Letter Home

Dear Family,

 I sat down to blog but have been staring at the blinking stationary curser for so long I decided to write you instead. Somehow imagining you on the other side of the screen, reading my words on your phones in your classroom or on your laptops in the living room after a long day of work makes me happy. It seems like I always have words when I am talking to you!

We arrived safely in M yesterday. The day started early, the taxi came to the house in Nairobi at five (!) but we just bundled the still sleeping babies into the car and headed to the airport in the chilly dark. It is amazing to see Nairobi without traffic. We were travelling heavier than I would have liked, but I am coming to terms with the fact that our days of the big travel packs only are long gone and to just gracefully receive the flurry of proferred help from “porters” at the airport who grapple with our trunks, pack n’ play (“What is this again?”) and diaper bag.

Mkat slept most of the way to J which was nice for me. We had a pretty tight connection to the MAF shuttle so I was braced for chaos when we all shuffled off the plane, trading out light sweaters for sunglasses and hats, while digging for passports and pens to fill out immigration cards in the sheer pandemonium that is the J International Airport (One of our favorite games to play at the J airport is the “Imagine-what-so-and-so-would-be-like-here.” Perhaps not the most gracious game in the world but good for a laugh when the kids are about to melt and the immigration officer is just about to hassle you for some stamp you didn’t know you needed). Good gosh I hope they get the new airport built soon. Even with the crowd-thinning conflict of late that has driven a number of NGOs away (and not only NGOs. You should have seen how many people were packing out the plane (after plane after plane) that were heading back North to K. The good ol’ “We were better off back in Egypt!” effect.) that place is crazy. Anyway, never underestimate the charm of two little Khawaja girls in SS, melting or not. They charmed the pants off of just about every 8 foot weapon-wielding military police officer in the joint as we sashayed through security, immigration and security again without so much as a raised eyebrow (other than the ones directed at our children running between peoples legs and shaking strangers hands).

Anyway, we weren’t in J more than an hour or two so and never left the airport so we never saw any signs of the recent fighting. (There were even some skirmishes as recently as last week.) Everyone was friendly and crazy and happy, just like usual. And even a part of me shudders with relief every time I leave that city, a part of me was experiencing a great surge of happiness to be back.

We have been so warmly received by our teammates in M; they have made us feel right at home. We are staying in a dense village on the edge of town on Leah and Melinda’s compound. Leah is travelling out of country so we are staying in her tukul. Melinda has her own tukul with an attached kitchen that she is graciously sharing. But when you hear tukul please don’t imagine the mud-walled rat-infested monstrosity of days gone by (you were there Abigail, you know what I speak of!). These have brick walls with painted ceiling and indoor shower areas (bucket baths but inside). They have city power until 11 at night and there is plenty of space for beds for the girls. And no rats! It just feels so homey. Dave and Bre even brought by a basket of groceries for us to use too (you can get BlueBand here, and you should see the fruit!!!!).

M is a fascinating mix of all the Africas I have ever known, or at least my experience of it is. Mama and Papa, the area we are staying in reminds me quite a bit of Mutangani in the old days. It is a closely clustered village, mostly mud and thatch but a cement house here and there, some with tin roofs. The mango trees are thick and huge and heavy with mangoes not quite ripe enough to be pelting the village but soon we will be inundated from above. People are friendly but familiar enough with our teammates that we feel welcomed but not besieged with Khawaja curiosity. Annabelle has been thrilled at her renewed barefoot freedom and spent the morning next door with a cluster of kids playing kick-the-mango and eating fried sweet potato. Clothing (I feel so naked without my head covered), stuff in the shops and even the terrain are so reminiscent of East Africa to me. Even so, communication has been a lot easier than I feared it would be (people say we have the “hard” Arabic but seem to understand us) and everything from food and tea shops feel very familiar. Bryan pointed out last night that we have lived in two places in S that were at war until 2003 at least (current conflict notwithstanding of course) while M hasn’t seen war since the 80s. You can tell the difference.

We are not yet sure how long we will be here. Maybe a couple of weeks, maybe longer. Probably longer actually. If a miracle happens we will go home to D at the end of the month. But Bryan talked to Musa the other day and it seems very unlikely that it will be safe enough to go back yet. The UN just did another food distribution that was close to half of what the refugees normally get, just lentils and oil. The conflict at large has completely disrupted supply lines and now there is no more food to give and people are hungry. Last week fighting between refugees (the J were not involved) and the host community left over 120 houses and tents burned to the ground and several people dead. So now there are displaced people within displaced people camps. And anti-government forces continue to build near the border of our county (one of three left in the state still held by the government). So none of it sounds good.

But then again, if I talk about all the things that “don’t sound good” and they sign a peace agreement tomorrow and we are on the first plane home people will panic because of all the things I have told them before. It is just so hard to know what to say. Because on the other hand, D is one of the places that has still had no outright fighting at all yet. And that is certainly a good thing. So be careful what you tell people when they ask about us. We just don’t know what the future holds and don’t want to unfairly spin it in one way or the other. This could be a long difficult road for a lot of people, ourselves included, or this could just be a blip on the historical radar. As they say here, “Mafi zol barif ila Allah.” No one knows but God.

