Back to the Hospital

It seems unfair to the last month to be writing in the pale glow of a hospital room again, with the soft ripple of bubbles in an oxygen filter nearby and my baby’s raspy breathing in the cot next to me. I have had so many blogs churning in my mind that never made it out – blogs about long walks on the beach of my childhood with my baby, leaving footprints in the damp fanfare of sand strewn from crab holes; blogs about three weeks with my mama, drinking chai after we finally got the girls to sleep and talking and crying about mothers and daughters and the fierce connection between them; blogs about the steady ache to be back in North Africa instead of the comfortable drift of roaming from one nice house to another here in Nairobi while we wait for a place to call home.

But I never wrote the words down, mostly because of the chaotic beauty of being a fulltime mother these days. Blogs, like sleep, have been hard to come by. But, one of the odd upsides to being in the hospital is a little more time to myself to do things like write. Time that I would happily give back.

Bryan was the first to come down with upper respiratory crud but Annabelle and Mary Katherine quickly followed suit. The mysterious super-shield that keeps mamas’ immune systems up in order to take care of the family has held up for me so far (though I am preparing for the inevitable crash when this is all said and done.) We took everyone to the doctor on Saturday morning and by Sunday Annabelle and Bryan were improving. But MK was not. She had fits of violent coughing that made my heart stop and then she started vomiting. All day Sunday I could hardly rouse her to eat much less do anything else. By evening we started deliberating whether or not we could wait until morning to see our pediatrician or if we should go ahead and take her to the ER. But when she started looking pale and frighteningly lethargic, our decision was easy.

It was around nine when I threw the diaper bag in the car and strapped a listless MaryKat into her seat. Bryan stayed behind with Annabelle who was already in bed, though I could tell it was killing him not to come with us. But with a toddler and a nursing baby there was little choice. I haven’t driven in Nairobi at night before and I was a little nervous. As I made my way through poorly lit round-abouts, harrowing high-speed two lane roads and a couple of wrecks I was just imagining scratching out the eyes of the corrupt cop that pulled me over to ask for a bribe. Normally I am an intimidated mess around police (at least on the inside) but God help the unsuspecting person that chose to mess with me that night. Thankfully, no one did and I made it to the hospital in good time. Mary Katherine was coughing the whole way and as I turned into the parking lot she started vomiting and choking. I screeched into a parking spot and scrambled to get her inside.

By the time I got her into the hospital she was white as a sheet and limp on my shoulder. Her breathing, which I was obsessively checking, was shallow and irregular. After what felt like months of paperwork I was directed to the pediatric waiting area where I sat down with a dozen coughing kids and their sleepy parents listening to a journalist wax on about the looming Kenyan elections on the TV above. Eventually a triage nurse called me back to look at MaryKat. Moments after checking her out she was ushering us down a hall to a room full of curtained off beds and fitting an oxygen mask over my baby’s face. At the time the number “65” didn’t mean anything to me. But now knowing that it should have been over 94, I feel sick to my stomach.  

The 48 hours after that have been a blur. I feel like I remember everything that has happened – the breathing treatments, the x-rays, the visits from Bryan and Annabelle - but I have no sense of chronology or time. I sleep when MaryKat sleeps, which is often only 20 minutes at a time with no respect to night or day. I can’t remember what was an hour ago or a day ago. She and I are both exhausted.

But, thank God, her heart rate and respiration rate have settled and on oxygen she is alert and hungry. The chest x-rays showed this was not pneumonia but just a really bad virus so now we just wait until she can pull enough oxygen into those little lungs on her own. Tonight when they took her off O2 her numbers were at 78 – still not good enough to go home. But her congestion is clearing, just slowly.

My precious cousin Terron who is working here for a year spent the day with Annabelle (having tea-parties and comforting baby dolls no doubt. She has a huge crush on her cousin-uncle) so that Bryan could be with Mary Katherine and me. Just a few hours with him and I think we both feel like we can go on with a little more grace. Four am last night was not our finest hour with all her tubes only allowing about a three foot circle to pace in when she (we) was crying. At one point a poor nursing student tiptoed in to take MK’s vitals and when he saw me I could see him mentally scanning his textbooks for the chapter on “What to do when you walk in on a bawling sleep-deprived anxiety-ridden white woman at 3am.” But tonight I think she and I are both encouraged and optimistic about a few hours sleep. She’s squeaking away in her little swing that her Papa brought up and I will curl up under the circus sheets on the hospital bed. We’ll see how the night goes.

