Girls' Trip

Dear Toto,

Sorry, now even I can’t seem to call you anything else. Ever since Bryan married into this family trying his best to impress us all with his fledgling Swahili you have been Toto. Even now to the girls you are just “Toto” (unless Annabelle is feeling especially proper and decides to educate the rest of us: “But her real name is AAA-bigail.”) They occasionally search their little arms for their BCG scars from birth trying to remember who has one on the forearm like Aunt Debo and who has one on their shoulder like Aunt Toto. It is a point of great pride for them to have something that I don’t that makes them so much like their awesome aunts.

How I wished for you last week! Since the UN flights don’t take kids we were looking for a flight out to Uganda for the girls and I for our branch meeting at the end of this month. The best we could find was a full week earlier than we hoped so I left a few days ahead with the girls and Bryan stayed behind to work to the end and catch a UN flight out. A week in Uganda without Bryan is really not a big deal, especially now that we have our own place and teammates two doors down. It is just the required overnight in the ever-lovely city of J that made it less appealing.

Oh, the blessed capital of this troubled country. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I let you fly away from me that summer and spend the weekend there before you flew back to the States! Almost every day I read new reports of more robberies, kidnappings, assaults and who-knows-what-else there and I think of how Mama and Papa would have killed me if anything had happened to you!

But as much as I was not looking forward to that part of the trip, I am so thankful for a husband who undermines his own credibility by somehow finding me endlessly capable. Remember that as you sift through suitors in this season of life. Marry someone who thinks you are perfectly capable of just about anything, whether or not you actually are. Send your wife to spend the night in the capital city of a war-torn country…six months pregnant…with two little kids? Shoot, why not? he says. She’s all over that. And in moments like that, though you may very well be completely freaking out inside, that’s the kind of man you want to spend the rest of your life with, (especially if he also gets up in the middle of the night to bludgeon rats that were keeping only you awake).

So late last week the girls and I were the only passengers aboard a Cessna Caravan that had dropped off a bunch of supplies for a medical organization as we taxied down the dirt airstrip and waved goodbye to a shrinking Bryan waving back up at us as he stood on the ground next to the ATV. The flying time was relatively easy. It was a little over two hours but I was armed with snacks and books and the girls even slept for a while. We landed on tarmac and puttered our way between massive UN aircraft and military helicopters to find a parking space. The charter organization’s Land Cruiser gave us a ride to the terminal (a word that sounds so misleading in this case. Read: “Hot, crowded, exceptionally dirty cement structure that smells like urine) where the bored looking soldier flipped casually through our passports and waved us on through.

Outside was, as expected, chaos.

I drug our wheeled suitcase roughly over dirt holding Annabelle’s sweaty hand who held Mikat’s sweaty hand who held her crotch because our potty break in the ditch back at the edge of our dirt airstrip was too long ago by now, and together in a line we weaseled our way through tall women in kilometers of brightly colored fabric from head to toe, flashy politicians in silky three piece suits, old men with wooden beads, walking sticks and gnarled teeth, teenaged boys selling phone credit and cigarettes, teenaged girls in denim mini-skirts and even more teenaged girls with elaborate facial scarring and traditional cloth tied elegantly over one shoulder, every one of whom was talking, yelling, or laughing exceptionally loudly. Mikat nearly took out a one legged soldier talking on his cell phone in the middle of the walkway, but we eventually ducked into a small space of unoccupied shade and waited for the driver for Christmas Hotel.

Oh yes, if you have not stayed at Christmas than you have not experienced the best that J has to offer! It is a small two story building with an inner courtyard made entirely of uneven tile run by a bunch of Eritrean guys who seem to have a median age of about 22. Nonetheless they offer free airport pickups in their blessedly air-conditioned Pajero and Ethiopian coffee for breakfast so you can’t complain about a whole lots else. Fortunately, the rooms have AC and are sealed up nice and mosquito proof with one small closed window. Unfortunately, there is currently a fuel crisis in the country so the generator for electricity only runs between 10pm and 2am. So we checked into our room and I promptly sprawled my beached whale of a self on the lovely floral bedspread in a sweaty stupor while the girls were enthralled with “the computer on the wall” and watched NatGeo Wild in Arabic.

