Nativity

This is a throwback from last year but it still articulates something meaningful to me. Merry Christmas everyone!

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 the girl he married.

Dear Lydia - Rest

Dear Lydia,

 The water is almost completely gone now. There are still a few places that the kids wade out with mosquito nets to try and catch the last of the mudfish but mostly now it is shallow enough that from the back porch I can see trails of kids dashing across the wet field at full speed. They look just like they are running stark naked on the surface of a lake instead of in ankle-deep muddy water. It seems that the deeper we get into dry season the more birds come out of hiding, perhaps drawn to the last remnants of water. And the more barren the landscape the more irreverently colorful they are – Red Bishops, Abyssinian Rollers, Bee-eaters, all looking like flecks of living paint splattered on the wrong canvas. They are so beautiful. Sometimes I sit on the back porch with my binoculars wishing my ornithologist father were sitting next to me with a cup of tea, while I simultaneously hope that the local ragtag militia camped on the other side of the ridge don’t think I am spying on them instead of birds. (But no worries. When I want to do that I sneak behind the latrine with the binoculars. I am happy to report they almost always look bored.)

I can’t believe we are leaving for our Christmas R and R tomorrow! These six weeks have gone so fast. In the first few days that we were back I was always running through lists in my mind – lists of what to take if we had to evacuate with only a small bag, how to entertain the girls if we were stuck on the UN compound for three days, what all needed rat-proofing before we left - but the past few weeks have been full of everything other than contingency worries and it has been wonderful. Security and stability may be a very delicate illusion, but it is one I am living with quite happily right now.

That being said, we are so ready for a couple weeks out as a family. We are pretty run down. We hit the ground running when we came back in and haven’t stopped since; and though all the projects and relationships and possibilities that are rolling because of that energy are exciting, we have all been sick for the past couple weeks and can’t seem to kick it either. Nothing serious, just upper respiratory junk, but it keeps hitting us over and over again. We’ve all been on antibiotics this month. Bryan sounds like he should be in a TB ward and I was in bed all day on Saturday. The girls are snotty messes but thankfully it hasn’t seemed to slow them down. They have recently added a young blind chicken to their menagerie of local animals and take turns carrying it around with them everywhere. I was worried they were hurrying it to its already rapidly approaching death, but it cheeps pitifully every time they put it down and falls asleep when they hold it, so I keep my mouth shut for now.

I have been meaning to tell you that Om-Iman had her baby! Do you remember her? She is Musa’s daughter-in-law, the one that had a string of miscarriages and still births. Her stillbirth was the story that I submitted to that book of short stories that was recently published. My copy of the book arrived with some cargo on a plane flown by Jim Streit the day before she delivered (he also smuggled us in some cheese. God bless bush pilots!). I was ridiculously excited to get the book and confess to a bit of an ameteur happy dance when I saw my words in print for the first time. Leila, who features largely in the story, asked me what in the world I was freaking out about and when I told her and showed her her name right there on page 89 she kinda shrugged and said what I am pretty sure is the Rotana equivalent of “Okay, whatever,” and went back to sweeping. That woman keeps me humble.

The next day though Musa came and told us Om-Iman had just delivered a baby at the MSF hospital. He hadn’t seen his newest grandchild yet and I was so eager to see the little one I have been praying for daily for months so we jumped in the ATV and went to visit her. She was one of five new mothers in a row of beds in a massive green tent kindly guarded by a handful of friendly midwives. If that fat pink baby boy in her arms didn’t look so much like his daddy and if she wasn’t still shaky from pushing him out I would think he must have been misplaced, he was so fair. But he looked healthy and strong, the answer to so many prayers with his balled up fists and scrunched face. The day before I had reread the words Om-Iman had spoken over a year earlier, God sees everything. He sees our sorrows as well as our joys and we must be patient through both. She said those words to me while milk from a lost baby slowly soaked through her shirt. But on this day, seeing her story brimming over beyond the few paragraphs I once cupped with my hands was a beautiful thing to me. Sitting at the end of her green plastic mattress while her tiny son squinted grumpily at the mild flash of my camera and Musa strutted proudly down the hall greeting and congratulating the other curious new mothers, I was a happy person in the company of happy people.

