Wildfire

Shortly after breakfast this morning I heard what sounded like loud wind heading our way.
This didn't bother me that much as the wind really has been unbelievable lately. It has been blowing through in unexpected gusts, blasting around the side of the mountain like it is running for its life, knocking chairs and kitchen ware off of our porch in it's hurry to get somewhere further away than here. The walls and floor of our tent bulge all around us then buckle violently back out in a way that makes me too nervous to sleep. (Last night I asked Bryan, "Why does this wind scare me so badly?" He answered "Because our house is made out of fabric.")
But the wind never hit our tent this morning. I looked out in the direction of the noise and saw a wave of dark black smoke and realized what I was hearing was fire. Lots and lots of fire. We watched it for a while hoping to see it die down but within half an hour a tsunami of orange flames that would occasionally burst as high as thirty feet in the air was rolling towards our home. Our neighbors (who lost their entire compound to fire last year) had a team of guys out starting smaller fires to try and head the wildfire off. Bryan lit a handful of grass on our camp stove and ran out to join them. I ran inside and started packing go-bags just in case - passports, laptops, my bible and family photos (and if you must know, a little bit of make-up and a favorite bra. In this part of the world that loss would hurt.) The black sky was full of ash and dozens of hawks trying to catch small animals fleeing the heat. It looked and sounded and smelled so awful.
Amazingly, the fire seemed to die down almost as dramatically as it started. Other than the singed hair on Bryan's hands and arms, we were ultimately untouched. The afternoon is now completely still and quiet, and other than the crispy blackness right outside our gate, you wouldn't have even known the fire was here only hours ago.
I expect there will be a time that we will loose things to fire. It seems to just be a part of life here. But this morning I just kept thinking, "Not yet. Please not yet." Some days this place just feels insane! Days are blisteringly hot and dusty while nights can feel freezing. The shockingly intense rain and thunder have been replaced with equally amazing wind and fire. All of it sweeps in so unexpectedly. And all of it seems so extreme. All you can do is pack up your underwear and pray.
And as scary as it can sometimes be, I have to admit, I kinda like it.

Sadika

It's so weird to get on Facebook these days and hear people talking about pumpkins and pies and leaves changing colors. Leaves are changing colors here too but that's mostly because there has been no rain for about a month and its so freaking hot that everything is slowly dying. Thankfully the wind is picking up too so even though it is hot, it isn't still. On breezy nights I find that it's quite easy to imagine that you are sleeping in a big boat instead of a big tent. When the wind picks up in the middle of the night I hear green canvas sails creaking overhead and outside my window I see moonlight reflecting on endless grassy currents.
This has been a much better week than last. Though a prideful part of me perhaps hates to admit it, one of the reasons for my renewed optimism is having found a new friend. Heather and her husband moved here from another part of the country last week to continue working with the organization next door to us. She's a little older than me but doesn't have kids yet either. She is a nurse, rides motorcycles, hates snakes, loves the movie "Man From Snowy River" and speaks Kiswahili. Her parents live in the same coutry as mine and she has a little sister back in the States. She even had a pet dik-dik for a little while! Apart from my own sisters, I have never met some one with a life so similar to mine. There is so much she understands about me without me ever having to verbalize. Which is of course why anyone who knows me would immediately suspect that I would hate her guts. I kinda thought I might too. I have always enjoyed being THE girl in most situations; and if not the only girl, than at very least, the only one who rides a motorcylce. And until lately I have been. (I should specify, the only English speaking one. Even if my Arabic was remotely good enough to use in a conversation about culture stress, I'm still not sure how far that would get me). But one trip to the market together with her proved me very wrong. I think I underestimated how much a friend helps in transitions like these. Someone who is shy to try her language too but pushes you to want to try a little harder. Someone who will shield for you when you try on skirts in the market and has tips on how the heck to cook egg-plant. Someone that even lives close enough to shout asking if you are okay when a six inch praying mantis lands on your face and you scream bloody murder (purely hypothetically speaking.) A friend. Who knew that it would be so nice to have one around?

