Seasons

It is hot.
The cold nights full of thunderstorms are long gone. It's almost as if mother nature saw how wet we all were and in an act of over-protective paranoia decided to swaddle us all up in suffocating layers of white hot sky. We're learning to go to be early and wake up early like everyone else, trying to make the most of the cooler hours of the day. It's actually a rhythm of life I'm really beginning to enjoy. Between noon and three everything stops. Shopkeepers pull their rope beds onto the porch and take a nap. Women lay in the shade of big trees and play with their babies. We sit in our tent and read.
People are beginning to harvest a few early crops like sesame. They are also beginning to prepare for the season of wildfires. Along with the coming drier weather and Harmattan winds come grass fires known for consuming entire mountainsides, and people's homes and farms along with it. In order to destroy the dry grass the fires feed on, people are already burning perimeters around their land, creating fire breaks that they can control. Several nights ago the hill behind our house glowed orange all night. Right now I can see several columns of smoke on the horizon with funnels of birds flying above them.
Last week our askari started burning the grass around our compound. It was amazing how fast it spread. Within seconds from the time he touched the fire to the grass the flames had run the width of our fence with a sound like a hundred little kids stomping on bubble wrap. Slender pieces of black ash wafted into our yard and gathered on top of our tent like a light dusting of black snow. It all made me incredibly nervous, but he was watching the direction of the wind and slashed any flames that strayed too far. Minutes later it died out almost as quickly as it had started.
When the rains were here, they brought incredible coolness but they also flooded roads so that it was hard to move around anywhere. The coming dryness brings the threat of fires but the market is now full of goods brought down from Northern towns. Watermelons have been replaced with custard fruits. Bees are pushing out the mosquitoes. We are slipping out of one season and into another. Even though we have been here four months, everything is still very new to me and I hate to think of the nuances of life I may be missing because of that. I'm gulping it all down now; I can't wait to just sip it. I can't wait until the time next year when I will more fully enjoy what I am feeling now because I know it will soon be gone; or, when I will wait expectantly for something that is coming soon because I know this can't last forever.
I can't wait to think, "Oh yes, I remember this."

Inshallah

We made it back! We had a bit of an adventure getting home but three days ago we not only walked in our front gate but did so with all our government paperwork in hand (if you only knew what a miracle that is!) Our trip back started with a late night car ride through the bush to a town several hours away from the southern capitol. We shared the rented car with three students headed home for the weekend who had also missed the last bus out of town. About twenty minutes down the road the kid sitting next to me pulled out a shiny black pistol and casually began loading it. When he saw Bryan and I exchange glances he laughed. “Don’t worry.” He said, “This is just in case someone decides to give us trouble.” I couldn’t imagine what situation could be improved by an eighteen year old with a gun, but thankfully my imagination wasn’t stretched and we made it in late that night, in time to catch a plane heading out at 6:30 the next morning.
Our place feels a little more like home every day. We have some furniture now in our tent bedroom and we are working on installing a beautiful porcelain toilet in our latrine (praise the Lord!). Our “yard” is still a wreck though as we get ready to start building our kitchen and guestroom. With all the piles of grass, stones and cinder blocks lying around it looks like the Big Bad Wolf was last week’s dinner guest.
Several friends have stopped by to say hello since we’ve been back which has made us happy. Today the women who work next door came over to chat, first with me, and then with each other when my Arabic ran out. At one point they poked their heads into our canvas bedroom door and eyed our home approvingly. When they saw our big bed in the corner though they asked me why we only have one bed. Before I could even begin to think of how to answer they continued, “Libby, if you have only one bed, why don’t you have a baby yet?” Sometimes language deficiency is a blessing. All I had to offer in response was a shrug a blush and one word “Inshallah.”

On the Banks of the Big River

We've been here in the big city of the south for only a few days now, but it has been long enough for me to begin suspecting that those first 30 minutes in the airport were moments spent in a microcosm of the city itself. We stepped off the plane and melted into the crowd swarming around the travel documents desk. Young development workers were exchanging their North Face jackets for aviator sunglasses. A local politician in pointed leather shoes was greeted by children in indigo school uniforms, singing and holding out a lei of tinsel flowers. Tall dark girls in denim and faux Dolce and Gabbana purses mingled against a wall adorned with anti-corruption posters while soldiers representing at least three different branches of the military smoked cigarettes up against another. Air conditioners blasted moderately cool air into the one-room terminal, patiently fighting a losing battle against the billows of dusty heat coming in from half a dozen open windows and doors.
Most of our days have been spent in the car, driving from one air-conditioned container-turned-office to another. We join the fleets of UN trucks, public transport vans and motorcycle taxis fighting for space on either incredibly nice paved roads or horrifically bad dirt ones. Piles of red and blue plastic bottles on the side of the road break up the colorless glare of glass-fronted banks. Men sell cut stalks of sugar cane in front of signs advertising "Snow Ball Ice Cream"(which I really want to look into). Herds of cattle with horns so long it seems that holding the weight of their own heads should be impossible push shiny black hummers to the side of the road. Our friend jokes that they are probably the ones cattle rustlers stole from his neighbors last night. He couldn't sleep because of the gun shots.
Although the registration process is quite daunting and more than a little time consuming, almost everyone in the many legal, governmental, political and developmental departments has been very professional and helpful. We're hoping the whole process won't take too long. We are anxious to get home. It's nice to have a pleasant place to come back to in the evenings though. Our hotel feels like the kind of place that was built by someone who realized they could make a fortune it they acted now. Everything from the prefab walls to the showerheads have company names like "Chang Hong" on them and our bedsheets are a lovely shade of bright eggplant. The water from the shower is pumped straight out of the big river itself and pools at your feet in a color that makes you feel a little less clean than you thought. But the view of the big river from the hotel is so beautiful it almost makes you feel proud to have bathed in it. On top of that, there is a quasi-tame vervet monkey named Kakule that has a pleasantly unnerving habit of hiding under the metal stairs and grabbing your ankles as you walk down. Why would we want to be anywhere else?

