Zahra

Bryan and I have always said that if we ever decide to adopt, we want to adopt a child that God plops into our life in desperate need of a family. Someone we might have developed a relationship with over time, whose story we were already familiar with. I think we have always said this with the relative security of not feeling “called” to adoption ourselves (Christianese for – “That’s somebody else’s good deed,”) and not really knowing any kids that fit the bill. But at the same time we have been deeply moved by the stories of some of our friends and peers who have chosen to adopt children whose lives intersected at some point with their own. So with all the piety of the completely clueless we have often casually remarked, “Yeah, maybe we’ll do that one day too.”  

When we are here in Nairobi we stay in a big house that is the occasional home to a random handful of people from various backgrounds, working in various places in various jobs. There have been times when some interesting mix of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Sudanese, South Africans, Brits and Americans have ended up passing through at the same time (each of us with our own charming brand of craziness I might add) and I have thought to myself that surely there are cameras hidden somewhere here filming the most bizarre reality show ever.

One of the younger members of this household is an eight year old girl I’ll call Zahra. She is a refugee from a neighboring country and living here with a family friend and his own two daughters who are close to her age. Unlike the other girls she is pretty quiet, a little shy but she eats up any scrap of conversation or attention that might drift her direction. She is obedient and quick to help. But I’ve seen her be quite the goofball too. Annabelle loves her. The story I’ve heard is that her parents un-amicably split after one of the two converted from one major world religion to another. Her mother took Zahra’s younger brother and remarried a man in Uganda. Her father immigrated to Canada and has started a new family of his own. Inexplicably, Zahra was left behind by them both and is now living on the compassion of a family friend with his own host of problems in life.

I had heard bits and pieces of this story over the weeks and months that we pass back and forth through this house. It never stirred much more than passing sadness in me until one morning quite recently as I was watching the girls play in the living room it hit me like someone dropped an anvil on my heart, “This is the kind of child we were talking about. It’s someone like Zahra.”

Over the weeks since that realization I haven’t been able to stop praying for Zahra, that someday she would have the kind of family she deserves, whether mine or someone else’s. I can’t stop thinking about her.

I don’t write this to hint that Bryan and I are near adoption. Holy cow, he would probably think I was crazy for writing this blog considering only a week ago I was bawling snot into his chest at midnight as I pondered whether or not I will be able to handle two baby girls come January. Furthermore, I don’t even know enough of her story to know whether adoption would ever even be an option. I long to think that her mother and father are out there somewhere desperately trying to get her back into their arms. They have lost such a treasure. I write this mostly because I started half a dozen other blogs today that remain unfinished. I have learned by now that nothing ever really gets written except what is most on my heart. And today, almost against my will, it’s Zahra.

I can easily imagine my motherhood encompassing two blond-headed blue-eyed little girls that look a lot like Bryan and me. But I can also imagine our family getting a little messier in the years ahead, in the best sort of way imaginable. And that’s not something I really could imagine very well before Zahra. At least not in the detailed way that I imagine now. Now I imagine comforting new kinds of bad dreams and birthday parties not just for babies; I imagine learning how to braid different hair and new dynamics of family vacations; I imagine endless hours of paperwork and legal hoops and how our families would react; I imagine a lot of laughter and enormous help with two littler ones; I imagine hard days but lots and lots of love. It terrifies me to be honest. And it excites me.    

I don’t know if any of these things will ever be more than just imaginings. That in and of itself has been a humbling, eye-opening experience. What I do know is that I am so thankful for Zahra teaching me something about God. He is relentless. You can never, ever get to a place where he will leave you alone. He is always, patiently, persistently, lovingly pushing us further and deeper into what he wants for this world. And if you open a door in your heart even a crack that he thinks should be flung open, you can rest assured you are going to have a hard time closing it even if you want to. What a terrifying and beautiful realization that is.