As always, thank you for your prayers. 

Post Script: I ran out of internet credit for my computer last night so I didn’t get to post this until now, twelve hours later with about six hours of sleep under my belt and almost double that for MK. Plus her O2 levels are now at 90%. I am so happy!

This Time Around...

When we were pregnant with Annabelle, all our friends with kids said, “Get ready. Having a baby changes everything.” At the time, I had to be careful not to roll my eyes. Of course it changes everything. Who gets pregnant thinking that everything will stay the same? But then nine months later I was the wild-eyed crazy woman clinging to my pregnant friend’s arms saying in the raspy voice of a disregarded prophet, “No, really. Having kids changes everything.” I think for a while there I really thought I might die from lack of sleep. Like one of those contestants on a radio program who stays awake for four days straight and wins a million dollars only to spend the rest of his brain-dead life in a nursing home. Yeah, I thought I was going to be that guy for a while.

So when those same friends said, “Your second baby is so much easier than the first,” I was both skeptical and hopeful. Experience told me I was in for a sleepless marathon. But their counsel had proved reliable in the past. I stepped into motherhood the second time around with trepidatious hope.   

And, granted, I am only two weeks in. But it has been two weeks of living in one-room as a family of four, changing two sets of diapers, and recovering from a touch-and-go week in the hospital with a preemie. And you know what? I still think this is easier than the first time around.

I have only cried irrationally once (by my count anyway; Bryan might define “irrationally” differently) and if you find civil war particularly heart-wrenching then maybe you would have cried at the opening scene of “The Hatfields and McCoys” miniseries too. The point is, overall, I have just been really, really happy.

Expectations have a lot to do with it. There is nothing like that first experience of being jerked by your hair right out of contented selfishness. By now I am already used to privacy in the bathroom being a rare treat and sleep being something that only comes one someone else’s terms. Confidence is another. I remember half of my sleeplessness a year and a half ago had less to do with Annabelle and more to do with me staying up panicking over my mothering skills. Am I letting her cry too much? Too little? Is she getting enough to eat? Is she too fat? Is she already destined to a lifetime of counseling because I wondering if she is too fat at two months old? But now I hardly wake up for nighttime feedings at all. I feed her when she is hungry and let her sleep with me when she wants to. And I don’t stress about it. I’m a mama, her mama. And right now, that’s enough.

But maybe more than anything, the peace I am experiencing this time around has to do with living just a little bit longer. When Annabelle was born I actually spent time thinking about things like whether she had enough cute outfits with matching bows for her first couple months of church, or how much I regretted not having access to a photographer who would take black and white portraits of her asleep naked in a basket sitting in a field of flowers. But this time around those things have scarcely crossed my mind. She hardly fits into any of her sister’s hand-me-down newborn onesies much less anything else and I couldn’t care less. Why? Because this time around I have friends with months and years of disappointments and maybe even a handful of miscarriages behind them, and still no big round belly to show off. Because this time around I have friends with babies due mere days before their husbands are deployed for months overseas. Because this time around I spent time in the nursery with women who had been coming though those swinging doors every day for two months to pump milk for the two pounds of life they still couldn’t even cradle in their arms. Because this time around I have seen the bush hospital where, with just a few days difference, Mary Katherine could so easily have been born and maybe forever changed in a heart-wrenching way, our experience of Christmas day.

But she didn’t. She forever changed it in a beautiful way. (On a side note, several Americans who have heard about MK’s birth story have said things along the lines of, “Oh, poor thing! She was born on Christmas? Now she will get jipped on presents for the rest of her life!” But I love the way Africans have responded. Almost without exception their answer has been, “She was born on Christmas Day? Wow, how lucky! She must be so special.” As though in some mysterious way that none of us can quite put our finger on, her birthday means something. I love it.)

This time around I feel just a little more grounded, a little more open-eyed, a little more aware of just how priceless the treasures in my arms really are. So even in those crazy-mama moments of wondering how in the heck I am going to do this (I still have them), I feel an overwhelming sense of peace and thankfulness. In this crazy world of imperfect beauty, I know just a little more fully how blessed I am.

