I have gotten out a lot this week. Thankfully there are also a lot of new young single nurses next door who have looked to me for ways to get to know women in the community, and I have a husband who is more than willing to play his fair share of Disney Princess Candy Land, so the ATV and I have bonded on several jarring trips weaving our way between pumpkin patches and UNHCR tents on our way to visit so-and-so in the camp. I have had lots of good Rotana language practice. I even sat down with Ibrahim and interrupted his work on the dictionary and story writing to help me do a rough translation of the Mary and Martha story into Rotana to share with women later this week. I have been practicing reading it. I am so curious what their reaction will be to hear a Bible story read in their language. I feel excited and encouraged about where we are at and the overwhelming potential of the next few months. I just have these moments of feeling like the needs of this place and what I have to offer are a forest fire and a thimble full of water sitting side by side. I know we follow one who fed thousands with some miserable little fish. I am holding out hope that he can do something with thimbles full of water too.    

On Sunday in church we heard five bombs fall. The first I thought was thunder. At the second the people around me started whispering “Antanov.” The fourth sounded close enough that I started looking around for the low spot to run to but the fifth sounded far away again. Everyone says there were all across the border and is not overly concerned about it so I am learning to shrug it off too. What else can you do? There is something profoundly spiritual in ways that I can’t fully articulate about praying with people while listening to bombs falling on their homeland. One woman told me the other day that the reason Omar keeps bombing their people is because he doesn’t have children of his own so he can’t possibly understand what it is like to lose the ones you love. I suspect the president of the North is most likely married with many children, though I don’t know for sure, but either way, I find it fascinating to hear people say that someone with power simply being able to empathize with their losses could make all of this stop.  

I should close. I bought a piece of goat in the market this morning and I need to figure out what in the world to do with it for supper. I am thinking goat fajitas…We are doing Thanksgiving with SIM on Saturday and we are all looking forward to it. I hope you are having a lovely day with family enjoying turkey and football and cooler weather. The days are still warm here but the nights are downright chilly, so much so that my African babies waking up crying for their sweaters. They send their love too, as do many others.

Hugs all around,

Libby

Dear Lydia - Airplanes

Dear Lydia,

 I don’t know if it is the slowly encroaching heat or the ebb of my happy-to-be-back energy burst, (probably some combination of both), but I have been so sluggish lately. By mid-afternoon I feel like I am dragging myself around under miles of deep warm water. A couple times I have taken advantage of the girls’ naps to lay down myself but have awoken from a half-conscious coma so groggy and dehydrated that I have regretted not just pushing on until bedtime.

I think most of the tiredness is because of my days being full of good things. The G language workshop going on here at the compound will finish tomorrow after two full weeks and even though I have been involved far less than Bryan, it has shaped my time significantly. I am imagining you reading Bryan’s email where he mentioned that all of the participants are staying in your house, and I am hoping that brought you great joy and not sheer panic. When I was putting clean sheets on your bed I said out loud, “Somewhere Lydia’s eye is twitching and she has no idea why.” It was a last minute decision, one based on people from this group living in the camp so far away. When we cleaned out your house I did my best to tuck away any of your personal things more than they already were. (Though, I am still amazed at how organized and thorough you were with a 24 hour heads up on our evacuation. Holy cow, if you were trying to organize my house post-evacuation for hosting a workshop I promise you would have bought a round-trip ticket back to the States just so you could smack me in the face. You would have just had to burn all the piles of crap we left lying around and start all over again. Suffice it to say, minus some spiders and rodents, and lots of termites, your house looked great.) Thank you so much for your long distance hospitality.

It’s been exciting seeing the six men and one woman attending the workshop, almost all members of another major world religion, work so hard to mold an orthography and some spelling conventions out of their mind-boggling tapestry of a language. Much of the grammatical and phonological issues they are wading through make my brain cramp up just to hear about. But it is so beautiful too. After having been violently forced from their homes due to their skin color, their culture and the language they were told was “monkey talk,” it is inspiring to see the purposeful energy they are pouring into developing their language for the first time ever. At the very moment I am writing these words, a handful of refugees are sitting around the plastic table on which you used to feed Josh his breakfast oatmeal, scratching away at notebooks as they resiliently engage in subversive resistance to a government that is still bombing their homes just miles away. Your home is playing hostess to a bunch of ragtag seditionists, boldly writing down their language in defiance and with great hope.   

