Priests, Kisses and Witchdoctors

Dear Mama,

I have thought of you a thousand times this week and wished I could blink you here. In some ways, I can’t believe you have never set foot in my home here! In other ways, given all the different circumstances it only makes sense. Some days I can hardly believe I am here. But I am hungry for you to at least be able to imagine exactly where I am sitting when I send you a Whatsapp message, what I might be hearing or smelling. For what it is worth, I am usually on the half wall of my back porch in the mild back-lit blue light in the hour or so before sunset. Usually my phone is in one hand while the other absently fans charcoal to life for something I am baking for dinner in the little oven by the back door. It glows and crackles like chalk while I type a tagline to some picture of the girls with my thumb to send to you. Sometimes I am on my dark brown couch in the living room, other times, if I am especially hot or tired, on my bed in front of the fan in my room with the door closed. But usually I am outside. That time of day, when your morning is just kicking off on the other side of the world, is so pleasant here. There is a feeling akin to relief most days as we crest the hump of noon and slip steadily towards evening and I know you are awake somewhere in the world.

I reminded myself of you this week playing hostess. We invited two of our good friends over for dinner, two Spanish Jesuit priests who are doing relief work here with refugees. Honestly, for reasons I can’t quite articulate even to myself, they are some of my favorite people in the world, even though I don’t know them all that well. They are Catalonian for one, minorities in their own right with their own language, culture, and subversive resistance movement to their name, which – clearly since I am where I am in the world – means something to me. They are barefoot for another. Always. Barefoot. I haven’t actually asked them why. I am assuming it is a vow of some sort and honestly, it is less conspicuous than you might expect. But seeing them walk around with both throngs of refugee kids, and UN officials in exactly the same state of pedicle undress, though mysterious and a little weird, just makes me happy. They are warm and funny and very honest. And, maybe more than anything, they are frightfully skinny. And the older I get the more obsessive my need to feed hungry-looking things, so our friendship works out well for all of us.

When they showed up the other night (Pau was actually sick with malaria and couldn’t make it, but Alvar came with Davide, a brand new brother from Italy only two days off the plane. He didn’t look so hungry yet,) we went out to greet them at the gate and welcome them in. I hadn’t seen Alvar since we had been back and he greeted me warmly with an embrace and two big air kisses over each cheek. He then handed us a package of cured ham, a kind of Spanish prosciutto, from what surely is a prized private stash on their compound. It tastes amazing.

And if you can brag to anyone you can brag to your mother, so you should know that I have inherited your gift for minor culinary miracles with limited resources at hand, as well as your skill in covering kitchen mishaps with gorgeous glazes and garnishes or something absurd like roses woven out of tomato skins. So when I served up a marbled chocolate cake with almond icing, Alvar was effusive in his praise, even though the icing hid the charred bits that my oven consumed and the marbling disguised the parts that against all odds would still not bake all the way through. “You won’t find a cake like this for hundreds of miles!” he told Davide, (who was incredibly polite considering his dinner last week was in Rome).

Most days I am raving about the craziness of the world in a way that makes my stomach churn. But sometimes the craziness of the world can just make my day. Who knew that the spiritual highlight of my week would be feeding chocolate cake to a skinny Catalonian? And who knew that in this refugee camp in North Africa, both my first public kisses from a man here (unless our guards are more observant than Bryan and I give them credit for), as well as the first pork I think I have ever eaten here were delivered at the hands of a barefoot Jesuit Priest.

The world is just too ridiculously wonderful.  

Other than cooking and home schooling this week I have spent the rest of my time putting the finishing touches on the J alphabet book and primer so we can get them sent off to a printer in Kampala. I have had fun testing the materials a couple times with groups in the community – once with a handful of women in a dim hut because it was raining outside, another time on mats in the splayed shade of a lalob tree that we kept rotating to follow as the sun moved across the sky. Since no one can read their language yet (one of those by-products of it having just been written down for the first time) one of the main things I am looking for in the alphabet book is that the pictures actually communicate a specific thing that can be connected with a specific sound in their alphabet. For instance, when they see the picture of the hyena do they say, “That’s a hyena!” or do they say “That’s a wild dog!”