Now if I can just keep in my mind my friends’ third piece of advice. I think their exact words were, “I don’t care if your comfort drink of choice is chamomile tea or gin and tonic, but you better have plenty of it on hand for that first year of having two under two.”

 Oh boy… 

Mary Christmas!

The pain started around 3 o’clock on Christmas Day. At first it was just a few regular contractions tightening painlessly across my stomach. But in minutes the tightening became achiness and then gradually cramps until eventually even the allure or Turkey and apple pie to a very hungry stomach couldn’t keep me up. I guzzled a few glasses of water and went to lie down. After 30 minutes I started watching the clock. After an hour Bryan started loading the car.

Even though I already couldn’t talk through contractions on the drive to the hospital, I still wasn’t convinced we were in actual labor. Our baby was due January 20^th, and this was Christmas Day. Surely, just a few days of running just a little too hard were catching up with me. I was already preparing myself for the awkwardness of the “No, honey. Just go home and put your feet up…” speech from the nurse on call. What I got instead was the “Yup. You’re dilated to a five. I’ll go call your doctor…” speech to which I think I stupidly replied, “You mean this baby is coming today, for sure?” The nurse smiled and said, “This baby will be here in a couple hours.”

As you can imagine I experienced a dizzying blur of emotions in those moments. On one hand there was the incredible excitement of thinking how close I was to holding my baby in my arms, of meeting her for the first time and looking into her eyes. On the other hand there was the fear of her coming too early. What if she wasn’t ready for the world yet? What if something was wrong? I also felt a pang of guilt mixed with gratitude because for weeks I had talked about our daughter coming early. I was concerned about her showing up while we were still in North Africa and even back in Nairobi I had my doctor perform a couple unnecessary pelvic exams just to make sure she wasn’t showing any signs of coming while Bryan was still a thousand miles away. Now I was so thankful I had sensed this for so long. But I also worried, had my seemingly needless concerns prompted the very thing I feared?

As much as I missed my mother while the contractions gathered and grew, I have to admit, there was something incredibly intimate about being alone with Bryan as we labored to bring our baby into the world. I sank deeper into my own little world of hurt, bent over the bed, counting my breaths and moaning the almost comically inadequate word “ow” over and over again while Bryan led sips of water to my mouth, whispered encouragement in my ear and constantly, endlessly, faithfully rubbed my back. It was just the two of us together working side by side to usher into this world the life we had created.

Mary Katherine was born ay 8:35pm on Christmas Day at 5lbs and 14 ounces, 19 and ¾ inches long. From the first pang to the final push, my labor lasted just over five hours. Though she came out squealing, under the harsh glare of a heat lamp the pediatrician quickly decided that her weak grunts were not sufficient for breathing and carted her off to the NICU. Shaky and weak myself, I just got a glimpse of long bluish legs and big dark eyes before she was taken out of the room. Bryan got a closer look but didn’t get to hold her either.

The past forty-eight hours have felt like an eternity. In fact I still can’t believe I have only been a mother of two that briefly. Having both of my babies out of my arms and body leaves me feeling naked and alone. In all honesty, the sheer novelty of complete solitude was a bit of a luxury at first, but it didn’t take long for the ache in my heart to replace the aches in my body. I have been grateful for the culture of breast-feeding that I find myself in. The walk down empty corridors with blinking Christmas trees at 3am to go pump in a quiet nursery full of impossibly tiny babies attended by sleepy nurses is strangely comforting. I think I have been grateful for a physical outlet to express love for my little one when the only other thing I can do is sing lullabies through holes in an incubator while stroking her toes.

I was especially sad earlier this evening when Mary Kat’s breathing was still uneven and the latest test results on her infection still unavailable. I sat in my Easter-green hospital gown pumping with only partial success while a cheerful Kenyan woman chattered away to a bundle in a bassinet across from me. Eventually we struck up a conversation. I noticed her business shoes under the hospital robe and realized she must have come from home to nurse her baby. When I asked her about it I learned that her son was born several months early and has been in the NICU for almost two months. He was supposed to go home tomorrow but instead are going in for surgery to try and remove an accumulation of water on her baby’s brain. I asked her what her son’s name was as she said, “Gifton. But of course we just call him ‘Gift’.” I can’t imagine.