Those brief moments with Om-Iman encapsulated a tension I often experience here, one you may relate to. It is a tension I most often feel when I write, trying to describe this place to people who have never been here before. I fear I often romanticize the beautiful – (mint tea under a baobab! new babies! People writing down their language for the first time!) or dramatize the ugly (bombs! Malnourished babies! Rejected rape victims!). But the tension is real, and it comes from living neck-deep in both the most breath-taking and the most horrifying aspects of the human experience that this world has to offer. War, hunger, sorrow, loss and death rub at one shoulder while resilience, hospitality, laughter, music and family all crowd at my other shoulder. Each clamors for attention, constantly vying for precedence over my emotions. And while the experience of living in such vibrancy, in a place absolutely pulsing with dangerous energy can be draining, painful even, it also makes me feel more alive than anywhere else in the world. Life here, for all its complexities, stresses and fears feels somehow more real and more urgent in a way that leaves the convenience of other places feeling muted and bland.

I struggle to put words to this place, picking up tired metaphors and broken phrases and fitting them into a mosaic that is a crude imitation of the real thing. I do it because I feel like, well, someone has to! It is to incredible not to at least try and describe. So I romanticize, I dramatize, and yet somehow still the most romantic and the most dramatic fall vastly short of this living, breathing realness that I am walking through.

Then again, maybe I feel free to laud this “realness” the night before I leave for the “muted” world of hot showers and ice-cream for a couple weeks. Who knows. I am grateful you have known this place, even if only for a season, though I pray you will know it for many more. On the days you miss it like crazy, don’t forget that it can make you absolutely insane in a heartbeat too. Even so, it is a rare privilege to miss a part of the world like this too, one that I am glad I share with you.

As I cleaned up the house today in preparation of taking off tomorrow, I couldn’t help but think about how when we come back in January, it will be with David. We are so excited to see him! When I told the girls today they were disappointed that you and the kids wouldn’t be coming for a visit too. Annabelle thought about it for a minute and then said, “Well, Lydia can stay with Rebekah but David can bring Josh with him. Tell them to do that!” And while I would gladly keep up with one more monkey for a couple of weeks, I know that this isn’t really possible right now. But Annabelle didn’t really understand why not and was a bit sulky. Mikat even tried to convince me to get in on the deal by promising to be sweet. And as much as I love my youngest daughter, I would advise against stuffing Josh into a suitcase based on that promise.

I will write again from Uganda. The internet will be good enough that I will even get some pictures up, inshallah! Love to you all,

Libby  

Dear Lydia - Dreams

Dear Lydia,

The water around our house is drying up quickly now. Soggy islands have reclaimed more marshland every morning and the children have been forced to wade further out to find brown pools deep enough to splash in. But the water birds are still flocking in and they cackle in huge numbers over the surface of the shallow water in the early morning. Blinding white Ibis settle over distant trees looking like they are posing for a poet. The UN helicopters spook them and they silently lift off the trees like a cloud of flowers that have suddenly tired of the view from their branches. The only downside to the receding waters is the shrinking fecal matter to brackish water ratio that leaves an unpleasant perfume by midday.

I have meant to sit down and write you many times this week, and have even jotted down some thoughts in little notebooks scattered around the house. But it seems like every day the mood of the week has shifted, both mine and the mood at large, and it has been hard to know what to say exactly. Rumor and truth remain inextricably tied and the network has been down for days making it even harder to understand reality. But the rebels from the South that have moved closer and then retreated again several times already are currently on their side of whatever line has been drawn up, so people are a bit more relaxed right now. One day I am emotionally preparing for the slew of hurried goodbyes and rushed exits, the next day I am confident we will be here until our planned R and R and back shortly thereafter. You know the game. We are ever riding the swells and dips that seem to never end. But the swell of the moment is a good one so we will enjoy it as long as we can.

I don’t have anything terribly interesting to report. My days continue to be filled with kneading bread, emptying purple potties into the latrine, washing out lentils, pouring mint tea for unexpected guests, hand selecting tomatoes from a salesman’s mat in the market, singing babies to sleep, chopping onions, making yoghurt. I have turned out to be so much more traditional then I ever expected and barefoot in the kitchen (and the answer to that question is no, I am not) has turned out to be a place I have laid claim to far more than I, or Bryan, ever expected. It is a preference conducive to a traditional place and people, and though I deeply delight in shaking things up a bit by driving the ATV like a mad woman, or publicly bantering with Bryan about something or the other, at the end of the day keeping our family clean and fed is a priority I enjoy.

That being said, I have had several dreams this week that are subtle reminders of the tensions at play within me. In one of them I was taking an art class and was walking around the classroom at the end of the day inspecting all my classmates’ work. I was so impressed by everyone’s paintings. They all seemed so layered and profound, thoughtful and multi-faceted. Then I got to my work and realized with growing horror that I was looking at pages and pages of beautifully colored Sesame Street pictures roughly pulled out of my children’s coloring books.

I am not making this up.

