Lalob Fruit

Dear Lydia,

I have been sitting on this couch for about ten minutes now, staring through the rent my children have put in the screen at the front door blowing cheerfully in the wind as it lets in clouds of flies while the girls squawk on the tire swing under the baobab and the cursor in front of me blinks patiently by the words “Dear Lydia”.

The irony of not writing in so long is being rendered absolutely speechless by the cumulative weight of so many words. I have composed long letters to you and my mother and others in my mind and evidence of this is scratched in little notes and unfinished sentences I have scattered in half a dozen notebooks filled with recipes and words in other languages that I still can’t remember. But none of it has made it to anywhere comprehensible. But here we are now, in the precious half hour I have snatched out of the sweet chaos of the day. Let’s see where we end up.

How I have longed for you this month my friend!

We have finally started developing literacy materials and it has been so exciting. My incredible husband has taken over daughter-duty in a big way so that I could spend hours holed up with Ibrahim and Hassan developing phoneme teaching orders, churning out stories and figuring out how to deal with issues like consonant length or transitional literacy. I wished for your experience and input so many times as I dredged the recesses of my brain thinking, “Did they really teach us in grad school how to develop functor lessons on languages with grammatical tone?!” But at the end of the day, we now we have primers and alphabet books drafted in both J and G languages and have even started testing them. I am so excited! They still have plenty of work left, but they are a good start and people are falling all over themselves to start learning to read in their own language. It is beautiful. We won’t have full blown literacy classes going until after our trip back to the States this summer, which is kind of killing me, but when we are ready I think this stuff is going to take off in a big way. 

I am realizing what diverse groups of pre-literate peoples we will be working with though. My sweet friend Aisha is an example of one. I sat down with her one afternoon and in an hour she was reading short stories in her language – stilted, and imperfectly, but reading. She is one of those with a few years of primary education under her belt in a language that uses a Roman script. She is so incredibly bright and eager and anxious to learn. I see her sitting on a sagging rope bed in the shade of my house, bracing her heavily pregnant body with one hand while the other traces letters on a page, a single mom surviving only by the goodwill of others, skinny as a rail, poor as dirt, and I think, What you could have been, my friend. In another life and time, she is somewhere teaching an auditorium full of college students, making her rounds at a hospital, writing long books sold in big bookstores. Caring for her children in this time and place has taken no shortage of strength and skills of their own sort. But I hope she understands that her circumstances in life have nothing to do with her intelligence or abilities. I love listening to her read.

And then there are people like our old guard Jafar. He has never held a pen. Whether we should be reading right to left or left to right is no more of a question then whether we be reading top to bottom or diagonally. The fact that lines can carry sounds is as bizarre a concept as it being night on the other side of the world while we sit in broad daylight here. And yet, the first time he slooowly, and painstakingly read the words, “This is the hyena’s house…” I thought he was going to fall off the rope bed laughing. He kept poking at the words on the paper with his gnarled old hands, half asking and half exclaiming in shock, “That’s my language? That’s my language!” It is, I kept saying, it’s yours.  

We have a long way to go and many problems still to sort out. But to see people beginning to read their language for the first time in the history of the world, well, that is something worth getting out of bed for in the morning.

Though, now that you mention it, sometimes getting out of bed in the morning is no small feat. Lydia, it is so nightmarishly HOT. All in all, I’ve been pretty proud of how well we’ve been coping. Of course, with the fridge now there is cold water to drink, and Bryan recently rigged up a couple more solar panels so we can run the fans through the night, so we cheat a bit. But the past couple nights it has been cloudy and we have all nearly suffocated in our sleep under Mother Nature’s smothering blanket, so much so that I wake up just to wet down my hair in a bucket. When we blow through all the cold water in a day and have to drink the hot water straight out of the filter I am mildly devastated. Peeing more than twice every 24 hours is a major accomplishment. The girls, like their father, are somehow naturals at staying well-hydrated. I on the other hand often have to have my nightcap of ORS (Oral Rehydration Solution) to just to make it through. But the mosquitoes, scorpions and centipedes are all dying off too so there is at least satisfaction in outliving the vermin. Suckers.

