Confession

For a while I was a bit panicky when I realized how many of my friends were saying goodbye to Facebook. There were days living out here in the boonies that my once-every-three-months binge fest on internet back in East Africa felt like my only thread of connection to college friends, cousins I hardly ever see, random childhood friends etc. and I gobbled it up like a rare luxury whenever I could. But now that we have internet access on our compound out here (at least most of the time) and I can pick up snippets of near strangers’ political opinions, belly pictures, memes of pop cultural references I no longer understand, and albums brimming over with near-identical sepia-tinted portraits of families of four on a quilt in a field laughing gorgeously at someone just beyond the photographer…I am feeling a bit more sympathetic to the droves of people disconnecting from social media. It’s not just the waves of envy and guilt and homesickness that come with the never-ending newsfeed. For me it’s often trying to figure out which version of myself to put out there. Wondering who is seeing what and if their opinions of my opinions are as divergent as mine are of all of theirs.

I know I worry too much about what people think. I worry about what my American friends would think about my opinions of how they let their daughters dress and what my North African friends would think about how I dress on vacation at the beach. I worry about what my liberal friends would think about my opinions on homosexuality, and what my conservative friends would think about my opinions on gay marriage. I worry about what my MusIim friends (and grandparents, come to think of it) would think about my opinions on the occasional glass of merlot over dinner and what my in-laws would think about what I let my children eat off the ground. And if my indy-music loving friends with good taste in everything musical ever find out about what I think about Pentatonix covers of Nicki Minaj songs I am absolutely going to die.

Maybe some of you can relate.

But as an American (from one of the most conservative counties in one of the most conservative States) who has close MusIim friends and who is living in this age of global political polarization, I find it most difficult to talk about working with MusIims.

The people who read this blog, or at least have at one point or another, are from wildly different walks of life. And when I write I am always worried of upsetting at least one of them. Like the relative who posts about how a MusIim could never be a “real” American when he senses just how bigoted, ignorant and downright ungodly I find many of his ideas. Or the best friend from high school, whose husband left his Christian roots to convert to Islam for her when she hears about the masses of people down the road from us who are seeking Jesus (and how happy that makes me). Or the precious old lady back in the States who daily prays for us when she hears me tell of how being asked if I am a MusIim by people here is a question that greatly honors me. Or the MusIim high-school coaches and teachers who I will always love and respect when they hear me talk about how communities I work with have been devastated by the violence and bigotry of a certain brand of Islam.

Sometimes I don’t know which is worse: unintentionally feeding the fears and abusive politics of the culture wars into which my nationality, “religion” and skin color all drag me, or denying the legitimate horrors my friends and neighbors have faced at the hands of their “religion”.  

Yesterday, seven young women walked a couple hours from a neighboring camp and came by our house for a visit. They are members of a tribe of refugees who are predominantly MusIims, but who have also faced some of the most horrific  things imaginable at the hands of their conservative Islamic government and, of their own initiative, have recently started seeking the way of Jesus en masse. Our visit yesterday was lovely. I don’t know them well yet but look forward to getting to know them better and the conversations still ahead. While we sipped mint tea under the Neem tree in front of my house and watched our kids play yesterday, I sat there thinking, I am drinking tea with a woman in a headscarf named Jihad (I am not making that one up) and we are talking about Jesus’ way of love and how we are going to celebrate the upcoming Eid holiday. How the heck am I going to write about this?

So this if how I decided to do it. To just admit that it is hard. And it is going to keep being hard. So please bear with me, however delighted our uncomfortable my thoughts or experiences might make you. Bear with me as I struggle to communicate sometimes. We are all on the same journey. On many days my closets traveling companions are church-going Americans from whom I have much to learn about faith, joy and generosity. But on other days I keep step with my MusIim brothers and sisters who teach me about patience, forgiveness and prayer. A part of what I am doing here, alongside literacy classes, teacher training, and vernacular language development, is to offer Jesus to those who seek him. He has meant too much to me not to share. But that doesn’t always look like or even mean what you might think. And even as I hold him out open-palmed, I am continually surprised by the ways I find him so graciously  extended back to me in ways I have never seen him before, sometimes offered back by people who don’t even know him yet.