For the most part the pictures have been great. We have access to hundreds of stock photos from a partnering organization with great artwork that is appropriate for this part of the world. And we have worked with a local “artist” to sketch a few tools and plants or whatever that make great key words that are specific to this context. But now we are sanding down those last few rough edges and I have been chewing on very specific little problems. For instance, “Y” for “Yukchan” didn’t illicit the word “fish” (although the picture looked like a perfectly good generic fish to me) but was clearly a mudfish to everyone who saw it, which doesn’t start with a letter anything like “Y”. And the picture under W for Wäl didn’t make sense to anyone because everyone knows that Wäls don’t have necks but are merely round. And as much as I suggested that “elbow” seems like a vastly preferable key word at least socio-linguistically to “witch doctor” for the letter “Ṭ”, I was outvoted.

So this week, because our local artist declined the task at hand and we have to get these files to the printer ASAP, I have been channelling my inner graphic artist that surely lies latent in me somewhere from the genes you contributed and have been trying to draw pictures of old men with feather headdresses, children hopping like frogs, and gourds with no necks to satisfy our literacy team. At one point I had a photo-copied page from a bird book on top of one of my glass baking pans balanced up against a sunny window trying to trace a picture of a knob-billed duck on my makeshift light-table and thought how thoroughly amused and proud you would be. Thankfully, I seem to have inherited your creativity but not your perfectionism so, though much less impressive than they would be if you were doing them, the books are at least getting done and I am even getting sleep in the process. (Now let’s just hope people can actually learn to read using them.)     

Bryan is out in one of the Western camps this afternoon and I am home with the girls. The network is down, which I wish it wasn’t, but he went with the Sat phone and all the latest chatter has been good, or at least neutral so I am not worried. In that department it has been a quiet week. I tried to get this knocked out while the pickles were napping but they are up now and have been asking for me to set them up with old t-shirts and paint for a while so I should probably close. You should see the things they paint. I think the artistic gene must skip a generation.

Tell Papa that talking to him on the phone the other day was balm for my soul. It was his birthday but I was the one who talked so much! Isn’t that always the case though. Thank you both for that. I hope you guys had a good day.

Love you so much. Let’s start making plans for a trip over here after littlest is born! Love and kisses all around.

Elizabeth   

P.S. - The network just flicked back on and Bryan texted to say he is almost home. So I am going to run and throw on some lip gloss and a splash of perfume - one more thing I learned from you!

Drums in the Distance

Dear Lydia,

It seems painfully cliché to start this with a reference to the weather, but I feel like you should know it is hot and muggy right now, a bit overcast outside where yesterday’s laundry is hanging limply on its second chance to dry. I scrambled to get it down yesterday when thunder started rumbling and the wind pushed in heavy black clouds over the rim of the horizon. But I should have known better because the storm rolled in from the South-West so ended up being all talk and nothing more. It’s the ones from the North-East that get me every time. No matter how mild-mannered they look and sound, they sometimes make me wonder if they are going to take the roof off when it’s all said and done.

We had one like that a few days ago. Bryan and the girls had taken Eli and his boys up on an invitation to walk down to the river in the afternoon while it was hot and bright outside (I was up to my elbows in flour). Ten minutes after they left I heard the first growl of thunder. Thirty minutes later the sky had split open and was pouring down so thick it was hard to see through. Bryan called in the midst of the deluge saying that it hasn’t quite let down on them by the river just yet but looked like it was about to and would I possibly be up for an adventure? I was, so I abandoned my baking project, threw on a raincoat and jumped in the ATV. At one point, when the grass was closing in over the top of the vehicle on the overgrown path and I was levelling small saplings as I crashed through the undergrowth, I seriously almost turned around and just let the guys carry my two whiney girls back home in the rain (I was pretty confident the two little ones and the adults who had to carry them were the only ones who were really at all interested in avoiding a long hike in the storm). But eventually the path opened up a bit and I found the soggy group surrounded by half a dozen local kids, all of whom piled in the back for the ride home. In the end, they all got home just as wet as they probably would have been otherwise in the bed if the ATV, but a little bit faster, and we did so with a fun story to boot.

