Homecoming

I’ll admit that the first day back was a little intimidating. A fine layer of dust and ash coated every inch of floor and furniture. Lizard poop and what looked suspiciously like rat pellets were sprinkled like perverse confetti over my dishes and silky spider webs fluttered in the breeze like eerie party streamers. I felt like our home was the playhouse we had outgrown for a season and were now coming back to inspect in a nostalgic moment. The refrigerator, warm enough to be make-believe, was littered with the carcasses or tiny jewel-colored beetles. How did they get in there? Termites had tunneled through one of my cookbooks, leaving it a mess of dirt and half eaten recipes for baked oatmeal and chocolate cake. And our tent…oh, our tent. It bore sad testimony to the seasonal winds that have already knocked down our bamboo fence a half a dozen times. It was hard to know where to start.

Bryan began by hooking up the solar panels and I filtered mosquito larvae out of the stagnant water left in our tank. But while I did, a line from my mother-in-law’s most recent e-mail kept flitting through my head. "But I will tell both of you this, it will be very hard there with a baby...wonderful, but hard." I looked at my reflection in the murky water, and for the first time in this pregnancy, felt my confindence waver.

But I woke up this morning with renewed optimism. One of the things that most affects me about this place when I have been gone for a while is the silence. No cars, TVs or loud music. The silence isn’t empty though. It’s flecked with the sounds of wind, birds and far-off children and their goats. Rich silence. In fact this morning brought to my mind and senses memories of my grandparent’s house in Carazozo, New Mexico, - odd because they haven’t lived there in a long time and I only have a handful of memories of ever having been there myself. But something about the cool, dry air whispering through the rain gutter felt familiar from a long time ago.  

There are things I do not like about living where I do, things that I know will not get easier with a baby. I hate having to sweep sand out of my kitchen every morning, but I love having a breeze skirt through my entire house all day. I hate having to flush the toilet with buckets, but I love being forced to live in a way that makes me treasure and appreciate every bucket full. I hate having to substitute half of the ingredients the recipe calls for, but I love cooking with only what is ripe, available and in season. I hate the occasional rat that finds its way too close to home, but, I confess, I love the daily adventure of wildlife, exotic and not-so-exotic, that finds its way into our fence.

Last night the winds kicked up at around two in the morning. It howled and tumbled over us, carrying sounds from the desert in the North. We lay awake listing to every creak and bang, praying the roofs would stay put and the fence would stand strong. I could hear the sand slipping in under the door and lying in wait for me on the kitchen floor. At one point I rolled over to my side and my daughter woke up. She began kicking furiously, pushing her skin against mine, fingertips against my insides. The feeling almost tickled and it made me smile in the dark. I could feel her curiosity, her interest in this strange outside world. And it comforted me to think that maybe, just maybe, I was in the company of someone else intimidated by the immensity of this world, but enchanted by all it has to offer. Maybe she is just as excited about seeing this world as I am about showing it to her. As wonderful and hard as it may be.        

Stars

Over the past couple weeks my parents have welcomed a houseful of holiday refugees into their home, filling this place with laughter as games, food and family traditions form a patchwork of happiness across the house. Every bed and empty seat around the dining room table has been filled up and we have stayed up way too late playing outrageous games of “telephone pictionary” and “blind man’s bluff”.

On the evening of New Year’s Day, however, we were more subdued. Too much pie and too little sleep made us all a little more contentedly quiet, and a group of us found ourselves lying on our backs looking up at the stars on the cement slab in the backyard. Far from any city lights, the sky was like a Turkish lamp, night-colored brass letting out pinpoints of bright white light. It seemed like it had been a while since I had laid out and looked at the stars. In retrospect, it was a good way to usher in the New Year.

