Broken Down

Dear Lydia,

On Sunday we decided to go as a whole family out to K, the furthest of the camps. We had been pushing hard through the week, especially Bryan, but with a quick trip out planned for the end of this month for branch meetings and then only a short term back in before we are out for several months to wait on baby girl, we have been feeling a constant low-grade anxiety to get as much done as we can while we can. So on Sunday morning I packed up a bag with everything we would need for an all-day adventure with two little ones (and, whom I kidding, one pregnant one) – water, satellite phone, snacks as unobtrusive as possible (dried mango and market biscuits), and a few activities equally low-key (we went with small stickers, a notebook and six crayons). 

Sundays in the camp we live in are actually pretty easy for the girls these days. Remember when we would walk all the way out on Sundays carrying all three kids? With the ATV up and running and the kids being older Sundays are much less draining than they used to be when you were still here. The local kids are completely familiar with them so they aren’t mobbed anymore, and 9 times out of 10 my girls are more interested in the few kernels of roasted sorghum someone kindly offers for them to gnaw on, or simple sticks and dirt and bugs to play with, so I don’t have to stress about pulling out all the flashy Khawaja stuff to entertain my kids who have a harder time than their peers sitting still on a log for three hours. But out in K it’s a different story. Most of the kids there have seen very few Khawajas and maybe no Khawaja kids ever so there is quite a bit more swarming to see what the white-haired little people are doing with those colorful sticky pieces of paper.

Nonetheless we were all excited about the day and in good spirits as we took off down the red murram road out of town that morning. The girls were hiding under pink scarves buckled between Bryan and I in the front; I had on my pink tobe and he had on his black and white checkered shawl wrapped around his face like an Arab truck driver hauling a load of cotton candy. In the back two local friends, an American working with SP and a random German guy we were hosting for the week (story for another day) were all standing braced against the wind. On these million dollar UN roads we can fly in that Polaris, and with no glass to shield us, it honestly felt a bit like zooming down a wide red river in a motorboat somewhere in a dusty Amazonian alternate reality or something. I got hit several times smack in the face by enormous bugs as we whined down the road, thankfully none of them were cognizant enough to sting me.

As we passed through town and then on out in the ghaba, I noticed more soldiers on the road than I expected. Most were heavily armed but alone or in pairs and on foot, so I didn’t think too much about it. I am on that road so rarely these days it’s hard to know what is normal anymore. And even though Bryan is out there much more often and has a better sense of what to expect, the ATV at 40 miles an hour is not conducive to conversation of any sort.

About 45 minutes into our trip there was a loud bang followed by a hideous flapping sound inside the engine and the smell of something burning. The burning smell sent me into immediate flashbacks to the time my skirt caught on fire riding around in that thing, (have I ever told you that story? Remind me to, it’s a good one) but once we eased off the side of the road and stopped we realized that what was burning was not my clothing but one of the belts to the vehicle. We were completely broken down.

The girls immediately wandered off to climb on an ant hill while I settled into the thin shade of a scrub brush and the guys messed around with the ATV. I was just settling myself into the idea of a very long hot walk when a Land Cruiser pulled out of the only compound in sight, an NGO clinic, and stopped to see if we needed help. Within ten minutes, miraculously, the guys had together pushed the ATV easily into the clinic compound (we just happened to die on a slight decline) and we had all piled into the back of the Land Cruiser for a lift back to our side of the county.

As we settled into the bench seats in the back and I passed out dried mango to the girls, the driver shouted back to us, “It’s a good thing actually that you are headed back home. We are just hearing over the radio reports of heavy fighting in L. If they close the roads you would have been stuck out in K for the night.” At that moment I remembered the thunder I had heard that morning, faint and distant but coming from the wrong direction for rain. But at the time it hadn’t seem to register with anyone else as something troubling and we hadn’t heard news that morning of fighting so I ignored it, something I will not do again. Even as we passed back through town on the way home, lorries full of heavily armed soldiers were roaring out of town, fists raised in recognition of the local women trilling shrilly in support as their boys headed out to shoo the rebels further afield.