The bush pilot who had flown us out invited us over for supper with his family that night so we rested for a while and then made our way over to their compound where lots of little pilots’ kids were playing on a trampoline. They graciously shared from their stock of cheese from Nairobi to make us all homemade pizza and we even had pumpkin pie leftover from Canadian Thanksgiving. (I would seriously be cool with you marrying bush pilot. They are my heroes.) We had a pleasant evening, but taking serious the pilot’s wife’s caution that we should get back before dark (“I don’t want to scare you but someone was shot a few weeks ago right outside the gate…”) we headed back to Christmas for an early night.

Being the hot, sweaty, pregnant mess that I was by this point I was quite annoyed to discover that the shower pressure in our festive accommodations was about equivalent to Mikat spitting after eating baobab fruit. But we were resourceful and all three of us had quite the little party bathing in the butt-washer hose hanging from the side of the toilet (is it called a bidet?) and while I prayed we weren’t all going to end up with cholera, Annabelle announced in a fit of giggles, “This is the best shower ever!” They never fail to give me perspective.

Ten pm to two am were a few moderately comfortable hours of semi-consciousness while the babies sweated happily beside me, thrilled to be sleeping with mama in one big bed. By eight the next morning though we had wandered out to the street to an outdoor tea shop where I had sweet milky ginger coffee and the girls drank red hibiscus tea while devouring fried zalabia. We stopped for a bottle of water at a little shop and not one but two kind strangers gave the girls chocolates, just because. Our Eritrean friends gave us a ride back to the airport in the coolest 20 minutes of the whole trip and by mid-morning we were back in the throng of the airport.

I let the girls make royal messes of themselves with the chocolate lollipops while I feverishly filled out immigration forms for all of us and a sea of humanity jostled around us. An eight foot soldier sauntered up at one point demanding in broken English that the girls give him their candy, the cliché way so many adults tease kids here, and while Mikat screamed bloody murder Annabelle struck up a conversation and started showing off by counting in Arabic. He was so impressed that he guffawed and gave her a big fist bump before pointing us towards the security line.

You can imagine what a sight a visibly pregnant lady and two little Khawaja kids are in that context and we got a lot of curious looks from the swarms of soldiers, humanitarian workers and journalists, equal mixes of admiration (“Wow, you’re here with your kids!”) and disparagement (“What in the world are you doing here with your kids!”).

One time last year I muttered ungraciously under my breath to Bryan while we waited in line behind people in a shouting match, “This airport is one of Dante’s inner circles of hell.” Not two minutes later an official escorted us to the front of the line past the pandemonium and moments after that a shopkeeper gave the girls a bag of chips as a gift, once again, just because. Since then I have learned to sometimes withhold my judgements about the positionings of heaven and hell. Or at least, in which of the two the angels on this earth choose to reside.

This trip was no different. When it was all said and done we probably by-passed an hour and a half of waiting as people ushered us to the front of lines and the girls collectively accumulated two chocolate bon-bons, two lollipops and four Kit-Kat bars before we finally collapsed into our Kampala house, exhausted and cresting down a massive sugar high but safe and together and with all of our stuff.

I am so proud of you, Bryan said on the phone that night, everything went just fine! And it did. But I didn’t tell him I ate a gallon of ice-cream and slept for nine hours straight afterwards. And it’s true, it all turned out just fine.

But as I contemplate doing this next year with a new baby, I need to talk to you about your plans post nursing school… Any chance you can come visit for the summer? Or for the year? Or longer…? I am sure there are some awesome single bush pilots out here. Just saying.

We need our Aunt Toto.

Praying your OB rotations are going well. Wish Baby and I were your patients! Much, much love to you.

Ba

  

Finally on the plane to Uganda....started out with stickers 

Moved on to our educational reading...

Aaaand...we crashed.