After supper and a bath tonight I got my own gift when I went back to the nursery to pump. A nurse was changing my Mary Katherine who for once was wide-awake and rooting with her IV bandaged fist. When I asked if I could please try nursing, expecting yet another, “Not yet” I was overjoyed to instead hear a “yes.” A chair was pulled up to her little incubator an IV stand, and swaddled and bleary-eyed, my beautiful daughter was placed in my arms for the first time. It was heaven.

My tiny daughter has a surprisingly strong suckle and we were soon working together perfectly. I never cease to be amazed at how much more than mere individuals we are, how even our biology seems to exist in community, in relationship. She created in my physical body what no machine could. Her tiny mouth pulled more milk from me than I knew existed and the thirst I had yet to feel after two full days of pumping soon had me guzzling water. She eventually fell sound asleep in my arms but only after a long time did I begrudgingly returned her to the nurse and her little pretend-womb. Hopefully she is only hours away from being free to stay with me. Until then I am counting the hours until I can get back to her.

I better go to sleep now while I can. In just a few hours my alarm will go off for another walk down late-night hospital halls and after that is a day-full of conversations with doctors and visits from precocious almost-two year olds who still don’t know exactly what “big sister” means. I’m not even going to read back over this before I post it because I know I will probably trash it if I do. I just had to get something up in the moments I had. Thank you all so much for your prayers. This has bee one of the most amazing Christmases ever. We have been given such an amazing gift.

(And if you think about it tonight, say a little prayer for Gift who is in the nursery with my daughter and his mama too. I know she would appreciate it.)     

Fever

So Annabelle’s fever didn’t go away.

Dr. Rob, an American doctor working at a clinic within shouting distance, made a couple of house calls to check out our lethargic baby with chills. Two malaria tests came back negative. There was no visible sign of a bacterial infection anywhere. Probably just a virus easily picked up from one of the hundreds of kids she has played with in the last two weeks. All you can do is keep her fever down and wait it out. 

Bryan and I weren’t overly concerned. After all, kids get sick no matter where you are, right? In fact, we have probably already missed out on several rounds of daycare and playgroup bugs that have worried our peers. Night-time syringes full of ibuprofen are just a part of the parenting package. So we waited.   
  

But by day five her high fever was still breaking through the ibuprofen after only a few hours and she wasn’t eating. And to make matters worse, Bryan got sick. Really sick. A quick finger prick showed that he had a good solid case of malaria and now that we were past the point of a virus’ lifespan, it was deemed prudent to treat both my babies for malaria. Annabelle’s coartem pills were crushed up and disguised in smears of peanut-butter only begrudgingly swallowed. She didn’t get any worse, but neither did she get better. Bryan swallowed his fistful of drugs willingly and got significantly worse. His fever soared and I woke up in the night to the bed shaking he was shivering so violently. But in 48 hours he was revived, eating and moving around again. Such a relief.

After a week and a half of the roller-coaster hope of seeing Annabelle up and playing or eating a cracker only to watch with worry an hour later as she lay in bed miserable again we decided to take her down the road to the nearest hospital. Dr. Rob had left by this point for his R and R and the mere doubtful mention of the word typhoid by his nursing staff was enough to make the fifteen minute drive by motorcycle seem like a pleasure ride (yeah, we’re not the more impressive NGO in these parts when it comes to transportation right now…). If my baby hadn’t been so hot and my belly so tight with harmless contractions, the image of me seven and half months pregnant with a one and half year old strapped to my back jostling behind my husband through the dust kicked up by land cruisers and herds of cows, I would have been laughing the whole way there. 

The hospital is a cluster of oddly built cement structures staffed by one doctor a couple of nurses and a handful of dubiously trained lab techs, surgical assistants and the people who take your temperature and clean up all manner of things from the floors. As we walked in the courtyard we stepped around people lying on mats in the shade while their relatives cooked sorghum porridge over small fires. We were welcomed with hugs by a lab tech who was a dear friend throughout our time across the border and he quickly ushered us around the corner to see the doctor. We picked our way through the steady flow of men, women and children and waited for a moment while our friend knocked on a green door. In a moment a man in scrubs, boots, gloves and a shower cap peeked his head out and gestured for us to remove our shoes and then follow him back inside. I stepped into the dark room in my bare filthy feet and realized with a feeling close to dread that we were in the OR. A young girl was lying naked on a bed and crying, more from fear than pain I think, as she was being prepped for surgery. Various people in surgical masks scooted politely around us as plastic chairs were scraped across the floor for us to sit in. 

