Good Things

Having some down time together in East Africa is always a welcome treat, and there are a handful of specific things I always look forward to when we are back here. Java House strawberry milkshakes just about tops the list for me I have to admit...

We also love going to see movies (this time out it's been Inception and the A-Team), hot showers, pedicures (those are my feet not Bryan's), wearing blue jeans, riding buses and matatus, eating sukuma wiki at sketchy restaurants in the middle of downtown, eating Italian at fancy restaurants outside of town, green apples, pears, cappacinos and...more milkshakes.

But there are a handful of things I am appreciating on this trip out that I never would have though twice about before. Things like ginger ale, plain toast, peppermint and crackers. Simple little things that have a knack for suppressing nausea. And that my friends is because I am oh so happy to tell you that we are pregnant! Most of you probably already know this from phone calls, e-mail or Facebook but I wanted to announce it here too. I will write more about it later. Right now we are still just enjoying time together and soaking in this big change. Just know that we are so happy and that we appreciate your prayers so much.

Cargo

One of the things we love about life here is that somewhat odd phrases like, "There's a cargo plane landing on the airstrip in two hours that has room on it if you want to go!" is cause for immediate action. Such was the case yesterday. Like other organizations working in this area, our policy is to spend ten to twelve weeks in country followed by two weeks out for R and R. However, unlike other organizations, we don't have our own planes flying in regularly so we rely heavily on the available space of other people's planes coming and going. The difficult part about this is that it requires a lot of flexibility and very loose travel itineraries. The fun part is that you never know quite what to expect.

So at about noon yesterday Bryan and I were plucking damp clothes off the line and stuffing them into our packs alongside travel documents and passports as we rushed to meet the plane that had decided to come in a day early. We managed to pack up in record time and jumped into the ATV with our coworkers Dan and Laura and started the fifteen minute trek out to the dirt airstrip. The UN has been pouring a staggering amount of money into repairing the road to the airstrip lately and despite dodging a few spastic bulldozers, we were making the best time we ever had on the freshly grated road. But as we eased around a bend in the road we saw something that made our stomachs turn.

The first thing that registered was two men sprinting down the road towards us, the second with a big stick in his hand. But our attention was quickly diverted from the men who sped past us to the Land Cruiser stopped at an odd angle on the road in front of us. Its bulbar was nosed up against a mound of dirt on the side of the road and all of its doors were flung open. A donkey lay sprawled in the middle of the road, its load of goods from the market scattered several feet in each direction. Three or four people were pacing awkwardly near the vehicle and one girl, an East African expatriate I recognized from one of the NGOs in town, was staggering towards us. As we pulled up and jumped out of our car she slumped to her knees. I could hear her hysterically crying, "Jesus, sweet Jesus!" over and over again. Following her tearful gaze we could see an awkward mound of fur under the front of the Land Cruiser. Next to it was a long blue form. "There's a man still there!" the girl screamed. "He's under the car." The next few moments were a blur of Arabic, Kiswahili, and English as people from three different countries tried to communicate through their anger and fear and confusion. We were already out of cell phone range so Bryan pulled out our satellite phone to try and reach the doctor in town while Dan went to the front of the car to try and get whoever and whatever was underneath out as safely as possible. In the midst of all this the man with the big stick returned and added his ire to the already volatile situation after unsuccessfully chasing down the driver of the vehicle who had fled seconds after the accident. Eventually someone else got in the driver's seat and began to carefully back the vehicle up. We all held our breath as the car rolled backwards crunching miserably over gravel and sacks of food. I was waiting for the screams of whoever was caught underneath the car and dreading what we were about to see. But instead of the mangled body of a person we all breathed a sigh of relief as we saw nothing other than a second donkey, bloody and obviously in shock, but unbelievably alive and thankfully, alone. Next to him was just a long blue plastic tarp rolled up with string. I never thought seeing such a badly hurt animal would make want to laugh with relief, but it did yesterday, though still through tears.

We eventually made it to the airstrip and climbed a ladder into the belly of the cargo plane. Webbing flapped behind our seats, holding back thirty-five feet of air in the now empty cargo bay as we lumbered down the dirt airstrip and up into the low lying clouds. The praying girl who had also been heading to catch the same plane put a scarf over her face and slept. And as I closed my eyes on tiny propeller-blurred trees and rivers outside my window and settled into the deafening roar around me, I found myself saying a quick prayer too. I really, really hope those donkeys survive and go on to live miraculously long lives and tell their donkey grandchildren about the day they took on a Land Cruiser. Because if they don't survive, I suspect there will be a family in a village far from town that will miss them very badly.

