Coming Back

Dear Mama,

The thought that only three months ago – almost to the day – you were holding my week old baby in Uganda is hardly conceivable to me. That already seems like a life time ago, doesn’t it? Life rolled on without you fixing our breakfast or walking girls to school or taking laundry off the line for three whole months and we got used to being a family of five, to less sleep and the constant bobbing about with a baby in our arms. It was a pleasant, healing season. And now, I am writing you from my North African living room, feeling even further away from you than I did in Uganda. The big girls are napping (Mary Katherine is sacked out spread eagle on her bottom bunk, Annabelle is quietly sounding out words from the stacks of books spread around her on the top bunk). Sabrine is semi-swaddled on my bed, soaking up the fan diligently pushing the muggy afternoon off of her.

We flew in a week ago. The Ugandan government had taken Al Shabaab’s threat to bomb the Entebbe airport seriously enough that soldiers were stationed at every corner and jets went screaming protectively over the city at all hours (because that made us all feel safer, of course….). So we decided that flying out of Entebbe the day of the threatened attack as we had scheduled wasn’t our most prudent move ever, and instead drove nine hours to a border town. We slept there one night and woke up early the next morning and all climbed sleepily into the plane full of little girls’ bikes, blackboards for literacy classes, brooms, buckets and six months’ worth of margarine, canned fruit and size 4 diapers and set out for home.

It never fails to amuse me by how nonchalant our girls are on trips like this. The fact that they can be bored by a ride on a bush plane that refuels next to UN helicopters kicking up dust storms or that soars over rebel territory where suspicious planes are sitting on abandoned airstrips in the middle of the bush is ridiculous. But it’s all no big deal to them and so they just nap or scratch away in activity books and ask me 50 million times if we are there yet while clouds graze the windows they press their noses against. Sabrine did great too. Really as long as she is somehow touching me she is pretty much game for whatever.

As we banked over the camp and glided down towards our airstrip I saw Bethany and the boys standing on a huge dirt mound waving up at us and it made me cry happy tears. A few minutes later we lurched to a stop and they drove their truck in past the peacekeepers and prepared to load all our stuff into it. Even before we could pry ourselves loose from our shoulder harnesses, arms were reaching up into the plane to take Sabrine and she bobbed sleepily from arm to arm in the plane-shaped shade.

This has been our easiest homecoming yet. People were in and out of our house while we were gone so the rats were never able to completly reclaim lost territory in our ongoing border wars. And the blessed Faders did more than I will probably ever even know to clean the house so the asthma attacks and general gag-factor has been significantly reduced.

Still, coming back is always hard. I have felt a bit paralyzed trying to remember how I ever created variety out of lentils and rice, and hauling water for three little bucket baths before everyone gets carried away by mosquitoes at night suddenly feels overwhelming. I forgot that you can’t leave out sticky rat traps during the day because they get filled up with lizards which only have about a 50/50 chance of surviving the destickification process, and the pretty purple quilt I brought up for Sabrine’s pack n’ play isn’t practical because I can’t see scorpions hiding in the pattern.  

But all that hard stuff fades in a week or so. I tell myself I am not allowed to panic about that kind of stuff until a week in, and at six days later I am already feeling mostly over it. My body is remembering the rhythms of life here.

But I let my guard down about the other things.

As we were unloading boxes of our stuff into the house the day we got back I heard three consecutive tremors in the distance. The far-away rumble that you really want to be thunder but know isn’t because its coming from the wrong direction and is too precisely defined.

I forgot what it feels like to hear bombs.

Apparently the bombing across the border has been intense lately and lots of people have stories about it. For reasons I suspect I will never really understand, many refugees still continue to travel home for months at a time. Sometimes it is to check on an elderly parent who stayed behind. Sometimes to give birth to a baby so it will be “at home”. Sometimes it’s to check on a grove of mango trees that are bearing fruit. Sometimes I think it is just to connect with one’s roots, to remember where they come from. But that this would be happening when the Antanovs are coming night and day is beyond me. That people would walk for two days through the bush to a place with no medicine if you get sick, where you can’t start a fire at night because the planes will target it, amazes me. But people do.

Last week Jafar, an old man who works as a guard on our compound, had a nephew who was hit by a bomb. Two actually. He was tending Jafar’s herd of cows that stayed behind when the plane came. He knew what to do and laid down in a low place. The explosion always goes up and outward. If you are on the ground you have a very good chance of escaping unscathed. Everyone knows this. Even me. But he was unlucky. The bomb fell so close that it hit his arm, splitting his hand and wrist. In pain and terror the boy got up and ran, only to be hit a second time. This time his lower leg was severed.

The kid miraculously survived and was carried out to the hospital a few kilometers down the road from us. So soon after we got back Jaraf asked for some of his salary so that he could go care for his relative.

The one who was in a bush hospital.

Because he got hit by a bomb.

Twice.

That’s the kind of stuff that has been hard this week. I forgot what it feels like to live in community with people who directly experience war.

The first couple of nights we were here I slept lightly, not because I was anxious but more because I was excited. The nights are deep and dark and full of the liquid swoop and chirp of a thousand different living invisible things. It’s beautiful. But now Bryan and I can sleep for nine hours and still wake up feeling like we have been hit by a truck. Our bodies are remembering how to live here. Our hearts are still catching up, I think.