I don’t know. Sometimes I just feel like my arm is being shaved off slowly slowly, a bit with every news report or phone call. And I keep putting Neosporin and Mickey Mouse bandaids on the wound and it scabs over just in time for the next slice. Sometimes I worry that this shaving is all leading to my arm just getting shaved off completely. And if that is the case I would like to know that right now so I could get started with the business of learning to live without my arm instead of spending so much time healing something that is really just going to be a comparatively minor problem in the long run. But of course, none of us know what is going to get chopped off when do we? (Line of the day, you can quote me.) So I stick with my Neosporin and bandaids and keep about the business of healing. Maybe in the end it will just be a scar with a good story after all.

I love you guys so much. It’s fun to be emailing again, just like we did in the old days (though Mama, I will try to call you this evening, probably before you get this email actually. Our little internet modem hasn’t been able to connect yet so who knows when you will read this.) I feel like miss you all more and more the older I get, the more the girls grow, the more life gets muddled and in the process, illuminates those things that really matter. Anyway, we are counting the days until we see you.

Hugs and kisses all around,

Elizabeth

P.S. – Mama, do you have a good recipe for mango chutney? I left my cookbooks in D. and if we end up being here for a couple of months I may need one. ( : 

The Patient Ones

About a week before we evacuated North Africa last month I went to visit a woman named Om Iman in the camp. Her name had confused me for the longest time; it literally means “Mother of Iman (Faith) and I had assumed she had a daughter named Iman and like every other woman I know, was referred to by the name of her firstborn. So I called her “Iman” for the longest time before eventually discovering that when she was born she was named after a woman with a daughter named Iman and was ever-after called “Imam’s mother”.

Om Iman is one of those women who is staggeringly beautiful, at least I think so. I feel like you could plop her down in a mall in suburban America complete with bare feet, traditional facial scars and her fuchsia tobe draped gracefully over her thick braids and she would turn heads admiringly. Her jet black skin is as flawless as obsidian. She is tall and willowy and smiles easily. She is pretty in her home culture – she is tall and strong and has high cheekbones, but I feel like there is something timeless and borderless about her beauty too. At any time or place in the world, in rags or silk, she would be lovely.

This loveliness had also led me to be confused when I heard that she was the first of her husband’s two wives. She seemed so young and pretty, why in the world would her husband have taken a second wife? But I have had to conced that in a world not always as defined by sex and beauty as the one I come from, especially in a time of war, perhaps there are things I just don’t know or understand. Undoubtedly there are.

I didn’t even know Om Iman was pregnant when our mutual friend Laila told me she had miscarried. Laila comes to my house several mornings a week to sweep and help contain my dirty dishes, and this particular morning, as she scrubbed oatmeal off of a white plastic bowl, she told me that Om Iman was very unwell. She said that she had gotten up early in the morning to sweep the blood out of Om Iman’s floor, using gestures that suggested a miscarriage far more serious than I would have imagined from the slight frame of the woman I had seen only two days earlier. I asked Laila if it would be appropriate to visit Om Iman. Our cultures are different, I told her, Does she want to receive visitors right now or should I wait a few days? Laila snorted at my question as though I was being intentionally funny and said, Tomorrow, we will go see her tomorrow.      

Laila, who had come in for half a morning’s work, and Aisha, who is my language tutor, and I started off the next morning in the ATV Bryan only had up and running again for a matter of weeks. It was my first time driving again since the rebels had quasi-graciously returned the vehicle (thank you Division 10), and I was praying it wouldn’t die on me in the middle of the road three miles from home. We careened over potholes and through herds or sheep with our tobes flying out the sides of the vehicle like colorful wings until the red murram road became a dirt track which became a grassy trail which became a clearing under a tree beside a tukul where we parked and got out and walked.  

Om Iman’s friendly husband greeted me warmly and escorted us to the UNHRC tent with pinned open flaps where Om Iman lives. She was sitting on a rope bed in a sleeveless cotton nightgown and she struggled to rise and greet us when we stepped in. We sat down across from her in the hot close air of the tent; Om Iman’s co-wife, a short girl with thick arms and a shy smile brought us a pitcher of water.  

It is in times like these that I feel the limitations of my Arabic. I can talk about sickness and pregnancy and babies and hospital visits quite comfortably, but wading through matters of the heart – grief, anger, disappointment – these things are still difficult. But Om Iman talked more freely than I expected her too. She sat on the rope bed and described the pains that gripped her stomach a few nights earlier and the dead baby she had birthed on the dirt floor, encircling her fingers around the skin just above her wrist with her palm outstretched to show me how big the baby had been. She told me this was her third stillbirth. Dark stains slowly blossomed on her nightgown as she talked, the slow leak of milk for another lost child.

What do you say in those moments? Even in English, to someone I grew up with, my own sister, what would I say? And then how do I say that to a new friend from a world so far from my own, in a language we are both borrowing? I am so sorry. I don’t know why this happened. God loves you and your dead baby. I am so sorry. So, so sorry.

But I tried, somewhat fearfully but immensely grateful for these people that have the uncanny ability to see through words and actions and stuff, straight to the heart. Sometimes this gift makes me nervous, but on this day I was so thankful. We prayed and Om Iman said thank you many times for our visit. Before we rose to go she said, You know, sometimes I just lie in my bed at night and think. I can’t sleep because my head is so full of thoughts. Sometimes I cry as I think about life. But God has another life for us. So we are patient. We must just be patient.

I saw Om Iman once more before we left North Africa, the day before in fact, and she was smiling and seemed happy. Not superficially so, but a genuine happiness, perhaps more noticeably for its contrasting rim of deep sadness.