Good Run

I often kick around ideas for a blog when I run in the evenings. This week I had flirted with a few random ones: how extracting maggots from my cat’s leg (I won’t tell you how many) has given me great peace that I didn’t miss my calling to the medical profession after all; how much the faded photographs a soldier showed us of himself crouching in tall grass with an automatic weapon reminded me of sepia tinted images of my father-in-law in Vietnam; how sad I am that a good friend is getting ready to move away and excited I am that my baby sister is about to start college. But as I set out to run last night all these pieces of the week peeled off and fluttered to the ground behind me. And at the end of a long week, it’s the memory of my run itself that lingers most.

I set off around six. Dark clouds were building in the southeast, but rain has been illusive lately and I didn’t expect it to come through. But I hoped it would. Though I am running a lot these days, I’m still not one of those people who enjoys it much more than how I feel afterwards. Though my runs get longer every time I go out, not a single one begins without the fleeting thought of “Can I really do this today?” So I play mind games with myself to get through it. Don’t start running until the stream and don’t stop until you get back to it. Short run have four different sections, long runs have six. Run fast up hills, slow down them. If a path separates then joins itself again, take one branch out, the other branch on the way back in. And always sprint the last stretch home. These rules structure every run I take.

In the first village I passed through I greeted a man digging around his sorghum and an old woman sitting on a stool with several babies at her feet. But after that point I saw no one else on the trail. The sandy path was full of prints under my tennis shoes – cows, goats, a bicycle track and little bare footprints. A lone black donkey trotted down the trail, easing me over into the grass as he made his way resolutely somewhere and I wondered if anyone was looking for him or expecting him. I heard lizards scuffle in the brush as I went by and birds cry from small trees but saw none of them. At one point a torn black plastic sack made me wince as it slithered near my foot. I was jumpy after my friend who often runs the same trail killed a puff adder sunning itself on the path last week. This made me start thinking about how I would say “I’ve been bitten by a snake!” in Arabic but all I could come up with was “I’ve been eaten by a snake!” which I fear would provoke more laughter than assistance getting to the hospital. I decided right then that I should look that one up, just in case.

The rain hit at almost the furthest point out on my run. It started as a light drizzle but steadily gained momentum until it sounded like the footsteps of thousands of little feet running in the grass beside me. It hit my forehead in cold drops and rolled down my nose into my open mouth. It soaked through my nylon pants which began sticking to my knees. I expected laughter as I ran through a second village, a crazy white woman running in the rain, but all I saw were sheep huddled under a baobab tree and smoke misting out of small huts. There are so many baobab trees in the village that I was almost untouched by raindrops through its entire length. At the edge of this village there is an old hand-dug well that they say was built as many as ninety years ago by British soldiers. I have always wondered why British soldiers would dig a well this far out of town and am curious if they thought the baobab grove was as beautiful as I do. There are usually a handful of women there pulling jerry cans on long ropes up out of the ground who offer me a drink as I go by, but yesterday the place was abandoned. And yet yesterday, I suddenly would have liked nothing more than a drink from that well.

At the rock where I turn around for long runs I almost broke a rule and actually stopped. The rocky green mountain rose wet and magnificent on my right. The heavy black clouds were rumbling menacingly behind me, still dropping cold clean rain. And the most unnaturally pink sunset was flaming directly in front of me, hurting my eyes with its brilliance and throwing my exhausted shadow back towards the storm. It was breathtaking. It seemed like I was the only person in the world, which felt beautiful and frightening.

But I didn’t stop. I slowed long enough to take try to soak it all in for one long moment, breathed a deep “thank you,” and turned back into the storm and ran home.

Libyan

The last coincidence in a long line of coincidences that finally makes you realize that the coincidences weren’t actually coincidences at all but rather your failure to understand something very clear to everyone else around you is usually the one that sticks in your mind. At least it’s been that way for me lately.