But I don’t mean to make it out that we have been sad or depressed. Sobered is a better word for it. Sometimes I am tempted to wonder if I overly dramatize life here, making both the good and the bad so much more extreme than they actually are. But as soon I get back I laugh at that fear. I am reminded that, more often than not, it’s actually quite hard to dramatize it enough.

Which is why you should know how beautiful so many of the moments are. I will write more soon and tell you about our first trip back to the camp, receiving many visitors thrilled to meet the new baby named after them, the girls first week running around with the boys and getting back into homeschooling, how fabulously I can cook with charcoal! : ) But for now I leave you with this image to savor knowing your babies are all well and exactly where they long to be. Many nights Annabelle, the more jumpy of our girls (aren’t we firstborns always?) likes to crawl in bed with Mikat. Sabrine, my precious, easy baby, falls asleep in her pack n-play in the room with them. Their bedroom door is open and their mosquito nets blow lightly in the rainy season breeze. Bryan and I sit on our comfortable couch drinking hot rooibos tea while he plays Papa’s old guitar and we sing the girls to sleep. This is most nights. And it is always precious.

I love you so much. I will write more soon.

Love,

Elizabeth

 

Phases of the Moon

Dear Bethany,

Of all things to be doing on our last day here, blogging seems like one of the least productive ways to spend my time. But the ETA for the plane keeps getting pushed back, and the last time Bryan called on the sat phone (cell network is down again) they said the plane is still on the ground in the deep South doing immigration so we still have an hour or so to kill before we head to the airstrip. Amazingly, our bags are packed, breakfast dishes are washed, trash is burned, the house is more-or-less rat-proofed, and the slew of guests popping in to say goodbye over the past couple of days has tapered off as everyone heard we were leaving early this morning. So, somehow I find myself in the highly unfamiliar position of feeling packed and ready with time to kill before we go catch a plane. It’s a Christmas miracle!

Leaving this time is so much more bitter-sweet than I anticipated, which is in and of itself a gift. To be honest, I was expecting to feel completed fried at this point after weeks of guests and blowing through projects and goals full-steam ahead knowing we had only a short window of time before heading out to have a baby. But I am actually quite sad to be leaving for another period of time measured in months, not days or weeks, thinking not so much of hot showers and fresh vegetables and ice-cream, but of time away from the house and people that have come to feel like home. The girls are even a bit weepy about the goodbyes, which amazes me considering how much they have missed having your boys around this last week. I thought for sure they would be ready to get out of dodge and back to Kampala where there are Christmas trees and other little cultural peers to play with in English. But even though the thought of Christmas and a new baby sister is exciting to them, Mikat keeps asking why we always have to go places. Any of these places is fine, why can’t we just pick one and stay put? But what a gift it is to be already so eager to come back, to realize how much of our hearts are embedded in the soil and walls and flesh of this place. I often fear the alternative. So I am thankful to be sad today.

The weather this week has been bizarrely cold. Even colder than when you left. This morning we must have woken up in the 50s. It is so odd to put the girls to bed at night in fleece pants and to tuck their curtain into the rebar frames of their windows to keep out the chill. And it is so dry. My skin feels brittle, like I’ll shatter if I move too suddenly. The girls and I have taken to rubbing pure shea butter into our skin after baths at night, leaving us as shiny as our North African neighbors who have been oiling themselves down too as protection from the air. And my feet! Mercy, they are disgusting. It has gotten to the point they actually snag on the mosquito net at night. Forget the Pediegg that promised miracles. I need some industrial grade sandpaper. I can’t wait to get a pedicure in Kampala! I sometimes think about the Kenyan beautician who responded to my apology for the state of my feet with, “Oh this is nothing. You should see the feet of the humantitarian workers who come in from Somalia.” But I fear that these days workers from The Horn may be rising in the ranks all thanks to the input of my soles…

You haven’t missed out on too much this week. On Friday we had our closing ceremony for the literacy teachers, which went well. The rebels across the border are still doing heavy “recruitment” throughout the camps so some of the community leaders were unable to attend as they dealt with that, but we had a good group and the top students showed off their new skills by reading stories out loud for everyone. I am admittedly a little nervous about leaving all of this hanging while we take off to have a baby. Abraham is still so new to mother tongue literacy to be taking on following up with new groups and leading his own teacher training out in K camp. But maybe exactly what needs to happen is to get Bryan and I out the way for a little while and see how things go. I am excited to get back and see for myself.

Earlier in the week we had just sat down to dinner as a family when a distant roar of cheering and crying went up in the camps. It was too late for a soccer match, too disorganized and widespread for any kind of political rally, too happy for a funeral, too un-musical for a wedding. It went on for quite a while before we realized that it was the first night after the new moon and the thinnest crescent had just appeared in the sky. Have you heard people talk about this? Apparently if the first crescent moon of the month is rocked open-mouthed towards the North, the rebels back across the border will have a great victory. If it is rocked towards the South then the Northern government will have victory. As we enter dry-season it seems that everyone is gearing up for fighting again so the night sky seemed more significant than usual. The moon followed in the wake of the sunset so quickly that I didn’t see it the night we heard the outcry, but the following night I saw it and thought it seemed perfectly balanced in the web of stars. I was pretty sure someone said that meant that neither side would have victory and everyone should prepare for long bloody months ahead. But I am new to reading signs in the sky so who knows.      