The doctor took his time examining Annabelle right there in the OR and eventually grimaced apologetically and said he would recommend putting her on a quinine and heavy antibiotic drip immediately. He moved his head in the direction of the wards we had seen literally overflowing with people and said quietly, “But I don’t know if admitting her here is really what you want to do. We could put her in the maternity ward but even that…”

It’s a very disorienting sensation to experience two extreme and opposing truths simultaneously. On one hand I was struggling to be brave in the face of my moderately sick baby being touched and greeted by people in a place where a thousand different diseases festered in the very air she was breathing. I was feeling pretty proud of myself managing to do that too, until I entertained the prospect of her being hooked up to IV for a week in a bush hospital. And that scared me. On the other hand I was painfully aware of a kind of shame that came with the only doctor treating a thousand people infinitely more sick than my child being pulled out of surgery to give us his attention because of …what? The color of my skin, my friendship with hospital staff, my connections with the hospital donors? Those two realities felt like they were going to rip me in half in that moment.        

At this point all I could think was, I am not tough enough for this, I am not tough enough for this, I am not tough enough for this. My daughter might be but I don’t think I am.

While someone went to gather the medicine for Annabelle we sat outside on a bench and talked about options. Annabelle sat quietly on my lap and watched while a girl only a couple of years older than her on her own mother’s lap on the bench next to us was given an IV in her tiny wrist. Dingy bandages bruised with iodine covered severe burns across her back and torso. 

Life in North Africa seems to constantly throw serious decisions at us that must be made in approximately 30 minutes. (Or as it was politely pointed out to me recently, maybe Bryan and I just attract/are attracted to those scenarios in the first place…) After some deliberation we decided to take advantage of a cargo charter flying in the following morning with fencing materials for our new compound. We could give Annabelle an injection of antibiotics that night and then she and I would be on our way to Nairobi the following morning. A week of intravenous meds without lab work seemed like overkill for such a little girl. But ignoring her fever was out of the question. Our whole family flying out in twelve hours’ notice seemed unnecessary with so much left to be done in North Africa in the next two weeks. But us all staying in, especially a pregnant mama and sick baby seemed equally silly.

So after a short night, Annabelle and I said a modest goodbye to Bryan on Wednesday morning at the airstrip while a cluster of kids watched on and WFP helicopters reverberated overhead. By the time we hit Lokichoggio she has already gone her first twelve hours in ten days with no fever. We were unable to get a ride out of Loki so a friendly taxi driver helped me find “the best” local clinic (think one yellow room with posters of happy Chinese children overlaid with trite sayings about happiness fraying on the wall and wet basins stacked beside boxes of cough syrup in the corner) where an obliging doctor administered the second antibiotic injection.

By the time we reached Nairobi the following day and finally made it to our pediatrician’s office and shared our story, we were both fried. 

But, my baby was healthier than she has been in two weeks. 

Thank you God.  

Once again, I find myself battling mixed emotions. I am overwhelmingly thankful that she is healthy again. I breath such a prayer of thanks every time that cool little forehead snuggles into my neck. But a part of me wonders too if we overreacted. Now that I am in Nairobi for two weeks without my husband and with a perfectly healthy little girl, I can’t help but think, should we have given it another day or two? Plus, I suspect rumors have flown around the world (as much as we try to contain them) that my daughter was dying of some terrible refugee camp disease and had to be medically evacuated out. (If you could talk to the bush pilots who had to scrape three hours of cartoon stickers off their windows they would assure you that Annabelle was just shy of fine by the time they got to her.) And I also think about that doctor in North Africa who has seen it all recommending to put her on IV drugs immediately, and I know that while we can be thankful for a quick recovery, there are some things you just don’t mess around with in this part of the world.

I guess more than anything I am grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to overreact, underreact…just to act at all is more of a privilege and a gift than I could have fully imagined before last week.

Thank you so much for your prayers. We are richly blessed.

Drums

I am propped up in bed with the computer on my lap, enjoying the comforting security of a wide mosquito net. My sick baby sleeps within arm’s reach under her own net and the last time I checked her fever was still down. Bryan reads Chinua Achebe next to me, the light of his Kindle helping to divert the tiny bugs that can still fit through the mesh from my screen to his. Outside, like every night that we have been here, drums beat wildly under a full yellow moon, as exotic and other-worldly as a cliché scene in a movie I would ridicule. I am so curious about them. Who is drumming and why? What do the words to their songs mean?

