Lalob Fruit

Dear Lydia,

I have been sitting on this couch for about ten minutes now, staring through the rent my children have put in the screen at the front door blowing cheerfully in the wind as it lets in clouds of flies while the girls squawk on the tire swing under the baobab and the cursor in front of me blinks patiently by the words “Dear Lydia”.

The irony of not writing in so long is being rendered absolutely speechless by the cumulative weight of so many words. I have composed long letters to you and my mother and others in my mind and evidence of this is scratched in little notes and unfinished sentences I have scattered in half a dozen notebooks filled with recipes and words in other languages that I still can’t remember. But none of it has made it to anywhere comprehensible. But here we are now, in the precious half hour I have snatched out of the sweet chaos of the day. Let’s see where we end up.

How I have longed for you this month my friend!

We have finally started developing literacy materials and it has been so exciting. My incredible husband has taken over daughter-duty in a big way so that I could spend hours holed up with Ibrahim and Hassan developing phoneme teaching orders, churning out stories and figuring out how to deal with issues like consonant length or transitional literacy. I wished for your experience and input so many times as I dredged the recesses of my brain thinking, “Did they really teach us in grad school how to develop functor lessons on languages with grammatical tone?!” But at the end of the day, we now we have primers and alphabet books drafted in both J and G languages and have even started testing them. I am so excited! They still have plenty of work left, but they are a good start and people are falling all over themselves to start learning to read in their own language. It is beautiful. We won’t have full blown literacy classes going until after our trip back to the States this summer, which is kind of killing me, but when we are ready I think this stuff is going to take off in a big way. 

I am realizing what diverse groups of pre-literate peoples we will be working with though. My sweet friend Aisha is an example of one. I sat down with her one afternoon and in an hour she was reading short stories in her language – stilted, and imperfectly, but reading. She is one of those with a few years of primary education under her belt in a language that uses a Roman script. She is so incredibly bright and eager and anxious to learn. I see her sitting on a sagging rope bed in the shade of my house, bracing her heavily pregnant body with one hand while the other traces letters on a page, a single mom surviving only by the goodwill of others, skinny as a rail, poor as dirt, and I think, What you could have been, my friend. In another life and time, she is somewhere teaching an auditorium full of college students, making her rounds at a hospital, writing long books sold in big bookstores. Caring for her children in this time and place has taken no shortage of strength and skills of their own sort. But I hope she understands that her circumstances in life have nothing to do with her intelligence or abilities. I love listening to her read.

And then there are people like our old guard Jafar. He has never held a pen. Whether we should be reading right to left or left to right is no more of a question then whether we be reading top to bottom or diagonally. The fact that lines can carry sounds is as bizarre a concept as it being night on the other side of the world while we sit in broad daylight here. And yet, the first time he slooowly, and painstakingly read the words, “This is the hyena’s house…” I thought he was going to fall off the rope bed laughing. He kept poking at the words on the paper with his gnarled old hands, half asking and half exclaiming in shock, “That’s my language? That’s my language!” It is, I kept saying, it’s yours.  

We have a long way to go and many problems still to sort out. But to see people beginning to read their language for the first time in the history of the world, well, that is something worth getting out of bed for in the morning.

Though, now that you mention it, sometimes getting out of bed in the morning is no small feat. Lydia, it is so nightmarishly HOT. All in all, I’ve been pretty proud of how well we’ve been coping. Of course, with the fridge now there is cold water to drink, and Bryan recently rigged up a couple more solar panels so we can run the fans through the night, so we cheat a bit. But the past couple nights it has been cloudy and we have all nearly suffocated in our sleep under Mother Nature’s smothering blanket, so much so that I wake up just to wet down my hair in a bucket. When we blow through all the cold water in a day and have to drink the hot water straight out of the filter I am mildly devastated. Peeing more than twice every 24 hours is a major accomplishment. The girls, like their father, are somehow naturals at staying well-hydrated. I on the other hand often have to have my nightcap of ORS (Oral Rehydration Solution) to just to make it through. But the mosquitoes, scorpions and centipedes are all dying off too so there is at least satisfaction in outliving the vermin. Suckers.