Broken Down

Dear Lydia,

On Sunday we decided to go as a whole family out to K, the furthest of the camps. We had been pushing hard through the week, especially Bryan, but with a quick trip out planned for the end of this month for branch meetings and then only a short term back in before we are out for several months to wait on baby girl, we have been feeling a constant low-grade anxiety to get as much done as we can while we can. So on Sunday morning I packed up a bag with everything we would need for an all-day adventure with two little ones (and, whom I kidding, one pregnant one) – water, satellite phone, snacks as unobtrusive as possible (dried mango and market biscuits), and a few activities equally low-key (we went with small stickers, a notebook and six crayons). 

Sundays in the camp we live in are actually pretty easy for the girls these days. Remember when we would walk all the way out on Sundays carrying all three kids? With the ATV up and running and the kids being older Sundays are much less draining than they used to be when you were still here. The local kids are completely familiar with them so they aren’t mobbed anymore, and 9 times out of 10 my girls are more interested in the few kernels of roasted sorghum someone kindly offers for them to gnaw on, or simple sticks and dirt and bugs to play with, so I don’t have to stress about pulling out all the flashy Khawaja stuff to entertain my kids who have a harder time than their peers sitting still on a log for three hours. But out in K it’s a different story. Most of the kids there have seen very few Khawajas and maybe no Khawaja kids ever so there is quite a bit more swarming to see what the white-haired little people are doing with those colorful sticky pieces of paper.

Nonetheless we were all excited about the day and in good spirits as we took off down the red murram road out of town that morning. The girls were hiding under pink scarves buckled between Bryan and I in the front; I had on my pink tobe and he had on his black and white checkered shawl wrapped around his face like an Arab truck driver hauling a load of cotton candy. In the back two local friends, an American working with SP and a random German guy we were hosting for the week (story for another day) were all standing braced against the wind. On these million dollar UN roads we can fly in that Polaris, and with no glass to shield us, it honestly felt a bit like zooming down a wide red river in a motorboat somewhere in a dusty Amazonian alternate reality or something. I got hit several times smack in the face by enormous bugs as we whined down the road, thankfully none of them were cognizant enough to sting me.

As we passed through town and then on out in the ghaba, I noticed more soldiers on the road than I expected. Most were heavily armed but alone or in pairs and on foot, so I didn’t think too much about it. I am on that road so rarely these days it’s hard to know what is normal anymore. And even though Bryan is out there much more often and has a better sense of what to expect, the ATV at 40 miles an hour is not conducive to conversation of any sort.

About 45 minutes into our trip there was a loud bang followed by a hideous flapping sound inside the engine and the smell of something burning. The burning smell sent me into immediate flashbacks to the time my skirt caught on fire riding around in that thing, (have I ever told you that story? Remind me to, it’s a good one) but once we eased off the side of the road and stopped we realized that what was burning was not my clothing but one of the belts to the vehicle. We were completely broken down.

The girls immediately wandered off to climb on an ant hill while I settled into the thin shade of a scrub brush and the guys messed around with the ATV. I was just settling myself into the idea of a very long hot walk when a Land Cruiser pulled out of the only compound in sight, an NGO clinic, and stopped to see if we needed help. Within ten minutes, miraculously, the guys had together pushed the ATV easily into the clinic compound (we just happened to die on a slight decline) and we had all piled into the back of the Land Cruiser for a lift back to our side of the county.

As we settled into the bench seats in the back and I passed out dried mango to the girls, the driver shouted back to us, “It’s a good thing actually that you are headed back home. We are just hearing over the radio reports of heavy fighting in L. If they close the roads you would have been stuck out in K for the night.” At that moment I remembered the thunder I had heard that morning, faint and distant but coming from the wrong direction for rain. But at the time it hadn’t seem to register with anyone else as something troubling and we hadn’t heard news that morning of fighting so I ignored it, something I will not do again. Even as we passed back through town on the way home, lorries full of heavily armed soldiers were roaring out of town, fists raised in recognition of the local women trilling shrilly in support as their boys headed out to shoo the rebels further afield.