By the time we tumbled back out of the Land Cruiser and walked the last little way back to our house I was feeling absolutely flooded with gratitude. When the car died we were within ten kilometers of the fighting as the crow flies (though not necessarily driving closer to it, just passing it). And while I still don’t feel like we missed certain death by a hair’s breadth by any stretch of the imagination, spending the night out in K pregnant with two little ones as we wait for security to improve so we could get home would have been pretty miserable too. As it is, we broke down in maybe the single most convenient spot in an hour and a half drive’s worth of possibilities, with a secure place to leave the car until we could come back to get it and a vehicle happy to give us a lift back.

Just the other day Bethany and I were sitting on my back porch in the evening waiting for our bread to bake in the charcoal oven that we had overfilled with pans of dough. Our husbands were off retrieving the ATV (security had cleared up by then and Bryan had all the spare parts on hand) and who knows where the kids were exactly, somewhere within ear shot. And we sat and talked about what it is exactly that makes this place so hard for women like you and me and her. On one hand it may seem obvious to people from the outside – my gosh, all you talk about is rats and hearing artillery in the distance, are you really asking why it is hard? But I really am. Because I really don’t think it is those things, or not those things alone anyway. I have a bush house that is pretty basic, but it is a really comfortable house that genuinely feels like home to me. The work that I devote my mind and heart to on top of the work of raising a family is work that even on my worst days feels like my dream job. I love it. And on the days that we hear the worst rumors of terrible political turmoil, one of the things that I feel – to my utter shame and regret – is excitement. My most base instinctive self likes the adrenaline of this place.

Many, if not most days, are the happiness of feeling worn out at the end of a long day of meaningful work, listening to my girls scream with delight as my husband swings them from the neem tree as I set our supper made from scratch while my baby kicks inside my big belly and James Taylor plays softly in the background. I may be sick of hauling buckets of water or hearing people talk about where the rebels are today, but still, we're talking really good days. But other days I am leaning over the lemon bars that taste like diesel because I couldn’t get my charcoal to light so I cheated and used fuel to start it and now I am crying my pretty little head right off. Why? Not because of the ruined dessert surely. Why do I cry so much here? (And I don’t mean just since I have been pregnant…)

I don’t know the answer. Maybe the rats and rebels play into that low-grade constant anxiety and I just don’t give it nearly enough credit. But I think maybe it has something to do with that same kind of feeling I had last Sunday as we drove home and passed soldiers going to the front and civilians streaming in from outlying villages to the safety of town. It is the immense relief and gratitude of being spared a significant inconvenience right as you pass by all the people for whom those inconveniences may cost their life, if not in actually fact, than at least in a thousand other true ways. Simply living this close to suffering day in and day out, even on the days when it hardly ripples the surface of my comings and goings, is hard.

At least that is all Bethany and I came up with before our bread was finished baking. You would like her a lot. She reminds me of you in many ways. And while I will never stop missing you being in your house, her presence there is balm on a wound. I have told God that a scenario in which she leaves and yet you are not back yet is not acceptable to me in any way whatsoever, but he has only told me to take one day at a time and not worry about tomorrow today which I am begrudgingly attempting to do. I trust his goodness and holiness and wisdom in all things. I just don’t trust him one little bit not to escort us through incredibly difficult things that make us grow in some way or another. He has proved to be faithful to both of those things in my experience.

Sorry for going on and on about things that probably stir up lots of mixed emotions in you too. I need to sit and talk to you about all this. Something tells me you can speak to many sides of those emotions, feeling miraculously spared and also so deeply hurt. Thank you for letting me use our distance to process my own thoughts on this journey. I smiled all day when I saw that picture of sweet Rebekah being fitted for her stander on Facebook the other day. Was it just me reading into the photo or did she look so incredibly happy? She is so beautiful.

Kiss her and Josh for us. We are getting so excited about seeing David in just a matter of weeks now.

Much love to you my friend.

Libby