Clearly it wouldn’t take someone with a doctorate in Freudian studies to pin a few hypothesis to the meaning of my dreams, (in another I was trying to make some comment to a visiting famous writer only he couldn’t hear whatever I had to say over the screams of my children). I guess I just wonder if the tension between the things we love the most – the ways we always dreamed we would spend our time and the ways we actually spend our time – is a tension normal to all young mothers. Or is it those of us who work in incredibly high needs places? Maybe it is just a human problem. I don’t know. I do know however that I am shocked sometimes by how one day I can feel so immensely proud of all I have achieved in a day, whether through a language lesson, thoughtful conversation with a refugee friend or simply an engaging round of Disney Princess Candy Land with two little girls in green toenail polish, and then the next day feel crippled under the weight of guilt and insecurity over all the things I haven’t done or should be able to do so much better.

With a new high-needs baby and a greater geographical distance between you and the work you thought you would be doing right now, I wonder if you sometimes feel the strain of these tensions too. I hope you don’t. I sometimes kid myself that if you were here we would have literacy classes lined up every day of the week followed by amazing writer’s workshops and women’s Bible studies and language lessons in two different languages. We would be literacy specialist-mamas-extraordinaire! I of course know the reality is that we would actually still be wrestling out all our roles and battling guilt and pride and hope and fear all at once. But at least we would be doing it together, often over long conversations in the evening under the Neem tree outside my front door while our kids squabble over the swing. I miss you most in that lull right before dinner when we used to sit outside and let the kids run around, those final moments of the day when the sun is just setting and the sky looks its biggest.

The good thing about these sparring emotions within me is that I have gotten out a lot this week. Thankfully there are also a lot of new young single nurses next door who have looked to me for ways to get to know women in the community, and I have a husband who is more than willing to play his fair share of Disney Princess Candy Land, so the ATV and I have bonded on several jarring trips weaving our way between pumpkin patches and UNHCR tents on our way to visit so-and-so in the camp. I have had lots of good Rotana language practice. I even sat down with Ibrahim and interrupted his work on the dictionary and story writing to help me do a rough translation of the Mary and Martha story into Rotana to share with women later this week. I have been practicing reading it. I am so curious what their reaction will be to hear a Bible story read in their language. I feel excited and encouraged about where we are at and the overwhelming potential of the next few months. I just have these moments of feeling like the needs of this place and what I have to offer are a forest fire and a thimble full of water sitting side by side. I know we follow one who fed thousands with some miserable little fish. I am holding out hope that he can do something with thimbles full of water too.    

On Sunday in church we heard five bombs fall. The first I thought was thunder. At the second the people around me started whispering “Antanov.” The fourth sounded close enough that I started looking around for the low spot to run to but the fifth sounded far away again. Everyone says there were all across the border and is not overly concerned about it so I am learning to shrug it off too. What else can you do? There is something profoundly spiritual in ways that I can’t fully articulate about praying with people while listening to bombs falling on their homeland. One woman told me the other day that the reason Omar keeps bombing their people is because he doesn’t have children of his own so he can’t possibly understand what it is like to lose the ones you love. I suspect the president of the North is most likely married with many children, though I don’t know for sure, but either way, I find it fascinating to hear people say that someone with power simply being able to empathize with their losses could make all of this stop.  

I should close. I bought a piece of goat in the market this morning and I need to figure out what in the world to do with it for supper. I am thinking goat fajitas…We are doing Thanksgiving with SIM on Saturday and we are all looking forward to it. I hope you are having a lovely day with family enjoying turkey and football and cooler weather. The days are still warm here but the nights are downright chilly, so much so that my African babies waking up crying for their sweaters. They send their love too, as do many others.

Hugs all around,

Libby

Dear Lydia - Airplanes

Dear Lydia,

 I don’t know if it is the slowly encroaching heat or the ebb of my happy-to-be-back energy burst, (probably some combination of both), but I have been so sluggish lately. By mid-afternoon I feel like I am dragging myself around under miles of deep warm water. A couple times I have taken advantage of the girls’ naps to lay down myself but have awoken from a half-conscious coma so groggy and dehydrated that I have regretted not just pushing on until bedtime.

I think most of the tiredness is because of my days being full of good things. The G language workshop going on here at the compound will finish tomorrow after two full weeks and even though I have been involved far less than Bryan, it has shaped my time significantly. I am imagining you reading Bryan’s email where he mentioned that all of the participants are staying in your house, and I am hoping that brought you great joy and not sheer panic. When I was putting clean sheets on your bed I said out loud, “Somewhere Lydia’s eye is twitching and she has no idea why.” It was a last minute decision, one based on people from this group living in the camp so far away. When we cleaned out your house I did my best to tuck away any of your personal things more than they already were. (Though, I am still amazed at how organized and thorough you were with a 24 hour heads up on our evacuation. Holy cow, if you were trying to organize my house post-evacuation for hosting a workshop I promise you would have bought a round-trip ticket back to the States just so you could smack me in the face. You would have just had to burn all the piles of crap we left lying around and start all over again. Suffice it to say, minus some spiders and rodents, and lots of termites, your house looked great.) Thank you so much for your long distance hospitality.