Patient, was the word she used. We must be patient. This is not a word I know. I am patient in long lines full of crabby people with carts full of soda and tangerines at a supermarket on a Sunday evening. I am patient in the maddening snarls of orderless traffic here in Nairobi, at least most of the time. I am patient when my baby throws her banana on the floor over and over and over again.

But patient when your third baby dies? Patient when you live in a tent because your government is bombing the mud huts in your home village? Patient when you watch fear and instability stalk closer and closer to the life you were rebuilding, threatening the peace you were just beginning to rest into?

I am having to be patient right now too. This isn’t what I wanted either. But my patience involves long runs in quiet neighborhoods with paved roads. It involves a little preschool for my firstborn three days a week. It involves a nice restaurant at least once a week and a church that worships in my heart language. Yes, I have had my fair share of sleepless nights and unexpected floods of tears. But I have not yet learned patience like Om Iman.

If it is true that God draws near to the broken-hearted, if he loves the poor and the abandoned of this world as much as he says he does, than I was in the presence of holiness that day on a rope bed under a hot UNHCR tarp, my feet tipped on a stained dirt floor. I was given the honor of sitting with the treasure of his heart, a favorite of the God of all creation.

If given the opportunity to sit in her presence again I will not take it for granted. She has so much to teach me.  

This is the best picture I could find of Om Iman. She is in the orange and yellow floral tobe towards the left looking off camera. Laila is on the mat in the foreground reaching towards her foot. I will take a better picture of them both when I see them again.

Deja Vu

We didn’t hear a single gunshot up through the day we flew out with the last of the NGOs in our area, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the vaguely sad fireworks over the Nairobi city skyline on New Year’s Eve to have made my heart lurch a bit. But they did. I guess several days of straining my ears even in my sleep, sifting through the rumble of a distant tractor, the beat of an owl’s wings, the slap of children’s bare feet on hard pressed dirt, doesn’t let those muscles relax again quickly.

Trouble had already broken out in the capital when we were due to return from our scheduled R and R in Kenya, and we spent 36 tense hours devouring the news, making long distance phone calls, weighing the options. In the end we flew home for lots of reasons – the hundreds of miles between us and the capital, our travel-weary babies, the supplies our plane carried for our pregnant teammates, simply wanting to be home. We landed on our airstrip on a beautifully clear day, untrustworthy in its perfect, unexpected coolness. Pedestrian traffic still shuffled contentedly past the plane and across the airstrip to market. People smiled and greeted warmly. The capital never seemed so far away.  

But in the five bittersweet days before our evacuation, it started feeling closer. Perhaps having lived through this all once not so long ago, things started feeling uneasy very shortly after we unlocked the front door. We have been the frog in the pot before. This time around we could feel the water warming up.

While Bryan threw himself into crises management mode – gathering info, charging SAT phones, stocking up on food and fuel – I wrapped myself in a warm cocoon of denial and threw myself headfirst into the all-absorbing task of making our first-ever small family Christmas. I obsessed over a tree, interrupting Bryan’s UN update to ask him what nearby plant he thought we could uproot without depriving the neighbors of some medicinal herb or vegetable or unknowingly poison our daughters. I finally drug a huge reed mat out from the store room, cut out a massive triangle, twisted it into a cone, adorned it with a few tacky ornaments from Nairobi and crowned it with a broom angel and called it good. Somehow the menial task of decorating a “tree” felt like the most significant job in the world.

The political crisis escalated far faster than anyone imagined it would. Granted, no one has ever claimed this is the most stable part of the world. I have spent hours thinking through contingency scenarios – where we will usher the girls when robbers bust down the door, where we run if the North loses their mind and decides to bomb the refugees, how sick a baby has to be before we call for a medevac. There are plenty of problems to waste time worrying about around here. But a full-blown rebel movement with genocidal tendencies in force across half the country practically overnight? I so did not see that one coming.

It didn’t take long to realize we were probably leaving, at least for a little while until things cooled down.  It was just a matter of when. I head-butted the days, willing us to get through Christmas and Mary Katherine’s first birthday. Please, please let us just get past the 25^th.

On Saturday night we had a contingency meeting with David and Lydia after the kids went to bed. We sat on our new couch and talked in low voices over ice-cold sodas from our two-day old refrigerator. If it hadn’t been for the topic of conversation, we could have been hosting a house-warming party now that we finally have furniture and curtains and a fat vanilla candle in a clay dish. It felt like home.

But it wasn’t a house warming party.

We talked through trigger points, 24 hour plans, 15 minute plans and the contents of our go-bags. Bryan and I brought baggage and experience from our time across the border. David and Lydia brought healthy senses of humor and deeply God-like spirits. To walk this road with them is such a gift. As reality sank down more and more heavily upon us we began to worry and grieve, and in hushed tones in the stillness of a hot night, to laugh.

On Sunday morning we piled up in the ATV and went to church in the camp. I wavered after breakfast, feeling groggy from a poor night’s sleep and concerned about MaryKat’s cough, savored the temptation of staying in. But something scratched at the back of my heart knowingly and so I packed up my purse anyway. After church we sat around talking to our friends. Everyone was happy and excited about a Christmas Eve vigil and the sheep we would eat the next morning. No one was concerned about “those people” and their problems in the capital. We remarked on the unusual level of air traffic at the airstrip and everyone conceded UNHAS was probably just playing catchup over the weekend because of their earlier cancelled flights. Everyone laughed in the way only refugees can at an orphaned boy who had just traveled from across the border with his grandfather and who darted towards the bushes in terror every time a plane passed overhead. Only weeks ago he was hiding from bombs in an altogether different war.

