Baobabs

Dear Melinda,

Your last email made me laugh. Sorry that as you get ready to head back to this side of the world you get stuck carting Dominion, one of those world-conquering board games that you so thoroughly despise. But I was really desperate for a Christmas present for Bryan! Thanks for playing Santa. I’m glad that you were at least amused by the fact that David Graves, world-conquering board game player extraordinaire and brilliant introverted nerd got stuck hauling in his bag a nursing bra sized by letter combinations my four year old hasn’t even learned in pre-school yet. Because he was getting here well before you, he got the short end of the stick. As this child in my womb grows we were getting pretty desperate in that department out here several thousand miles away from the closest Target. My bosom and belly have together conspired against me and created this perfect little cavity right at my sternum that is a beacon for all way-faring flying insects, (especially sitting around the dinner table with male guests it seems). Feeling six legs and four wings panic inside my shirts is getting really old. Anyway, all that to say, thanks for being one of the many people that have been willing to stuff all sorts of random things into their suitcases for us.

I am so sorry that your hometown in this country is still such a mess. Your line about feeling sick to your stomach every time you look at your suitcases waiting to be packed filled me with such bittersweet empathy. I know what it feels like to be on that side of the ocean getting ready to come back over and not knowing exactly what you are coming back to. I know you already know this, but please know again that it really will all be okay. Really. Especially if you have an open-minded perspective on the definition of okay. Bryan tells me this all the time and somehow, inexplicably, it does make me feel better.

Either way, I’m really ready for you to be closer.

So I have thought of you a lot this week as I get ready to kick off my first literacy teacher training event. Woohooo! I am incredibly excited. And intimidated out of my gourd…. But mostly excited. The whole thing will be a bit less traditional than the standard “workshop” approach. We presented the literacy materials to the Sheikhs of the community and asked them to each select three individuals that they think would make good mother tongue literacy teachers. After lots of running around the camps to meet with people, wait around on people, try to actually find people, etc. etc we have rounded up a group of ten individuals, most of whom I think will make great learners and teachers. I am excited to see how they will carry this work forward with their community, even while we are out to have Baby Girl.

In fact, as I was leaving the last meeting with the Sheikhs and prospective teachers on Friday morning, a woman ran out of a nearby hut and began to speak in her language rapidly and earnestly to the Sheikh escorting me back to the ATV, and to Abraham, my local literacy counterpart. She had been hanging in the background during our meeting, taking care of a slew of toddlers, hauling water, bending over a cooking fire. Unlike the (relatively) well-educated women who had been selected for the training who were dressed in nice tobes and occasionally checking their Nokia phones, she was dressed in a dirty cotton slip, her neck and arms full of traditional beads. I have no idea if she has ever been to school a day in her life.  I couldn’t understand her words as she spoke, but her eyes and gestures communicated clearly. Please, please can I be one of the ones to learn to read my language. After they spoke for a minute Abraham turned towards me with a shrug, “There are others who aren’t committed to coming and she is begging to come to the training. Can we take one more?”

I said yes. How could I not? Maybe she will turn out to be the brightest one in the group. She has certainly shown the most passion. And that goes a long way in my books.

So starting Monday morning I will be meeting with a group under our baobab tree. We have a chalkboard and some rope beds to sit on. I don’t suppose we need much else. It is interesting to be doing a literacy teacher training event that is also just a good old fashioned literacy class. This language was written down for the first time just a matter of months ago. So I have to teach people to read it themselves first before I teach them how to teach other people to read it.

I am really excited.       

It’s hard to believe that it was not quite a year ago that you were here up North with us. The seasons are passing each other at the doorway and the weather is starting to remind me of when you were here. That last stray shower we all wondered about weeks ago we now know for certain was the last rain of the season. It is so dry the air feels brittle, but the bugs are all out in their final death throes before they wither up and die like the grass. The rim of the sky is bleaching slowly, the ashy whiteness bleeding higher and higher into the cloudless blue with each passing day. Ash flutters from above in solitary flakes almost every afternoon as grass fires crackle beyond the fence line. I usually can’t see them during the day, only the plumes of smoke they send up from the fields, but at night, when I go outside to fill up a bucket for baths or scrape a dinner pot into the trash barrel I can see orange flames rippling casually in the near distance, unsettling and beautiful at the same time. But the nights are still cool, dusty and sharp, but blessedly cool.

While every other plant is curling into itself and dying, the baobabs are heavy with fruit, their olive green pods fat and fuzzy on all the sprawled branches. At seven months pregnant I feel a great fondness for these great trees, all confidence and beauty in their corpulence and blatant fertility. Boys clamor up them to staggering heights and knock the pods down. Even as I write this the Fader boys are loping back on to the compound with sacks overflowing with gongolez and are squatting down to crack them open with rocks. The seeds inside are as white as the sky today, the cracks of pod against stone ringing out pleasantly into the afternoon.

I’ll close with the cobra story. It’s a truly terrible way to end a letter but I forgot about it until just now and I have to tell you. Last week I was going into our bedroom to get the girls towels after bath. I knew exactly where they were and didn’t bother turning on the light. But as I grabbed them up I heard a suspicious sound in the corner under the table – not the fast scurrying of a rat, or even the scaly rustle of a lizard. This sounded legless. And big. I froze and hollered for Bryan who came and immediately switched on the light (genius). Sure enough, a big black snake writhed in the shadows under the table. We didn’t have a weapon immediately on hand so he kept an eye on it so we wouldn’t lose it while I ran to the front door and yelled for the guard, scooting dangerously curious little girls back out into the living room and up on furniture. Beleil was there in two seconds with a big stick and killed it easily enough once they found it hiding behind my blue suitcase. It turned out to be a cobra, just under four feet long.

In my bedroom.

Needless to say I was thoroughly freaked out for a couple days and propped pillows up against the gap under the front door every night before we went to bed (because that is the only way I can think that it got in) and drilled the girls on what to scream in Arabic if they see a snake (Arabic because heaven knows I am no help, I would rather Beleil come running). But eventually I decided that just thanking God that it was in my room and not the girls’ room and then getting over it and going back to sleeping deeply at night was a better long term plan. So that is where I am at now. And as long as there are no more cobras I think it is a plan that will work out just fine.

Actually someone told me the other day that pregnant women apparently have snake powers and can freeze snakes to the spot with an intense stare. That’s a pretty cool super power actually. I’ve got a couple more months to test that one out. Hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is, I will be ready with my big belly for a stare down for any reptile who wants to take me on.

I will let you go now. Kiss the grandbabies for us. And even as you grieve telling them goodbye in the week ahead, be consoled knowing there are two (soon three!) little girls, and their mama, excited about seeing you again on this side!

Blessings in the days ahead. It will all be okay. Somehow.

Much love,

Libby

Is this really the only picture of us in tobes? Get back up here so we can rock them together again!