It’s been exciting seeing the six men and one woman attending the workshop, almost all members of another major world religion, work so hard to mold an orthography and some spelling conventions out of their mind-boggling tapestry of a language. Much of the grammatical and phonological issues they are wading through make my brain cramp up just to hear about. But it is so beautiful too. After having been violently forced from their homes due to their skin color, their culture and the language they were told was “monkey talk,” it is inspiring to see the purposeful energy they are pouring into developing their language for the first time ever. At the very moment I am writing these words, a handful of refugees are sitting around the plastic table on which you used to feed Josh his breakfast oatmeal, scratching away at notebooks as they resiliently engage in subversive resistance to a government that is still bombing their homes just miles away. Your home is playing hostess to a bunch of ragtag seditionists, boldly writing down their language in defiance and with great hope.   

Being back for a couple weeks now it is so easy to forget that there are several wars all around us (lots of little wars? Many facets of one big one?). No matter how much my brain tries to remind me that we could be forced to leave again tomorrow, with every passing day I find myself settling back in just a little deeper, resting just a little more fully in the joys of a glass of mint tea under a baobab tree, a belly laugh over a joke in another language, the sound of a robaba plinking out a tune that feels as rooted to this little corner of the globe as the very trees themselves. No matter how much language I learn, or how many times I evacuate, I think I will always be blind to certain realities of life here. It is a blindness that the daily joys feed, and I eagerly devour each one that is offered, losing even more sight with every sweet moment I taste.

But every once in a while the veil is lifted, and at least briefly, I see the fuller picture again. 

A moment like that came earlier this week when an Antanov flew overhead. Cessnas, MI-8s, C-130s, Dash-8s, the occasional Buffaloes - I still haven’t learned to tell any of them apart as they fly overhead to land on the airstrip dozens of times a day. But a couple days ago I looked up to see Leila frozen in the bedroom doorway, broom in hand with a look of restrained panic and deep concentration. Why isn’t that plane landing? She asked quietly. Before I could answer I saw Hakim, one of the workshop participants, coming out of your house, eyes shielded to the sun and holding up his phone to the sky to take pictures as evidence. At this point I stepped outside too and saw an Antanov gliding overhead, low enough to clearly recognize, but much too high to be coming in for a landing. It passed over the airstrip and then disappeared. Hakim calmly sat down and explained that it was a scout plane from the North – what else could it be? – gathering intel on our airstrip. Laughing without smiling he swept his hand across our compound and said, “And where is your foxhole?” When I asked if he truly thought we would ever need one he answered, “No no, of course not. You wouldn’t need to use it. But wouldn’t it be stupid not to have one if you did need it?”

A few minutes later the Antanov returned and eased down for a landing. It was an NGO plane after all, maybe just an especially cautious one making a flyover before landing on a congested strip. Who knows. It certainly wasn’t a scout plane from the North. Everyone laughed the incident off and returned to work as before. But the instantaneous recognition on the part of everyone around me to something I would never have even heard was sobering. The woman who washes my kid’s cereal bowls knows that sound because it came moments before her village was bombed. The man across the yard knows that sound because it has killed people near him. And no matter how sweet the tea, how funny the joke, how beautiful the tune, they will always be watching and listening for things just beyond my range of sight and sound.   

I say that I forget things are not normal here these days, but that is not completely true. There are things that are different for me now too.

I used to never take pictures. Bryan was good about snapping some, but I was always too distracted, too lazy, too self-conscious of the flashy splash of a camera. But not now. Now our camera is full of pictures of people, posing however they like – with their impressive garden of sorghum, holding their nephew and the cat, grinning between both wives. I have also introduced my friends to the group selfie, so there are some ridiculous snaps of us crowded into the lens on a rope bed in a mud hut, me a pale splash of white in a sea of perfectly smooth black skin and white teeth.

I used to hoard the stuff from America. The Koolaid, pudding and taco seasoning. Bubbles and stickers for the girls. The Bath and Body Works lotion from my mother-in-law. But not now. I came back to too much lost to mold and rats and expiration dates. So we are eating pudding lavishly and I leave the lotion on the kitchen counter so that when Leila gets ready to go home after work she can slather it all over her arms and into her hair, going back to her tent in a refugee camp smelling like sweet cinnamon pumkin.