In some ways I wonder what in the world we have done this week and in other ways I wonder how we did everything we did. The logistics of getting building supplies in this place is a never ending nightmare which has kept Bryan fully occupied and simple living has kept me busy. I made cornbread on the stove top the other day which felt like a huge accomplishment; I washed a couple loads of laundry by hand and have kept the house relatively clean. I kept my panic under control when the first night adder sashayed into the house and almost worked up the courage to kill the second one myself in the kitchen. (I let Bryan do the dirty work both times.) The third one that dares enter my house has it coming for him.    

On Thursday we went into the camp to greet some old friends. Many men have come by the house to say hello or have crossed our paths in the market. But most of the women I once knew are as home-bound as I am and I was excited about getting out to see them, even with the long walk.

The camp feels like a camp. There is space between the homes and people come and go freely. Little kids walk back from the pond with mudfish slung over their shoulders on home-made poles. But UNHCR tarps drape over almost every roof. Men sit in threadbare patches of shade as though waiting for something. Some are working metal or leading tired donkeys down the road. But there is a lot of waiting. Or at least the feeling of it.

I had a sweet reunion with my dear friend Aisha. She was one of the last people I saw on Thursday. I had already had time to cry behind my big sunglasses as we were swarmed by throngs of children who were shooed away by old men and women with babies on their hips, each soul pressing around us holding more stories than I could imagine. And all somehow happy. I was happy too. By the time I saw Aisha I was able to keep it together, which seemed somehow culturally appropriate. But she threw her arms around me in a long giggly hug which didn’t really seem that culturally appropriate at all, so maybe in the end it would have been okay to just cry in her shoulder. It was so sweet to hug her neck.

She has a new baby, a fat little girl named Khajija. I did the rough math while I bounced her on my knee and realize Aisha was at least four months pregnant when she fled her home, carrying small children for days on end. She looks good, isn’t much thinner than when I last saw her and her kids seems healthy. Her UNHCR tent is pitched in a shaded area with a wide sweep of clean-swept earth in front of it. But when I asked about her oldest child, a girl who was living with her grandmother in another town when war broke out, Aisha looked calmly away and said someone called her a few months back to say the girl had died in another camp in Ethiopia. She was eight years old.

On Sunday afternoon Bryan played ultimate Frisbee with some other khawajas on one end of the airstrip (the end with the wreckage of an old airplane). I sat on a mound of dirt and watched while Annabelle played with a bunch of kids nearby. A couple of little boys batted iridescent dragonflies out of the sky and brought them to her patiently even though she would end up letting them slip through her chubby fingers and back into the sky almost every time. I sat and watched and thought about a lot of things.   

I’ve had moments of feeling overwhelmed by the refugee context, of the sobering reality of what living here will mean. I have lots of questions about how all this is going to play out still. I sit with Aisha for half an hour under a tree and my heart constricts in longing for a time when we both still had houses to serve tea in and her daughter was still alive. With a pang of guilt I often think, this is not what I wanted. I wanted a place where people were settled and in a place that felt like home to them, even if it didn’t always to me. I wanted a place where I might have to work through what it means to have a friend who struggles to pay her kids school fees, but not what it means to help her keep them alive. I wanted a place where I would have to live simply and adjust to roughing it from time to time, not a place where I would have to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a prefab house with no plumbing that you can’t get to by even a really crappy road. I was ready for complicated. But why does it have to be this complicated? I have thought this so many times this week.

I hear the irony in my voice when I say these things. I know if questions were visible, my own would be one among thousands tonight blocking out the moon and stars overhead with their number. Why does it have to be like this? Why? I am not the only one thinking this.

I can’t answer these questions for myself, much less for Aisha and the thousands of people that live in the camps with her. But in those moments of conflicting emotions, when I sit thoughtfully in the dirt and watch my joyful daughter receive generosity from refugee children, I find myself returning to a couple of things that I know to be true. Things that help center me.  

I know that the one I live for has asked his followers to live helping people who have a lot less than they do. That is unarguable, (believe me, I’ve tried). And I know that the people I am living next to right now fit the bill better than just about anyone I can imagine. There are few people more deserving of a bit of a break, a bit of justice than people like Aisha. That is undeniable.