One thing that has been new to me this month is taking several trips to some of the outlying camps beyond the one we live in. The road is well maintained by an army of UN machines, but it is long and so dusty that I thought we might drown in clouds of red dirt buzzing down the road in our windowless ATV the first time we went out. That week there was a lot of tension between the refugees and the host community and several times we passed armed militia who would step out of the bush on the side of the road to watch us pass and every time my heart would stop, thinking they were about to ask us to pull over. In moments like those, as I cradle a sleeping sunburned toddler tucked under my tobe, I think surely I am the worst mother in the world. But they never did more than wave in greeting and, not that it’s relevant really but, the girls think riding in the ATV is better than Six Flags. They love life here so much. And every time I hear Annabelle pray for God to keep the war far away from us and to bless the people who have war near them, I feel my heart spasm in both grief and overwhelming gratitude that she is learning to trust him in all things from so young an age.

Bryan has been making trips regularly to one of the camps to meet with a group of men who sought him out repeatedly with questions they would like help finding answers to. He has been meeting with these men in their home several times a week as they together read, discuss and ask God for his guidance in their journey. The response has been more amazing than I can fully tell you here. And they are sharing their journey of discovery with their own neighbors and relatives in their own separate gatherings at other times when Bryan is not there. They are so hungry. The longer I live and the more I see, the more I believe that the lines and boundaries we have crisscrossing the world are absolute rubbish. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that the only distinction between people that really means anything at all is the one that distinguishes those who are hungry for an authentic relationship with our Creator and those who really can’t be bothered. Not a whole lot else matters I think.

These men have been in the former category for a while now. But there are forces of darkness in this world that are trembling to see them growing even closer to the light. Last week one of the men’s houses burnt to the ground in a fire that no one saw start. Their children were sleeping inside, though the brave little boy woke up and carried his sleeping baby sister to safety. But they lost everything. And the week before that another man’s healthy ten month old baby boy got sick with diarrhea. They took him to the clinic and he was responding to treatment. But within 48 hours he died in the night. Oh Lydia, I don’t want to see a demon under every rock when the ground is already so littered with stones. But what do you say to a woman whose baby has just died, when you, and she, believe that is likely a result of her steps of faith? Steps you prayed for and encouraged? I long for you in these moments. I feel like I know so little of suffering because of obedience to God. But you understand something of loss as a direct result of you walking in faith. And your sweet baby has felt the sting of that faithfulness. What a blessing I think you could be to so many here! What a blessing you already are. I pray God brings you back soon.

And finally, I miss you when Bryan and I are annoyed at each other. I miss having another American married woman nearby so badly. This week Bryan and I had the worst fight of our married life, though I shouldn’t say fight because we don’t fight. We just hurt each other’s feelings and then stay up all night talking and crying until we feel better. (What can I say, we are lightweights.) That has never, in all nine years that we have been married taken more than one night. Ever. But for three of four nights this week we were up late talking and trying to understand each other and feeling completely confused. I’m not saying if you were here I would air all our dirty laundry out in front of you, but I think I miss having you to remind me that being married is hard sometimes and that some of our miscommunications are so absurdly normal. Cliché almost. And also because you are the people we would throw our kids at when we need to go take a walk together. : )

I will close this letter by reiterating ad nauseum that I have the most amazing husband imaginable and I cannot imagine this journey without him. He is such a good man. And despite the dirt and heat and rebels, I am still so in love with this place too. It is like the lalob fruit to me, the ones that grow on that thorny tree right by your laundry line. Kids and guests will occasionally pick them up off the ground and suck on them, and not long ago I peeled off the yellowish shell and popped one in my mouth too. At first it was sweet, like honey, and then a terrible bitterness seeped in that made my eyes water. But just as I was getting ready to spit it out in disgust, the bitterness faded a bit, though not completely, and the sweetness drifted in again. And the next thing I knew, I was shoving another one in my mouth, only to be delighted and disgusted all over again.