I used to get tired of people. The constant flow of people in and out of the gate, regardless of mealtimes or kids naps or my own attempt at a schedule. To my shame, there would be a point that the news that so-and-so was waiting under the Baobab tree would make me groan inwardly. And, obviously, it’s not that I am always brimming over with happy energy all the time even now. (I started this letter whining about being tired didn’t I?) But truly, the awareness that every conversation with someone could be my last for a while, that every opportunity for a visit to the camp or a walk to the neighbors or even just a chat with the guards could be the only one for months and months to come, these things have changed my perspective. I still get tired, but not of people.

Yesterday was one of those days. Aisha, Om-Iman and another woman I don’t know as well came by and we all sat in the earthy cool of the guard hut and ate leftover kisra. Om-Iman is heavily pregnant now (praise God!) and Aisha is also five months along. They said that the lines at the food distribution point were crazy so they came to wait out the crowds and the heat of the day at our place. We talked some but after the happy rush of coming back and finding I could still speak Arabic I am know realizing how big the holes in my proficiency still are (big) and I felt clumsy and tongue-tied. They were tired enough to just rest on the rope bed or occasionally chat in their shared mother tongue too. It’s nice to realize that silence in the company of friends is okay. It was a good moment for me. Not terribly productive or profound. Just quiet and peaceful. No deeply spiritual conversations or recollections of traumas gone by. Just some pregnant women and their friends waiting out the heat in the shade. When we were so far away these past ten months, these were the kind of moments I missed the most. As always, I wish you had been there too.

Sorry for my ramblings. This is absurdly long. I will close for now. Thanks again for sharing your house. Things are happening!

Much love, 

Libby 

P.S. – No more snakes. But the indoor scorpion tally is up to SIX! Big critters outside or little critters inside? Hmmmm.

Have I ever told you I hate the “Would You Rather Game”?

Dear Lydia - Night Noises

Dear Lydia,

So, I don’t even think I mentioned all the water in my last letter! Our compound is completed surrounded by hundreds of meters of water of two sides. Behind the compound, the water is only a few feet from the back fence, so close that I fear another hard rain and our latrine will slide off into the lake! All day long, the clatter and shriek of children splashing in the shallows wafts through the hot air, and the mere sound of water makes me feel cooler, like some vicarious placebo. They dive in just at the spot we used to take the kids in the late afternoons, where the tamarind tree stoops low over the sand pit. Now those branches catapult naked boys into warm brown water all day long.

Everyone says the rains were heavy and late this year. I was comforted by this fact as people also say that fighting will start again as soon as the rains dry up. We have had one good storm since we have been back and I felt like water pouring out of the sky and into the millions of gallons of water pressing around our home was like protective hands cupping us in its hold. It spoke to me, maybe not of peace exactly but at least of delayed war, which is almost as good, right? But it hasn’t rained at all in several days now. And despite the torture of thunder on the horizon, the days are growing hotter and hotter. When I wake up in the morning the water is still and greenish grey, the exact same color as the trees. They look like they are standing in puddles of their own melted reflection.

Just as we once feared, the high waters have brought the snakes slithering up to high ground. The third night we were here the guards came to get Bryan to help them kill a snake, which was terrifying enough on its own. You know anytime night watchmen come to get the Khawaja to help kill a snake it must be a monster. It was a six foot cobra that has slipped into the guard hut to get one of the chickens. I didn’t see it from the safety on my front stoop until I saw Bryan, Abdul and Bashir all armed with rocks and sticks and running backwards in the dark while the bobbing circles cast from their flashlights picked up something very long and fast flying out of the guard house after them. Thankfully, Abdul is a crackshot and pegged the snake with a rock. If my survival depended on me being able to hit a poisonous moving object with a rock I would have been dead a long time ago.

Annabelle found the second snake. She hasn’t taken too keenly to our return to the out-of-the-house latrine system and has had a few accidents since we have been back. After one such accident I had rather impatiently sat her down on the commode and when she threw a fit I said she could sit on her own until her attitude improved. I sat just outside the door, and when her stubborn silence turned to terrified wails I opened the door and said something along the lines of, “What in the world are you freaking out about? I am right here!” She then pried one little hand from the toilet on which she was precariously perched and sniffling pitifully pointed up to the window where a 4 or 5 foot yellow bellied who-knows-what kind of snake sat pressed against the screen and said, “But Mama, I was just scared of that big snake right there….” Oh yes, I get the mother of the year award. Needless to say the little purple potty in her bedroom is now getting lots of use.