One thing that has been new to me this month is taking several trips to some of the outlying camps beyond the one we live in. The road is well maintained by an army of UN machines, but it is long and so dusty that I thought we might drown in clouds of red dirt buzzing down the road in our windowless ATV the first time we went out. That week there was a lot of tension between the refugees and the host community and several times we passed armed militia who would step out of the bush on the side of the road to watch us pass and every time my heart would stop, thinking they were about to ask us to pull over. In moments like those, as I cradle a sleeping sunburned toddler tucked under my tobe, I think surely I am the worst mother in the world. But they never did more than wave in greeting and, not that it’s relevant really but, the girls think riding in the ATV is better than Six Flags. They love life here so much. And every time I hear Annabelle pray for God to keep the war far away from us and to bless the people who have war near them, I feel my heart spasm in both grief and overwhelming gratitude that she is learning to trust him in all things from so young an age.

Bryan has been making trips regularly to one of the camps to meet with a group of men who sought him out repeatedly with questions they would like help finding answers to. He has been meeting with these men in their home several times a week as they together read, discuss and ask God for his guidance in their journey. The response has been more amazing than I can fully tell you here. And they are sharing their journey of discovery with their own neighbors and relatives in their own separate gatherings at other times when Bryan is not there. They are so hungry. The longer I live and the more I see, the more I believe that the lines and boundaries we have crisscrossing the world are absolute rubbish. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that the only distinction between people that really means anything at all is the one that distinguishes those who are hungry for an authentic relationship with our Creator and those who really can’t be bothered. Not a whole lot else matters I think.

These men have been in the former category for a while now. But there are forces of darkness in this world that are trembling to see them growing even closer to the light. Last week one of the men’s houses burnt to the ground in a fire that no one saw start. Their children were sleeping inside, though the brave little boy woke up and carried his sleeping baby sister to safety. But they lost everything. And the week before that another man’s healthy ten month old baby boy got sick with diarrhea. They took him to the clinic and he was responding to treatment. But within 48 hours he died in the night. Oh Lydia, I don’t want to see a demon under every rock when the ground is already so littered with stones. But what do you say to a woman whose baby has just died, when you, and she, believe that is likely a result of her steps of faith? Steps you prayed for and encouraged? I long for you in these moments. I feel like I know so little of suffering because of obedience to God. But you understand something of loss as a direct result of you walking in faith. And your sweet baby has felt the sting of that faithfulness. What a blessing I think you could be to so many here! What a blessing you already are. I pray God brings you back soon.

And finally, I miss you when Bryan and I are annoyed at each other. I miss having another American married woman nearby so badly. This week Bryan and I had the worst fight of our married life, though I shouldn’t say fight because we don’t fight. We just hurt each other’s feelings and then stay up all night talking and crying until we feel better. (What can I say, we are lightweights.) That has never, in all nine years that we have been married taken more than one night. Ever. But for three of four nights this week we were up late talking and trying to understand each other and feeling completely confused. I’m not saying if you were here I would air all our dirty laundry out in front of you, but I think I miss having you to remind me that being married is hard sometimes and that some of our miscommunications are so absurdly normal. Cliché almost. And also because you are the people we would throw our kids at when we need to go take a walk together. : )

I will close this letter by reiterating ad nauseum that I have the most amazing husband imaginable and I cannot imagine this journey without him. He is such a good man. And despite the dirt and heat and rebels, I am still so in love with this place too. It is like the lalob fruit to me, the ones that grow on that thorny tree right by your laundry line. Kids and guests will occasionally pick them up off the ground and suck on them, and not long ago I peeled off the yellowish shell and popped one in my mouth too. At first it was sweet, like honey, and then a terrible bitterness seeped in that made my eyes water. But just as I was getting ready to spit it out in disgust, the bitterness faded a bit, though not completely, and the sweetness drifted in again. And the next thing I knew, I was shoving another one in my mouth, only to be delighted and disgusted all over again.

North Africa, marriage, parenthood, God – it’s all the lalob fruit. Equal parts sweet and bitter. But maybe a little more sweet than bitter at the end of the day, because somehow I keep finding myself shuffling in the thorny shade, searching the ground for another yellow piece to dust off, shell, pop in my mouth and suck the life out of. I can’t get enough.

Small voices are calling my name from outside so I should close. I love you and yours dearly and can’t wait to see you in just a couple short months. Kiss your babies for me.

Much love,

Libby