North Africa, marriage, parenthood, God – it’s all the lalob fruit. Equal parts sweet and bitter. But maybe a little more sweet than bitter at the end of the day, because somehow I keep finding myself shuffling in the thorny shade, searching the ground for another yellow piece to dust off, shell, pop in my mouth and suck the life out of. I can’t get enough.

Small voices are calling my name from outside so I should close. I love you and yours dearly and can’t wait to see you in just a couple short months. Kiss your babies for me.

Much love,

Libby            

  

What if She Can't Run

Dear Leila,

Or maybe I should start calling you “Kina” like almost everyone else does. I thought it was such a pretty nickname when I first heard your cousin-sister Aisha calling you that. To my ignorant ears it sounded lively and playful and short, so much like you on all accounts. But when I learned its meaning, the one who comes after all the children who died, I balked. Among my people, to daily conjure up and connect you to so many dead siblings would be unheard of, hurtful at least, offensive to many. But seeing your own mother call out to you using this name, and in response receive only pangs of life – your affirming “Ooo-oh” from a distance, a burst of unrestrained laughter, an irritated cluck of distraction – makes me think this name is a part of some ongoing healing I don’t really understand. So Kina, it is for now. Maybe I will try it out when you come in for work in the morning.

I talked to your cousin Aisha yesterday for the first time in a while, sitting on an angareb in the shade of a dom tree. You were sitting nearby but I am not sure how much you heard or how much you already knew. Most, I suspect. When I asked about her kids she told me that Nariman had been sick for a couple weeks. I immediately had visions of malaria, diarrhoea stretching miserably on day after day, the thick rasping cough that seems to plague every child this time of year. I honestly wasn’t prepared for the ragged gash across the top of her little foot that she was trying to hide under the dirty hands her mother gently pried away, black and deep and crusty. It shouldn’t surprise me that Aisha didn’t know how it happened, these terrible little mysteries crawl all over the place here, but not knowing what bite or sting or thorn that caused her foot to swell and split like that still catches me off guard. It looked simply awful.

When I asked her if she had taken Nariman to the clinic, she said that Nariman couldn’t make the walk and was now too big for a heavily pregnant woman to carry alone. She must have seen something cross my face because she quickly, almost defensively, reminded me of how strong Nariman is, how she walked all the way from your homeland when the bombs came three years ago. At age five she walked the whole way while her father carried the baby and her mother carried everything else that she could. “But I can’t sleep at night now.” She said softly, maybe so Nariman wouldn’t hear, maybe not. Again, I thought of terrible worries, the kind that often skirt the edges of my own maternal mind - tissue damage, blood poisoning, gangrene. “I can’t sleep because I worry about how she will run if trouble comes again. We are all in the hand of God but we still have to be ready anytime. No one knows what will come and people are uneasy. She is strong and she is fast. But what if she can’t run?”

As Aisha was speaking, Sara – you know her yes? She is a Southerner married to one of your people, very thin with scars like cat whiskers etched into the sides of her mouth – Sara began talking about a big affair in Juba where some foreign man was healing people left and right. I was only listening with one ear and even that ear was still distracted. My mind was far away from Juba, rolling slowly with thoughts of what it would be like to tuck my girls in every night and pray not that they don’t wake up with bad dreams, but that they don’t wake up having to run for their lives.

Aisha must have seen my tears gathering and threatening to spill over, because she reached out and lightly touched my knee. “You are understanding what she is saying?” I think I made an embarrassed noise loosely resembling a short laugh. “Yes, but that is not what I am thinking about. My thoughts are on other things. On your words…” but I faltered a bit, Arabic words that I am not sure that I even have in the first place rendered inaccessible by emotion. But your cousin has always had a way of understanding my heart, even from those early days back across the border when I first met her. This gift of hers is both comforting and unnerving. She nodded and sat back in a way that communicated she didn’t expect me to say anything else. She smiled softly and repeated, Nina gaideen fii yed bita Allah.