The snake may have been the cause of a bad dream Annabelle had the night before Halloween. She woke up crying and I felt my way into the girls’ room by moonlight and sat down beside their bed to soothe her back to sleep. Right as I started into a lullaby I heard the distant sound of heavy automatic gunfire perforated with the hallow boom of artillery. It was the heaviest gunfire I have ever heard. I wasn’t aware of much fear, just sadness and weariness laced with a single thread of excitement that I can never completely deny no matter how serious the situation. I whispered loudly to Bryan in the other room and was already running through my mental checklist of things to throw in a bag when I noticed the gunfire – still very heavy – was overlaid with the distant trills of women singing and the steady staccato of dozens of drums beating in perfect unison. I tried to understand who in the world would be celebrating a firefight, especially with drums, and went through every possibly scenario I could think of to explain the bizarre and eerie combination of noises drifting in on the breeze. Bryan returned from checking with the guys outside and over the next few days their story was confirmed – a local traditional ceremony called “The Throwing of the Fire” to chase off the old year and welcome in the new. This happened just before dawn for three nights in a row, each time a little bit closer, to the point I was shocked (and thankful) the girls slept through it. Though I was relieved it wasn’t an actual conflict, the proof of enough arms in the area to showcase a traditional ceremony (we never heard anything like that last year did we?) was a bit unnerving.  

Sorry for all the unpleasantries I started this letter with. Maybe I am subconsciously wanting to help you not be too homesick. Whatever you can say about life here, not one moment of it is ever boring!

We worshipped at the little church in the camp on Sunday. Driving it in the ATV made me wonder how we ever did that on foot with all three of our babies on our backs! Church was much like it usually is – long, good, hot, happy. Both girls fell asleep mid-way through the teaching – Annabelle on a kanga laid out on the dirt floor, Mikat in my arms. The woman nest to me took her for a while when she saw I was in danger of falling off my log onto my numb bum. Afterwards we walked to Hamed and Sabrine’s house and sat in the thorny shade and talked. We drank warm, sweet juice from a white bucket stamped with the letters UNHCR poured into tin cups. The girls walked around all day with little orange mustaches. A handful of women you would recognize all crowded around me and asked very specific questions about you and Rebekah. Word had reached everyone that you are delayed because of her sickness but they had so many questions. What kind of sickness does she have? Is there no medicine for it? Is Lydia sick too? And of course they all wanted to know how big Josh is now too. I answered their questions as best I could and even though I fumbled without words like heartbeat, oxygen, brain, seizures, you are in a community of mothers who understand unexplainable injury and loss and they nodded silently with genuine comprehension. They are praying for healing and they are glad you are near your people.

Other than a quick trip to the market and church on Sunday I have been relatively homebound, which probably doesn’t surprise you. Though I may be the talkative one, you were often the one who was good about actually getting us out, even if you were quiet once we got there. (:  Between chatting with guests under the baobab I am mostly cleaning up the house, unpacking boxes, washing musty clothes, glancing at the expiration dates on cans and bottles, wincing, then throwing them in the pot for supper anyway. They are jobs you would understand. Picking pebbles out of rice, sifting bugs out of flour, shaving my legs out of bucket on the back porch in the warm quiet after lunch (okay, maybe I was the only one scandalous enough to make a habit out of that), tossing leftover popcorn to the chickens, taking clothes crisp with sunshine off the line and folding them into round basins. These are things I never do anywhere else, things I even enjoy not doing when I am somewhere else. But here they make sense somehow. They give shape to the day and rhythm to the quiet moments.

The girls just woke up from their naps and are fussing for a snack so I should go. But one last thing, tell Josh we have an orphaned black baby goat for a pet now. Apparently, the guards gently tossed him out of our gate a few days in a row and he always found his way back in so now they just ignore him. No one has come to claim him. Sometimes he tiptoes into the house, sometimes I feed him a little milk in a bowl, sometimes he nibbles on my skirt to get my attention, usually he just sits in the shade somewhere. I call him Babanoos.

Love to you all,

Libby

      

    

Dear Lydia - Coming Home

Dear Lydia,

So I hope the fact that you are reading this as sterile white letters on the black screen of my blog and not as a handwritten letter smudged with the finger-prints of my curious children or at very least an email full of rushed misspellings and semi-colon smiley faces, doesn’t bother you. But while every time I sit down to write a blog I am paralyzed with false starts and mediocre ideas, my days are filled with sentences and descriptions I am mentally sending to you. While blogging often feels like a long-neglected chore I can’t seem to make myself do, writing to you feels like a delightful luxury I never have time to let myself enjoy. So I decided to channel my connection to you into this blog. Raw honesty and unglamorous glimpses of humanity seem to be in vogue in the blogosphere these days, but when I do it, regardless of how it lands on others’ ears, it sometimes feels contrived to me. But you have always had access to my unglamorous sides and openness comes easily in your company. And what’s more is it feels natural. So here we are. Thanks for being a listening ear.

