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”?
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