Mary

In May, Annabelle and I drove to Friona, Texas to visit my grandmother, Mary Lee Talley. I had been warned that she would be much weaker than last time I had seen her, that she might not remember me. When we walked into the home where she was staying, we found her sitting in the entryway with many of her neighbors. She was holding a stack of papers, shuffling through them slowly while the old men and women around her craned for a better look. When we walked up to hug her, I could see that the papers she was holding were pictures of my Annabelle that someone had printed off for her from emails. When she saw us she lit up and said, “And there she is, my African baby!”

As I feared it might be, that was the last afternoon I spent with my Granny. Three days ago she passed away. Though she went quickly, faster than my dad could fly back to the States to be at her bedside, her death at 87 was not a shock. I say that even though in many ways death always seems like a surprise doesn’t it? As though it is not patiently waiting for each of us. As cliché as this truth is, we have all found ourselves celebrating through our tears this week. The thought of her at complete rest, reunited with her own parents and grandparents, with the love of her life from age sixteen, it’s hard to be too sad. We grieve our own loss. Like many of my cousins, as a grandchild I grieve the promotion of my parents to the next generation at the front of the line. But we can’t help but be anything but happy for her.

I wasn’t especially close to my granny and I feel far away from the commemoration of her life now. But even so I feel like I have my own unique touch of sadness and happiness this week. Yesterday we went in for our 20 week ultrasound here in Nairobi. The doctor patiently worked the wand across my jellified belly as the grainy image of our wiggly baby twitched across the screen. He finally settled on a good angle and squinting into the monitor told us with a grin that we have a healthy, (energetic!), beautiful baby girl.

She will be Mary Katherine, named after the paternal grandmother she never had the chance to meet. It makes me smile to imagine them crossing paths on their way in and out of this world, my Granny and her newest African baby. I know Granny would give her a wet kiss right on the lips just like she always did to all of us regardless of how young or old or distantly related to her we were. And I can only hope that in the handing off of a name, some of the residual love from a life well-lived will still cling to it as it is passed on to my daughter.

You are already so loved, Mary Katherine. You carry the name of one God chose above all others for the most honorable task a woman has ever had. You carry the name of one who loved her husband and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all of her life with apple-cakes, hand-made quilts, the occasional spanking and lots and lots of wet-lipped kisses. We can’t wait to see how you will make this name your own, how you will serve God and love people. We can’t wait to meet you, sweet girl.  

   

Stories

I actually wrote most of these words late last night in my daughter’s muppet notebook by the intermittent light of my cell phone while Annabelle slept in the room with me. Now it is late once more, the night before another long trip. But the words are still burning in my heart, like they need to be written again.

Granted, I had a few reasons to cry already when Bryan called. Devastating news of cancer from not one but three dearly loved people in my family’s life has reached us this week leaving us feeling far away and helpless. It was my baby sister’s last night in Tanzania for what will probably be a long time, and the last time I will see her before some sweet and yet unknown reunion in the future. And after almost three weeks apart I am just flat out missing my husband. Five minute phone calls on a satellite phone just aren’t cutting it anymore.

So Bryan could have told me just about anything last night and I probably would have started crying. But when he told me about some of the stories he had heard that day, not so much narrating a story as flatly stating facts out of his own numb shock, I felt like something inside of me broke.

He told me that people spent the afternoon talking to him about how when they ran for their lives, leaving everything behind and walking through the wilderness for weeks to get to safety, the very old and the very young were most vulnerable. This is not surprising. I’ve probably even said that very thing to others before. But I’m not sure I ever stopped to imagine what that might mean. I didn’t imagine crippled old men whose houses were burned down around them by their own people while they were respectfully left in their beds instead of being abandoned to the approaching enemy. And I didn’t imagine the mothers who made it days, maybe even weeks into their journeys’ before realizing that they could not carry all of their small children any longer. And deciding to save the children they could, they left their smallest babies to die alone under a tree while the rest of the family carried on. But those are the stories Bryan heard yesterday.