Honestly, the thunder has been a welcome, even if sometimes unnerving sound these days. After bragging to my mom about how incredibly peaceful it has been here lately – no looming security rumours or urgent need to keep go bags ever ready – (and I wasn’t lying to her!), I’ve had to resort to being a bit more selective in what snippets of daily life I throw in a text message or email. You know how that goes, the necessary silence to avoid panicked rumors back home. That is one of the hardest things about life here to me, throwing up a Facebook post about bugs in my flour when really I want to say something more along the lines of “Oh my Gosh, you would never believe what we are hearing right now…!” But I understand the reasons why that’s important.

It was Friday evening and I was outside with Mikat wondering whether I should go look for Annabelle who had wandered off on an adventure with Josh when I heard it – that thrilling, terrible sound in the distance that could be a hallow jerry can being thumped from somewhere quite close, but just isn’t, or that might be thunder, but is just too even-toned and man-made. At that very moment Bryan walked in the gate from a UN security meeting that had gone unusually long and I was bummed to see from his face that the meeting wasn’t long just because some long-winded and overly sentimental expat was blabbing on melodramatically at the end of his six-month term. Thankfully, Annabelle and Josh wandered in just moments behind him, seemingly oblivious to the continued percussion the background as they showed us their skewers of captured grasshoppers.

We stayed close to the compound over the weekend, but other than that day, we’ve heard nothing more than the occasional round popped off by a drunk soldier or hunter and everyone is moving freely once again and without much fear. Those who came too close were apparently scattered and no longer much of a threat. Though, from what we hear, they were moving through with their women and kids and herds, apparently just trying to get further North without a fight. That means that after Friday night, many of the local hospital beds are full of women and kids, and I shudder to think of who all is still “scattered” in the bush.

Anyway, the incident, as far as it relates to most of us, is over. But it has meant that we are now all listening again. I forgot how exhausting it is to always be listening.

The days feel long but the weeks are flying by. We have started homeschooling the girls now, so most of my mornings are spent with them reading stories and praising pages printed with wobbly capital letters and paintings that draw much more on the use of colour than any discernible forms. But I love it. I really, really love it. And so do they. It has lent a stability and routine to our lives that we were all sorely needing.

A couple mornings a week Bryan will take over school and I will work on literacy stuff. I am so encouraged about how close we are to a big literacy push. In the next month or so I think we will have the primer, alphabet book and maybe even a song book and story book ready to print. I’m going to spend some time in the camp tomorrow testing the primer. On Saturday Bryan sat with a group and read Genesis Chapter one with them in their language for the first time ever. Moving doesn’t even begin to describe what that felt like.

I am feeling Baby Girl move more and more every day. I am a few weeks past the half-way point in this pregnancy now, right about the point where I transition from thinking, “Wow, this is going by so fast!” to the terrifying curiosity “How will this child possibly continue to fit inside my body for four more months...” I am ashamed to say I was a bit nervous about coming back pregnant after four months in America to a refugee camp. I mean, the typical African comment after you have been away of “Welcome back, you are so gorgeous and fat!” is one thing. But coming back after Mama’s cooking and pregnant to people whose UN food rations have been cut by several hundred calories a day is just cruel. I was smugly relieved the first time I was back around a bunch of women to hear one comment that my belly seemed small for this point in a pregnancy (A. Not true. B. Why do I still have to be so blasted American about this stuff?!). But good old Aisha, my oldest and dearest North African friend quickly stood up for me. “Well of course her belly looks small. Women with big butts always have small bellies.” Aaaand there it is. Welcome back.

The girls send Josh their love. They are learning more about interacting with boys than they ever have before in their lives now that there are three of them are living in your old house. This week alone I have heard Annabelle utter things I have never heard her say before, things like “We gave it a quick death,” or “It looked like thick green infected blood.” Though in all fairness, she answered the boys at the door the other day with a baby doll stuffed under her shirt, saying dramatically between pant breaths: “My tummy hurts. I think the baby is coming. You need to take me to the hospital!” So no telling what new things their parents are hearing from them around the dinner table at night.

In fact, as I write this I see the three little ones outside squatting in a circle around something on the ground and Annabelle is joyfully shrieking, “Step on it!” so I better close for now and go check on them. Give David and your babies our love. As always, you are greeted by many here.

Love,

Libby

Obligatory belly picture. (As we have determined, I am an American woman deep down after all.)

Art class in our little homeschool classroom... 

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