What if She Can't Run

Dear Leila,

Or maybe I should start calling you “Kina” like almost everyone else does. I thought it was such a pretty nickname when I first heard your cousin-sister Aisha calling you that. To my ignorant ears it sounded lively and playful and short, so much like you on all accounts. But when I learned its meaning, the one who comes after all the children who died, I balked. Among my people, to daily conjure up and connect you to so many dead siblings would be unheard of, hurtful at least, offensive to many. But seeing your own mother call out to you using this name, and in response receive only pangs of life – your affirming “Ooo-oh” from a distance, a burst of unrestrained laughter, an irritated cluck of distraction – makes me think this name is a part of some ongoing healing I don’t really understand. So Kina, it is for now. Maybe I will try it out when you come in for work in the morning.

I talked to your cousin Aisha yesterday for the first time in a while, sitting on an angareb in the shade of a dom tree. You were sitting nearby but I am not sure how much you heard or how much you already knew. Most, I suspect. When I asked about her kids she told me that Nariman had been sick for a couple weeks. I immediately had visions of malaria, diarrhoea stretching miserably on day after day, the thick rasping cough that seems to plague every child this time of year. I honestly wasn’t prepared for the ragged gash across the top of her little foot that she was trying to hide under the dirty hands her mother gently pried away, black and deep and crusty. It shouldn’t surprise me that Aisha didn’t know how it happened, these terrible little mysteries crawl all over the place here, but not knowing what bite or sting or thorn that caused her foot to swell and split like that still catches me off guard. It looked simply awful.

When I asked her if she had taken Nariman to the clinic, she said that Nariman couldn’t make the walk and was now too big for a heavily pregnant woman to carry alone. She must have seen something cross my face because she quickly, almost defensively, reminded me of how strong Nariman is, how she walked all the way from your homeland when the bombs came three years ago. At age five she walked the whole way while her father carried the baby and her mother carried everything else that she could. “But I can’t sleep at night now.” She said softly, maybe so Nariman wouldn’t hear, maybe not. Again, I thought of terrible worries, the kind that often skirt the edges of my own maternal mind - tissue damage, blood poisoning, gangrene. “I can’t sleep because I worry about how she will run if trouble comes again. We are all in the hand of God but we still have to be ready anytime. No one knows what will come and people are uneasy. She is strong and she is fast. But what if she can’t run?”

As Aisha was speaking, Sara – you know her yes? She is a Southerner married to one of your people, very thin with scars like cat whiskers etched into the sides of her mouth – Sara began talking about a big affair in Juba where some foreign man was healing people left and right. I was only listening with one ear and even that ear was still distracted. My mind was far away from Juba, rolling slowly with thoughts of what it would be like to tuck my girls in every night and pray not that they don’t wake up with bad dreams, but that they don’t wake up having to run for their lives.

Aisha must have seen my tears gathering and threatening to spill over, because she reached out and lightly touched my knee. “You are understanding what she is saying?” I think I made an embarrassed noise loosely resembling a short laugh. “Yes, but that is not what I am thinking about. My thoughts are on other things. On your words…” but I faltered a bit, Arabic words that I am not sure that I even have in the first place rendered inaccessible by emotion. But your cousin has always had a way of understanding my heart, even from those early days back across the border when I first met her. This gift of hers is both comforting and unnerving. She nodded and sat back in a way that communicated she didn’t expect me to say anything else. She smiled softly and repeated, Nina gaideen fii yed bita Allah.

His hands. They are sometimes such a terrifying fortress.

I love it when you are washing dishes and I am kneading bread and you tell me stories about when you and Aisha were little girls together back home. My favourite is when you convinced her to help you steal the bottle of wild honey from the roof of the hut where your grandmother had hidden it. I still can’t believe you drank it all. Of course your head was turning round and round! Aisha always says you were (and are) the brave one, and I have seen you sass men and pick up live rats without flinching. I believe her about that. But I don’t believe her when she says she is the “red snake”, the one who always runs to hide when she sees people in her path. She may not rise up and spit venom like others of us sometimes do, but she is no coward. Her strength is quiet and often bruised. But it is real.

I am going to pick Aisha and Nariman up from the camp tomorrow morning and give them a lift to the clinic. If they don’t have to wait past midday you can jump in with us for a ride back home. Thank you for your friendship, Kina. Your connection with Aisha makes me miss my own sisters, both of my blood and of my heart. I am grateful that both of your lives have intersected with mine.

MaaSalaam,

Libby

First Run

Dear Mama,

It was so good to hear your voice for a little while yesterday! I am so thankful the network has been up lately. I couldn’t believe my little Annabelle who normally shuns talking to her own father on the phone, talked to you for so long! I wish you could have seen through the other end of the phone pressed up against her little ear as she wandered from the ATV to the swing to the back porch in that purple Rapunzel princess dress you sent in the package, already grubby from climbing in trees and eating from huge communal platters or sorghum and okra in it, as she narrated to you her love of green mangoes with salt and sugar and her recent vexation with “blaggers” (black boogers – her linguistic invention not mine). I think the fruit rollups you stuck in that box must have won her heart over completely. The Christmas M and Ms are already starting to melt but the Kisses look so pretty in a glass jar on the kitchen cabinet. It is a lingering aftertaste of Christmas that makes me feel happy every time I see (eat) one (four).