I can’t stop crying about those babies. And I know my tears are mere raindrops in a roaring river. I find myself begging God to have please, please, please picked up every single one of those babies and cradled them in his arms while they died alone. I don’t know if I can bear it otherwise.

I find it so difficult to understand that this world is a place in which one day, while I was chopping an onion for dinner or sleeping dreamlessly or washing my baby’s hands, another woman was kissing her baby’s head and walking away to leave him under a tree to die alone. How is that possible? How could those things have happened simultaneously? Surely I should have felt her heart break into a million pieces in that moment too. One soul cannot contain that kind of pain; surely all of creation should stumble under that kind of burden. And yet she walked away and somehow, miraculously, my world did not so much as shudder. I didn’t know to stop chopping or sleeping or washing, to fall on my face on the floor and weep for her. For all of us.

In my grief and shock I have this reaction, this flicker of audacity to believe that surely, surely I would have been able to do something different. That, had I been in her place, some source of strength or store of resources would have been made available to me that were not available to her. That I would have found a way to save all my children. I comfort myself with the lie of thinking that I could ever understand and dare make different decisions in that hell. That I somehow love the child I pushed out of my body any differently than she does.  

Some days preparing to go to this place – to develop an unwritten language, teach people to read and write, help people process their trauma – these things feel too big for me. But sharing their stories is one thing that has never felt like too much. I have always been excited thinking about listening and giving voice, even if only in very small ways, to the suffering and injustice of the voiceless. If nothing else, I have thought, when I am not strong enough to try and heal or comfort or restore in any measure, I can listen and I can write.

But when I imagine sitting before that woman and hearing her voice and her story for the first time, while my children and hers play at our feet, I think, oh dear God, I am not sure I am even strong enough to do that.   

  

    

Phone Call

I’ve imagined the conversation so many times. I’ve always been nervous that I wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it, but when the moment actually came, to my surprise, the words appeared out of nowhere quite naturally. Whether my eroded Arabic made choosing words easy, or the traumatic circumstances that prevented goodbyes in the first place allowed small talk to have an ironic comfort, I’m not sure. But it was good.

Bryan and I had talked a couple of times already and sent a dozen or so texts back and forth between North and East Africa. But trying to cram the emotional and sensual experience of reuniting with old friends in a refugee camp of 110, 000 people in a place that shows up on very few maps in the world is not something that can fit into a time-conscious long distance phone call or fifty character text.

When Bryan passed her the phone at first I just heard the background murmur of a tea shop. But then Zainab’s voice pushed to the forefront salaaming me almost shyly, as though she was sitting in the chair across from me and not a thousand miles away. My first reaction was to laugh and she laughed too. And then a tidal wave of emotion swelled over my voice and swallowed it whole. I was suddenly grateful for the physical and cultural gulf still between us, that she couldn’t see my contorted face or hear my voice break. I was afraid she would think, what do you have to cry about, though in my heart of hearts I know she wouldn’t.

How are all your people? And your children?

Praise be to God, we are all well. How is your baby, is she walking yet?

Yes, yes. Hana is walking..

The conversation was laughable. For a moment I could almost doubt that she had ever been running for her life, that she had ever walked for weeks with her babies to get to safety. For a moment I almost thought she really did have all she needed to eat and feed her family.

I have had several conversations like these this week. As Bryan finds (and is found) by friend after friend after friend, a woman who once showed me how to brew coffee properly or who patted my pregnant belly knowingly will ask him if she can use his phone to call me. And almost a year since I last heard her voice, we greet and chat and inquire about each other’s children. We say, God willing, we will see you again soon.  

Bryan is excited. I can hear it in his voice as he rattles off stories of whose families are there safely, what’s available in the market and what people are predicting for the future. He says the situation is bad, very bad, and yet maybe not as dire as we feared. People are hopeful, as though the worst has passed and somehow, in the slowly settling dust, hope is still standing there alive.