Friday

Thank goodness it's Friday.
Friday means a quiet market, construction workers who leave our compound early, and football matches in the evenings. It means home delivery injera and wat (as in, a guy hops on his motorcycle and brings across the border to our house) and a few episodes of our latest addiction - bootlegged copies of the first few seasons of "Smallville." (I know it's lame, but we are nothing if not easily entertained.)
I'm glad it's Friday too because it's felt like a really long week to me. I've been frustrated a lot. The charms of living on a construction site by day and a campsite by night are wearing a little thin. We can see progress every day so I know I should only be thankful. Our toilet is working so beautifully that sometimes I want to sit in there far longer than is necessary, and our well-fed solar panels are generating lots of bright white light into the tent. Our neighbors across the way are still happy to let us mooch off of their internet which is incredible (though sometimes in order to skype we have to sit with our laptops in the waist-high grass of the field between our two plots - like that guy in the ad they show at the beginning of every British Airways flight.)
But even with all these wonderful things I have felt frazzled all week. When I realized that the curtains for our tent that I had worked so hard to explain in Arabic to the tailor fell off of the back of my motorcycle somewhere on the way home, you would have thought I had just lost the Shroud of Turin. When the pot of lentil sloppy joes I had made for guests came out tasting like lentil dish-water I had an internal melt-down. When the sprung rat trap was dagged half way across the yard and empty two mornings in a row I started just waiting for the maimed rodents to hunt me down. And these are just the "big" things. I have been frustrated over a dozen more little stupid things all week.
So on our night to relax a little, I reflect back on this long week, hope that next week is better and thank all of the people who made this week really not as bad as it seemed some times - the vegetable vedor who bought us a frozen orange drink just for trying to speak Arabic with him; my husband for for going back to look for my lost curtains and for the man on the side of the road who found them for us; the guy who teased me for wearing a rival soccer jersey and all those silly little kids who ran down the road with us on our jog this morning. And lastly, for my three new chickens whose ungraceful panic over grossly exaggerated and misplaced fears makes me cringe and laugh on an almost daily basis.

Seasons

It is hot.
The cold nights full of thunderstorms are long gone. It's almost as if mother nature saw how wet we all were and in an act of over-protective paranoia decided to swaddle us all up in suffocating layers of white hot sky. We're learning to go to be early and wake up early like everyone else, trying to make the most of the cooler hours of the day. It's actually a rhythm of life I'm really beginning to enjoy. Between noon and three everything stops. Shopkeepers pull their rope beds onto the porch and take a nap. Women lay in the shade of big trees and play with their babies. We sit in our tent and read.
People are beginning to harvest a few early crops like sesame. They are also beginning to prepare for the season of wildfires. Along with the coming drier weather and Harmattan winds come grass fires known for consuming entire mountainsides, and people's homes and farms along with it. In order to destroy the dry grass the fires feed on, people are already burning perimeters around their land, creating fire breaks that they can control. Several nights ago the hill behind our house glowed orange all night. Right now I can see several columns of smoke on the horizon with funnels of birds flying above them.
Last week our askari started burning the grass around our compound. It was amazing how fast it spread. Within seconds from the time he touched the fire to the grass the flames had run the width of our fence with a sound like a hundred little kids stomping on bubble wrap. Slender pieces of black ash wafted into our yard and gathered on top of our tent like a light dusting of black snow. It all made me incredibly nervous, but he was watching the direction of the wind and slashed any flames that strayed too far. Minutes later it died out almost as quickly as it had started.
When the rains were here, they brought incredible coolness but they also flooded roads so that it was hard to move around anywhere. The coming dryness brings the threat of fires but the market is now full of goods brought down from Northern towns. Watermelons have been replaced with custard fruits. Bees are pushing out the mosquitoes. We are slipping out of one season and into another. Even though we have been here four months, everything is still very new to me and I hate to think of the nuances of life I may be missing because of that. I'm gulping it all down now; I can't wait to just sip it. I can't wait until the time next year when I will more fully enjoy what I am feeling now because I know it will soon be gone; or, when I will wait expectantly for something that is coming soon because I know this can't last forever.
I can't wait to think, "Oh yes, I remember this."

Inshallah

We made it back! We had a bit of an adventure getting home but three days ago we not only walked in our front gate but did so with all our government paperwork in hand (if you only knew what a miracle that is!) Our trip back started with a late night car ride through the bush to a town several hours away from the southern capitol. We shared the rented car with three students headed home for the weekend who had also missed the last bus out of town. About twenty minutes down the road the kid sitting next to me pulled out a shiny black pistol and casually began loading it. When he saw Bryan and I exchange glances he laughed. “Don’t worry.” He said, “This is just in case someone decides to give us trouble.” I couldn’t imagine what situation could be improved by an eighteen year old with a gun, but thankfully my imagination wasn’t stretched and we made it in late that night, in time to catch a plane heading out at 6:30 the next morning.
Our place feels a little more like home every day. We have some furniture now in our tent bedroom and we are working on installing a beautiful porcelain toilet in our latrine (praise the Lord!). Our “yard” is still a wreck though as we get ready to start building our kitchen and guestroom. With all the piles of grass, stones and cinder blocks lying around it looks like the Big Bad Wolf was last week’s dinner guest.
Several friends have stopped by to say hello since we’ve been back which has made us happy. Today the women who work next door came over to chat, first with me, and then with each other when my Arabic ran out. At one point they poked their heads into our canvas bedroom door and eyed our home approvingly. When they saw our big bed in the corner though they asked me why we only have one bed. Before I could even begin to think of how to answer they continued, “Libby, if you have only one bed, why don’t you have a baby yet?” Sometimes language deficiency is a blessing. All I had to offer in response was a shrug a blush and one word “Inshallah.”

