Dear Mama,
I have thought of you a thousand times this week and wished I could
blink you here. In some ways, I can’t believe you have never set foot in my
home here! In other ways, given all the different circumstances it only makes
sense. Some days I can hardly believe I am here. But I am hungry for you
to at least be able to imagine exactly where I am sitting when I send you a
Whatsapp message, what I might be hearing or smelling. For what it is worth, I
am usually on the half wall of my back porch in the mild back-lit blue light in
the hour or so before sunset. Usually my phone is in one hand while the other
absently fans charcoal to life for something I am baking for dinner in the
little oven by the back door. It glows and crackles like chalk while I type a
tagline to some picture of the girls with my thumb to send to you. Sometimes I
am on my dark brown couch in the living room, other times, if I am especially
hot or tired, on my bed in front of the fan in my room with the door closed.
But usually I am outside. That time of day, when your morning is just kicking
off on the other side of the world, is so pleasant here. There is a feeling
akin to relief most days as we crest the hump of noon and slip steadily towards
evening and I know you are awake somewhere in the world.
I reminded myself of you this week playing hostess. We invited two of
our good friends over for dinner, two Spanish Jesuit priests who are doing
relief work here with refugees. Honestly, for reasons I can’t quite articulate even
to myself, they are some of my favorite people in the world, even though I don’t
know them all that well. They are Catalonian for one, minorities in their own
right with their own language, culture, and subversive resistance movement to
their name, which – clearly since I am where I am in the world – means something
to me. They are barefoot for another. Always. Barefoot. I haven’t actually
asked them why. I am assuming it is a vow of some sort and honestly, it is less
conspicuous than you might expect. But seeing them walk around with both
throngs of refugee kids, and UN officials in exactly the same state of pedicle
undress, though mysterious and a little weird, just makes me happy. They are
warm and funny and very honest. And, maybe more than anything, they are
frightfully skinny. And the older I get the more obsessive my need to feed
hungry-looking things, so our friendship works out well for all of us.
When they showed up the other night (Pau was actually sick with malaria
and couldn’t make it, but Alvar came with Davide, a brand new brother from Italy
only two days off the plane. He didn’t look so hungry yet,) we went out to
greet them at the gate and welcome them in. I hadn’t seen Alvar since we had
been back and he greeted me warmly with an embrace and two big air kisses over
each cheek. He then handed us a package of cured ham, a kind of Spanish prosciutto,
from what surely is a prized private stash on their compound. It tastes
amazing.
And if you can brag to anyone you can brag to your mother, so you
should know that I have inherited your gift for minor culinary miracles with
limited resources at hand, as well as your skill in covering kitchen mishaps
with gorgeous glazes and garnishes or something absurd like roses woven out of
tomato skins. So when I served up a marbled chocolate cake with almond icing, Alvar
was effusive in his praise, even though the icing hid the charred bits that my
oven consumed and the marbling disguised the parts that against all odds would
still not bake all the way through. “You won’t find a cake like this for
hundreds of miles!” he told Davide, (who was incredibly polite considering his
dinner last week was in Rome).
Most days I am raving about the craziness of the world in a way that
makes my stomach churn. But sometimes the craziness of the world can just make my
day. Who knew that the spiritual highlight of my week would be feeding
chocolate cake to a skinny Catalonian? And who knew that in this refugee camp
in North Africa, both my first public kisses from a man here (unless our guards
are more observant than Bryan and I give them credit for), as well as the first
pork I think I have ever eaten here were delivered at the hands of a barefoot Jesuit
Priest.
The world is just too ridiculously wonderful.
Other than cooking and home schooling this week I have spent the rest
of my time putting the finishing touches on the J alphabet book and primer so
we can get them sent off to a printer in Kampala. I have had fun testing the
materials a couple times with groups in the community – once with a handful of
women in a dim hut because it was raining outside, another time on mats in the
splayed shade of a lalob tree that we kept rotating to follow as the sun moved
across the sky. Since no one can read their language yet (one of those by-products
of it having just been written down for the first time) one of the main things
I am looking for in the alphabet book is that the pictures actually communicate
a specific thing that can be connected with a specific sound in their alphabet.
For instance, when they see the picture of the hyena do they say, “That’s a
hyena!” or do they say “That’s a wild dog!”
For the most part the pictures have been great. We have access to
hundreds of stock photos from a partnering organization with great artwork that
is appropriate for this part of the world. And we have worked with a local “artist”
to sketch a few tools and plants or whatever that make great key words that are
specific to this context. But now we are sanding down those last few rough
edges and I have been chewing on very specific little problems. For instance, “Y”
for “Yukchan” didn’t illicit the word “fish” (although the picture looked like
a perfectly good generic fish to me) but was clearly a mudfish to everyone
who saw it, which doesn’t start with a letter anything like “Y”. And the
picture under W for Wäl didn’t
make sense to anyone because everyone knows that Wäls don’t have necks but are
merely round. And as much as I suggested that “elbow” seems like a vastly preferable
key word at least socio-linguistically to “witch doctor” for the letter “Ṭ”, I
was outvoted.
So this week, because
our local artist declined the task at hand and we have to get these files to
the printer ASAP, I have been channelling my inner graphic artist that surely
lies latent in me somewhere from the genes you contributed and have been trying
to draw pictures of old men with feather headdresses, children hopping like frogs,
and gourds with no necks to satisfy our literacy team. At one point I had a
photo-copied page from a bird book on top of one of my glass baking pans
balanced up against a sunny window trying to trace a picture of a knob-billed
duck on my makeshift light-table and thought how thoroughly amused and proud
you would be. Thankfully, I seem to have inherited your creativity but not your
perfectionism so, though much less impressive than they would be if you were
doing them, the books are at least getting done and I am even getting sleep in
the process. (Now let’s just hope people can actually learn to read using
them.)
Bryan is out in one of the Western camps this afternoon and I am home
with the girls. The network is down, which I wish it wasn’t, but he went with
the Sat phone and all the latest chatter has been good, or at least neutral so
I am not worried. In that department it has been a quiet week. I tried to get
this knocked out while the pickles were napping but they are up now and have
been asking for me to set them up with old t-shirts and paint for a while so I
should probably close. You should see the things they paint. I think the
artistic gene must skip a generation.
Tell Papa that talking to him on the phone the other day was balm for
my soul. It was his birthday but I was the one who talked so much! Isn’t that
always the case though. Thank you both for that. I hope you guys had a good
day.
Love you so much. Let’s start making plans for a trip over here after
littlest is born! Love and kisses all around.
Elizabeth
Loved reading this! I felt like I was there --your discriptions are so vivid! My daughter Sophia is back in Africa too. She is living in Kigali, Rwanda with her husband. Blessings to you and your family!
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