His hands. They are sometimes such a terrifying fortress.

I love it when you are washing dishes and I am kneading bread and you tell me stories about when you and Aisha were little girls together back home. My favourite is when you convinced her to help you steal the bottle of wild honey from the roof of the hut where your grandmother had hidden it. I still can’t believe you drank it all. Of course your head was turning round and round! Aisha always says you were (and are) the brave one, and I have seen you sass men and pick up live rats without flinching. I believe her about that. But I don’t believe her when she says she is the “red snake”, the one who always runs to hide when she sees people in her path. She may not rise up and spit venom like others of us sometimes do, but she is no coward. Her strength is quiet and often bruised. But it is real.

I am going to pick Aisha and Nariman up from the camp tomorrow morning and give them a lift to the clinic. If they don’t have to wait past midday you can jump in with us for a ride back home. Thank you for your friendship, Kina. Your connection with Aisha makes me miss my own sisters, both of my blood and of my heart. I am grateful that both of your lives have intersected with mine.

MaaSalaam,

Libby

First Run

Dear Mama,

It was so good to hear your voice for a little while yesterday! I am so thankful the network has been up lately. I couldn’t believe my little Annabelle who normally shuns talking to her own father on the phone, talked to you for so long! I wish you could have seen through the other end of the phone pressed up against her little ear as she wandered from the ATV to the swing to the back porch in that purple Rapunzel princess dress you sent in the package, already grubby from climbing in trees and eating from huge communal platters or sorghum and okra in it, as she narrated to you her love of green mangoes with salt and sugar and her recent vexation with “blaggers” (black boogers – her linguistic invention not mine). I think the fruit rollups you stuck in that box must have won her heart over completely. The Christmas M and Ms are already starting to melt but the Kisses look so pretty in a glass jar on the kitchen cabinet. It is a lingering aftertaste of Christmas that makes me feel happy every time I see (eat) one (four).

The girls are happy to be home again, despite how wonderful Christmas in Kampala was. Annabelle’s only complaint has been that there is no movie theatre here so she can’t watch “Penguins of Madagascar” again while Mikat seems to be immensely relieved to be somewhere familiar where there isn’t a downstairs for mama and papa to retreat to after they go to bed. She is our homebody, our creature of routine and predictability. And, as well as she manages this somewhat ridiculous life our family has been given, I do sometimes think she looks at her three family members with a touch of scorn when we happily pull out another suitcase or change a plan at the last minute.

It has been so wonderful to have come back in with David. I felt like a terrible teammate for being too cowardly to snuff out every last rat in the dark corners of their house, especially when he killed 17 in his first 48 hours here. But he has been a trooper and in his quiet way, seems really happy to be back and reconnect a bit. I suspected his visit would swing one of two ways – either a sobering reminder of how overwhelmingly difficult life here with a special needs baby will be, or how deeply they miss it and are committed to getting back over here as fast as they can. I suspected the first, maybe out of a need to protect my own heart, but so far, I think it is swinging the other way. They really, really want to be here. So please keep praying, as I know you are, for them and for us, that God will give each of us wisdom, courage and grace to keep moving forward however we are called. I have spent so many months grieving their absence and preparing my heart for the worst. I almost don’t know what to do with the treasured hope that they could be back, a mere 20 feet away again.

