My New Kilimanjaro

A year and a half ago Bryan started trying to talk me into climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with him. At first I was somewhat resistant to this idea. A childhood in a household of competitive women has made me reluctant to start into any physical challenges without a reasonable assurance of success and the idea of summiting the tallest mountain in Africa did not conjure up my greatest moment of self-confidence. My first reaction was more or less – no thank you. “But just think…” he said. “If we don’t do this now we may start having kids soon and never get another chance like this for years to come.” His manipulative argument was highly persuasive to one already symptomatic of a mild case of baby lust. Long story short, I caved and we started training for the climb. But somewhere along the way, during those long early morning jogs down dirt roads, the Kilimanjaro/baby connection shifted a little bit. Instead of being about climbing a mountain before we have babies, it became about climbing a mountain in order to have babies. In my mind, the stamina and endurance required of mountain climbing was similar to that required of bearing a child. Somehow Kili became a personal test. If I could make it to the top of Kilimanjaro, I was ready to get pregnant. (Bryan didn’t know what he was signing up for.)

I know that probably sounds weird. Mountain climbing and childbearing are two completely different things and it probably wasn’t healthy for me to link them so closely. How would I have felt if I didn’t make it all the way to Uhuru Peak? Or what if I did make it but didn't end up pregnant at all? But at the end of the day, I did make it to the top (probably helped in part by the presence of my extremely capable little sister), and now, fourteen months later, I am mere weeks away from holding my daughter for the first time.

And while the idea of having a baby helped me get to the top of Kili, and the image of climbing a mountain has so far helped me carry this baby, I find that these “metaphors” are more aptly coupled than I may have once thought. For instance, those first few months of elated daydreaming while puking my face out were much like the terrifying thrill of those first long hikes through rainforest. And feeling those first kicks and regaining my appetite was a lot like getting used to thinner air and enjoying the view above the clouds. But now…now we are on that last long straight-up hike to crater’s rim. Waking up five times a night to empty my bladder, maneuver a foot out of my ribs or try and squirm an ache out of my back only to greet the morning prospect of twelve hours of blazing sunshine with a sense of dread feels strangely similar to hiking through scree at midnight, too tired to put one boot in front of the other, too cold to stop moving. Nine weeks out and Uhuru peak is within sight, but still eight long hours away.

A friend stopped by the other day and brought the mountain climbing/baby bearing connection home even further. As I put my bottle of filtered water back in the refrigerator and stepped outside to greet her, she was unloading at least fifty pounds of firewood off of her head and slumping her eight-month pregnant frame into a chair in the hot shade for a short break before her last mile home. I manage the heat and backaches with an electric fan and foot-rubbing husband; she does it with a sweltering cooking fire and rickety rope bed. Immediately, the image of the porter in holey tennis shoes with a massive tent and cooking pots strapped to his back hiking resolutely beside me (or more often ahead of me) sprung to mind. Yes, he’d been up the mountain dozens of times before and yes, this is my friend’s seventh baby, but still. Something tells me the blisters in the cold and contractions in the heat still feel just about the same.

So the hike goes on, right now feeling rather long and slow (and they tell me I don't know anything yet). But with each step and each week that gets me closer to that incredible goal, I find myself encouraged by the miles behind me and so inspired by those on the trail with me. And when I take the time to sit down for a quick water break, I am filled with a humbling sense of thankfulness to have been given the gift of this journey.

At the end of the day mountain climbing and having a baby are still in fact very different. But if that hike a year ago is anything to go by, something tells me that the view from the top of this mountain is going to be absolutely spectacular.

Green Words

Last month while we were with my parents in East Africa, we attended a small church in the village where they live. A handful of Christians met under a thatch shelter without walls next to a field of harvested stalks of maize. We sat on roughly hewn benches in the sultry heat, men on one side, women on the other. When it came time for guests to greet the group and introduce themselves, I stood up shyly and self-consciously dusted off the limited Swahili I only occasionally use these days. But in that moment of acute language stage-fright, something weird happened. Something about my surroundings unlocked a very rusty box in my mind that hadn’t been opened in a very long time. Whether it was the pattern of palm-tree shadows on sandy paths and the lingering scent of smoke from cooking fires or simply being with my parents again in a rural environment, something flipped a switch in my mind. When I opened my mouth the first few words to come creaking out were in Kigiriyama, a language of my childhood that I haven’t spoken and have hardly even heard in over fifteen years, (and which was of no practical value in that setting.) Even now I am amazed to think of the things buried in my own mind. Things that resonate somewhere deep inside of me when the strings of my senses are plucked.

A couple of days ago Bryan and I first dipped our toes into learning Rotana, the mother tongue of a people group of about 50,000. Their language has never been written down. They have no alphabet. No books. You can’t read a Rotana story anywhere in the world, though they have some good ones. Little kids can’t start learning to read Rotana in school before transitioning to Arabic or English because there are no primers. We are here to try and help those in this community who want to change that. It’s a long process. And for us, it starts with learning the language too.

So for about 45 minutes the other day, we sat with our friend Abdul and tried to learn something. We listened to the flavor of his words, sampling a few ourselves as we rolled sounds curiously around on our tongues. I was blown away by how different Rotana is than any other language I have ever studied. Word breaks elude me completely and vowels are swallowed up in the bristly hedges of their neighboring consonants. My lips and tongue and throat feel lethargic and out of shape as they try to transition out of Arabic and into something completely new. It’s too early for my mind to comprehend anything I am saying or hearing. For the time being meaning is modestly hidden behind the taste and smell and color of this new language. So even as I transcribe new words, ponder syllable structure and marvel over the advanced tongue root phenomenon that my grad school professors swore would only show up in a handful of languages any of us would ever work in (!), I am mostly just savoring this short-lived season of initial sensations.