So if this life we have chosen and this work we are stubbornly fighting for a chance to just try is messy, if it is hard, even if it turns out to be one big failure, it is still worthwhile. Or at least it seems that way to me when I sit and think about it for a little while. This is the kind of thing, the kind of place, the kind of people worth using up one’s life out on. God knows it’s a mess. But despite my fears and grief and an occasional sense of deep loss - none of which will go away soon I feel - I cannot shake, cannot pull off, cannot dig out of the sinews of my heart the burning sensation that this is right.

So here we are.

I just got up and checked on Annabelle. Her fever is back so I gave her some ibuprofen and watched her suck it down and then nestle cozily back into her Graco pack n play. I breathed a prayer of bare-bone thanks and then crawled back into bed next to my sleeping husband. The drums are still pounding out in the darkness. Maybe tomorrow I will find out what they mean.

    

Thirsty

The night before we left Loki I became aware of a growing sense of emotion, something between anxiety and sadness, eclipsing the edges of my excitement but always in the periphery of my heart’s sight. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was or why it was there but I felt it. But as we crawled in bed that night and I snuggled away from the sagging mosquito net and deeper into Bryan’s arms (one of his favorite things about crappy nets) I realized that a year had passed since I had been to North Africa. A year had passed since I had seen those faces, held those hands, tasted those flavors and heard those sounds. I was returning to somewhere that was home for over two years but had been jerked out under my feet in the confused rush of one strange night. And now I was getting ready to go back. Bryan had been back twice already and I had lived vicariously through so many of his reunions and rediscoveries. But this was my first time back. And like so many of the sweetest things in life, this return caused a twinge of something less definable than mere happiness. 

We landed on the wide airstrip now full on UN bulldozers and WFP planes. I lowered my heavy self gingerly down the ladder and stepped into the brown dust. Refugee women carrying bags of food walked across the airstrip on their way back from the camps and kids waved at Annabelle from mounds of dirt in the near distance. The last time I stood in this place I was jostling a four month old while a kind-eyed woman told me that the home we had just left behind was bombed ten minutes after we left the ground. But I decided to reign in those memories for the moment and just took sweet heavy sips of my surroundings, resisting the urge to guzzle. 

It’s difficult to know what to say, I feel both so parched for words and yet drowning in them. I find myself wanting just to describe little pieces of the world around me, as though they better speak to the story I want to tell. 

There is a broad plain behind our compound that is flooded with chai-colored water and full of naked children, their bodies like wet obsidian in the sun. They laugh and splash in the warm water, and I heard them once shriek “Antanov! Antanov!” and then dive for cover from the pretend shadows of the real planes that drove many of them from their homes. 

Apparently thirty minutes before we arrived, our very pregnant neighbor rushing to get home doubled over on the path in front of our house, squatted in the grass and pushed her baby out of her body. When help quickly came the baby boy was gently picked clean of dry leaves and carried home in a basin next to his wet placenta. Even now I can occasionally hear healthy newborn cries from the hut across the way.    

On our first evening here Annabelle, (“Hana”), and I took a walk down the road and were quickly engulfed in curious children. I stepped back and just watched as Annabelle nonchalantly shared her collection of pebbles with the kids. They traded her green pods of small beans. And then to peals of shocked laughter my bold daughter began touching everyone’s belly buttons, one by one, (most of which will already exposed, though not all) and proclaiming proudly “Button!” A couple of the kids exclaimed, “She knows Arabic?” and I had to laugh too. Buton is the Arabic word for stomach.  

On a personal  level, it’s amazing the things that feel “homey.” I forgot how much I enjoy bathing from a bucket under the stars with my husband every night. I love looking through the steam of whatever I am cooking and seeing deep into every direction - kids playing in a puddle, women carrying firewood home on their heads, drowsy goats resting in some patchy shade. I love lingering early morning breakfasts that smell of sweet tea and passing smoke, the one meal of the day during which I am not sweating. I love long messy greetings with groups of people, inquiries into family and health braided over and under lots of thank yous to God.