Security-wise things continue to wax and wane much as they have for the past few months, drifting somewhere between absolutely normal and completely volatile. Markets buzz about like normal, I haven’t heard a single gunshot down the road or bomb across the border, people move about as always. I sometimes find myself turning into one of those naïve people whose ache for peace and stability so outweighs their sense of reality and the bigger picture that they say, “Everything is fine. Nothing could ever happen here.” Forgetting that just a few months ago, it did happen here. Sometimes my blinders to the tensions simmering from a hundred different directions under the smooth, clear surface of daily life are just so dadgum comfortable I want to let them just grow into the bridge of my nose and sit there. But, I try to take them off every once in a while so that, God forbid, should anything happen, I won’t be left picking up the shattered pieces of my sense of security in this place and God’s big plans for it. And I also take off those blinders out of respect to the women who I occasionally see speedwalking down the road with a basket full of belongings on their heads and three kids in tow who are fleeing into the bush and away from some rumor that hasn’t quite been disproved yet. Someday when that rumor is true and I get out on an airplane with my kids and a good story, my reality will still be worlds apart from hers. But treating the situation with just a bit of gravity only seems respectful to me. I'm not a fear-monger. But neither will I ignore the unease that still pulses in the people around me. (Sorry, for the tangent. Raw nerve perhaps?)   

But nonetheless, know that your babies are all well and on most days I think we are still hitting that sweet spot of responsible awareness and peace and joy in the moment. The other night just as we were drifting off into deep REM sleep something enormous clattered onto our roof and bounded across it making a terrifying racket. While I feared the biggest rat in existence was hunting for David to avenge his slain kinsmen (“Nextdoor!” I would shriek, “The man you seek is nextdoor!”) I think Bryan was still mostly asleep and thought half-a-dozen commandoes had just parachuted out of the sky onto our roof because between panic breaths he was hissing to me, “Get down, get down!” and in the dark I realized he was gesturing for me to get under the bed. The next morning David showed us a picture of what we think is a Genet that he caught with his camera somewhere behind his house in the night, and our best guess is that it jumped out of the Baobab tree and on to our roof on his way to seek out the chickens. So, we must be at least a little on edge. But at least that short-lived hysteria has produced triple its value in laughs.

And finally, I close with something of an admission. I got up yesterday morning at 6am, fumbled into my shoes in the dark, and took off towards the airstrip in the dark. I tried to walk in the thickest veins of sand to muffle my footfalls against packs of skinny dogs that are overly defensive of their masters’ goats. I traced my way along the path that rises over mounds of dirt past the rusting fuselage of the wrecked Antanov which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up in the fading moonlight. At the main entrance to the airstrip my heart jumped when four shapes emerged out of the shadows and didn’t answer my Arabic greeting, but they proved to just be Rwandan peacekeepers, sleepy and cold in their flak jackets and blue helmets. Their English and my French both proved deficient enough for us to simply move on.

For the first time since I was with you this summer in Lubbock, I ran. I ran and I thought of all the moments you would get up and run before dawn when we were kids, often dragging us with you. I thought of all the times I have insisted, I am not a morning runner. And I thought, I am turning into my mother. It’s just a matter of time before I am tricking Annabelle and Mikat into running with me too. (You played on our sisterly rivalry and told each of us separately that the other was going when in reality the other was still sound asleep – don’t tell me that’s not trickery.) But it made me smile. I ran up the North side tucked well into the camp where the warm bite of roasting coffee wafted out of the dark mouths of tents, and back down the South side where the red dirt drops abruptly off into the immensity of wide bushland, thoughts of you trailing in my slow wake.    

An anemic sun had paled the sleep-dusty world slowly awake when I stopped, breath ragged, dry heaves threatening. One of the Rwandans was shooing a lazy family of ducks off of the airstrip. A donkey brayed from somewhere in the camp behind me. You were on the other side of the world, probably feverishly preparing for your first class as Professor Talley while Papa urged you to come to bed. I am so proud of you Mama. I would love to come and sit in your class. But I am thankful to have done so many times before, both literally and in many other ways.

Sorry this is so long. Little ones are fussing for a snack. Where did naptime go?! We all love you and Papa so much! Greet everyone for us and get some good sleep tonight.

Hugs and kisses,

Elizabeth

  

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”?