Home

While we were back in the States over the past few months several people told us, “It is so good to have you home.” And when we were hugging people goodbye preparing to head back this way, many people said things like, “We are sad to see you go but so happy to know you are going back to your home.” I accept statements like these in the precious spirit out of which they offered - they always make me feel loved. But they never fail to highlight a paradox in my heart, the realization that for many people, home is a specific place or idea, something that can be succinctly articulated by a point on a map, a select handful of people or a specific accumulation of personal belongings.

But for me home is not so neat an idea. It is more like a complex set of muscles that are in a constant state of tension and relaxation. As I move between spaces and places they inhale and exhale, a settled sigh of contentment simultaneous with a subtle bracing. In any one place there is rarely a complete tension, but similarly never a total relaxation, every place various parts familiar and foreign. For me it is always give and take, ebb and flow, the push and pull that moves me down the well-worn paths between my homes.

For instance, in the past three weeks I have been in three places – the American city in which I was born and where my parents now live, the East African city so similar to the place I grew up and where we have a private space to retreat to in times of R and R or evacuations, and my North African home where I have my favorite kitchen stuff and a shelf full of my daughters’ favorite books. Being in these three places in so brief a time has highlighted many of the nuances of home.

An example of one of these is my use of language. Leaving the States is like slipping off the most comfortable house slippers of my mother tongue, American English tinted lightly with the hue of West Texas, lazy “R”s and “ya’ll”s , slipped off and left casually by the front door. Next to them is the pair of sturdy and reliable Birkenstocks I wear most often, the “Airport English” born out of my high school days and used everywhere between West Texas and North Africa. The sharper American edges are worn down into well-worn grooves where my heels regularly tread. East African idioms and British flavored vowels – “For bad luck…”, “I was quite chuffed” and sentences flourished nicely at the end with “isn’t it?”  

And now I strap on my beautiful Arabic sandals, bright beads and delicate straps that pinch a little. At the end of a long day my high arches ache a bit, but the colors make me feel beautiful and happy – vivid green “Mashallah!”s, deep purple “Kalaas”s and the ever useful bright orange code-mixed Harrison-created ejective: “Ya-sa-freaking-laam!” I may still be breaking them in, but this pair is one of my favorites.

After over a week in Kampala - decompressing from our wonderful time in the States, attending some meetings and meeting the doctor who will deliver our baby early next year – we spent all of Friday on an absurdly little plane skirting storms before landing back on our dirt airstrip late in the afternoon. The girls rode home on the donkey cart and Annabelle declared at one point, “Well, this is funner than I remembered!” which seemed to me to be a reference to something bigger and more abstract than just the donkey cart ride, but who knows.

Seeing how gracefully (and effectively) nature begins to reclaim territory you staked out in your five month absence is a humbling thing. Spiders and small rodents have seem astonished by our presence in our own living room, and I am reminded that the battalions of tiny ants that line the walls of the house and window sills are not to be fought off, but merely politely redirected in less obtrusive directions. I could not possibly kill them all.   

And yet even as my creepy-crawly muscles tighten up at the nightly routine of spraying mosquito nets and wiping up every last vestige of food from counter tops within minutes, other muscles are breathing an enormous sigh of relief and relaxing. I love my bedspread and my handmade kitchen curtains that are the colors of all the spices I love to cook with – cumin, cayenne and turmeric. I love the constant purr and cackle of birds overhead and being reminded every time I go to the latrine at night that the Milky Way is not just mythology. I like trading out the rush to meetings with the steady stream of lazy visits. And even though there is a part of me that now tenses up with every unexpected rainstorm, there is another part of me that loves the renewed intimacy with the weather, even as I rush to get clothes off the line or shutter windows closed.

Home. It is a complicated idea to me, made up of lots of little pieces scattered across the globe that could never possible being swept up into one place or time. On some days, I grieve this fact, and envy those who can always regularly return to something so sweet. I have cried a tear or two for a sense of home that I will never have. But on my good days, days like today, I feel absurdly blessed. I gag a little as I sweep up the confetti of ants into a dustpan that had set up camp in the bathroom, and then sit down to a cup of Kenyan tea with my husband in our living room with the sisal rug and while we talk about a new Arabic word we learned or a funny memory from a Jimmy Fallon youtube video that we watched last time we were in Uganda, we watch our girls outside eating green tamarind pods as they climb all over the ATV in their purple dress-up clothes, all while I periodically check my phone to see if the network has come back on so I can text my mom.

Home.

It’s a good place to be.

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