Along those lines, security has still been good, though a few anemic rumors have bubbled to the surface this week. In fact, several people have told us that around 4am a few nights ago an Antanov flew over the camp and the surrounding areas slowly and with a light shining down as though it was looking for someone or something. Sultan himself is supposedly back in the in the area so I am sure the plane was just gathering intel, but still. The thought of Antanov poking around in the middle of the night gives me the creeps and has revived old curiosities I haven’t visited in a while, like what a bomb up close really sounds like up close. But otherwise, all has been quiet, the only man-made sounds in the night and early morning those of local churches celebrating the approach of Christmas.

Speaking of security issues, we are praying for you as you travel to Burundi for your holidays with loved ones! I pray that you will be able to relax in the lush countryside far away from the chaos of big cities. I don’t know whether the never-ending uncertainty of contexts like the ones where you and I are raising our kids make us more adept at relaxing in political crises or more in need of good ol’ boring, but I pray that whatever it is you need, you will find in abundance this Christmas.

You looked so pretty in those whatsapp pictures you sent me from Nairobi! It makes me realize how I never see you with your hair down. Mine is permanently braided or wadded on top of my head here, especially now that I can’t bend over to soak it in a bucket of water to get it wet for washing. I just end up feeling guilty for using so much water simply dumping it over my head three times for a soaking and two rinses of shampoo and conditioner, instead of recycling it. I actually had Bryan help me wash my hair the other night, since bucket baths in general are getting less convenient at this point in my pregnancy. It wasn’t exactly the scene from “Out of Africa”, but there is something romantic about a man who is willing to soak, lather and rinse a woman’s hair with a bucket and a cup, even if she is 32 weeks pregnant, and swatting at mosquitoes while complaining about heartburn. He is a good man.

The VHF radio is crackling to life on the table as the voices of pilots flying the planes I can hear landing just beyond the bush behind our house announce their descent. I have only heard European and East African accents so far, none of the North American voices that usually announce the planes that carry us in and out, but still, they will probably be here soon so I should close.

Give all your boys our love. Annabelle has a running list of all the things she needs to tell Josh when she seems him again so I hope he is duly prepared. I can hardly believe I believe I will have joined your ranks as a mother of three the next time I see you! Forgive me if I am a blubbering, sleep deprived mess.

Merry, merry Christmas to you and yours, dear friend. May this be a season of peace for us all.

Love,

Libby

My traveling gooses...

In a Perfect World...

Dear Lydia,

Oh friend, the number of times I have started writing to you in the past week or so and been cut short by one of a million things are too many to count! Bryan is with David at the airstrip as we speak. They are probably having tea in a little shop by the side of the strip as they wait for his plane to land. As is usually the case, I was caught off guard by the goodbyes. Even having known for the whole two weeks he was here when exactly he was leaving, the flurry of packing up and going to the airstrip, prayers and one hug for him and lots more for you and the kids felt rushed.

His visit here has been so good and we have been so grateful for all his help with the translation team. Thank you for being so cheerfully willing to play single parent for over two weeks while he travelled the globe to come pitch in on this side again for a while! That is no small thing. Bryan and I have felt so encouraged about where things stand this week workwise. It turns out that despite everything - all the wars and evacuations, obstacles, challenges and setbacks, it is happening. Somehow – creatively and imperfectly, but steadily – it is happening. Thank you for the part you have and are playing in that.   

I have wished for you these past few weeks as I have been doing this literacy teacher training course. In a perfect world you would have been there with me, lending your experience from Tanzania and thoughtful, thorough personality, to my experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, creative messiness. We would have made quite the team! We will still, I think. Until then though, it has been good for me to gain a little experience in all of this on my own too. Because, we don’t live in a perfect world do we? And you have to start somewhere.

This particular thing has started under a tree in our front yard. Every morning one of the earliest participants sweeps the sprinkling of yellow neem leaves that have fallen in the night from the shady expanse of smooth dirt that is our classroom. When class starts and we are busy parsing syllables on the rippled blackboard hanging  by a piece of red string and a nail from the broad scarred trunk of the baobab, the guard’s hoard of scatter-brained chickens bob around our feet and women fill jerry cans loudly from the masura nearby.  Our chalk pieces and duster get stored between drills in the battered wheelbarrow propped against a bumpy root.

The trickiest thing about this training to me has been trying to find the perfect balance between focusing on training teachers (here is the methodology behind the primer, switch up drills to keep your class engaged, talk through what you are doing as you do it blah, blah, blah) and focusing on actually teaching this group to read (ḍ is for ḍulak, let’s pair it with the vowels we’ve learned - ḍä, ḍa, ḍu,ḍi, ḍï, ḍo, de, ḍü; nope, other way, remember we actually read left to right in your language, and so on). It is a teacher training course.

But until three weeks ago they had never seen their language written down.

So, understandably, it’s been a bit tricky.

Thankfully, about half the group was already quite literate in English because they are attending local secondary schools (they can’t speak a word of English but they are familiar with the Roman orthography) and they have picked this up fast. Yassir volunteers for everything, grinning like a kid while he reads with gusto through the story of the giraffe and bull fighting over the milk. They have been practicing actually teaching lessons this week, and he is a natural, confidently walking us through the drills and the story, feeling free to tweak what it is the primer to better fit whatever the reality of the class at the moment.