A few days ago I was buying some black and white beads at my favorite bead shop in the market when a man in the stall next door said hello. I had never met the man before and we quickly went through the usual greetings and a name exchange. This only happens about fifteen times per trip to town so I didn’t think anything of it until Bryan walked up and the man said something a wee bit odd to my husband. “Hello! I just met your wife. It’s nice to meet you as well.” He then asked the question that gave it all away. “So, are you from Libya too?” While Bryan looked at me for clarification I had one of those moments where dozens of other vaguely confusing occasions suddenly fall into place in a flash of blinding clarity (“Libya, how are you today?”; “Wait, where are you from?” or “You’re already half African”). We later explained the situation to a friend who laughed out loud at our story. “Libby” he said, “Your name means Libyan in Arabic.” Libyan. I am the Libyan. You may be wondering how in the world I couldn’t have known this before now. I’m wondering that a little myself. But there you go.

A second “coincidence” that I have noticed lately is what language educated men choose to speak to me. I have had a chance to explore this theory on several occasions too. Most recently it happened when we were introduced to a teacher at a local school. He was well dressed and carried himself with the kind of confidence I sometimes see in people who are well travelled. And despite the fact that Bryan initiated the greetings in Arabic, he replied in excellent English. Language is political, social and religious, and just like us, people here are often eager to practice languages they weren’t born into, so when the man shook my hand I complied with a general “Hello. How are you?” But to my surprise he overlapped me with a “Salaam Alekum. Inti kwaisa?” I quickly changed gears and answered him in Arabic before he turned back to Bryan and started into a conversation in English. This always surprises me but it has happened enough that I think it can’t be random. All I can come up with is that because women are typically far less educated than men in this country, if they are lucky enough to speak a major language at all, it will probably be Arabic and not English. I think that by default, educated men will speak to me in Arabic and my husband in English because he is a man. And I am a woman.

You might think that this subtle sexism would bother me (if that is in fact what it is). But on the contrary it delights me. For someone to first see my gender and not the color of my skin is so refreshing, even if it comes with a suitcase full of assumptions. When I run or go to the market or drive down the road, I hear “Khawaja, khawaja!” over and over and over again. And though it doesn’t always bother me, being constantly reminded of how starkly I stand out is not always comfortable. Which is why I am trying out something new. Lately I have been taking the time to stop on my runs to tell every mob of waving six year olds on the edge of the path that my name is Libby. I have told the fresh teenager at the butcher trying to sell me suspicious looking meat that my name is Libby. I have told the group of women balancing impossibly large containers of water on their heads as they walk past my house that my name is Libby. And little by little I think it may be paying off. There will probably never come a time when I won’t be called khawaja. But it’s the important things that I want people to know. That I am a woman. And that I am Libyan.

Minding my ن s and ب s

It has been so cool lately that I feel like we have all been making up for those sleepless, sweat-drenched nights of a few months ago. The sunrise hardly makes a ripple on the surface of my sleep in the mornings, and throughout the day vague memories of dreams drift across my mind in fragments – pieces of the kind of lives lived only under miles of deep slumber. Even Asad only stumbles onto the back porch well after breakfast, bleary-eyed and groggy and Nimir, who has recently struck up an affair with the pretty black and white cat next door, is dead to the world until at least three o’clock in the afternoon. Only the chickens seem to be willfully up at a reasonable hour these days, and all nine of them follow us with an air of disgust from tent to bathroom to kitchen until they get their breakfast of sorghum and sesame seeds.

We’ve bumped our language lessons up to four times a week now (which may be a more rational explanation for my increased desire for sleep.) Arabic language learning continues to be the source of my greatest sense of accomplishment and my deepest discouragement. There are days in conversations when all the “random” questions fall just right and gullible people exclaim, “Wow, you know Arabic so well!” And then there are those days when the most basic and childlike request is so completely void from my vocabulary and grammatical awareness that you would never in your wildest dreams imagine I have lived here for a year. (And that is not false modesty.) Sometimes I console myself with the thought that learning a new language in our case has come complete with a new script that goes from right to left and a twenty eight letter alphabet, each of whose symbols have three unique forms. Though I know we sound like eight year olds trudging our way through Fun With Dick and Jane (in our case Ahmed and Zainab, actually), we really can read a lot of things now, albeit belabored. And the other day, when our teacher asked simple questions to which we wrote out full-sentence answers on lined paper, he could read our answers, even through his chuckles. So we are making progress, though I often worry it’s slower than it should be. (I should clarify that I am speaking only for myself here. Being married to a freak-of-nature-language-learner is a two-sided coin. And I say that with the deepest affection.) One thing that eases my mind however, especially on bad language learning days, is to think of how much better I will be at teaching other adults how to read and write because of this experience. I don’t remember becoming literate the first time I did it. But I am quite certain this second go around will stick with me for quite awhile. From now on, I will always have great admiration and empathy for that person awkwardly grasping a pen, tongue sticking out as they shakily struggle to curl an unfamiliar shape. Because right now, that person is me.