The sky was huge. I needed chameleon eyes to take it all in at once, from one tree fringed end to the other. We lay in the dark, disembodied voices floating around each other as we pointed out familiar constellations and made up our own, measuring light years with our fingertips. Like I always do, I felt like I needed more than just my eyes to soak up the fullness of the stars, as though tasting and hearing stars could somehow help me absorb its grandeur, were that even possible. For the next hour or so, our conversation wandered on unmarked paths through the stars, paying visits to both the laughable and the profound: Papa talked about his cousins in Roswell, New Mexico who swear they’ve seen UFOs. Ross pondered whether or not space is really expanding beyond itself. Abigail wondered out loud if we were seeing old light, the ghosts of long-dead stars. Then someone asked if we believed in ghosts at all which set off a string of stories about strange incidents in childhood houses. We laughed and shivered in the dark, and I thanked the artisan of human curiosity for being considerate enough to carve out a universe of mysteries for us to explore.

We saw a few dim meteors graze the sky as we talked and occasional satellites stalked metrically across the night. But just as our conversation was fading out and the couch inside was beginning to sound more comfortable than the cement at our backs, the night sky exploded with the most beautiful falling star I have even seen. Leaving sparks of white hot light in its wake, it burned brilliantly across the sky for eternal seconds. Without chameleon eyes, our heads followed it like sunflowers. It was almost impossible to believe that something so stunning was completely soundless, though we filled the vacuum with our collective gasp. And when it finally fizzled out over the horizon, without thought or words, we all erupted in spontaneous applause. It must have seemed silly, a dozen mosquito-nibbled people lying on the ground clapping at the sky. But sometimes nothing else will do.     

Home for Christmas

I am not the only person in the world who responds to the question, “Where is home to you?” with a grimace and a long exhale. In fact, my answer is much simpler than a lot of people’s. Even so, many friends have been surprised by my apparent inability to answer that question simply, and even more so by my occasional lack of desire to even try. Others have tried to help me out by generously assuming to know the answer: “It must be Kenya, right? I mean that’s where you grew up.”; “You were born in the States, went to college in the States and have always lived with an American family. America will always be home…right?”; “You have made your home in North Africa with your husband” or “Your parents live in Tanzania. Going to see them must be like going home.” The truth of the matter is none of these places will ever exclusively encompass every aspect of that deeply warm and completely comfortable word. Each and every place holds a different piece of the beautiful puzzle that is home to me.

That being said, this Christmas, I am really enjoying this particular piece of the puzzle.

Bryan and I dropped out dusty packs in a puddle of Christmas lights a few days ago after weeks of whirlwind travel across three international borders, five airports and a dozen government offices. Before this week I had spent only one night in this house my parents now live in. The dogs in the yard are unfamiliar and I haven’t learned the trick to the hot water in the guest room shower. I don’t know which shelves to put the clean dishes in yet. But somehow, this unfamiliar house feels like home. I know the old Lamu chest in the living room well and could pull out of it albums full of pictures of us from Christmases gone by – hair mussed as we smile gap-toothed in our Mickey Mouse pajamas ensconced in piles of shredded wrapping paper. I know the rough feel of the worn Ethiopian carpet even though it is now relegated to wall-hanging status; it allows patches of wall to peek through the bare spots from years of wrestling with Papa after supper. The little brass gecko from Thailand still perches on the wall behind the Christmas tree, perpetually waiting for a mosquito to come just a little bit closer. Book shelves full of Penguin Classics expose me shamelessly. “The Prison of Zenda” and “Jane Eyre” lean their tattered backs against each other; “Ivanhoe” and “War and Peace” incriminate me with their only half worn spines. Like the sibling you will lovingly squabble with by day three no matter how old you are or how long you have been apart, my allergies have flared up as I inhale in dust, pollen and perfume these familiar things have collected and carried with them from house to house over the years. I am breathing home.

 When pressed to answer this question I find so difficult, I often truthfully resort to a tired cliché. Home is where my family is. Which means with Bryan, Mama and Papa, Abigail and Baby all here with me this Christmas, I am home. I am with the people I love the most in the world and am so grateful. But some of the people I love most are not here. Deborah and Joshua, I am missing you today more than I think I ever have. A piece of the puzzle is still missing.

For those of you savoring the bittersweet beauty of an incomplete and ever-changing puzzle this Christmas, as well as those of you reveling in the joy of the whole picture, merry, merry Christmas! May you enjoy the rich sweetness of home.               

