Drums

I am propped up in bed with the computer on my lap, enjoying the comforting security of a wide mosquito net. My sick baby sleeps within arm’s reach under her own net and the last time I checked her fever was still down. Bryan reads Chinua Achebe next to me, the light of his Kindle helping to divert the tiny bugs that can still fit through the mesh from my screen to his. Outside, like every night that we have been here, drums beat wildly under a full yellow moon, as exotic and other-worldly as a cliché scene in a movie I would ridicule. I am so curious about them. Who is drumming and why? What do the words to their songs mean?

In some ways I wonder what in the world we have done this week and in other ways I wonder how we did everything we did. The logistics of getting building supplies in this place is a never ending nightmare which has kept Bryan fully occupied and simple living has kept me busy. I made cornbread on the stove top the other day which felt like a huge accomplishment; I washed a couple loads of laundry by hand and have kept the house relatively clean. I kept my panic under control when the first night adder sashayed into the house and almost worked up the courage to kill the second one myself in the kitchen. (I let Bryan do the dirty work both times.) The third one that dares enter my house has it coming for him.    

On Thursday we went into the camp to greet some old friends. Many men have come by the house to say hello or have crossed our paths in the market. But most of the women I once knew are as home-bound as I am and I was excited about getting out to see them, even with the long walk.

The camp feels like a camp. There is space between the homes and people come and go freely. Little kids walk back from the pond with mudfish slung over their shoulders on home-made poles. But UNHCR tarps drape over almost every roof. Men sit in threadbare patches of shade as though waiting for something. Some are working metal or leading tired donkeys down the road. But there is a lot of waiting. Or at least the feeling of it.

I had a sweet reunion with my dear friend Aisha. She was one of the last people I saw on Thursday. I had already had time to cry behind my big sunglasses as we were swarmed by throngs of children who were shooed away by old men and women with babies on their hips, each soul pressing around us holding more stories than I could imagine. And all somehow happy. I was happy too. By the time I saw Aisha I was able to keep it together, which seemed somehow culturally appropriate. But she threw her arms around me in a long giggly hug which didn’t really seem that culturally appropriate at all, so maybe in the end it would have been okay to just cry in her shoulder. It was so sweet to hug her neck.

She has a new baby, a fat little girl named Khajija. I did the rough math while I bounced her on my knee and realize Aisha was at least four months pregnant when she fled her home, carrying small children for days on end. She looks good, isn’t much thinner than when I last saw her and her kids seems healthy. Her UNHCR tent is pitched in a shaded area with a wide sweep of clean-swept earth in front of it. But when I asked about her oldest child, a girl who was living with her grandmother in another town when war broke out, Aisha looked calmly away and said someone called her a few months back to say the girl had died in another camp in Ethiopia. She was eight years old.

On Sunday afternoon Bryan played ultimate Frisbee with some other khawajas on one end of the airstrip (the end with the wreckage of an old airplane). I sat on a mound of dirt and watched while Annabelle played with a bunch of kids nearby. A couple of little boys batted iridescent dragonflies out of the sky and brought them to her patiently even though she would end up letting them slip through her chubby fingers and back into the sky almost every time. I sat and watched and thought about a lot of things.   

I’ve had moments of feeling overwhelmed by the refugee context, of the sobering reality of what living here will mean. I have lots of questions about how all this is going to play out still. I sit with Aisha for half an hour under a tree and my heart constricts in longing for a time when we both still had houses to serve tea in and her daughter was still alive. With a pang of guilt I often think, this is not what I wanted. I wanted a place where people were settled and in a place that felt like home to them, even if it didn’t always to me. I wanted a place where I might have to work through what it means to have a friend who struggles to pay her kids school fees, but not what it means to help her keep them alive. I wanted a place where I would have to live simply and adjust to roughing it from time to time, not a place where I would have to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a prefab house with no plumbing that you can’t get to by even a really crappy road. I was ready for complicated. But why does it have to be this complicated? I have thought this so many times this week.

I hear the irony in my voice when I say these things. I know if questions were visible, my own would be one among thousands tonight blocking out the moon and stars overhead with their number. Why does it have to be like this? Why? I am not the only one thinking this.

I can’t answer these questions for myself, much less for Aisha and the thousands of people that live in the camps with her. But in those moments of conflicting emotions, when I sit thoughtfully in the dirt and watch my joyful daughter receive generosity from refugee children, I find myself returning to a couple of things that I know to be true. Things that help center me.  

I know that the one I live for has asked his followers to live helping people who have a lot less than they do. That is unarguable, (believe me, I’ve tried). And I know that the people I am living next to right now fit the bill better than just about anyone I can imagine. There are few people more deserving of a bit of a break, a bit of justice than people like Aisha. That is undeniable.