The girls are happy to be home again, despite how wonderful Christmas in Kampala was. Annabelle’s only complaint has been that there is no movie theatre here so she can’t watch “Penguins of Madagascar” again while Mikat seems to be immensely relieved to be somewhere familiar where there isn’t a downstairs for mama and papa to retreat to after they go to bed. She is our homebody, our creature of routine and predictability. And, as well as she manages this somewhat ridiculous life our family has been given, I do sometimes think she looks at her three family members with a touch of scorn when we happily pull out another suitcase or change a plan at the last minute.

It has been so wonderful to have come back in with David. I felt like a terrible teammate for being too cowardly to snuff out every last rat in the dark corners of their house, especially when he killed 17 in his first 48 hours here. But he has been a trooper and in his quiet way, seems really happy to be back and reconnect a bit. I suspected his visit would swing one of two ways – either a sobering reminder of how overwhelmingly difficult life here with a special needs baby will be, or how deeply they miss it and are committed to getting back over here as fast as they can. I suspected the first, maybe out of a need to protect my own heart, but so far, I think it is swinging the other way. They really, really want to be here. So please keep praying, as I know you are, for them and for us, that God will give each of us wisdom, courage and grace to keep moving forward however we are called. I have spent so many months grieving their absence and preparing my heart for the worst. I almost don’t know what to do with the treasured hope that they could be back, a mere 20 feet away again.

Security-wise things continue to wax and wane much as they have for the past few months, drifting somewhere between absolutely normal and completely volatile. Markets buzz about like normal, I haven’t heard a single gunshot down the road or bomb across the border, people move about as always. I sometimes find myself turning into one of those naïve people whose ache for peace and stability so outweighs their sense of reality and the bigger picture that they say, “Everything is fine. Nothing could ever happen here.” Forgetting that just a few months ago, it did happen here. Sometimes my blinders to the tensions simmering from a hundred different directions under the smooth, clear surface of daily life are just so dadgum comfortable I want to let them just grow into the bridge of my nose and sit there. But, I try to take them off every once in a while so that, God forbid, should anything happen, I won’t be left picking up the shattered pieces of my sense of security in this place and God’s big plans for it. And I also take off those blinders out of respect to the women who I occasionally see speedwalking down the road with a basket full of belongings on their heads and three kids in tow who are fleeing into the bush and away from some rumor that hasn’t quite been disproved yet. Someday when that rumor is true and I get out on an airplane with my kids and a good story, my reality will still be worlds apart from hers. But treating the situation with just a bit of gravity only seems respectful to me. I'm not a fear-monger. But neither will I ignore the unease that still pulses in the people around me. (Sorry, for the tangent. Raw nerve perhaps?)   

But nonetheless, know that your babies are all well and on most days I think we are still hitting that sweet spot of responsible awareness and peace and joy in the moment. The other night just as we were drifting off into deep REM sleep something enormous clattered onto our roof and bounded across it making a terrifying racket. While I feared the biggest rat in existence was hunting for David to avenge his slain kinsmen (“Nextdoor!” I would shriek, “The man you seek is nextdoor!”) I think Bryan was still mostly asleep and thought half-a-dozen commandoes had just parachuted out of the sky onto our roof because between panic breaths he was hissing to me, “Get down, get down!” and in the dark I realized he was gesturing for me to get under the bed. The next morning David showed us a picture of what we think is a Genet that he caught with his camera somewhere behind his house in the night, and our best guess is that it jumped out of the Baobab tree and on to our roof on his way to seek out the chickens. So, we must be at least a little on edge. But at least that short-lived hysteria has produced triple its value in laughs.

And finally, I close with something of an admission. I got up yesterday morning at 6am, fumbled into my shoes in the dark, and took off towards the airstrip in the dark. I tried to walk in the thickest veins of sand to muffle my footfalls against packs of skinny dogs that are overly defensive of their masters’ goats. I traced my way along the path that rises over mounds of dirt past the rusting fuselage of the wrecked Antanov which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up in the fading moonlight. At the main entrance to the airstrip my heart jumped when four shapes emerged out of the shadows and didn’t answer my Arabic greeting, but they proved to just be Rwandan peacekeepers, sleepy and cold in their flak jackets and blue helmets. Their English and my French both proved deficient enough for us to simply move on.

For the first time since I was with you this summer in Lubbock, I ran. I ran and I thought of all the moments you would get up and run before dawn when we were kids, often dragging us with you. I thought of all the times I have insisted, I am not a morning runner. And I thought, I am turning into my mother. It’s just a matter of time before I am tricking Annabelle and Mikat into running with me too. (You played on our sisterly rivalry and told each of us separately that the other was going when in reality the other was still sound asleep – don’t tell me that’s not trickery.) But it made me smile. I ran up the North side tucked well into the camp where the warm bite of roasting coffee wafted out of the dark mouths of tents, and back down the South side where the red dirt drops abruptly off into the immensity of wide bushland, thoughts of you trailing in my slow wake.    

An anemic sun had paled the sleep-dusty world slowly awake when I stopped, breath ragged, dry heaves threatening. One of the Rwandans was shooing a lazy family of ducks off of the airstrip. A donkey brayed from somewhere in the camp behind me. You were on the other side of the world, probably feverishly preparing for your first class as Professor Talley while Papa urged you to come to bed. I am so proud of you Mama. I would love to come and sit in your class. But I am thankful to have done so many times before, both literally and in many other ways.

Sorry this is so long. Little ones are fussing for a snack. Where did naptime go?! We all love you and Papa so much! Greet everyone for us and get some good sleep tonight.

Hugs and kisses,

Elizabeth