Then I have a several that I am pleased will just be finishing up knowing how to pick their way through a sentence. Mostly that’s Zahia. She’s older than the other two women in the class. She dresses nicely and has a Nokia phone. But mercy, she can’t read worth a flip. Which isn’t really what bothers me as much as her refusal to try. She can memorize a six sentence story having heard it just once so at first I thought she was a fantastic reader, that is, until I saw that her finger was off by about three words the entire time she “read” a story. Whenever she is asked to come do something at the blackboard she takes her sweet time flipping her sky blue tobe over her shoulder and dragging her flipflops loudly as she makes her way to the front. And instead of trying to actually sound anything out she guesses – brilliantly - but almost always a guess. And if she is wrong she throws her head back and laughs a gorgeous, carefree maddening laugh before handing the chalk to someone else.

The gender divide is more distinct than I hoped it would be. Even Mariam and Khadija, the other two women in the training, are soft-spoken and easily overrun by others. It almost makes me appreciate Zahia’s fearless sass. But Mariam and Khadija try, and though they are quiet, I see them sounding out words to themselves as their fingers move across a page and my heart swells. They may not be standing in front of a class of 30 other people anytime soon, but I bet they will teach their kids to read their language. And that is enough for me.  

We are all learners together. Some of us are learning how to sound out a few letters while others are learning how to explain the reading process to others. I am learning all sorts of new Arabic vocab as I stretch the limits of my language, shuffling through my Arabic dictionary as I try to remember the words for vowel or confidence. Similarly they are expanding their language as they practice teaching in their mother tongue and come up with words that haven’t really existed before. Words like syllable, comma, page. I love what I hear. A story is something like “Fox thing” because traditional stories are often about (told by?) foxes. A book is something like “spider web” because when books were first introduced to their community in years past people thought the white paper looked like spider webs. All the boxes for drills in the primer have been dubbed “houses” so we practice syllable drills in “the big house”. It’s absolutely fantastic.

But I think the best thing that maybe any of us have learned in the past three weeks is that it turns out I actually love teaching literacy. I love it. That should be obvious enough. But after years of spending the bulk of my time focusing on learning language(s), building a house(s), growing and feeding a baby(ies) etc. etc. and then facing the terrifying inertia of actually getting started, it is an immense relief to me to realize I did not in fact miss my calling. I was made for this. I may be making a mess of it all now as I wade through the necessary mistakes and learning curve of all the things I now know not to do next time, but I like it. It feels important. And I think someday, I will be good at it too.  

The other day Aisha and I had a conversation while I was kneading bread and she was washing the dishes. I know she would love to be sitting in on this class, and would quite frankly, be one of the best learners in the group, but as a single mom with a job it just didn’t work for her to be in on it this time. But I feel bad sometimes when I see her sweeping the porch out of the corner of my eye, straining to listen in as we read as a group. As we worked in the kitchen together yesterday and talked about the literacy class she said something that meant the world to me and that will sustain me on the days I feel like I’ve completely blown it. She said, “Thank you for this work you are doing. It is giving us patience.” It was that sabur word again, the one that has meant so much to me in my years here that I am naming my daughter after it. Patience. Endurance. Sabur. This work is giving sabur. To think that anything I am doing is bringing about that, fumbling and bumbling under a baobab tree with a warped chalk board in this imperfect world, well, that’s enough for me.

You are a part of that gift of sabur too. And I hope you receive it back as I do, in your own ways and time. May God continue to give us all sabur.

Other than all that literacy chatter I have no big news. Life here has been so delightfully quiet lately that the UN cancelled their weekly security meeting last week. I haven’t heard a single gunshot in the night this week and no one has cut through the fence line looking for something to snatch in weeks. But it is still never boring. There is an endless supply of random happenings spattered throughout the week that keep me just the right amount on our toes.

A couple days ago an adolescent chicken plum fell right out of the sky a few feet from where Bethany and I sat entertaining guests. A hawk had snatched it from the yard then lost its grip when it tried to settle in a tree overhead. One of the ladies plucked it up, tossed it on the hot charcoal heating water for coffee and proceeded to casually turn it every few minutes, occasionally removing tufts of charred feathers or innards as the skinny bird cooked. Eventually she pulled it off the fire barehanded and tore it into bits and handed it out kindly to the kids who clamoured for some roasted meat, my daughters the greediest among them. They noisily ate the unexpected manna from heaven that had been bobbing around our yard literally minutes before   

Another day a Land Cruiser full of Rwandan UN Peace Keepers pulled into the compound, all heavily armed and weighted down with blue helmets and flak jackets. They were a brand new battalion, and having heard of a number of robberies at NGO compounds, elected to familiarize themselves with the area. When they had called ahead of time to say they were “sending someone” to get the GPS coordinates of our home we were imagining an individual turning up. Instead the truck roared in right up between the two houses and a dozen soldiers (who could speak neither Arabic nor English) leapt out and fanned out across the yard, from the latrine to the guard hut to the tire swing, standing at attention and hardly averting their eyes from who knows what in the distance even when Bethany offered them glasses of water. It was bizarre. Thanks again UN. I feel so much safer now that there are twelve AK-47s and several grenades within feet of my children. But they didn’t stay long and I shouldn’t complain. Like I said, we haven’t had a petty break in in a while.

I will let you go. We are praying for your sweet reunions with David very soon! He is coming with lots of love and hugs from all of us here. Hope you are gearing up for a very merry Christmas.