Where Arabic tasted warm and grainy on my throat when I first started learning it, like fresh baked bread full of nuts and kernels, Rotana has a sour tang to it – more like the sorghum mush of the villages than the round loaves they sell in town. It is dry, but full of texture, like the baobab fruit that coats your tongue with soft white tanginess, while its oddly shaped seeds roll around in your mouth like marbles. Where Arabic had a Semitic gruffness to it sanded down with smooth rolling laterals, Rotana has a Nilotic nasal-ness that I feel hum pleasantly somewhere between my nose and the roof of my mouth. Arabic tasted golden-yellow to me. Rotana tastes green, like baby leaves.

I need to remember right now that for me, acute frustration is usually hot on the heels of initial elation as far as language is concerned. While trying to learn an unwritten language right now is an enticing mystery, when I can’t turn to a dictionary or grammar book for clues later on it may be maddening. While helping people craft an alphabet and choose a script to give shape to their beautiful language right now sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime, it won’t take long before that becomes the most intimidating thing I can imagine. (Ok, I’ll be honest, it already sort of is.) But when those days come, I hope and pray that the enthusiasm of the man leaning over my shoulder, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of my notebook and see what his language just might look like someday will be all the incentive I need to take a deep breath and just keep trying.

Until then, as one who still knows nothing, I am just enjoying the tastes and smells of this incredibly old new language.

Asad

(He's asleep...)

Animals in Africa are a difficult thing, especially for those of us who dare try and make them into something akin to pets. You would think I would have learned that from a childhood of funeral services beside popsicle stick crosses in the backyard, or, even more recently, an unfortunate incident with a dikdik. But even as an adult on this continent, I still find myself trying to squeeze into some non-existent space, seeking balance on a violently swaying playing field.

Not long ago I overheard a friend of ours, a vet from this area, remarking on the cans of pet food he had seen at a neighboring organization. “Dog food!” he spat out with disgust. “They are bringing in food for their animals when there are hungry people all around! These animals aren’t meant to be fed. They are self-sufficient!” And though I cringed at the time and kept my mouth shut, I felt a flicker of guilt. This was coming from a man I have also heard berate donkey owners for beating their work animals. He does not tolerate animal cruelty so his words hit a soft spot on my heart. I suppose when there isn’t enough mercy to go around for all the people who deserve it, showing any to animals does seem a little misplaced.

When my mother in law came to visit us, she fell in love with our cat, Nimir, and dog, Asad. Her cats at home get ice-cubes in their filtered water so I felt my fears at how she would respond to our animals' North African lifestyle were well-founded. But generally, I was relieved. I only caught her trying to slip them the “clean water” once. It wasn’t until her second week here that she proposed we bring them back to the States with us when we go home for a visit. My snort of a response apparently didn’t go over very well and we found ourselves in an intense conversation about the responsibilities of pet owners to their animals. These animals get treated better than any other in this state, maybe this country! I argued. Just because other people treat their animals badly doesn’t mean you can settle for treating them half-way badly. Is what I heard in response.  Round and round we went, getting nowhere.

That afternoon a donkey cart with a barrel of water came by. Against my better judgment, I set out Asad’s bowl of food while the man emptied his buckets into our tanks. As soon as I set the bowl of rice and scrap meat in front of Asad, I regretted my decision to feed him right away. The man’s eyes were wide when he asked, “What is he eating?”

“Just leftover food that people were finished with,” I hedged awkwardly.

“He eats all of that?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Every day?”

“Mostly.”

“Rice and meat?”

“Well, he doesn’t always get meat…” I said stupidly, though of course, at that point it didn’t really matter. The whole time the man filled up our tank with his dirty water, his eyes didn’t leave my dog licking up every last grain of rice from his own personal bowl before lapping up the water this man had just hauled across town so that people could bathe and cook. 

On Friday Asad attacked a goat. He had killed one last month and even though the owner had been compensated and the dog punished, we all knew what it would mean if the incident repeated itself. A dog in America couldn’t get away with robbing banks either.  This time the goat survived with some serious scratches on his backside (thank you Dan for stitching him up) but we all realized what had to be done. Poor Asad looked remorseful tied up under the tree next to his water bowl but the blood all over his muzzle kept him looking anything but innocent.

Maybe I have learned something over the years because my goodbye with Asad wasn’t terribly emotional or well marked. I just holed myself up in the house while the police, whose mandate to maintain public peace apparently extends to eradicating dogs who are a public menace, lent their services. It was over with very quickly and Bryan tells me they were both professional and surprisingly apologetic about the situation. It’s too bad you have to kill your dog. But we understand. Today it’s goats, tomorrow it might be a child.

A neighbor’s offering of homemade cinnamon rolls went a long way towards easing my sadness and a week later, my emotions have already faded a bit. But one thing still lingers faintly, and that is a sense of guilt. Guilt for trying to love a thousand years of wildness out of a North African mutt, expecting him to sit down and roll over like a good dog. Guilt for treating him too well. Guilt for not treating him well enough. Guilt for feeling a little bit relieved that I am no longer the foreigner with an unclean animal. Guilt for missing his wagging tail when we come home.

I say animals in Africa are a difficult thing. But really, if I think about it, I realize that what is so hard is really probably something much bigger than that.

P.S. Thank you Mama Dona for letting me use our conversations to process my own private feelings in this somewhat public space! Your words are such a good catalyst for thought. Love you.

Things that got eaten while we were away...

Termites are responsibel for the first two pictures. The last two...a saber toothed rat perhaps?

The window...

The cookbook...

The ice-tray...

And the tea kettle.

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.