Liver and Pudding

Playing dress-up like mama...

Dear Debo,

Well this is ironic.

I started this letter planning to tell you all about how amazing my baby is. After your last message that had that passing reference to your next project being working on making my kids some cousins, I wanted to sweeten that deal by telling you all about my precious Sabrine. How yesterday I plopped her down in the frame of the backdoor where there is a nice breeze and she sat there for 45 minutes cooing in wonder up at the pattern of dark green leaves dappled against the grey sky while I mixed and kneaded an entire batch of bread. She is so relaxed and content to just be that sometimes I actually forget where I have left her in her little chair – out under the clothes line where I had been taking down laundry, or on the back porch where I was trying to get charcoal lit. Or how she will bounce from hand to hand when people come to greet her, bestowing gorgeous leaky wet grins at people regardless of what language in which they are baby talking to her (Angale, leke bati!). Or how at midnight, when she calls out from her pack n-play propped up next to her sisters’ bunkbeds, Bryan groggily fumbles between all the mosquito nets back and forth and nestles her into the warm space between us, and she instinctively finds my breast in the pitch dark and cuddles into me as comfortably as an extension of my own body and we all fall deeply back asleep to the rhythmic gurgle of her tiny swallows. These are some of the most precious moments of my life. Things I will cherish until the day I die.

But, those moments are not this moment.

In this current moment Sabrine is refusing to sleep in the heat of the afternoon although she hasn’t slept all morning and both of her sisters have passed out. She can’t sleep without being swaddled but once swaddled she is miserable in her sweat and every time she finally dozes off an accursed fly will land on her left nostril and she wakes up enraged all over again. So here we are, me passive aggressively rocking her little chair with my left foot while humming an exhausted lullaby and trying to type while she resentfully frowny sleeps into the blast of a fan sucking away at the solar batteries. Motherhood someday may not look exactly like this for you, but there will be days it will be just as maddening.

Otherwise though, your newest niece is pretty amazing. She is happiest in the mornings which works out well since that is when I homeschool her big sisters. We have taken to doing school outside most days this week because the rains have been teasing us, and it is cooler outside under the thick grey blanket of clouds than inside under the tin roof that pops and growls as it heats up. I sit on a rope stool while Annabelle and Mikat sit at their little plastic tables and chairs and we read Little House in The Big Woods and color in matching pairs of animal mamas and their babies and trace jittery letters and numbers and glue absurd amounts of construction paper together to make all manner of things. I know your teaching forte is kids older than mine, but I can’t help but think of what an amazing job you would do with these little preschoolers. Between growing up in a world not so different from theirs and all your boundless creative energy, you would have so much fun with them, and they with you.

As much as they grieved leaving behind their sweet little school of five months in Kampala, I think they are genuinely happy here, maybe even happier. This week they have seemed a little bit high on the freedom that comes with life out in the middle of nowhere. They are rediscovering all the joys of cooking up feasts in the sand pile, climbing dangerously up the tall mast of a Neem tree, painting pocketfuls of rocks outlandish colors and then throwing the leftover painted water at white chickens, finding dead chameleons, experimenting with which plants on the compound are edible (and the nuances differences between “edible” and “desirable”).

Last Saturday we went out to one of the further camps in the county. I was a bit dubious about the whole thing considering we were leaving at one in the afternoon, interrupting naps to venture out at the hottest part of the day. The girls managed alright through the community meeting we attended although they were a bit bored by the grownups’ long conversations under a rakoba outside of the camp market with only a handful of curious kids hanging nearby. But with some dried pineapple and a nearby ant hill they managed alright. But we had been invited to a friend’s house afterwards and I confess to an impeding sense of doom as we made our way through close tarp walls and into a clustering of huts inside a compound at 4:30 in the afternoon, all three of my girls wilting by the minute.

We stepped inside though and immediately realized we had been invited to a wedding. Hundreds of women in exquisite tobes were daubed like garish paint across the earth toned canvas, making me feel shabby in the cotton tobe I had thrown on as we left the house, old and cool over a baby. Huge trays heavy with food were weaving overhead between the thick clusters of people, each making their way towards men in turbans sitting on mats or old women behind mud walls. Conversation hummed around us while little children dressed like miniature versions of the parents scattered between all the legs and baby goats butted heads in a rusty wheelbarrow. We were ushered to rope beds covered in velvety gold cloth and offered water in blue glass goblets, all delightfully opulent against the dirt and tarps and extravagant poverty.

We were greeted by a stream of happy people, including the groom and his brother, each almost playfully somber and wielding long swords braided out of grass and flowers. Eventually we Khawajias (Bryan, Eli and the boys were somewhere out of sight with the men) were escorted to a quieter yard where the throngs of children were forbidden to follow and we were served rice and meat, bread and rice pudding a rather alarming shade of yellow. The daughters I thought would be melting were instead mesmerized by the whole affair and gobbled up a whole plate of food themselves. In fact, to my embarrassment and pride, they couldn’t get enough of the fried pieces of liver and loudly asked for more in a tone that transcended all language barriers. Our gracious hosts (and a seemingly thankful Bethany) shoveled more liver onto my little girls’ plate which they ate until they could eat no more.   

Before we left in order to get home before dark, we were invited to watch the very beginning of some traditional dancing. An old man in a white jalabiya and vest was plucking on the biggest robaba I have ever seen with a leather cover so worn it had to have been carried out from their country when the war started. Old women were ringed around him and shuffled their feet while sing-chanting kicking up curling clouds of dust into the evening air. How desperately I wish I could have gotten a picture of my Annabelle, Hana, in her bright blue headscarf pushed to the inner circle and concentrating on the rhythm of the feet around her, stamping her bright pink crocks in imitation. But I didn’t, because my phone was somewhere in my bag which was somewhere with a girl who had kindly offered to carry it somewhere back to the car for me and who had disappeared somewhere into the crowd. Furthermore, a bawling Sabrine who had been passed from hand to hand for the past hour was now offered back into my arms smelling like an Arabian bride from the homemade perfume that had been dabbed gently onto her forehead and the sweaty rolls of her arms.

Drill Sergeant Mary Katherine and her foot soldiers

We fell into bed late that night, too full of rice pudding and liver to even eat supper. The girls did eventually start to melt into emotional trainwrecks, but miraculously, that wasn’t until they were already bathed and in jammies and required little more attention that simply turning out the light. I fell asleep shortly after, pretty tired myself, but so thankful for these troopers. In the same way that I don’t mind that all their playmates are boys and that they spend much of their time in trees or playing army, because at the end of the day, for better or worse, they are obsessed with the color pink, refuse to wear anything but dresses and fight over the “Elsa and Anna” plate at supper time, I similarly am grateful for every moment they spend in places like traditional weddings in a North African refugee camp eating liver and petting baby goats. They are American little girls and at the end of the day, they are still going to grow up with occasional trip to Disney World, too much stuff at Christmas and an opportunity to go to college. When we first got back I had a couple of heart pangs when they would cry for their school in Uganda, questioning again all the things they are missing out on. But this week I feel better about it all. That image of Annabelle gazing up at the old man playing the robaba as she tried to dance with the women around him is emblazoned in my mind. They are missing out on some things. But they are cashing in on a whole lot more.

Gotta run. Sabriney Beanie is waking up with a big old grin ready to hang out. Love you bunches. Get to work on those cousins! Love you,

Liz