So if this life we have chosen and this work we are stubbornly fighting for a chance to just try is messy, if it is hard, even if it turns out to be one big failure, it is still worthwhile. Or at least it seems that way to me when I sit and think about it for a little while. This is the kind of thing, the kind of place, the kind of people worth using up one’s life out on. God knows it’s a mess. But despite my fears and grief and an occasional sense of deep loss - none of which will go away soon I feel - I cannot shake, cannot pull off, cannot dig out of the sinews of my heart the burning sensation that this is right.

So here we are.

I just got up and checked on Annabelle. Her fever is back so I gave her some ibuprofen and watched her suck it down and then nestle cozily back into her Graco pack n play. I breathed a prayer of bare-bone thanks and then crawled back into bed next to my sleeping husband. The drums are still pounding out in the darkness. Maybe tomorrow I will find out what they mean.

    

Thirsty

The night before we left Loki I became aware of a growing sense of emotion, something between anxiety and sadness, eclipsing the edges of my excitement but always in the periphery of my heart’s sight. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was or why it was there but I felt it. But as we crawled in bed that night and I snuggled away from the sagging mosquito net and deeper into Bryan’s arms (one of his favorite things about crappy nets) I realized that a year had passed since I had been to North Africa. A year had passed since I had seen those faces, held those hands, tasted those flavors and heard those sounds. I was returning to somewhere that was home for over two years but had been jerked out under my feet in the confused rush of one strange night. And now I was getting ready to go back. Bryan had been back twice already and I had lived vicariously through so many of his reunions and rediscoveries. But this was my first time back. And like so many of the sweetest things in life, this return caused a twinge of something less definable than mere happiness. 

We landed on the wide airstrip now full on UN bulldozers and WFP planes. I lowered my heavy self gingerly down the ladder and stepped into the brown dust. Refugee women carrying bags of food walked across the airstrip on their way back from the camps and kids waved at Annabelle from mounds of dirt in the near distance. The last time I stood in this place I was jostling a four month old while a kind-eyed woman told me that the home we had just left behind was bombed ten minutes after we left the ground. But I decided to reign in those memories for the moment and just took sweet heavy sips of my surroundings, resisting the urge to guzzle. 

It’s difficult to know what to say, I feel both so parched for words and yet drowning in them. I find myself wanting just to describe little pieces of the world around me, as though they better speak to the story I want to tell. 

There is a broad plain behind our compound that is flooded with chai-colored water and full of naked children, their bodies like wet obsidian in the sun. They laugh and splash in the warm water, and I heard them once shriek “Antanov! Antanov!” and then dive for cover from the pretend shadows of the real planes that drove many of them from their homes. 

Apparently thirty minutes before we arrived, our very pregnant neighbor rushing to get home doubled over on the path in front of our house, squatted in the grass and pushed her baby out of her body. When help quickly came the baby boy was gently picked clean of dry leaves and carried home in a basin next to his wet placenta. Even now I can occasionally hear healthy newborn cries from the hut across the way.    

On our first evening here Annabelle, (“Hana”), and I took a walk down the road and were quickly engulfed in curious children. I stepped back and just watched as Annabelle nonchalantly shared her collection of pebbles with the kids. They traded her green pods of small beans. And then to peals of shocked laughter my bold daughter began touching everyone’s belly buttons, one by one, (most of which will already exposed, though not all) and proclaiming proudly “Button!” A couple of the kids exclaimed, “She knows Arabic?” and I had to laugh too. Buton is the Arabic word for stomach.  

On a personal  level, it’s amazing the things that feel “homey.” I forgot how much I enjoy bathing from a bucket under the stars with my husband every night. I love looking through the steam of whatever I am cooking and seeing deep into every direction - kids playing in a puddle, women carrying firewood home on their heads, drowsy goats resting in some patchy shade. I love lingering early morning breakfasts that smell of sweet tea and passing smoke, the one meal of the day during which I am not sweating. I love long messy greetings with groups of people, inquiries into family and health braided over and under lots of thank yous to God.

I’ve also been reminded of all the things I don’t like about this life, mostly superficial. The cones of bugs that swarm around the little islands of lights over our heads are claustrophobic in the evening and I hate the fine sheen of mud that repellant leaves on my dirty skin at the end of the day. It’s hot, not even as hot as it will get but still oppressive to my Nairobi weakened system. And the drop latrine. I’m not going to lie, this private-minded seven-month pregnant lady is struggling a bit with the tin outhouse full of flies shared by six other adults and, purportedly, a rat. I have confirmed you can’t squat, poop, balance and cry at the same time, at least not pregnant.