As we loaded up the ATV and started down the jutting ribs of the underfed road that leads home we got the call. Our closest neighbors and friends in alike-minded organization were heading out in the morning. We had decided days earlier that when they went so would we. And just like that, it was time to go.

The night before a planned evac is always such an incredible disarray in my experience. A disarray of emotions, a disarray of the house, a disarray of thoughts and kitchenware and words and clothing. When you should be packing you are sorting silverware. When you should be contacting organizational leadership you are reading news that no longer has a bearing on your decision. When you should be washing dishes you are eating stale pretzels even though it’s two in the morning and you are not remotely hungry. You are griefstruck and relieved, frantic and calm, focused and confused. And very very tired.

We made the decision to let the girls open Christmas presents even though they wouldn’t be going with us. Sixty-six pounds for a family of four doesn’t leave a lot of room for stocking stuffers. Thankfully, the fantastic mess of newness was a wonderful distraction in the middle of the living room; they seemed oblivious to their dazed parents weaving through the house tacking mats over windows, packing food into trunks and weighing and reweighing small bags to go.

The speed of the decision to go and our family culture of chaotic chronic last-minuteness serves me well in times like this. There was hardly time for farewells to anyone much less long emotional ones. I left my much-treasured eggs and potatoes with our guards as well as two of my tobes for Aisha and Leila, two of my dearest friends. And the whole way to the airstrip I worried over how they would receive them when they heard we had left. Would it communicate my love for them? Or a finality that I dared not even let my mind consider…Should I have left more, less?

We were a somber group walking to the airstrip. Our friends in our neighboring organization were as grieved and frazzled by the evacuation as we were. There were many tears and confused hugs from the people who live around us whom we have all grown to love so much. Comprehension and the cold trickle of fear was beginning to settle across the entire town as a final line of khawajas made their way towards the plane with only what they could carry. People still shuffled across the airstrip on their way to the market. But the day was already hot and people weren’t smiling. Just watching nervously.

The plane landed and the pilot, the friend who had flown us in four days earlier, told us that fighting had just broken out in our state capital and one of their planes had been turned away from picking up people on the ground there. It was time to go. As the bags were being shoved into the cargo bay and I was waiting my turn to board the plane I felt a hand at my elbow. I turned to see my friend Leila. I wish I had time to write about her tonight, to tell you more of her story and paint you a picture of her spirit. Another day I will do that. Just know that this is a woman who is almost always smiling, who has arms of thick brawn and is known for being a snake killer. She lost her first baby a few days after he was born, fled a war on foot and now lives in a refugee camp, but I have never seen her cry. But on this day she stood before me with tears pouring out of her eyes. We held each other and wept. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know all the nuances of her tears. And then she asked me, “Why are you crying?” Even now I am curious to know what things were a part of her question. Did she wonder why I was crying if I was the one about to get on the plane to safety? Did she wonder why I was crying when I saw her specifically? Did she wonder if I knew something terrible that she didn’t yet know, something that would send me and my family fleeing to Kenya leaving her and hers behind?

I told her the truth. “I’m crying because I love you and I love your people and I really don’t want to leave. I want to live here and I don’t want to leave. I really don’t want to leave.” I don’t know what my words meant to her. But she nodded and wiped tears away with the back of her hand. Then we cried and hugged a moment more before she turned rather abruptly and walked away.

I shuffled on to the plane awkwardly with Mary Katherine strapped to my chest. Annabelle settled into the seat next to her Papa and kept asking me why I was crying. The pilot said a quick prayer and then we were taxying down the airstrip and hurtling into the air. I could see Leila walking back towards the camp. She walked a few feet and then sat down at the ditch at the edge of the airstrip and glared at the distance, not looking at the plane or the friend who waited patiently behind her. I watched her sit there until we were too high to see anything anymore except the sprawling mass of the camp from the air, its rim flecked with herds of animals.   

And that was it. We took down the swing, locked the front door, left money for our guard’s salaries and flew away.

At the time in felt nauseatingly familiar and Bryan almost had to shake me into remembering that this wasn’t the same thing happening all over again. We will be back. This isn’t the end.

Oh dear God, please let that be true.

After a week of hot showers, a few runs and time to just be quiet I feel much more peace then I did that day, two days before Christmas and my baby’s birthday. Community has helped. We are surrounded by people who have just had to go through the same thing we did, and worse. They understand. That helps more than anything.

There is hope.

There is a lot of fear still too.

But there is real hope.

But for now, in this sea of unknowns, in a peace-filled place so far from where I really want to be, we wait patiently. More patiently on some days than others, but nonetheless we wait.

And pray.

Nativity

The Story is so much easier for me to imagine now than it once was. The images are perhaps no more factual than the blue-eyed cherub in a sanitized barn. But its truth is powerful to me today. This Christmas my heart is somewhere far away from where I now sit. And this story is a balm to my bruised heart.