Being back for a couple weeks now it is so easy to forget that there are several wars all around us (lots of little wars? Many facets of one big one?). No matter how much my brain tries to remind me that we could be forced to leave again tomorrow, with every passing day I find myself settling back in just a little deeper, resting just a little more fully in the joys of a glass of mint tea under a baobab tree, a belly laugh over a joke in another language, the sound of a robaba plinking out a tune that feels as rooted to this little corner of the globe as the very trees themselves. No matter how much language I learn, or how many times I evacuate, I think I will always be blind to certain realities of life here. It is a blindness that the daily joys feed, and I eagerly devour each one that is offered, losing even more sight with every sweet moment I taste.

But every once in a while the veil is lifted, and at least briefly, I see the fuller picture again. 

A moment like that came earlier this week when an Antanov flew overhead. Cessnas, MI-8s, C-130s, Dash-8s, the occasional Buffaloes - I still haven’t learned to tell any of them apart as they fly overhead to land on the airstrip dozens of times a day. But a couple days ago I looked up to see Leila frozen in the bedroom doorway, broom in hand with a look of restrained panic and deep concentration. Why isn’t that plane landing? She asked quietly. Before I could answer I saw Hakim, one of the workshop participants, coming out of your house, eyes shielded to the sun and holding up his phone to the sky to take pictures as evidence. At this point I stepped outside too and saw an Antanov gliding overhead, low enough to clearly recognize, but much too high to be coming in for a landing. It passed over the airstrip and then disappeared. Hakim calmly sat down and explained that it was a scout plane from the North – what else could it be? – gathering intel on our airstrip. Laughing without smiling he swept his hand across our compound and said, “And where is your foxhole?” When I asked if he truly thought we would ever need one he answered, “No no, of course not. You wouldn’t need to use it. But wouldn’t it be stupid not to have one if you did need it?”

A few minutes later the Antanov returned and eased down for a landing. It was an NGO plane after all, maybe just an especially cautious one making a flyover before landing on a congested strip. Who knows. It certainly wasn’t a scout plane from the North. Everyone laughed the incident off and returned to work as before. But the instantaneous recognition on the part of everyone around me to something I would never have even heard was sobering. The woman who washes my kid’s cereal bowls knows that sound because it came moments before her village was bombed. The man across the yard knows that sound because it has killed people near him. And no matter how sweet the tea, how funny the joke, how beautiful the tune, they will always be watching and listening for things just beyond my range of sight and sound.   

I say that I forget things are not normal here these days, but that is not completely true. There are things that are different for me now too.

I used to never take pictures. Bryan was good about snapping some, but I was always too distracted, too lazy, too self-conscious of the flashy splash of a camera. But not now. Now our camera is full of pictures of people, posing however they like – with their impressive garden of sorghum, holding their nephew and the cat, grinning between both wives. I have also introduced my friends to the group selfie, so there are some ridiculous snaps of us crowded into the lens on a rope bed in a mud hut, me a pale splash of white in a sea of perfectly smooth black skin and white teeth.

I used to hoard the stuff from America. The Koolaid, pudding and taco seasoning. Bubbles and stickers for the girls. The Bath and Body Works lotion from my mother-in-law. But not now. I came back to too much lost to mold and rats and expiration dates. So we are eating pudding lavishly and I leave the lotion on the kitchen counter so that when Leila gets ready to go home after work she can slather it all over her arms and into her hair, going back to her tent in a refugee camp smelling like sweet cinnamon pumkin.

I used to get tired of people. The constant flow of people in and out of the gate, regardless of mealtimes or kids naps or my own attempt at a schedule. To my shame, there would be a point that the news that so-and-so was waiting under the Baobab tree would make me groan inwardly. And, obviously, it’s not that I am always brimming over with happy energy all the time even now. (I started this letter whining about being tired didn’t I?) But truly, the awareness that every conversation with someone could be my last for a while, that every opportunity for a visit to the camp or a walk to the neighbors or even just a chat with the guards could be the only one for months and months to come, these things have changed my perspective. I still get tired, but not of people.