Bryan says there are babies everywhere and has reported back about several friends with new little ones. I am amazed and amused by this fact, as is everyone else apparently. I suppose there are limited recreational activities on hand when you are sitting in a refugee camp (or hiding in the bush?). People thank God for his generosity and congratulate us on the blessing we will also receive in January. Many of our friends back home think we are crazy to be thinking of taking a baby and pregnant wife to a refugee camp. But we are in good company it seems.

I’ve felt residual guilt about having been away for so long, for having jumped on a plane in the middle of the night and not come back. At least not yet. But Bryan tells me everyone left not long after we did, not on a plane obviously, but they scattered and lost track of each other too. And as he walks around this camp, stopping by tents and huts to greet former neighbors and teachers and shopkeepers, he witnesses reunions of old friends and relatives, other people who haven’t seen each other for almost a year. It would be absurd and wrong to compare my situation to that of our old friends. The differences are innumerable. But in small ways, ways that for some reason matter to me, those differences may not be as vast as I may have once thought. And that excites me.

One of the people that Bryan ran into a couple days ago was the man who built our house in North Africa. He made it across the border safely along with his wife and children and grandchildren. When Bryan met him again he was busy making bricks for someone else’s house and he and Bryan shared a laugh. “Are you ready to do this all over again?” Bryan asked. “We’re ready!” our friend replied.

I think maybe I am too.

    

Pangolin

We just came inside from an early morning rendezvous with a pangolin.

Apparently these rare creatures are known for their divining powers around here and in-between using him to predict the next rain shower, some local farmers brought him by the house to show him off. It’s by far the weirdest animal I have ever seen. Somewhere between an anteater and a hedgehog, it looked like a lopped off dinosaur tail loping around the yard on two tiny back legs. With its surprisingly calm and wise little eyes buried under thick armor I almost believed it really could have told me the weather forecast if I asked it to. Annabelle, still in her Carter’s frog pajamas and with oatmeal on her face, tottered around barefoot after it, dragging babydoll behind her. She squatted down next to Aunt Abigail (who was braver than her mother) and posed for a picture, grinning “cheese” before reaching out and running her hand across the scales as wide as her palm. Not even a year and a half old and already petting pangolins.

Bryan jumped on a bus to Kenya a few days ago and is flying North from there today. He will be gone a couple weeks, spending time in the refugee camp trying to find answers to our many questions. I already miss him like crazy, but am anxious to hear what he learns. There is a long list of people I hope he finds and I am both hopeful and terrified to hear how they are. While he is traipsing around the bush in North Africa, Annabelle and I are hanging out in Tanzania at my parent’s quiet, cool house, waiting again, but enjoying the company.

It has been fun to watch Annabelle readjust to the continent of her birth. She spends most afternoons wandering around the back yard, picking up bruised franjipani flowers or rocks, or sometimes slipping leaves through slats in the baby goat pen for the kids to nibble. There is a troop of neighborhood children who whisk her off from time to time and she alternates from overwhelmed to overjoyed by their presence, depending on her moods. Her shins are scratched up and she is filthy by bath time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her so happy. Watching her through a screen-door is a bit like watching an echo of my own childhood and it makes me realize how much I want my daughter to grow up in Africa.

I want her to grow up in Africa because I want her feet to be honest-to-goodness filthy at the end of the day. I want her to grow up, maybe not color-blind exactly – she’s already had her hair and arms rubbed enough to know that people are different – but to grow up so cheek-to-cheek with those differences that they don’t really feel like differences anymore. I want her to know what poverty is, what it eats and drinks and how it plays. I want her to be outside. A lot. I want her to learn languages and music styles, even ones much of the world has never heard of. I want her to be a dang good tree climber. I want her to see enough of this big world that she never once regrets missing out on high school band trips or cheerleading tryouts. I want her to have first crushes on boys that look different than she does. I want her to grow up aware of how wealthy she is, and thankful for it. I want her to grow up thinking that beauty is thick hair and bright eyes and a strong, healthy body. And I want her to grow up having strange pets, probably not pangolins, they’re a bit too scaly for me even if they can tell the future, but other peculiar things she will one day tell her grandchildren about.