He normally would be the one astride the donkey, his calves bobbing along the animal’s warm sides as they pick their way down the dirt road. But he had seen her stumble beneath the weight she hides gracefully under the gauzy folds of her tobe and watched her catch her breath with the gathering pain. So he helps her up onto the worn saddle and leads the animal carefully between the stones in the road. The grass one either side of them is dead and yellow, the air thick with the seasonally hot dust. He wipes sweat from his brow into the white sleeve of his jallabiya and glances back at her, not knowing what to ask her. But her eyes are closed.

By the time they reach the village the sun has sunk into a violently colored haze on the horizon and night is spreading her wings across the sky. A thin sickle moon and a single brilliant star hang caught in the silhouetted branches of a baobab tree. A skinny dog howls as they pass the first few huts on the outskirts of town. The scattering of lantern lights and the thick murmur of warm voices in the darkness around them marks the flood of people who have come home to be counted, as does the smell of smoke, urine and competitively thick perfumes. The twang of a traditional love song floats from the copse of neem trees where people have gathered to laugh and drink marissa out of clay pots through long reeds. A baby cries from somewhere close by. Donkeys bray in unison in the distance.

The first funduk owner actually greets them and offers explanation. The last bed…so many people…no relatives here? But the others are too busy to really notice the worried young man and quiet girl or to comment on the fact that she rides the donkey. They just continue drawing water from the barrels, shuffling trays full or leftover food or pouring cups of scalding mint tea, hardly looking up as they mutter, “Sorry we’re full.”

He is growing desperate when he salaams the final place, a homestead with a tin door half eaten with rust and no fence. The woman who uprights from over a cooking fire shakes her head before she even greets them, and waves her wooden spoon apologetically. His heart sinks as he hears the girl behind him catch her breath with another contraction. But then the woman squints into the darkness. “Yusif?” she says, “Yusif, walid Yakob?” His mother’s cousin cackles in recognition, then sighs and waves them in.

The rakoba is thick with smoke. The coals, the color of something living, feed the wood that keep the flies and approaching desert night chill away from the clan of goats and family of cows that crowd under the grass roof. He brushes pellets of manure away on the most level patch of sand and lowers her down. In the firelight he can see her flawless black skin is shiny with sweat, her brow furrowed in concentration. He wishes her sisters were here, the ones with broods of their own children who would support her while she squatted against the wall, shouting at her and berating her, pushing her to bring forth life with the crushing weight of love and tradition. But there is no time for that now, she stifles a scream and leans into him as he plumbs the depths of his heart for the strength they will both need.

They are both terrified until the moment the baby slips out of her torn and exhausted body. She falls back on the mat that Yusif’s relative has managed to scrounge up from somewhere and he looks at the baby in his hands – wet, pinkish grey and squalling. He has never held a baby this small before, never touched life this new. With tears he doesn’t fully understand straining at his eyes, he carefully unwinds the white ima from around his head and wraps it around his firstborn. Mariam’s beaded wrists are strong when she reaches out for the baby, despite her exhaustion. She pulls him close to her and then guides the breast Yusif has never touched to the baby’s small mouth. The baby reaches up and rests his splayed fingers against the decorative dots and scars of her dark skin. He closes his eyes.

The small family is just beginning to doze when there is movement in the grass just beyond the circle of their fire. Yusif reaches instinctively for the wooden bom resting beside him just as shapes emerge out of the darkness but relaxes when he hears the soft clink of a goat’s charm. The boys greet him shyly and then sit at a respectful distance. The eyes of their sleepy herds glint like small lights in the night; the boys’ eyes, still brimming over with the remnant of a brilliant light that was theirs alone, never leave the sleeping baby. They are silent until one pulls out a robaba and begins picking out a wiry tune; the song is haunting and holy in its sparseness. Yusif’s also relative appears out of the darkness with a bowl of sorghum aseeda, dampened with a pool of green weka, and a pitcher of water. She pauses when she sees them there, smiles and then raising one gentle fist into the air she lets out a loud trill, her celebratory cry rising alone in the quiet night.

Mariam looks at her baby and wishes she had even a single strand of black and white beads to tie around his wrist. She pulls the ima a bit closer around his small body, worries that he is cold. In this moment of bewildered peace, she cannot yet imagine the gold that lavishly dressed foreigners will one day kneel and place on the dirt floor of her mud hut. Or the night similar to this, when they will run for their lives from the government troops intent on massacre. Tonight there is no place for the future and its unknowns or the past and its dreams. There is only tonight - the animals, a few unwashed boys, a dying fire and a tiny baby, utterly dependent on a poor carpenter and his wife.

The Diaper Bucket

When we came back in from branch meetings in East Africa three months ago, we brought a stash of diapers with us. Annabelle was still un-potty-trained and MaryKat was in cloth diapers during the day but paper at night, so Pampers size 3-4 filled up a modest portion of cargo space on our Cessna caravan charter.

When we got settled into the tukul again I started energetically back into the routine of taking wet and soiled cloth diaper inserts and faithfully depositing them into the big blue bucket full of Dettol water sitting outside our front door and faithfully washing them all by hand every few days and hanging them out in the sun to be zapped dry. Bryan had suggested I hire someone to wash the diapers for me but I somehow cringed at the thought of someone else having to handle my kids poop. And though it’s not a chore I love, I’ll admit to a surge or pioneer satisfaction in seeing rows and clean white diapers hanging on the line and feeling my hands mildly chapped from getting them that way. And there is seriously nothing cuter than seeing a fat baby scooting around in hot pink plastic pants over her cloth diaper (her “super pants” as Bryan calls them). Yes, when we got back I was feeling an almost patriotic dedication to the cloth diaper cause.