Soul Food

I read the other day that my baby is practicing swallowing. He or she is sipping away on his or her amniotic fluid (yum) and, most interesting to me, while working out all those developing esophagus muscles he or she is also getting a tasty sampling of everything I am eating. That’s right. Baby is tasting everything I am tasting (albeit with a distinct hint of amniotic fluid flavor I suspect). This thought amused me the other day as I reflected on the assortment of culinary oddities I have been passing on.

One of the few items in our house that treads the fine line between luxury and necessity, thus earning it a place between layers of underwear in our 15-kilo bags on bush planes carrying us back from East Africa, is nam-pla, a fishy sauce from Thailand that pervaded the kitchen of my Bangkok-raised mother throughout my childhood. And now, even though I have spent no more than a week or so in Thailand in the course of my own life, at least once a week my own little kitchen in the middle of arid North Africa is filled with the balmy smells of limes, hot peppers, garlic, coconut milk and onions all delicately strung together with salty nam-pla rationed out greedily from a tall glass bottle. And when I sit down to a steaming bowl of neu-pat-prik tumbling over a mountain of white rice, I imagine my unborn child smacking his or her lips and daydreaming about the summers he or she will spend savoring curries at his maternal grandmother’s kitchen table.

But my mother-in-law has been here with us for the past couple of weeks and the smells emanating from my little kitchen have plucked me right out of tropical Asia and plopped me into the heart of the humid antebellum South. The mouth watering stench of turnip greens bubbles from a huge pot on my gas stove supported gently by the buttery warm scent of baking cornbread. Black-eyed peas are soaking in a pot on the floor nearbye. And when I sit down to a glass off ice-cold sweet tea and a bowl of salty wet boiled peanuts (“bolled” I’ve been informed, not “boi-led”) I imagine my baby savoring that taste of Georgia and daydreaming of the Easter Sundays he or she will spend at his paternal grandmother’s house stealing spoonfuls of purple-hull peas.

When I eat these foods I feel like I am doing more than just getting full. I feel like am ingesting memories and emotions and traditions. I am eating a heritage. And I wonder if my baby can taste those things too - the complex beauty of one, the warm comfort of the other. Bitefuls of the people who already love him or her so much.

Yesterday afternoon I felt the baby kick for the first time. Not just a suspicious swish or a vague bubble-burst like I have been. I felt an all-out kick, a tiny heel shoved into the palm of my hand resting just right of my belly button. And it made me smile. Which one was it, Baby? The green guava dipped in sugar and hot pepper or the leftover piece of pecan pie?

French Toast Breakfast

We ran into one of the officials from the local government office on Tuesday at the airstrip when Bryan and Mama Dona flew home. Seeing our happy reunion, and no doubt considering the Eid celebrations ahead, the official told us not to worry about registering Mama Dona officially at his office that week. “I’ll just come by the house to get her name and paperwork tomorrow,” he said and waved us off.

He popped in the next morning as we were finishing up a jet-lagged breakfast amidst the detritus of new clothing tags and stray Starburst wrappers. As Bryan went to fetch her travel documents (“legal” travel here is still carried out under a rebel movement stamp of approval), Mama Dona welcomed our government official friend to a plate of French toast and a cup of tea, her big Southern hospitality both jutting oddly out of place and yet simultaneously melting in perfectly. As the official carefully worked the sticky slices onto his fork my mother-in-law began to ask him questions. What is your name? Where is your home? What is your language? How many languages do you speak? Her happy curiosity about this new part of the world spilled out in an eagerness to learn as much as she could all before breakfast was over. Each question was answered concisely in concentrated English, though often accompanied with a subtle smile. At one point, after lamenting the fact that her babies have chosen to live so far away, Mama Dona patted Bryan’s hand lovingly and pointedly asked our guest, “Now where does your mother live?” The official swallowed the bite in his mouth and then answered matter-of-factly, “My mother was shot during the war when all of our people were trying to run across the border.” Bryan and I exchanged glances while Mama Dona took this new information in. “Oh. And how old were you when this happened?”
“I was eleven.”

“I…I’m so very, very sorry.”

There was a moment’s silence and then Bryan explained that our guest had spent almost twenty years in a refugee camp and had only returned to his childhood home a few years ago, when the peace agreement was signed. “But I was very lucky.” Our guest went on casually, wiping his face with a napkin and giving the travel documents a cursory glance. “I learned English there and received an education. Now I have this job.”