By the time we tumbled back out of the Land Cruiser and walked the last little way back to our house I was feeling absolutely flooded with gratitude. When the car died we were within ten kilometers of the fighting as the crow flies (though not necessarily driving closer to it, just passing it). And while I still don’t feel like we missed certain death by a hair’s breadth by any stretch of the imagination, spending the night out in K pregnant with two little ones as we wait for security to improve so we could get home would have been pretty miserable too. As it is, we broke down in maybe the single most convenient spot in an hour and a half drive’s worth of possibilities, with a secure place to leave the car until we could come back to get it and a vehicle happy to give us a lift back.

Just the other day Bethany and I were sitting on my back porch in the evening waiting for our bread to bake in the charcoal oven that we had overfilled with pans of dough. Our husbands were off retrieving the ATV (security had cleared up by then and Bryan had all the spare parts on hand) and who knows where the kids were exactly, somewhere within ear shot. And we sat and talked about what it is exactly that makes this place so hard for women like you and me and her. On one hand it may seem obvious to people from the outside – my gosh, all you talk about is rats and hearing artillery in the distance, are you really asking why it is hard? But I really am. Because I really don’t think it is those things, or not those things alone anyway. I have a bush house that is pretty basic, but it is a really comfortable house that genuinely feels like home to me. The work that I devote my mind and heart to on top of the work of raising a family is work that even on my worst days feels like my dream job. I love it. And on the days that we hear the worst rumors of terrible political turmoil, one of the things that I feel – to my utter shame and regret – is excitement. My most base instinctive self likes the adrenaline of this place.

Many, if not most days, are the happiness of feeling worn out at the end of a long day of meaningful work, listening to my girls scream with delight as my husband swings them from the neem tree as I set our supper made from scratch while my baby kicks inside my big belly and James Taylor plays softly in the background. I may be sick of hauling buckets of water or hearing people talk about where the rebels are today, but still, we're talking really good days. But other days I am leaning over the lemon bars that taste like diesel because I couldn’t get my charcoal to light so I cheated and used fuel to start it and now I am crying my pretty little head right off. Why? Not because of the ruined dessert surely. Why do I cry so much here? (And I don’t mean just since I have been pregnant…)

I don’t know the answer. Maybe the rats and rebels play into that low-grade constant anxiety and I just don’t give it nearly enough credit. But I think maybe it has something to do with that same kind of feeling I had last Sunday as we drove home and passed soldiers going to the front and civilians streaming in from outlying villages to the safety of town. It is the immense relief and gratitude of being spared a significant inconvenience right as you pass by all the people for whom those inconveniences may cost their life, if not in actually fact, than at least in a thousand other true ways. Simply living this close to suffering day in and day out, even on the days when it hardly ripples the surface of my comings and goings, is hard.

At least that is all Bethany and I came up with before our bread was finished baking. You would like her a lot. She reminds me of you in many ways. And while I will never stop missing you being in your house, her presence there is balm on a wound. I have told God that a scenario in which she leaves and yet you are not back yet is not acceptable to me in any way whatsoever, but he has only told me to take one day at a time and not worry about tomorrow today which I am begrudgingly attempting to do. I trust his goodness and holiness and wisdom in all things. I just don’t trust him one little bit not to escort us through incredibly difficult things that make us grow in some way or another. He has proved to be faithful to both of those things in my experience.

Sorry for going on and on about things that probably stir up lots of mixed emotions in you too. I need to sit and talk to you about all this. Something tells me you can speak to many sides of those emotions, feeling miraculously spared and also so deeply hurt. Thank you for letting me use our distance to process my own thoughts on this journey. I smiled all day when I saw that picture of sweet Rebekah being fitted for her stander on Facebook the other day. Was it just me reading into the photo or did she look so incredibly happy? She is so beautiful.

Kiss her and Josh for us. We are getting so excited about seeing David in just a matter of weeks now.

Much love to you my friend.

Libby

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