There are plenty of things still to wonder about, even a few to worry about from time to time. But watching my daughter play this morning I couldn’t help but think, “It’s good to be back.”

(P.S. - I am back in the land of touchy internet too so sorry for the wonky formatting of pictures and text...)

Going

Back in the day, (read, still-to-date) I was a Lost junkie. I was obsessed with that show before we even left for North Africa. And when we got there a scratched bootlegged DVD of the first half of season 2 with Chinese subtitles became my coping mechanism for culture stress. Those of you who have watched the show know that it jumps back and forth between different times and places in each episode, usually with the sounds of the coming scene overlapping with the end of the present scene. In other words, before Jack flashes back to a conversation with his dad at a hospital, the sounds of an OR being prepped for surgery will play while Jack is still standing on the desolate beach of a crazy island.

I’ve felt like that a little lately. Three days before I fly back across the world and already the edges of this scene are fading. Driving down I-20 at 65 miles an hour I hear the rattle of donkey carts sloshing water down the road. Over the hum of my washing machine I hear the whirling chirp of a thousand crickets. In the quiet roar of humanity at a Wal-Mart on Saturday morning I can just make out the pleasant buzz of price-haggling in Arabic. I feel like any second I will walk out of a room and this will all disappear behind me. My current reality is trembling with transience.

Several well-meaning people have told me lately, “Wow, you must be SO ready to get back to Africa by now. I mean that’s really your home anyway.” I appreciate the sentiment. They are aware enough to recognize that America is not always the land of milk and honey we make it out to be, maybe especially for those of us who have lived a long time elsewhere. But their comments make me feel a little guilty. Like I should be dying to leave this place and get back to what really makes me happy. And if I was getting on that plane on Thursday to return to a place and a people that were familiar, that I had known for a long time, I know I would be. I would have been ready to get back months ago, (though even then not without a trace of sadness). But on Thursday I am getting on a plane to fly back into the unknown. Our home, like the homes of so many we once knew, is buried in a ghost-town haunted by soldiers. The friends we once shared tea with are scattered in refugee camps that don’t even meet the minimum standards for a crisis situation. I am dying to get back. But a part of me is still hesitating, still asking yet unanswerable questions.

I’ve spent a lot of time weighing my feelings, which are varied, trying to assign appropriate value to each. The big ones are these: I feel a deep longing for a home, for a place my children will at least remember through some of their childhoods. I think I am being honest with myself when I say it doesn’t even have to be a terribly comfortable home. Just a place I can call mine for a while. A place I can plant a few vegetables and be there long enough to eat them. I also feel a deep longing for the sharp-edged beauty of North Africa again, for its people, language, food. The other day Annabelle was listening to a children’s song that counted to three in a bunch of languages. When the voice in the speaker chirped out “Wahid, itneen, talata” I felt a crushing sense of something akin to home-sickness and burst into tears. I want to be there again. Badly. But one of the most intense things I have been feeling is a lack of clarity. Is this move to a hard place, to a people in more desperation than I have ever encountered in my life really what is wanted from us? Can we really make a difference? Again, I am confident I am being honest with myself when I say I would do the most outrageously difficult things in the world if I was flat-out asked by the one who knows best what this world needs. But what if I was doing it just for my own pride, my own desires or dreams…?

My mom’s side of the family celebrated the marriage of my cousin last weekend and Bryan, Annabelle and I drove out of town for one last gathering with all my relatives. My grandparents were there, the ones who served in Thailand and the West Indies for fifty years (literally). The ones I hardly know. On top of the literal days that I could count that I have spent with them in my 29 years of life, they are getting old, albeit with grace. My beautiful grandmother gave me a strong hug and firm kiss on the cheek when she said hello, but her voice registered a friendliness that lacked recognition. Over lunch on Sunday I felt a pang of jealousy as Bryan chatted away with them both, asking detailed questions about their incredible lives that I should have known the answers to, eliciting amazing stories I had never heard. At one point Bryan asked something about their early years in Thailand. Oddly enough, I don’t even remember the exact question now. But my grandmother put down her sandwich and wiped her mouth in a ladylike fashion. Then she looked us right in the eye and said, “You know, at some point you will get to a crossroads and you won’t know which direction to go. You should pray and then…” with a delicate wave of her hand, “…then you go.”