This feeling evaporated completely after about one week.

First, of all, I realized I needed every ounce of available energy to cling to sanity in those final weeks in the tukul as the rats were trying to recapture the territory they had claimed while we were away. We had a wave of guests from the outside that meant an uptick in cooking and cleaning in general with not a lot time leftover for washing diapers. Then, here recently, Annabelle practically potty-trained herself (the height of my pride as a parent thus far has to be her nonchalant success over a drop-latrine while I held her over a hole that could swallow her alive covered in flies and general malodorous dampness in a refugee camp while 50 kids squawked for her attention just outside the tarp shielding us), leaving more than enough paper diapers to get us through this term without having to go back to cloth at all. And of course, there was also just the sinking realization that hand-washing diapers is actually not fun at all, whether you are pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder or not.

So what started as MaryKat in paper diapers for “just a couple of days” became a luxurious habit that lingered on.

At first the diaper bucket (still full of dirty diapers) was left neglected by the front door under the excuse of, “Just until all our guests leave…” But then we moved into our house and it stayed where it was. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months.

You see where this is going.

Here it is. My name is Elizabeth Harrison and I left a huge blue bucket full of poopy baby diapers half-soaking in rancid water for two months in the blazing sun.

Really.

For a while I think I held out hope that maybe the rats would just magically carry it away one night and I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, but then I realized even they aren’t that disgusting. I thought about just throwing it all away, burning it maybe, but besides the fact that these diapers were an incredibly generous gift from some very precious friends, the truth is that  that sooner or later I knew I would need the cloth diapers again.

So yesterday, approximately 42 days after I had last peeked inside, I stood armed with three basins of water, a massive bottle of bleach and small tub of detergent and took off the lid to my diaper bucket.

At first glance I thought I was looking at some kind of animal and almost ran to grab a weapon. But then I realized I was just seeing the long fingers of translucent white fungus growing up towards me like amphibious hands reaching up for something to grab on to. Which was both a relief and a disappointment, really.

It. Was. Gross. I won’t go into any more details but let’s just say there were colors and textures and smells in that bucket that were like an entire bayou boiled down and concentrated into about ten liters. I soaked and rinsed and scrubbed and resoaked about a dozen times before I hung them out on the line to let the lovely North African sun do what it does best and kill every last living thing that could have possibly survived.

And you know what? They look good. We lost a couple diapers in the line of duty, true, but the rest are more or less unscathed. I looked at my clothesline full of pastel plastic shells and unbelievably-close-to-white diapers waving in the breeze and felt immensely satisfied. The deep-seeded shame at being the kind of mother that lets her baby’s undergarments rot in water for a month was replaced by the simple happiness of a wrong made right and the redemptive rawness of my hands. Like somehow scrubbing the life out of those diapers (hopefully literally) made up for the neglect and general badness of the situation, for lack of a better word.

As we were crawling in bed last night Bryan said, “You know what? I feel like it’s all starting to lift. We’re in the house, we got the ATV running again, we’re in the swing of language lessons, we finally got a newsletter out, you even got the diaper bucket taken care of today! We are starting to get on top of things again.” And I think he’s right. Life is starting to feel manageable again. Like maybe instead of just running around trying to survive we can start focusing on thriving.

I’m not sure how much the diaper bucket is going to be a part of my practice of thriving, however. In fact, as pleased as I feel about those clean diapers right now, I am pretty sure come Monday morning the sweet lady who washes our clothes is in for a pay raise.       

Karama

Our Colloquial Arabic - English/ English – Colloquial Arabic, A Concise Dictionary says that a Karama is, “1. Sacrifice to get a blessing (slaughtering of a sheep) 2. Alms Giving 3. Miracle done by holy man or saint.”

Around here a Karama is an event, sometimes big, sometimes small, but never without the slaughtering of an animal. Karamas are most often held after the birth of a child or the acquisition of some great new thing like a car or donkey cart. It is a way to give thanks for God’s generosity, and to reflect that generosity in turn towards one’s neighbors and friends. You invite people over, tell God thank you and then sit around and eat a lot of meat and drink a lot of coffee together.

As our houses neared completion we were inundated with questions of when we were holding the Karama, who all we were inviting, how many goats we would buy. And the whole notion of a Karama started feeling a bit intimidating. For starters, it’s awkward being the richest people your friends know. The thought of flaunting the cinderblock mansions we have just built at a party that seemed a lot like a “Look at this awesome thing God has given me!” kind of party, felt weird, especially when all your guests are refugees who live in tents. And then there was the whole issue of navigating, hosting even, a cultural phenomenon that is still a little fuzzy to our American minds. We have baby showers and house warming parties, not Karamas. How do you do a Karama, and do one well?

Yesterday we found out.

Despite the fact that we had all been sick for well over a week (and when I say “all”, I mean all four Harrisons and three Graves, sick sick) we finally buckled down and decided to muscle our way through the week to hold our Karama on Saturday. Upcoming travels and holidays and funerals of local friends meant that there was no other obvious time to hold a Karama without the opportunity just slipping away completely. We had already sensed a touch of mild confusion or disappointment that we hadn’t held one already. So after we sought out some counsel and a few pointers from our friends, we spent a couple of blurry days doped up on antibiotics and advil, running around and buying mountains of food in the market, borrowing dozens of chairs from our neighbors and handing out hastily-written invitations (and here when I say “we”, I mostly mean Bryan).

