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
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