I don’t think my grandmother saw the tears rolling down my face. She hardly knew which grandchild I was much less the details of our situation. There is no way she could have known how badly I needed to hear those words. And yet somehow, this woman of faith spoke directly to my heart. Though she will someday pass from this world without us ever having known each other well, I will treasure her wisdom until the day I follow in her footsteps.

God alone knows how intensely we want to make a difference in the darkest parts of this world, how sincerely we want to follow him, wherever that leads us. He alone knows how difficult and confusing that can sometimes be. And how beautiful.

The walls of my heart are caked with prayers. I feel a tugging at my arm. It’s time to go.  

Father's Day

I was exceptionally protective of my parent’s marriage as a kid. Exceptionally. There was a blind old beggar woman who sat outside the grocery store where we shopped growing up. She was shriveled and bald, usually dressed in threadbare kangas and led around by a grandkid. She was the image of pity. But even as the kid who bawled every time Fivel Moskawitz got separated from his family on the ship to America (every time), that old lady couldn’t touch my heart of stone. In fact, I couldn’t stand her. Why? Because she called my father her husband. Hobbling towards us with hand outstretched she would speak to my father in Kigiriama and say something like, “Oh my husband, my husband how can you let your wife go without food today?” And my dad would greet her respectfully and ask about her aches and pains and family while I tried to discreetly maneuver our shopping basket between them, and then he would pass her some spare change or a loaf of bread. We would go into the store and after turning back from shooting a blind beggar dirty looks, to my dismay I would always glance up to see my mother smiling.   

Sometimes, after kissing us goodnight and tucking the mosquito net around our bunk beds, my dad would pause at the bedroom door, say goodnight one more time and tell us he loved us. And occasionally one of my sisters or I would pipe up and say something funny like, “Do you love us move than DJ?” (DJ was our much-loved wart infested mongrel dog). And Papa would say yes, he loved us more than DJ. The next question, would up the ante a little. “Do you love us more than Rehema?” (Our ayah who sometimes helped out with laundry.)

“Yes, I love you more than Rehema.”

“Do you love us more than Caleb and Nathan?” (Best friends down the street.)

“Yes.”

“More than Aunt Sharon?”

“More than Aunt Sharon.”

“More than Granny?”

“Even more than Granny.”

This would go on for a while, measuring his love for us against all sorts of people and things we weren’t really concerned about. And then would come the fateful question, the real heart of the matter, slipped in at the end almost like a trick. “Do you love us more than Mama?”

Papa was always standing in the doorframe so I could never really see his face when he answered, just his form silhouetted against light from the living room. But his answer never failed, never even hesitated.

“Nope. Not more than Mama. I love her more than anyone in the world.”

And that was the end of it.

I don’t really remember any follow-up questions or explanations. We just cuddled happily under our sheets, Papa said I love you one more time and we fell asleep, secure in our little world as number two.

I don’t take for granted the immeasurable blessing of growing up as number two in my father’s life. That place has shaped my life and relationships for good in more ways than I can even imagine. On Father’s Day, after sending him a text across the world to let him know I was thinking of him I sat and cried remembering a dear friend whose father’s reckless decisions continue to break her heart wide open. I am blessed beyond measure. And I know it. I am so thankful, because in loving me second to my mother, my father gave me the key to my own first place. And from it I now look at my cherished daughter and dream of the man who will someday love her more than anyone in the world.   

Happy Father's Day Papa. And thank you for everything.