The morning of the Karama itself started early. Mahmun and Omar arrived when it was still cool and hazy and led the two nervous sheep and one oblivious goat to the back corner of the compound. With my black-handled Faberware kitchen knife they gently traced a cross in the goat’s forelock and then lightly tapped the taunt throat three times before slicing down and I had to turn away. Annabelle, barefoot and still in pajamas, stood at a modest distance and giggled at the goat’s death throes with callous innocence. As the carcasses were hung on a small tree and carefully skinned and dissected and reassembled into neat piles on broad aluminum platters – meat, fat, liver, intestines – hawks began to circle overhead and their shadows wove patterns across the yard all day.     

The women arrived late, at least two hours past their promise, but came hauling pots and pans, babies, kettles and charcoal stoves. Despite my open door, they settled comfortably into the shade along the side and back of the house, casually arranging stones to encircle cooking fires and greasing the heavy kisra griddles with something grey in a dish, all the while talking and managing babies like an unnoticed extra appendage. The whole compound was filled with the sound of their laughter, the clink of ceramic funjal shuffling for space on a tea tray, the chalky crack of breaking charcoal, the swish of a hababa breathing life into a fire, the steady pulse of coffee being pounded in a worn wooden funduk. Dust began to rise as young men swept dead leaves out from under the Baobab tree and arrange chairs into a wide circle.

As guests began to arrive David and Bryan gathered with the men under the Baobab. Lydia and I naturally fell into hostess duties; she welcomed guests and made sure everyone had a glass of juice or piece of toffee while I followed the directives of my cooking friends and hunted down an extra pan to roast coffee or soap to wash hands. For the first hour or two we flitted about like nervous birds, scurrying to get an important man’s wife a glass of tea or trying to round up another big spoon somewhere. But somewhere along the way, probably far earlier than I was aware of it, the whole day took on a life of its own, and I quickly realized I was not a part of moving anything forward but simply caught up in the warm current of the occasion.  And I found myself sitting on a mat outside my front door with a dozen other women and kids, drinking scalding clove tea, talking about the weather, laughing with my neighbors, hollering half-heartedly at my kids and daydreaming about the food that wafted out of big pots bubbling on open fires nearby.

We did this for hours. 

There was an official program of sorts. Bryan and David each said a few words and a handful of elders also spoke. There was a scripture reading and an Islamic holy man sang a song he played on his robaba. Then the older men all offered prayers and blessings inside each house. But other that we just sat around. And talked. And drank copious amounts of caffeinated hot beverages. And ate.

Food came out on the typical huge circular platter, heavy with mounds of purplish kisra, folded like reams of warm sorghum cloth. There were also chewy circles of bread from town and little piles of ground red pepper and wheels of lime. There were piles of roasted meat and bowls of meat soup and pasta with meat and dishes of liver. Each platter was like a human magnet and we all scooted in shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, hand to hand and filled our bellies to bursting.      

The day ended with me sitting in a chair holding a filthy sleeping baby while two girls wove fat braids into my hair. Behind me women were belching and rewrapping their tobes around their heads and shoulders and in front of me men were unfolding themselves from chairs and making the slow rounds of final handshakes. A slow stream of people were trickling out of our bamboo gate carrying leftovers and children and pots while a bone white moon rose in the dirty lilac dusk overhead.

When everyone was finally gone we all collapsed into bed full and happy, exhausted beyond belief and yet satisfied in both our stomachs and souls. Karamas are a good thing we found. A good way to say thank you, to both God and the people who have helped you along the way. A good way to share in the generosity that has been shown you. A good way to have a party and eat some good food.

We still struggle with the notion of being rich sometimes, and we are working hard to try and understand what it means to be the righteous rich in this time and place. We are rich whether we want to be or not. But we really want to learn how to be righteous too. 

One thing that I think that might mean is to hold really good Karamas. And from the way people smiled and held their stomachs when they left, I think we may have done that. 

The irony or course is in assuming the generosity was ours. We fed a few people, but a fair portion of those people worked all day to make sure there was food prepared for everyone to eat. They swept my yard, poured endless pitchers of juice, handed out platters of food. People who only months ago were sleeping on the ground in the middle of the bush with their only belongings being what they had on their backs spent the day bent over bubbling pots to make sure our guests were honored. People who have lost almost everything so effortlessly gave so much. An Anatnov droned overhead early in the afternoon and everyone turned skyward to watch it pass by on its way to bomb those they left behind. And even then, no one wailed or stomped off and demanded justice or recompense from those of us who have escaped such loss. They just shrugged sadly over the things we will never understand and went back to stirring the soup.

And why did they do all of this? Probably because it is just their way. I’ve never met more hospitable people anywhere, I doubt they exist anywhere on the planet. Probably because it is the unique stamp of God on their hearts. They said it was because we have no people here, and that they are our people now. (And heaven knows you can’t throw a Karama without your people). Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. They are all right here, right across the road to the refugee camp.

On Saturday we celebrated God’s faithfulness and generosity towards our families. But it is abundantly clear that the gift we celebrated was far more than just the walls and ceiling I fall asleep in tonight.