Couch

Two weeks ago, we dragged ourselves into the compound covered in mud, soaked to the bone and freezing cold after a crazy drive home from our trip out West. The drive back to hours longer than it should have as black cotton mud caked our wheels solid about every kilometer, locking us into immobility. Even after the guys scraped tens of pounds of mud out of the wheel wells and we could continue inching our way down the road, it often took two of us to fight the steering wheel into place so we wouldn't go careening off into the bush. Our poor little golf-cart-on-steroids was probably scared into performance by the sight of dozens of other vehicles half swallowed in mud and abandoned until the dry season. Altogether we counted one lorry, one tractor, two tractor trailers and six motorcycles- all casualties of the rainy season roads. Since being back we've decided that the next few months will probably be more wisely spent in office work, language learning and home repairs than travelling.

So, we've spent the last few weeks working on our little house. Our teammates flew in on a chartered flight with supplies a few days ago and I honestly felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder greeting Pa as he came in on the wagon. Not only did we have a few boxes of peanut butter, olive oil, cornmeal, shortening, vinegar, spices (and yes, Nutella) but we also had a COUCH! I feel so materialistic saying this, but I have to confess, this chunk of wood and cushioning has changed my world. I love having a couch! It's a futon actually, a very blasé piece of unoriginal craftsmanship purchased at the East African equivalent of Wal-Mart, and a few character-adding scratches show it had a rough trip in the back of the Cessna Caravan. But setting it down in our living room you would think we were looking at an 18^th century French armoire. We have a couch. We can sit on it and read a book in the evenings. We can welcome guests into it for a cup of tea. We can even take a nap there on rainy Sunday afternoons. A couch. I had no idea it would be such a big deal.

I have also been enjoying my newly rearranged kitchen. It is now separate from the dining room/living room and my shelves are painted. I have been enjoying cooking so much more now that I have more space, privacy and a prettier view of the little mountain. I remember when my kitchen was the front porch of our tent and my stove was a little camp burner. When we moved into this building with nothing more than a few trunks and a set of plastic chairs and table I felt like we had moved into a mansion. And now I have a gas stove and oven, gas refrigerator, solar electricity and a pantry full of things to eat other than lentils. It's amazing how really
simple living can make fairly simple living seem so luxurious. Or maybe more amazing is how quickly luxurious living can become discontenting (I don't know if that is a word but it is the one I want to use). Hmmm...

I promise though, all I need to be happy is my Nutella.