Mud

The airstrip in our area is many miles outside of town and well out of cell-phone reception so when you "go to the airstrip" you are there until you leave on your plane or with your guests. We didn't know just what that would mean for us on Thursday when we flew out. The cargo plane taking us out was scheduled to land at 10am although it didn't appear on the horizon until closer to 10:30. This was the biggest plane I have yet seen on our little dirt airstrip and I was almost surprised it managed at all. Usually the planes land, taxi all the way down the 800 meter strip, turn around and then make their way back to where people and Land Cruisers wait to unload the cargo. However after the plane landed this time, someone with a sat phone got a call from the pilot saying we would have to meet the plane down at the far end of the airstrip. We all thought this was a little odd, but attributed it to the plane's size, thinking it would need the entire length of the airstrip on the way out. But when we got down to the end of the strip we saw the real cause of the problem. The huge gray plane full of five tons of cargo was tilting eerily to one side, with one wing slanting on a skyward trajectory and the other dipping behind the tall elephant grass beyond the edge of the airstrip. Apparently the pilot had been unable to turn the plane around on the little runway successfully, and as a result, the right wheel and landing gear had slipped off of the raised airstrip and deep into a muddy ditch on the side.
Over the next five hours tractors, Land Cruisers, man power, shovels, and lumber were all used to try to pull the plane out. The whole ordeal varied between extreme excitement and sweltering boredom. One minute everyone was up and ready to scatter as other smaller planes buzzed overhead, trying to land on the airstrip despite our lumbering presence, or when massive UN tractors chained themselves to the plane and tried to wrench her out. But most of the time those of us who weren't digging were just sitting in the shade of the plane's belly, swatting away sweat bees and flies. Every once in a while the pilots would turn on an engine to try and give her more power to get out, but, being so far from our destination, fuel conservation was a serious consideration. So we all shared around our cookies and water bottles, put on sunscreen, took a few pictures and waited.
Finally, with the help of a second tractor the plane wiggled free. Knowing that some of us had a connecting flight we were within five minutes of missing, the muddy pilots hustled us all into the plane as soon as she was loose, and within minutes we were airborne. A few hours later, as we made our descent, we all looked out the porthole windows a little nervously as the mud and grass caked landing gear creaked down for landing. But she pulled it off perfectly and we were able to sprint happily across the (tarmac) runway and into the open doors of our next waiting flight.
The craziest part of it all though is that the day which started out in a tent and centered around a mud-stuck cargo plane, ended up with Java House milkshakes, deep hot baths and a big clean bed!

Sad Day

I don't have long to write as we are packing up to fly out of town for a week or two tomorrow. Being off our land by 6:30 every morning has become a royal pain so we are jumping on a cargo plane out in the morning (which should be interesting) and heading off to get some government paperwork done in another part of the country. Hopefully when we get home our land will be land-mine and UN free.
I had to write though to tell you about Jena. When we got home from dinner with friends last night our askari (night watch-man) began animatedly talking to us, though we were having a hard time following what he was saying. I had a sick feeling in my heart when we directed us into his hut and pointed under his bed. Jena was cowered in a corner with a badly broken body. Apparently, a stray dog had wandered in through the huge whole in our fence left by the UN and found her. The askari had brought her into his house to keep her safe until we got home. She didn't appear to be in much pain and still licked our hands when we held her but it was clear from the way she tried to drag herself to a hiding place that she knew she was dying. It was so, so awful.
We buried her by lamp-light in the corner of our yard and there was something oddly comforting in the familiarity of the scenario. I know that sounds weird, but I felt like a little girl again, which isn't always a bad thing. It made me think of the many tears over various puppies, water-bottle birds, field mice and who-knows-what-else buried in graves marked with pop-sickle stick crosses under the kunazi tree in our back-yard in Malindi (and the very patient men who helped us do it - thank you Papa and Bryan).
Over dinner last night several people there were telling horrific stories of their experiences during the war here, of the schools full of children they saw bombed and the people lying dead in a once-busy market. I think in some ways my flood of tears last night were for more than just Jena. Violence in any form is always heart-wrenching, and though I reserve some saddness for the death of a well-loved animal, I pray that most of my grief will be for the suffering of people. I don't know if I will ever seen the kind of suffering I heard about last night with my own eyes. Right now this place seems so beautiful and full of life that it is hard to imagine the stories I heard took place in the very recent lives of almost everyone around me. But witnessing death in even the smallest of ways last night turned my heart just a little bit closer to something I know I will never understand.
It's been a sad day.

Five Thousand Words

Thank goodness for Katadyn water filters, (I promise you'd never know that's how your drinking water started!)


What happens when you don't get a well-hydrated dik dik off your porch fast enough...



More crazy storms...


Bryan enjoying a watermelon.


Our host and hostess for an Eid meal.

Enjoying an Eid feast with friends.