  

Home

Two years ago last month we evacuated from a town about a hundred miles from where I now sit ten minutes before it was bombed. Ever since then, with the exception of six months that we were parked in a friend’s house in Dallas, TX, we have been living out of suitcases. Literally. We’ve stayed in more guest bedrooms and guesthouses than I can count scattered across five different countries. We’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and a few major holidays on the go and had a baby along the way in there somewhere too. During a few visits with relatives and one sweet holiday week in Jinja, Uganda last month Bryan and I shared a room alone, but other than that at least one baby, usually two, has been in our room, sometimes our bed. All our belongings reside in trunks, the sturdy plastic kind you get at Wal-mart, and have a stateside address written in permanent marker fading under the sticky remnants of duct tape. They are a royal pain to get in and out of every time you need a notebook or pair of socks.

As traumatic as the events surrounding our hurried departure from North Africa were two years ago, that experience has been in many ways far easier than the wearing toil of two years of constant travel and homelessness.

We have been in one place (more or less) for the last six months. We have settled in a refugee camp just across the border from where we used to live; it is home now to about 45,000 people, including almost all of our old friends and neighbors. And despite certain realities here that everyone is coming to terms with, it is a good place to be.

On May 23^rd we broke ground on a house and launched into a huge building project. It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of building a simple house here (we are talking cement blocks and tin roof – but granted it has three little bedrooms and an office). The logistics of getting building supplies to a place that does not sell so much as a two-inch nails in the market and whose unpaved rainy season roads have been unpassable for a while still makes my brain hurt. And the volume of cement used to make my new walls so smooth when a single bag costs as much as $45 honestly makes me feel like throwing up a little bit. This has been a difficult, expensive project.

During these last few months that we have watched foundations being dug and walls slowly go up we have lived in a tukul on our compound, a 4X8 meter mud hut with a grass roof. You have heard me talk about the tukul before. It was charming at first, cozy and unpretentious. But tukuls aren’t designed to be lived in exactly. They are to be slept in. So when I tried cramming all my wal-mart trunks full of crap into it and then tried to make space to cook in it, put my kids down for naps in it, sit at the computer and write a blog in it, so on and so forth, not just because that is what we do in houses where I come from but also because twenty men with wheelbarrows and hacksaws were covering every inch of space outside … I gallantly led my whole family on a slow but very steady descent into insanity.

In the end it was really the rats that did me in. I am a messy person by nature, and the carefully landscaped piles of laundry, books and kitchenware in every bit of livable space was really just a mild irritant on most days (don’t ask Bryan about it). The ants coming up through the floor were not a big deal and two babies a few feet away from us every night was a little bit endearing really. But the rats. Oh my goodness, the rats.

I could write volumes about the rats. About how they learn to nudge the trap to set it off without risking their lives and then eat the bait and anything else they want. About how they sound when the light goes out and what starts as one or two scurries above and behind you becomes a full-blown horror-movie style closing in from every direction. About how the sweet relief of silence is really the shivering of rodent terror broken only by whiskery screams as the snake chases granddaddy rat from behind one of the trunks and just past baby’s pack n’ play. About how when they finally breached the mosquito net fortress I just gave up on sleep all together and waited the 36 hours until the front door was nailed on the new house so I could move in. There were days I eyed the matchbox behind my stove and thought about how much I would love to shoo my family out the front door and then delicately light the whispy edge of my roof and sit perched in a nearby tree with a BB gun and shoot every living thing that came out right between the eyes.

It was not a pretty season.

I tell you all of this not to make you feel sorry for me or reflect on how tough I am or sit astounded by the sheer absurdity of putting oneself in this situation intentionally. I tell you this – all of this – the evacuation, the travel, the tukul and the construction site all because I want you to understand just a taste of how incredibly happy I am right now. To feel just a flicker of the absolute joy and relief I am experiencing.

I am in my new house.

For the past three nights I have slept in a bed with my husband in a room with no children anywhere in site. I have bathed under a roof and between cement walls without frogs hopping on my toes. I have cooked dinner in a kitchen with cement counters and enough room to make about as big a mess as I want to. I have plopped my babies down on a wide empty floor and not worried about them being eaten alive by stinging ants. And when I wake up to animal noises at night it is only the cry of the white owls in the huge baobab tree outside my wide windows. And I just say, Dear God, please let them be eating rats, and then roll over and fall back asleep. 

For the first time since Bryan and I were married we are living in a place we can imagine being in for ten years or more. For the first time in their lives my daughters have their own room. And for the first time in two years, I feel like I can unpack my trunks.

Bryan reminded me tonight not to be devastated when the honeymoon ends and I realize I don’t have any furniture (yet), the house is only partially wired for electricity so far and we are still taking bucket baths and eating lentils. And he’s right. Whatever the reasons, bad days will come again.

But, praise the Lord, they will come in my house. They will come in my house where I have a room to cry in or a kitchen to knead frustrated bread in or a floor to just sit on and love my babies. And after those bad days have barged in my front door, swept through the living room and then slipped out the back door and disappeared off the porch, I will still be here. Here in a place where I can think about what dreams I will dream in these walls, what words I will write, what conversations I will have with my husband. About what things will make me laugh and what things will make me cry. When I leave this house someday in the future, what things about me will be the same and what things will have changed.

A house is not everything. The Important Things have been with me all along, in the airplanes and guesthouses and tukul. And I am more thankful for them than I have ever been before.

A house is not everything. But tonight it feels like so much.