Much love,

Libby (or Lïbï)  

Of Kittens and Snakes

Dear Mama,

The girls are napping and Bryan is out at one of the camps down the road so I am going to take advantage of a quiet moment to say hello. I am covered in flour as I write, especially my belly which conveniently bumps into everything these days. I am baking about four dozen of your delicious earth bread rolls in my little charcoal oven for Thanksgiving, which we will celebrate tomorrow. Some SIM friends are slaughtering a sheep in lieu of turkey and in the evening we will all have a big meal together. I made the rolls today and the green mangoes are softening in a hot pot of cinnamon sugar right now for a mock apple pie. Tomorrow I will make the cinnamon rolls.

Bethany and I have had to figure out how to cook four dozen rolls, three dozen cinnamon rolls, three pies and some stuffing between my little charcoal oven (that won’t completely close when my cookie sheet goes in the top) and her big solar cooker. So we started a day early and I think will all have it under control by tomorrow evening. Inshallah.

Oh mama, what an unspeakable blessing it is to have Bethany next door! I didn’t know how long I could have stayed emotionally healthy without the Graves there, and despite the handful of other Khawaja women around to connect with, there is nothing like having another wife and mother within shouting distance. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined God redeeming that specific heartache and loss in this season so perfectly. Most days we are running so busy with homeschooling, cooking, hosting, and our own individual ministries and projects that we don’t get much more than I “Can I borrow some yeast?” asked through a screen window. Life is too crazy here right now for us to catch up sufficiently on the lives we led before our paths crossed. But simply knowing there is someone close enough to call for out loud and who intimately understands, that is an unspeakable gift. Isn’t it crazy that I feel that close to someone whose birthday I don’t even know yet?!

Sometime last week Bethany told me she was hosting a girls’ night on Wednesday and asked if it would be okay for all her guys came and crashed at our place for a couple hours while we all hung out at her house. I was impressed that she was up for hosting when Eli was just getting over a serious bout of malaria and they have been hit with one logistical challenge after another on their team lately.  We have only been back in for three weeks or so and I already feel the wear and tear of daily life nipping at my hems. They have been in for four months and are tired. But that is so Bethany, ever cheerful and eager to pitch in. So girls’ night it was.

I walked all thirty feet from my front door to hers on Wednesday night right at seven, admiring the enormous full moon peeking up over her tin roof and the tea candles blinking in her wide windows. I was surprised to hear voices inside already, expecting to be one of the first, having by far the least distance to walk. I loudly salaamed everyone inside instead of knocking, slipped off my shoes into the pile already outside on the porch and stepped inside to a room full of friends and neighbors all standing to greet me with big smiles. Vaguely confused I then noticed the paper chains hung over the curtain rods and the pinks sign taped overhead that read “We love baby girls!” My first thought was honestly, who else is having a baby girl? I am a pretty suspicious person and I feel like it takes a lot to surprise me. But I have to say, when I finally realized it was a surprise baby shower for me and Sabrine, I was undoubtedly the most shocked I have been in a long time.

It wasn’t your typical baby shower. There was no diaper cake or punch bowl, no pastel wrapping paper or silly celebrity baby name games (and of course it would have felt bizarre if somehow there was). We drank cool Koolaid out of plastic cups and ate charcoal-oven-baked goodies made from everyone’s treasured stock of chocolate while enjoying the soft oscillating exhale of a fan that kept the mosquitoes at bay. The conversation and laughter were sweet, the prayers were precious, the blessings offered were priceless. They were a gift because they were offered up by women – some who are mothers, most who are not – who nonetheless live shoulder to shoulder with me in this beautiful mess of a place and love it and hate it and wouldn’t trade it for anything just like me. Women who again, in one way or another, understand.

What’s more, I realized that this was my first baby shower ever, which made it even more special!  Having all three of these babies in Africa has made traditions like baby showers … impractical, shall we say, though we have never been lacking for anything. In fact, I am pretty sure when I was pregnant with Annabelle some sweet ladies Bible class at a church back in the States actually threw us a shower and sent us boxes overflowing with adorable clothes and burp clothes. But a baby shower in absentia is just not the same thing, and Wednesday night felt so incredibly meaningful to me. I knew you would want to hear about it, to know that there are sweet souls out here who love your baby and your baby’s babies, even the unborn ones. I am so thankful for Bethany.

In fact, in this stressful season for her, I can only hope that living next door to someone who understands means as much to her as it does to me, because I sometimes feel like a pretty crummy friend. Juggling nonstop guests (we have calculated that by December 9^th, we will have had guests with us 47 of the previous 50 nights), this literacy training course, homeschooling and all regular life and work stuff, I have not been much help shouldering any of her burdens. This has been a good week for me and I have felt incredibly encouraged about life in general, but a couple weeks ago, when I was hiding from my children in the latrine bawling and having something akin to a panic attack, I know her presence on the compound was a subtle, but very real, comfort to me.

A few days ago their sweet little kitten Oreo got bit by a small snake one night or ate some neighbor’s rat poison or something equally dreadful and started into a slow and miserable demise that was just heartbreaking to witness. Every morning I would quietly ask, “Is she gone yet?” and be horrified to hear that she was steadily shutting down, completely paralyzed and unresponsive, but still breathing. It made me think of that blasted, precious baby dik-dik I had when we were still up North across the border and his sad end. In this place where there isn’t enough mercy to go around for all the human beings that need it, it can feel so confusing to grieve for animals, and yet at the same time, crying over anything that is suffering always seems worthwhile to me. And frankly, after all the other losses the Faders have had to endure in the past year, losing a kitten so painfully just seemed like such a low blow. I kept praying that God would let it die quickly, which didn’t seem like that big of a request really, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.