Garin

Friday July 2, 2010

Bryan and I started out the day with an invigorating hike up the small rocky mountain within footsteps of Abdul's front door. The enormous boulders looked like they had been unceremoniously dumped out of some giant pail, making me feeling like a character from Gulliver's Travels as we scrambled over them in our climb to the top. From the summit, we could see dozens more of these mountains on the blue-green expanse of horizon, looking like piles of pebbles in a child's sandbox.
When we reached the mountain where Garin was being held, I was initially disappointed to see many clusters of only dozens of people, not the "hundreds" I had begun to expect. Though it was late afternoon, the time the festivities were set to begin, most people were still busy cooking, dressing their children, or sitting around large pots of home-brewed sorghum beer getting happier and happier. Bryan was invited to sit with a group of men under a huge baobab tree while I was ushered to a hut where women were busy making themselves beautiful. In the midst of an intoxicatingly different world, I was amused by how familiar the preening and fawning in front of small plastic mirrors was to me. Take away the thatch roof, drone of a Nilotic language and the swarms of flies and I could have been back in my college dorm room before a formal. In fact, I was kicking myself for not having though to bring some of my own jewelry or at least dangly earrings as I watched the women fasten inches of colorful beads alongside brass bangles or insert sickle nose-rings into their nostrils. Hair was branded up with cowry shells and beads and skin was thoroughly massaged with oil and strong perfume. Older women had strands of flattened coke bottle tops attached to their elbows that clinked pleasantly when they moved. Women held each other's squalling babies, sometimes three to a lap, while putting finishing touches on hair or fastened jewelry in hard to reach places. In the dim light of the hut I was surprised at how effectively I seemed to blend into the mud wall I was leaning up against. That sensation is rare here, and I both savored it and mourned it a little bit. Observing the every-day intimacy of these women as they preparing for the occasion was a great privilege. I loved being able to see and hear the things I did. But I felt very much like an outsider. This obviously is only right considering that is exactly what I am, and to a certain degree, will always be. Still, I envied the sisterhood of the moment.
Hours passed and eventually, the buzz of energy around me seemed to intensify. Someone poked their head into the hut and as soon as their eyes were adjusted enough to see me, said "Come on. It's time to go." Bryan and Abdul along with several other friends were waiting outside and we began walking out of the village towards the far side of the mountain. On the way we received several quick tips, which we appreciated knowing absolutely nothing about what was about to happen. The advice ran something as follows: Don't have anything on your head –even your sunglasses, Bryan – or you might get captured. If you dance, it's very important to keep time with everyone else or you might fall down. Always carry your bom in your right hand (a traditional wooden hunting stick obligatory for the occasion). If anyone rushes at you with their bom, don't run away from them or towards them but just stay ready. You know, just the basics really. While I was still scrambling to figure out the literal meaning of "captured" and "stay ready" as well as whether the falling down was merely due to poor dancing skills or some outside influence, we walked up on Garin.
Close to two hundred people were running around in a circle with boms waving in the air, trilling and barking shrilly as nearly twenty witchdoctors clustered in the middle singing boldly and beating huge twirled antelope horns and sticks together. It had the effect of a huge human whirlpool. Often the singing would stop momentarily and the people would slow their running to a walk, laughing and jostling each other until the witchdoctors organized themselves for another song. Demanding even more of my attention were the times the witchdoctors would suddenly dart free of the ring and scamper off to a new space, maybe fifty feet away, and while the crowd rushed to keep up and regroup, passive observers (of which they were many) would scramble frantically to get out of the way of the rushing horde. I saw a lone witchdoctor, tall and strong despite being well into his fifties swagger through the crowd. He teased young girls who ignored him outright, but when one boy cautiously accepted his outstretched hand, he pulled the boy into him, sending the terrified kid into hysterics of squirming to get away. The whole event seemed to maintain a delicate balance of pure fun and thinly veiled unease.
The singing and dancing went on late into the night, moving from the far field to the confines of the village itself. More and more people poured slowly in from far away areas though in the darkness it was difficult to see how many people were gathered around us. With nightfall, the ceremony grew perceptibly darker and we thought it best to go back to our tent at Abdul's house. Several people wanted to catch a lift back with us and so we left along with three other men. As the singing and percussion faded into the night behind us, I could see dozens of blue flashlights freckling invisible pathways in the distance as even more people streamed in to celebrate.
However, our adventure was not quite finished as we headed in for the night. A rusted old army tank, its cannon still pointing uncomfortably towards the main road to town, is the marker I had been using all week to note the military checkpoint on the road ahead. Such checkpoints are common here, and appropriate travel documents have always cleared as through, though simply waving and slowing down is usually sufficient. This night however, as we rolled past the old tank and towards our home for the night a soldier jumped out into the road in front of us, screaming things I couldn't begin to understand while his AK-47 was leveled right at our eyes. Bryan slowed the car to a stop and no one moved a muscle. But the soldier continued to scream at us. Abdul was sitting next to me and quietly told Bryan to switch of the car headlights. Bryan did so, and the soldier's shouts, now coming out of the pitch black behind what I imagined was the still pointed gun, lowered a decibel. Abdul eased out of the car, his hands lifted harmlessly from his sides. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another soldier appear out of the bushes on our left. My stomach had turned to water and I laughed inside at all the times I've berated TV characters who have ruined everyone's chances of escape by melting in front of a gun we all know the bad guy won't shoot; and here I was frozen stiff in front of a gun, not all that close to me, that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was just for show and would never be fired tonight. But staring at that little black hole at the end of a rifle in the hands of someone you know has used it many times before is a very humbling experience. It scared me. As it turned out, we had travelled down a road we shouldn't have at some point, and our perceived lack of respect for the local authorities was being addressed. After brief muffled conversation ahead of us and profuse apologies, we were waved on with an annoyed hand gesture. Abdul and the guys in the back laughed it off, but we passed that check point with far more caution the next day.
Once again, we slept deeply that night; it's possible however, that our prayers were a bit longer and more heartfelt before we said goodnight though.