I’ve also been reminded of all the things I don’t like about this life, mostly superficial. The cones of bugs that swarm around the little islands of lights over our heads are claustrophobic in the evening and I hate the fine sheen of mud that repellant leaves on my dirty skin at the end of the day. It’s hot, not even as hot as it will get but still oppressive to my Nairobi weakened system. And the drop latrine. I’m not going to lie, this private-minded seven-month pregnant lady is struggling a bit with the tin outhouse full of flies shared by six other adults and, purportedly, a rat. I have confirmed you can’t squat, poop, balance and cry at the same time, at least not pregnant.

The tears have come in more than just the toilet. Even with the natural pacing that comes with pregnancy and toddlerhood - the 45 minute walk into the camp has been delayed until little girl’s naps naps and Mama’s energy levels align, and settling into life rhythms, even just temporary ones, has been time-consuming with solar panels and gas cookers to set up, mosquito nets to string and boxes to unpack – but even with this, I have still felt overwhelmed at times. One moment it’s the trying to remove the live bug from my husband’s ear while my toddler panics in the background (you would think I would be the person least traumatized by that incident, wouldn’t you?) Another moment it’s hearing hauntingly familiar songs from another lifetime trilled out in a hot church building. In these moments I felt overcome. And I have cried.

There is so much to soak in here. And it’s hard to pace yourself when you are so thirsty. 

Lokichoggio (again)

We woke up at 5:15 this morning to catch our flight out of Wilson Airport, the launching pad out of urban East Africa to half-a-dozen of the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster areas and most exotic game reserves. I felt a twinge of self-consciousness as I squeezed my Motherhood Maternity clad belly and squirmy eighteen-month-old obtrusively between UNHRC representatives in linen business suits reading glossy dossiers, and tourists in North Face gear toting professional grade cameras around their sunburned necks in the small crowded airport terminal. But that’s who we are I suppose, our own complex category of crazy heading into the beautiful mess that this part of Africa can sometimes be.

We are here in the outpost town of Lokichoggio until Wednesday when a bush pilot friend will fly our chartered Cessna up North and drop us off. Right now Bryan is out of cell range somewhere near the border trying to get our passports stamped in at the hut they call immigration. Annabelle is sprinkling sand on a bored looking tomcat sitting in a green canvas chair nearby. She’s collected a handful or bottle caps and pebbles in a plastic container at her feet and periodically looks up to exclaim something unintelligible about the noisy guineas in the bushes. We are only one foot out of civilization and already she is happier than I have seen her in weeks.

I am too, I think.

Sweat is wearing a path down the back of my calves though Loki’s dramatic skyline is heavy with rain clouds. Mary Katherine is tossing and turning inside of me as though she can sense the change in the world outside too. But it feels good to be on the move again. It turns out the thing I grieve the most about our lifestyle lately, our ever-packed bags and changing view from the bedroom window, is also the thing that makes me feel invigorated today. Or maybe it’s just because in this case the move is taking us one step closer to putting away the suitcases for good for a while. I’m not sure. But even with the sweat and the promise of far more to come, I’m really excited.

We will be in North Africa for about five weeks before we come back out to wait for Mary Katherine to be born in Nairobi. We will stay in the simple house of some friends working with another organization (they are in Nairobi to have their baby right now) while we try to get our feet under us. Bryan will be working to get a fence up around the plot that will become home and a couple of cement slabs laid for what will eventually be our floors. Annabelle and I will be doing a lot of adjusting back to the life we have been away from for a year – bucket baths, creative cooking with eggplant, making the secret nutella stash last, learning language, making new friends and catching up with old ones, trying to nap in the heat.

Choosing to deal with Braxton Hicks and potty training a strong-willed toddler in a part of the world that doesn’t have running water, electricity or any fruit in the market beyond the occasional tomato might seem a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. (It alternates between the two for me depending on the day of the week and how much sleep I’ve had the night before.) But in some bizarre way, it sounds like everything in the world that I want to do. I’m going with the two people I love most back to a life that I have missed. Genuinely and deeply missed. It’s not going to be fun every day. But something tells me it’s going to be really good on at least most of them.

Sometimes I wonder if I am being overly-glib. In the next few weeks we will see if eventually that one-too-many ants in the sugar bowl, that one-too-many mosquito bites on my baby, that one-too-many degrees on the thermometer after sunset will send me over the edge. Maybe it will, who knows. But right now whether out of an intrepid spirit or profound naiveté, I am really looking forward to the next season of life.