Yesterday the whole Fader family was out in the afternoon and I had the sudden passing thought perhaps I should help nudge the poor thing across the line it was hovering on, though the thought terrified me. I ultimately didn’t, mostly because I was afraid of the Faders coming home and their three boys finding Aunt Libby having snuck into their house and in the middle of smothering their sick cat and not only emotionally scarring them for the rest of their lives but also ensuring that they move away forever. But later that night, when Bethany was coming over to put something in our fridge and said in sadness and utter relief that the poor thing had finally died, I admitted to her my very real temptation from earlier in the day and we laughed with tears in our eyes. Because really, what else can you do?

Anyway, the point of that sorry tale is that she is that kind of person. I wouldn’t put a kitten out of its misery for just anybody. But I would do it for her in a heartbeat.

I meant to tell you all about how the literacy training is going but I will save that for another day. I should close for now. I hope you guys had a good Thanksgiving all together. Abigail’s messages about Thai food and ice storms made me feel very far away but somehow happy too imagining you together and warm with curry and fireplaces. Bits and pieces of news also sifted through poor internet connections and patchy cell networks about the Roaches daughter dying in the car accident and Deb and Josh’s puppy getting loose and being hit by a car. The thanksgiving and the grief always seem to go hand in hand don’t they? Different colors bleeding into the same sunset.

My prayer is that those whose hearts are hurting - bruised or completely shattered, whether from the loss of a small animal or from the loss of an only sister - may they sit in the company of someone who understands. I am pretty sure that is God’s greatest gift to us in this fragile life. People who ultimately can’t fix anything, but who know intimately the texture and feel of your deepest griefs and joys. I’m not sure what else to hope for on this side of that line.

I will write more soon. Your grandbabies, filthy and running around the yard with three little boys they have come to adore, send their love. I need to take bread out of the oven.

Love you so much.

Elizabeth 

My surprise shower with precious ladies! (Bethany is behind me on the right)

Baobabs

Dear Melinda,

Your last email made me laugh. Sorry that as you get ready to head back to this side of the world you get stuck carting Dominion, one of those world-conquering board games that you so thoroughly despise. But I was really desperate for a Christmas present for Bryan! Thanks for playing Santa. I’m glad that you were at least amused by the fact that David Graves, world-conquering board game player extraordinaire and brilliant introverted nerd got stuck hauling in his bag a nursing bra sized by letter combinations my four year old hasn’t even learned in pre-school yet. Because he was getting here well before you, he got the short end of the stick. As this child in my womb grows we were getting pretty desperate in that department out here several thousand miles away from the closest Target. My bosom and belly have together conspired against me and created this perfect little cavity right at my sternum that is a beacon for all way-faring flying insects, (especially sitting around the dinner table with male guests it seems). Feeling six legs and four wings panic inside my shirts is getting really old. Anyway, all that to say, thanks for being one of the many people that have been willing to stuff all sorts of random things into their suitcases for us.

I am so sorry that your hometown in this country is still such a mess. Your line about feeling sick to your stomach every time you look at your suitcases waiting to be packed filled me with such bittersweet empathy. I know what it feels like to be on that side of the ocean getting ready to come back over and not knowing exactly what you are coming back to. I know you already know this, but please know again that it really will all be okay. Really. Especially if you have an open-minded perspective on the definition of okay. Bryan tells me this all the time and somehow, inexplicably, it does make me feel better.

Either way, I’m really ready for you to be closer.

So I have thought of you a lot this week as I get ready to kick off my first literacy teacher training event. Woohooo! I am incredibly excited. And intimidated out of my gourd…. But mostly excited. The whole thing will be a bit less traditional than the standard “workshop” approach. We presented the literacy materials to the Sheikhs of the community and asked them to each select three individuals that they think would make good mother tongue literacy teachers. After lots of running around the camps to meet with people, wait around on people, try to actually find people, etc. etc we have rounded up a group of ten individuals, most of whom I think will make great learners and teachers. I am excited to see how they will carry this work forward with their community, even while we are out to have Baby Girl.

In fact, as I was leaving the last meeting with the Sheikhs and prospective teachers on Friday morning, a woman ran out of a nearby hut and began to speak in her language rapidly and earnestly to the Sheikh escorting me back to the ATV, and to Abraham, my local literacy counterpart. She had been hanging in the background during our meeting, taking care of a slew of toddlers, hauling water, bending over a cooking fire. Unlike the (relatively) well-educated women who had been selected for the training who were dressed in nice tobes and occasionally checking their Nokia phones, she was dressed in a dirty cotton slip, her neck and arms full of traditional beads. I have no idea if she has ever been to school a day in her life.  I couldn’t understand her words as she spoke, but her eyes and gestures communicated clearly. Please, please can I be one of the ones to learn to read my language. After they spoke for a minute Abraham turned towards me with a shrug, “There are others who aren’t committed to coming and she is begging to come to the training. Can we take one more?”

I said yes. How could I not? Maybe she will turn out to be the brightest one in the group. She has certainly shown the most passion. And that goes a long way in my books.