Yesterday was one of those days. Aisha, Om-Iman and another woman I don’t know as well came by and we all sat in the earthy cool of the guard hut and ate leftover kisra. Om-Iman is heavily pregnant now (praise God!) and Aisha is also five months along. They said that the lines at the food distribution point were crazy so they came to wait out the crowds and the heat of the day at our place. We talked some but after the happy rush of coming back and finding I could still speak Arabic I am know realizing how big the holes in my proficiency still are (big) and I felt clumsy and tongue-tied. They were tired enough to just rest on the rope bed or occasionally chat in their shared mother tongue too. It’s nice to realize that silence in the company of friends is okay. It was a good moment for me. Not terribly productive or profound. Just quiet and peaceful. No deeply spiritual conversations or recollections of traumas gone by. Just some pregnant women and their friends waiting out the heat in the shade. When we were so far away these past ten months, these were the kind of moments I missed the most. As always, I wish you had been there too.

Sorry for my ramblings. This is absurdly long. I will close for now. Thanks again for sharing your house. Things are happening!

Much love, 

Libby 

P.S. – No more snakes. But the indoor scorpion tally is up to SIX! Big critters outside or little critters inside? Hmmmm.

Have I ever told you I hate the “Would You Rather Game”?

Dear Lydia - Night Noises

Dear Lydia,

So, I don’t even think I mentioned all the water in my last letter! Our compound is completed surrounded by hundreds of meters of water of two sides. Behind the compound, the water is only a few feet from the back fence, so close that I fear another hard rain and our latrine will slide off into the lake! All day long, the clatter and shriek of children splashing in the shallows wafts through the hot air, and the mere sound of water makes me feel cooler, like some vicarious placebo. They dive in just at the spot we used to take the kids in the late afternoons, where the tamarind tree stoops low over the sand pit. Now those branches catapult naked boys into warm brown water all day long.

Everyone says the rains were heavy and late this year. I was comforted by this fact as people also say that fighting will start again as soon as the rains dry up. We have had one good storm since we have been back and I felt like water pouring out of the sky and into the millions of gallons of water pressing around our home was like protective hands cupping us in its hold. It spoke to me, maybe not of peace exactly but at least of delayed war, which is almost as good, right? But it hasn’t rained at all in several days now. And despite the torture of thunder on the horizon, the days are growing hotter and hotter. When I wake up in the morning the water is still and greenish grey, the exact same color as the trees. They look like they are standing in puddles of their own melted reflection.

Just as we once feared, the high waters have brought the snakes slithering up to high ground. The third night we were here the guards came to get Bryan to help them kill a snake, which was terrifying enough on its own. You know anytime night watchmen come to get the Khawaja to help kill a snake it must be a monster. It was a six foot cobra that has slipped into the guard hut to get one of the chickens. I didn’t see it from the safety on my front stoop until I saw Bryan, Abdul and Bashir all armed with rocks and sticks and running backwards in the dark while the bobbing circles cast from their flashlights picked up something very long and fast flying out of the guard house after them. Thankfully, Abdul is a crackshot and pegged the snake with a rock. If my survival depended on me being able to hit a poisonous moving object with a rock I would have been dead a long time ago.

Annabelle found the second snake. She hasn’t taken too keenly to our return to the out-of-the-house latrine system and has had a few accidents since we have been back. After one such accident I had rather impatiently sat her down on the commode and when she threw a fit I said she could sit on her own until her attitude improved. I sat just outside the door, and when her stubborn silence turned to terrified wails I opened the door and said something along the lines of, “What in the world are you freaking out about? I am right here!” She then pried one little hand from the toilet on which she was precariously perched and sniffling pitifully pointed up to the window where a 4 or 5 foot yellow bellied who-knows-what kind of snake sat pressed against the screen and said, “But Mama, I was just scared of that big snake right there….” Oh yes, I get the mother of the year award. Needless to say the little purple potty in her bedroom is now getting lots of use.