On the Banks of the Big River

We've been here in the big city of the south for only a few days now, but it has been long enough for me to begin suspecting that those first 30 minutes in the airport were moments spent in a microcosm of the city itself. We stepped off the plane and melted into the crowd swarming around the travel documents desk. Young development workers were exchanging their North Face jackets for aviator sunglasses. A local politician in pointed leather shoes was greeted by children in indigo school uniforms, singing and holding out a lei of tinsel flowers. Tall dark girls in denim and faux Dolce and Gabbana purses mingled against a wall adorned with anti-corruption posters while soldiers representing at least three different branches of the military smoked cigarettes up against another. Air conditioners blasted moderately cool air into the one-room terminal, patiently fighting a losing battle against the billows of dusty heat coming in from half a dozen open windows and doors.
Most of our days have been spent in the car, driving from one air-conditioned container-turned-office to another. We join the fleets of UN trucks, public transport vans and motorcycle taxis fighting for space on either incredibly nice paved roads or horrifically bad dirt ones. Piles of red and blue plastic bottles on the side of the road break up the colorless glare of glass-fronted banks. Men sell cut stalks of sugar cane in front of signs advertising "Snow Ball Ice Cream"(which I really want to look into). Herds of cattle with horns so long it seems that holding the weight of their own heads should be impossible push shiny black hummers to the side of the road. Our friend jokes that they are probably the ones cattle rustlers stole from his neighbors last night. He couldn't sleep because of the gun shots.
Although the registration process is quite daunting and more than a little time consuming, almost everyone in the many legal, governmental, political and developmental departments has been very professional and helpful. We're hoping the whole process won't take too long. We are anxious to get home. It's nice to have a pleasant place to come back to in the evenings though. Our hotel feels like the kind of place that was built by someone who realized they could make a fortune it they acted now. Everything from the prefab walls to the showerheads have company names like "Chang Hong" on them and our bedsheets are a lovely shade of bright eggplant. The water from the shower is pumped straight out of the big river itself and pools at your feet in a color that makes you feel a little less clean than you thought. But the view of the big river from the hotel is so beautiful it almost makes you feel proud to have bathed in it. On top of that, there is a quasi-tame vervet monkey named Kakule that has a pleasantly unnerving habit of hiding under the metal stairs and grabbing your ankles as you walk down. Why would we want to be anywhere else?

Mud

The airstrip in our area is many miles outside of town and well out of cell-phone reception so when you "go to the airstrip" you are there until you leave on your plane or with your guests. We didn't know just what that would mean for us on Thursday when we flew out. The cargo plane taking us out was scheduled to land at 10am although it didn't appear on the horizon until closer to 10:30. This was the biggest plane I have yet seen on our little dirt airstrip and I was almost surprised it managed at all. Usually the planes land, taxi all the way down the 800 meter strip, turn around and then make their way back to where people and Land Cruisers wait to unload the cargo. However after the plane landed this time, someone with a sat phone got a call from the pilot saying we would have to meet the plane down at the far end of the airstrip. We all thought this was a little odd, but attributed it to the plane's size, thinking it would need the entire length of the airstrip on the way out. But when we got down to the end of the strip we saw the real cause of the problem. The huge gray plane full of five tons of cargo was tilting eerily to one side, with one wing slanting on a skyward trajectory and the other dipping behind the tall elephant grass beyond the edge of the airstrip. Apparently the pilot had been unable to turn the plane around on the little runway successfully, and as a result, the right wheel and landing gear had slipped off of the raised airstrip and deep into a muddy ditch on the side.
Over the next five hours tractors, Land Cruisers, man power, shovels, and lumber were all used to try to pull the plane out. The whole ordeal varied between extreme excitement and sweltering boredom. One minute everyone was up and ready to scatter as other smaller planes buzzed overhead, trying to land on the airstrip despite our lumbering presence, or when massive UN tractors chained themselves to the plane and tried to wrench her out. But most of the time those of us who weren't digging were just sitting in the shade of the plane's belly, swatting away sweat bees and flies. Every once in a while the pilots would turn on an engine to try and give her more power to get out, but, being so far from our destination, fuel conservation was a serious consideration. So we all shared around our cookies and water bottles, put on sunscreen, took a few pictures and waited.
Finally, with the help of a second tractor the plane wiggled free. Knowing that some of us had a connecting flight we were within five minutes of missing, the muddy pilots hustled us all into the plane as soon as she was loose, and within minutes we were airborne. A few hours later, as we made our descent, we all looked out the porthole windows a little nervously as the mud and grass caked landing gear creaked down for landing. But she pulled it off perfectly and we were able to sprint happily across the (tarmac) runway and into the open doors of our next waiting flight.
The craziest part of it all though is that the day which started out in a tent and centered around a mud-stuck cargo plane, ended up with Java House milkshakes, deep hot baths and a big clean bed!