It feels so right to be back in D, but so wrong to be back here without you. In all the excited rush of coming back up here for the first time as a family since December (ten months!) I wondered in my distraction if your absence would be as noticeable as I at one time feared it would be. But when we pushed open that rickety bamboo gate and stepped onto the compound, your house sitting quietly next to ours was a beautiful heartache of a greeting. I haven’t been inside yet but I see your purple kitchen curtains sigh in the breeze and it’s hard to think that you are not on the other side of them. Last night I heard a wooden tapping and honestly briefly wondered what you were chopping up for dinner.   

But I will do my best not to be all nostalgic. Take a moment to lighten the mood and picture this: Our family of four, travel weary and hot as we pass through the capital city on our way up here. You know that monstrosity of an airport - the chaotic visa lines, bored and underpaid soldiers, wide-eyed Japanese peacekeepers, indignant politician’s wives busting out of their shiny dresses and throngs of jaded NGO workers with sarcastic expressions that I both relate to and resent. It’s just as it was in all its glory…except for the new addition of the infectious disease screening tents pitched over rickity crates in the muddy patch just off of the runway apron. Mikat and Annabelle are close to melting (literally and figuratively) and I am praying that the cheap lollipops I have strategically shoved into their grubby hands will last through however many forms we have to fill out and the temperature test by the face-masked health workers. Now imagine a small but ridiculously potent winged insect flying right up my skirt and crawling up my leg in the middle of this chaos. I caught him about thigh-level but missed on my first panicky grab giving him just enough incentive and opportunity to sting the absolute fire out of me. I will leave the ensuing scene to your imagination, but let me just say I had a dinner plate sized red hot welp on my leg that night!

But truly, it does feel so good to be back. Yes, as you can imagine the house is coated is a thick layer of dirt and a few things far worse, and I have just about given up on the war against rats. They generally stay out of my bedroom and I make a habit of not going into the storeroom after dark so we have a truce of sorts. But the house is amazing. The girls room is painted pink and the kitchen is full of my pots and pans. The solar fridge works shockingly well and I finally hung the curtains you and I scurried all over Kampala to have made almost a year ago. They look fantastic. Even with the rats, it still feels more like home than anywhere else.

We have had a steady stream of visitors who have come to welcome us back. After so many months away I sometimes find myself doubting if certain relationships mean as much to others as they mean to me. But when Leila showed up to wash my dishes this morning she had tears pooling in her eyes when she pulled away from our embrace. And when Aisha came with several other women you would know this afternoon, I thought we would never stop hugging. The reunions have been so sweet; the sweetness is ever sharper with the lingering bite of fear that the goodbyes are not all behind us.

I sat with these women under the baobab tree for a couple hours this afternoon. We talked about you a lot. They wanted to hear all about Rebekah. They shook their head with such sad understanding and said they have been praying for you - and her - constantly. I told them you are praying for them too and that you send your love and greetings. If the internet cooperates (it hasn’t been) I will try to send you a couple of pictures of familiar faces. At one point Aisha said, “Libby your house has become so beautiful,” and as I quickly prepared to downplay the cinderblock tin-roofed mansion that I really do love but often feel guilty about, I realized she wasn’t referring to my house but to the two filthy blond girls playing at our feet. “God has given you such gifts. Your children bring joy to your guests. Your house has become beautiful.” And in that moment I realized that even if we have to leave again tomorrow, today alone has been worth it. Reconnecting with these incredible people and having the honor of seeing the world through their eyes if only briefly makes it all worth it.

Your house too has become beautiful, even if it is not exactly where I want it to be these days. Thirty feet away seemed like a good distance to me but for the time being I will have to be content with the miles of ocean between our front doors. Kiss the people of your beautiful house for me and know that you are loved by many people far away.

The frogs are loud tonight, the drums are soft and the stars are absolutely deafening.

Blessings,

Libby     

    

Lucky Day

A couple weeks ago my new neighbor offered to take me downtown to buy some fabric for curtains in our new home. I wanted a local design at a local price, but not yet knowing the local language, markets or public transportation systems, my new friend Martha, who was born and raised in the city, kindly offered to run around with me on a Tuesday morning. We walked down the dirt alley in front of our adjoined houses, past a nursery school and all the ramshackle stalls overflowing with papaya and avocado to the nearest matatu stage. We ducked into the 14 passenger van revving its engine along the side of the narrow road and waited for it to fill up. Once all seventeen of us had squeezed in we pushed off and headed into town.