So starting Monday morning I will be meeting with a group under our baobab tree. We have a chalkboard and some rope beds to sit on. I don’t suppose we need much else. It is interesting to be doing a literacy teacher training event that is also just a good old fashioned literacy class. This language was written down for the first time just a matter of months ago. So I have to teach people to read it themselves first before I teach them how to teach other people to read it.

I am really excited.       

It’s hard to believe that it was not quite a year ago that you were here up North with us. The seasons are passing each other at the doorway and the weather is starting to remind me of when you were here. That last stray shower we all wondered about weeks ago we now know for certain was the last rain of the season. It is so dry the air feels brittle, but the bugs are all out in their final death throes before they wither up and die like the grass. The rim of the sky is bleaching slowly, the ashy whiteness bleeding higher and higher into the cloudless blue with each passing day. Ash flutters from above in solitary flakes almost every afternoon as grass fires crackle beyond the fence line. I usually can’t see them during the day, only the plumes of smoke they send up from the fields, but at night, when I go outside to fill up a bucket for baths or scrape a dinner pot into the trash barrel I can see orange flames rippling casually in the near distance, unsettling and beautiful at the same time. But the nights are still cool, dusty and sharp, but blessedly cool.

While every other plant is curling into itself and dying, the baobabs are heavy with fruit, their olive green pods fat and fuzzy on all the sprawled branches. At seven months pregnant I feel a great fondness for these great trees, all confidence and beauty in their corpulence and blatant fertility. Boys clamor up them to staggering heights and knock the pods down. Even as I write this the Fader boys are loping back on to the compound with sacks overflowing with gongolez and are squatting down to crack them open with rocks. The seeds inside are as white as the sky today, the cracks of pod against stone ringing out pleasantly into the afternoon.

I’ll close with the cobra story. It’s a truly terrible way to end a letter but I forgot about it until just now and I have to tell you. Last week I was going into our bedroom to get the girls towels after bath. I knew exactly where they were and didn’t bother turning on the light. But as I grabbed them up I heard a suspicious sound in the corner under the table – not the fast scurrying of a rat, or even the scaly rustle of a lizard. This sounded legless. And big. I froze and hollered for Bryan who came and immediately switched on the light (genius). Sure enough, a big black snake writhed in the shadows under the table. We didn’t have a weapon immediately on hand so he kept an eye on it so we wouldn’t lose it while I ran to the front door and yelled for the guard, scooting dangerously curious little girls back out into the living room and up on furniture. Beleil was there in two seconds with a big stick and killed it easily enough once they found it hiding behind my blue suitcase. It turned out to be a cobra, just under four feet long.

In my bedroom.

Needless to say I was thoroughly freaked out for a couple days and propped pillows up against the gap under the front door every night before we went to bed (because that is the only way I can think that it got in) and drilled the girls on what to scream in Arabic if they see a snake (Arabic because heaven knows I am no help, I would rather Beleil come running). But eventually I decided that just thanking God that it was in my room and not the girls’ room and then getting over it and going back to sleeping deeply at night was a better long term plan. So that is where I am at now. And as long as there are no more cobras I think it is a plan that will work out just fine.

Actually someone told me the other day that pregnant women apparently have snake powers and can freeze snakes to the spot with an intense stare. That’s a pretty cool super power actually. I’ve got a couple more months to test that one out. Hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is, I will be ready with my big belly for a stare down for any reptile who wants to take me on.

I will let you go now. Kiss the grandbabies for us. And even as you grieve telling them goodbye in the week ahead, be consoled knowing there are two (soon three!) little girls, and their mama, excited about seeing you again on this side!

Blessings in the days ahead. It will all be okay. Somehow.

Much love,

Libby

Is this really the only picture of us in tobes? Get back up here so we can rock them together again!

Sabrine

Dear Sabrine,

I dreamed about you again last night.

In this dream you came relatively easily into the world. You were silent and big-eyed as you took in your new surroundings. My mama held you for a long time and when you began to cry I gathered you into my arms and nursed you. When I woke up this morning you were tossing and turning in my womb as though the dream had woken you too.

You have been so active lately. Even though the space you inhabit has been occupied twice before, feeling - and often seeing - another human jostle inside of me never fails to take my breath away. There have been times I have called near-stranger’s attention to my taunt belly, pointing out your tiny knuckles and heels as they arch across my skin. I am already so proud of you and hungry to show you off.

Earlier this week you even woke your Papa up in the night. It has still been cool enough that I don’t mind him sleeping close and apparently your kicks to his ribs were enough to wake him. He tells me he poked you back and the two of you spent some time conversing in this strange morse code while I slept. It’s odd to think of you two sharing moments like this while I sleep. He is also good at finding your heartbeat, one of the advantages you have in being the third occupant of my womb. He rests his ear on my stomach at night before we go to sleep and then taps out the rhythm he hears on my side.

He and I call you by the name we have chosen for you, Sabrine Elizabeth, though often still privately. Mikat insists you should be named “Alinda” a variation of a good friend’s name, and while Annabelle cycles through various names with vaguely royal implications, she most often calls you simply “Talata”, number three.

Your name has stayed with us for a long time, long before we saw that unexpected pink line on the white stick announcing your existence. It comes from the Arabic word sabur, which you will learn means patience. In the past few years we have heard our North African friends use this word over and over again as they face trial after trial. But we must have patience, they say. God has asked us to be patient.