Bryan eventually walked our guest back out to his motorcycle at the gate and I begin stacking up syrupy plates. Mama Dona stayed sitting in her chair at the table and then said in a voice as monotone as the departing official’s, “Okay, I am going to have a good cry now.” She then picked up a paper napkin, delicately unfolded it, put it to her face and began to sob. I put down the dishes I was holding and wrapped my arms around her, a few of my own tears sliding into her silver blond hair. Through her fingers I heard a mumbled “Oh God why? He was only eleven…” and then later, “I knew this happened. We all knew it was happening but it was so far away.”

We sat like that for a while. And I watched as many of the emotions I have experienced in the past year and a half – the guilt and grief and gratitude – all bound themselves up in one conversation, one face, and one story all around my table in one morning over breakfast.  

   

Greek

Thing 57 that I like about living here: the frequency with which simply grocery shopping intersects with sheer unexpectedness.

Often it’s a newly available product. It may be grapes or it might be goat heads. Each is equally unexpected in its own way.  Other times it’s an unexpected event. The local crazy woman gets in a fight with the local crazy man and you duck behind a mound of potatoes to avoid being hit in the head by a flying rock. Some days it’s just the weather. A surprise thunderstorm, freak wildfire or sudden dust storm creeps up without warning. You just never know if your trip to the market is going to a regular ol’ stroll through outdoor aisles of cabbages and tomatoes or something brand new that you walk away from saying, “Well, I have never seen (smelled, tasted, felt, heard etc.) that before.”

A few days ago my meeting with unexpectedness came in the form of a person.

I first noticed him while I was assessing cucumbers at my favorite vegetable stall. He was on the far end of middle aged, short, heavy set and dark haired. I couldn’t see his face but his arms and profile were dark brown – much fairer than most people in the market and much darker than me – “normal colored” as Bryan and I like to say, using a somewhat un-academic term for the complexion of most of the world, as first introduced to us by a Central Asian friend. Someone could have easily convinced me that the man in the market was a citizen of anywhere from Morocco to Mexico and many places inbetween. I had never seen him before and he didn’t seem terribly familiar with the market, though he certainly wasn’t completely out of his element. As I walked away I heard him speaking to the vendor in flawless Arabic.

A few minutes later at the bread stand the stranger passed by again and this time we made eye contact. A Khawajia in a head scarf is of occasional interest to non-locals so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he waved and turned towards me. As he approached I made a quick scroll through my mental rolodex of categories of people in this area, his loud English greeting narrowing my quick search. UN affiliate? Flip-flops and a light button-down shirt that looked well hand-washed: Probably not. Businessman from the North? Gaudy jade crucifix dangling around his neck: Unlikely. Very, very lost tourist? (Insert new category into rolodex) Effortless navigation of language and goats in the road: No. As he shook my hand warmly and started into an overflow of friendly questions well-seasoned in an accent I couldn’t quite place, I was drawing a blank. Who was this guy and what was he doing out here?

After I satisfied his similar questions with a brief introduction, he returned the favor with gusto. “My name is Antonio. I am ethnically Greek,” he said proudly, as the accent I now recognized from a movie about a wedding clicked into place, “but” he continued with equal pride, “I am a national of this country!” My expression must have shown the mix of the confusion and interest I felt because for the next five minutes in the middle of the sandy road, he colorfully narrated a very condensed version of a fascinating story, pieces of which I had already heard from locals but had only chalked up to urban legend, (or in this case, rather rural legend actually).      

The man I met in the market is the son of a Greek merchant who moved to this tiny town in the 1960s, right after the British, Egyptians and Italians had all been politely asked to leave the broader area. Why he chose to move here, I still don’t know, but he opened up a shop, built a house, dug a well, raised a bunch of kids and eventually died and was buried just down the road. His kids grew up, moved a few miles away to the state capital, got married, built homes, opened up shops and are now raising kids and grandkids of their own. And on this particular day, I stood talking to one of those sons who had returned to the town of his birth to visit his father’s grave. Of all the people I might have imagined this man to be, it wasn’t a Greek North African coming back to visit his roots.