The snake may have been the cause of a bad dream Annabelle had the night before Halloween. She woke up crying and I felt my way into the girls’ room by moonlight and sat down beside their bed to soothe her back to sleep. Right as I started into a lullaby I heard the distant sound of heavy automatic gunfire perforated with the hallow boom of artillery. It was the heaviest gunfire I have ever heard. I wasn’t aware of much fear, just sadness and weariness laced with a single thread of excitement that I can never completely deny no matter how serious the situation. I whispered loudly to Bryan in the other room and was already running through my mental checklist of things to throw in a bag when I noticed the gunfire – still very heavy – was overlaid with the distant trills of women singing and the steady staccato of dozens of drums beating in perfect unison. I tried to understand who in the world would be celebrating a firefight, especially with drums, and went through every possibly scenario I could think of to explain the bizarre and eerie combination of noises drifting in on the breeze. Bryan returned from checking with the guys outside and over the next few days their story was confirmed – a local traditional ceremony called “The Throwing of the Fire” to chase off the old year and welcome in the new. This happened just before dawn for three nights in a row, each time a little bit closer, to the point I was shocked (and thankful) the girls slept through it. Though I was relieved it wasn’t an actual conflict, the proof of enough arms in the area to showcase a traditional ceremony (we never heard anything like that last year did we?) was a bit unnerving.  

Sorry for all the unpleasantries I started this letter with. Maybe I am subconsciously wanting to help you not be too homesick. Whatever you can say about life here, not one moment of it is ever boring!

We worshipped at the little church in the camp on Sunday. Driving it in the ATV made me wonder how we ever did that on foot with all three of our babies on our backs! Church was much like it usually is – long, good, hot, happy. Both girls fell asleep mid-way through the teaching – Annabelle on a kanga laid out on the dirt floor, Mikat in my arms. The woman nest to me took her for a while when she saw I was in danger of falling off my log onto my numb bum. Afterwards we walked to Hamed and Sabrine’s house and sat in the thorny shade and talked. We drank warm, sweet juice from a white bucket stamped with the letters UNHCR poured into tin cups. The girls walked around all day with little orange mustaches. A handful of women you would recognize all crowded around me and asked very specific questions about you and Rebekah. Word had reached everyone that you are delayed because of her sickness but they had so many questions. What kind of sickness does she have? Is there no medicine for it? Is Lydia sick too? And of course they all wanted to know how big Josh is now too. I answered their questions as best I could and even though I fumbled without words like heartbeat, oxygen, brain, seizures, you are in a community of mothers who understand unexplainable injury and loss and they nodded silently with genuine comprehension. They are praying for healing and they are glad you are near your people.

Other than a quick trip to the market and church on Sunday I have been relatively homebound, which probably doesn’t surprise you. Though I may be the talkative one, you were often the one who was good about actually getting us out, even if you were quiet once we got there. (:  Between chatting with guests under the baobab I am mostly cleaning up the house, unpacking boxes, washing musty clothes, glancing at the expiration dates on cans and bottles, wincing, then throwing them in the pot for supper anyway. They are jobs you would understand. Picking pebbles out of rice, sifting bugs out of flour, shaving my legs out of bucket on the back porch in the warm quiet after lunch (okay, maybe I was the only one scandalous enough to make a habit out of that), tossing leftover popcorn to the chickens, taking clothes crisp with sunshine off the line and folding them into round basins. These are things I never do anywhere else, things I even enjoy not doing when I am somewhere else. But here they make sense somehow. They give shape to the day and rhythm to the quiet moments.

The girls just woke up from their naps and are fussing for a snack so I should go. But one last thing, tell Josh we have an orphaned black baby goat for a pet now. Apparently, the guards gently tossed him out of our gate a few days in a row and he always found his way back in so now they just ignore him. No one has come to claim him. Sometimes he tiptoes into the house, sometimes I feed him a little milk in a bowl, sometimes he nibbles on my skirt to get my attention, usually he just sits in the shade somewhere. I call him Babanoos.

Love to you all,

Libby