We were only a couple of minutes down the road when the engine started sounded funny. The van lurched a few times and we began losing speed. The thick traffic behind us honked and jerked past on the busy road. The van sounded like it was drowning, coughing and staggering up a long hill while the driver fiddled with pedals and gears out of my sight. It quickly became evident that we were almost completely out of gas. We inched our way miserably up the hill, all of our heads jerking in unison with every jolt forward. This went on painfully for several kilometers.

We finally crested the hill and eased our way into one of the busiest intersections in Kampala, four huge roads spilling into a massive roundabout where traffic swirls around a singular patch of grass housing an ugly monument to something or other. There, we made our way slowly into the very heart of the chaos… and promptly stopped.

The car died.

The driver turned the ignition.

Nothing.

Outside thousands of tons of metal and glass turned to some strange viscous liquid and pooled around us like we were a mere rock in a stream. Hugs buses, Land Cruisers and pickups and thousands of motorcycles carrying their loads of mattresses, beer-crates, chickens or women in folds of diaphanous cloth all bled past us like some strange school of fish on their way downstream. Outside was the cacophony of organized chaos.

Inside was surprisingly silent. The woman in front of me scratched the skin between her braids with a long red fingernail and glanced at her watch. The tout fiddled with the wad of small bills interlacing his fingers. Someone behind be uttered a single loud cluck of indeterminate meaning, tongue rapping loudly on the soft palate of his mouth. Martha and I sat there side by side, the skin of our bare arms sweating into each other, an odd intimacy shared with a near-stranger.

We probably only sat there three minutes, maybe less, but it felt much longer. Eventually the driver turned the key once more and the van took a final gasp. It was just enough to propel us forward one last time and we wove impossibly through the masses and then coasted lifelessly down the other side of the long hill and into the waiting arms of a petrol station.

While the van filled with the smell of gasoline Martha beside me started to laugh, her huge breasts jiggling as she wiped sweat from her face with a fold of cloth. “We made it,” she said and gave me a little nudge with her elbow, “Today we are lucky, eh? Yes, this is our lucky day.”

That perspective is one of favorite things about Africa and one of the things I am most blessed to have been immersed in for about twenty of my thirty-one years. On some days it strikes me as sheer optimism with a pretty strong aftertaste of fatalism, but usually I recognize it for what it is - the eyes to see all the blessings that are strewn haphazardly all over our paths. Those inconvenient gifts that have a tendency to get underfoot and trip us up if we aren’t paying close enough attention to them.

I think of the time several years, three houses and two evacuations ago when Bryan was moving a huge water tank to better position it under a rain gutter. He had scooted it a few feet across the damp dirt just off our back porch when we discovered millions of carpenter ants pouring out of the earth he had disturbed and flooding across the yard. While Bryan and I rushed to get cans of bug spray to kill the hoard advancing towards the kitchen, our guard Ahmed broke into a huge grin and shouted, “No, no, don’t poison them. It’s a blessing. It is food for the chickens!” Then he trotted off towards the chicken coop whistling to our tribe of hungry hens.

I may have lived on this continent for most of my life, but I sometimes remain so blind to the blessings those around me seem to see so clearly. These past few weeks I have felt stripped down. Breaking my dang foot has probably been a big part of this. (It was a silly accident on a very aggressive flight of stairs, a fairly uninteresting story for another day – I will be fine.) Life circumstances have just left me feeling so incapable of doing what I want to do. Like I am still stuck in that matatu in the middle of the intersection unable to get the car moving at all much less in the right direction.

Tonight after supper while I was washing dishes on one foot (I insisted. Bryan has been doing everything else and I was determined to be a little helpful) I heard the sound of insanity in the living room. I hopped in with my soapy hands and found my crazy little family had moved the furniture out of their way and was dancing their hearts out to Andrew Peterson's ridiculous songs. I leaned against the doorframe for a minute and watched them leap about like maniacs, the girls laughing hysterically while Bryan swung them in circles through the air. And this time instead of hollering at them to be careful or to keep it down a little so the neighbors don’t think we are being robbed or something, I put down my crutches and decided to join in.

Cheap furniture is easy to move around. A still somewhat-empty house is great for acoustics. New rhythms of life mean that work and play have clearer distinctions now, making family nights more fulfilling than they have ever been. And, as it turns out, a broken foot dance to the lyrics of “Ten Piggy Little Toes” is good for try-not-to-pee-in-your-pants laughter.

Lucky. Blessed. It is something I am, whether or not I always see it that way in the moment. Sometimes I am still rushing to poison the very thing that is going to feed my heart. In this season of lingering uncertainty, growing understanding of the loss and new beginnings not quite off the ground yet, I am learning from the example of those around me - to open my eyes a little wider and looker a little closer. This is my lucky day.