This man’s passport, memories, livelihood and family are all inextricably linked to this part of the world. I wonder how often he has been to Greece, if ever. Though he stands out, this country is his home like nowhere else in the world. But as he said goodbye he cradled my hand in both of his, smiled as greasily as his hair and said warmly, “I’ll be in town for a while. We should get together for a beer!” and I realized that, however North African we may turn out to be in the end, the influence of our fathers’ homelands doesn’t go away quickly. (Good naturedly inviting a married woman twenty years your junior to share a drink in an Islamic society just somehow seemed very…Greek at that moment.)   

I have seen this man in town a couple of times since that day though we haven’t spoken again. He is usually sitting with other shopkeepers and seems to be deep in conversation each time. I imagine they are talking about how this town has changed in the last fifty years and I would love to sit down and eavesdrop. But I just keep walking and think of the questions I would love to ask him if we ever do run into each other again. Like: What was it like to live here as a kid? Do you eat mussaka (sp?) or kisra at home, or both? Do your kids speak Greek? What do you think about the politics of this country? Does the well your father dug still have water in it?

What a fascinating world we live in. I love meeting people whose stories and experiences I would never have imagined up myself, people who don’t quite fit any category I’ve come up with yet. I love having to constantly add new entries to that mental rolodex of mine.

November

Stepping out of October and into November has felt like shrugging off the light cotton sundress you wear to spring picnics and pulling on that scratchy sweater that has been stuffed in an old trunk all year. Almost overnight the once cloudy skies have been bleached a dirty white and our cool mornings and evenings have been replaced with oppressive heat. Right on cue, the tall grass and lush leaves are all turning yellow-brown and the mosquitoes are in one last feeding frenzy before they die out with the evaporating puddles. Ash sifts through the air and settles on our laundry and drying dishes while the horizons burn with feral bush fires. My garden only has a few days of produce left, and everything I pick comes pre-cooked: my basil leaves are steamed on the bush; my carrots are baked before they come out of the ground; and my cherry tomatoes feel boiled on the vine. As vividly as I remember the intensity of the dry season last year, the sheer greenness of the rains washed all memory of the experience from my physical body which is responding like it has never been through this before. And as recent as the rains were, after only a week of their absence they already seem like a distant dream. It is amazing how quickly things change here. I can't believe I ever used to heat up my bath water.

Bryan is leaving for a week tomorrow – first to the Southern capital to work on government documents and then on to East Africa to pick up his mother who is coming for a visit. We are so excited about her upcoming visit. She is the first member of our immediate family to come here and we are so excited to introduce someone we love so much to other things we have come to love so much. We are not without trepidation though. North Africa could be considered an acquired taste and this is her first trip to the continent. Bucket baths and lizards may not be as charming in real life as they sound in emails. I am proud of my mother-in-law already though, even if this adventure turns out to be a bust. She is the least likely candidate in our families to come visit us in the middle of nowhere Africa at the beginning of dry season a month before a political brouhaha that could result in the world's newest nation. She isn't the mother who grew up overseas or the sister who wants to be a doctor in Congo. She isn't the father who served two tours in Vietnam or the sister who runs half-marathons. She is the retired math teacher from Georgia who loves her diet coke, is a little bit overweight, and is having a hard time leaving her hair curlers behind. She is nervous about the lack of air conditioning, sleeping under a thatch roof and trying out the sorghum and okra. And to be honest so am I, a little bit.

But a week from Thursday, she is stepping on that trans-Atlantic flight with a bag full of sunscreen and mosquito repellant (and if I know her at all, good things for us) and is coming to see her babies. And that, my friends, is true love. She has heart as big as the wildfire that will consume the hill behind our house any day now and a capacity for loving people regardless of who they are that I believe will overcome the overwhelming newness of life here. There will be hard days, but in many ways I think I may discover that she may not turn out to be as "unlikely" as I once expected. (And on the slim chance that I am dead wrong we will finish off the whole party with a safari and beach holiday in East Africa….)

The next few weeks will be an adventure for us all, one I am quite excited about. Mama Dona, we can't wait to see you!