And they are. Endlessly, beautifully, heartbreakingly patient.

Your name ties us to a people and a place that has become a part of our very hearts. It calls us to a gentle strength that we have witnessed again and again and that we want to own in our own lives and that we pray you will own in yours as well. You are named for the resilient beauty we believe God calls us all to.

The name Sabrine translates wonderfully across cultures too. Variations show up in poems about ancient Scottish princesses and modern-day magazine articles about Egyptian movie stars. From France to the Phillipines to Brazil, the name Sabrine represents something that can be transmitted across languages and cultures with an easy fluidity, while simultaneously retaining a subtle exotic foreignness, at least in most places I suspect. This is also something I hope will be true for you too, that you will be a citizen of the world, able to identify and connect with all manner of people and places with relative ease, yet without ever becoming so melded into any one of them that you lose distinctiveness. This is not an easy blessing to bestow on your unborn child, but if you can learn to carry it well, it will bless your life in immeasurable ways. And I trust that you will bear this gift with incredible grace.     

You are getting bigger by the day, which means so am I. We plan on going to Kampala just before Christmas to wait for your arrival, and by then I suspect I will be huge and tired and sweaty most of the time. It hasn’t been unbearably hot here recently, but I feel each of the hauled buckets of water and ovens full of white-hot charcoal by the end of the day. Even so, I am so grateful to be pregnant here among people that see my swollen ankles as such a gift. In America dear friends responded to our announcement of your impending arrival with, “Number three? Whew, better you than me, girl!” as though they feel a little bit sorry for my bad luck. While here women say, “Mashallah, you are getting so big. God’s work is such a blessing!” as though my current state is worthy of great envy. I like being around people like that. People who talk about how good it is to have your daughters first so they can help with later babies, instead of which maternity clothes are the most flattering.

Of course, there are two sides to that coin. Almost every single woman here in North Africa has answered my question, “How many children do you have?” with two numbers. The first number is higher – 5, 7, even 10 - the number of “stomachs” she has had, pregnancies or babies born alive. The second number is always lower, sometimes much lower – 5, 3, 1 -  the number of children in her home currently alive. In this world babies aren’t named for weeks or even months after they are born, maybe similarly to how in the West rarely name a baby as soon as we get that initial positive pregnancy test, rather waiting at least until the end of that first tenuous first trimester. And yet named or not, mothers always give that first number, including every life, however short it may have been, I am a mother of ten. I have four children living at home.

Sometimes the realities of this world pressing in around me like a swaddle get to me and I begin thinking too much about whether or not the mosquito that just bit my ankle is carrying malaria, whether the bush hospital down the road has oxygen for preemies, how I’m not even sure yet if the hospital in Kampala will let your father in the delivery room with me or not. I am so much less fearful with you than I ever was with your sisters, and yet even so I have moments of anxiety.

But your sweet kicks and rolls and the precious moments of hearing your name spoken out loud and finding it lovely give me such peace. You seem so healthy to me, and despite the growing aches and Braxton hicks, I feel so healthy too. God has been so absurdly good to us. There is even a peace in remembering that no matter the circumstances surrounding your birth and the days and weeks on either side of it, you and I have little to no control one way or the other. So we ride these last few weeks out together, savoring the sweetness and knowing that the aches along the way are passing.

I am so excited to meet you sweet one. Keep following God’s instructions as you grow and stretch, as you practice blinking and sucking and dreaming. We are waiting for you patiently one the other side, sweet Sabrine.   

Much love and anticipation,

Your mama

P.S. – It bears mentioning that your father, though absolutely thrilled at the prospect of being the father of three daughters, was not completely convinced by the grainy images at the last ultrasound a couple months back. While I am confident beyond a doubt that you are my baby girl, if circa February 6^th, 2016, we find out that you are in fact my little boy, I promise to rewrite this letter more appropriately. And I love you forever no matter what.   

Psalm 24

It is all his anyways,

all it holds and hides and lays bare.

Every anthill and tamarind tree, every gushing river and heart beating under fur or scales or skin.

We are all his, every person on the face of the planet.

Not someday. Not hopefully.

Now.

Every one of us.

We belong to him.

Because, in the beginning

he pressed down the reared head of the foaming sea

and told it to be still.

And on its bound limbs he built beauty and pattern and purpose.

Over the fathomless depths of chaos,

he built a world of teeming, towering life.

Who dares look into the eyes of the ones who did that?

Who could possibly reach out to grasp those hands?

And yet…

We are invited to be so bold.

Are you deeply aware of your place in this existence?

Can you distinguish truth from its cheap, glistening imitations?

And are you willing to give up everything else in pursuit of it?

Are you honest and humble and kind?

Then grasp those hands with confidence.

And when you are plagued by doubt and dark memories,

remember the name he has chosen for himself.

I am of Jacob, he says.

Jacob.

Lying, scheming Jacob

who nonetheless saw truth one dark night

and wrenched loose his bones to grasp it.

Take heart.

That is the name he chooses to wear.

Look into his eyes without fear.

Ancient doorways and passageways, rusted and corroded shut for centuries are now creaking open.

Those same hands that balanced creation on chaos are now prying open ways long shut.

Who are you? the spaces and and souls within quiver in anticipation. Who are you?

He is the master craftsman here to reclaim his masterpiece.

He is powerful, and hungry to bless.

He is the King of glory.