The tears have come in more than just the toilet. Even with the natural pacing that comes with pregnancy and toddlerhood - the 45 minute walk into the camp has been delayed until little girl’s naps naps and Mama’s energy levels align, and settling into life rhythms, even just temporary ones, has been time-consuming with solar panels and gas cookers to set up, mosquito nets to string and boxes to unpack – but even with this, I have still felt overwhelmed at times. One moment it’s the trying to remove the live bug from my husband’s ear while my toddler panics in the background (you would think I would be the person least traumatized by that incident, wouldn’t you?) Another moment it’s hearing hauntingly familiar songs from another lifetime trilled out in a hot church building. In these moments I felt overcome. And I have cried.

There is so much to soak in here. And it’s hard to pace yourself when you are so thirsty. 

Lokichoggio (again)

We woke up at 5:15 this morning to catch our flight out of Wilson Airport, the launching pad out of urban East Africa to half-a-dozen of the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster areas and most exotic game reserves. I felt a twinge of self-consciousness as I squeezed my Motherhood Maternity clad belly and squirmy eighteen-month-old obtrusively between UNHRC representatives in linen business suits reading glossy dossiers, and tourists in North Face gear toting professional grade cameras around their sunburned necks in the small crowded airport terminal. But that’s who we are I suppose, our own complex category of crazy heading into the beautiful mess that this part of Africa can sometimes be.

We are here in the outpost town of Lokichoggio until Wednesday when a bush pilot friend will fly our chartered Cessna up North and drop us off. Right now Bryan is out of cell range somewhere near the border trying to get our passports stamped in at the hut they call immigration. Annabelle is sprinkling sand on a bored looking tomcat sitting in a green canvas chair nearby. She’s collected a handful or bottle caps and pebbles in a plastic container at her feet and periodically looks up to exclaim something unintelligible about the noisy guineas in the bushes. We are only one foot out of civilization and already she is happier than I have seen her in weeks.

I am too, I think.

Sweat is wearing a path down the back of my calves though Loki’s dramatic skyline is heavy with rain clouds. Mary Katherine is tossing and turning inside of me as though she can sense the change in the world outside too. But it feels good to be on the move again. It turns out the thing I grieve the most about our lifestyle lately, our ever-packed bags and changing view from the bedroom window, is also the thing that makes me feel invigorated today. Or maybe it’s just because in this case the move is taking us one step closer to putting away the suitcases for good for a while. I’m not sure. But even with the sweat and the promise of far more to come, I’m really excited.

We will be in North Africa for about five weeks before we come back out to wait for Mary Katherine to be born in Nairobi. We will stay in the simple house of some friends working with another organization (they are in Nairobi to have their baby right now) while we try to get our feet under us. Bryan will be working to get a fence up around the plot that will become home and a couple of cement slabs laid for what will eventually be our floors. Annabelle and I will be doing a lot of adjusting back to the life we have been away from for a year – bucket baths, creative cooking with eggplant, making the secret nutella stash last, learning language, making new friends and catching up with old ones, trying to nap in the heat.

Choosing to deal with Braxton Hicks and potty training a strong-willed toddler in a part of the world that doesn’t have running water, electricity or any fruit in the market beyond the occasional tomato might seem a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. (It alternates between the two for me depending on the day of the week and how much sleep I’ve had the night before.) But in some bizarre way, it sounds like everything in the world that I want to do. I’m going with the two people I love most back to a life that I have missed. Genuinely and deeply missed. It’s not going to be fun every day. But something tells me it’s going to be really good on at least most of them.

Sometimes I wonder if I am being overly-glib. In the next few weeks we will see if eventually that one-too-many ants in the sugar bowl, that one-too-many mosquito bites on my baby, that one-too-many degrees on the thermometer after sunset will send me over the edge. Maybe it will, who knows. But right now whether out of an intrepid spirit or profound naiveté, I am really looking forward to the next season of life.  

Malu

Last Monday we loaded up the little car we rent when we are here in Nairobi with a couple bags, a scrabble board and a sack of snacks and headed out of town. Annabelle slept for the first hour or so of the trip and woke up right as we crested the Great Rift Valley. The precarious road hemmed only with vegetable vendors and herds of fat sheep wove drunkenly along the edge of the rift, while Mt. Longonot soared out of the patchwork valley far below us. I knew when Annabelle woke up because I heard her mumble groggily from the backseat, “Oh my ness…” as she gazed out the window.

The dirt road to Malu Lodge wound steeply up an escarpment outside of Naivasha town through brushy forest and over a couple streams. By the time we arrived our car was splattered with mud after a couple close calls. We stepped out into a meadow tired and hungry and at the beginning of what turned out to be an absolutely lovely first-ever getaway as a family of three.

We stayed in a two bed-room cabin with a stone fireplace and wide front porch overlooking the lake far below. The four-poster beds were made up with white-down comforters and the walls were hung with water-color paintings of Joy Anderson’s lions and old black and white photos of Karen Blixen. The water to the deep bathtubs ran from a tank over a wood-burning fire nearby. It’s just the kind of place that makes you realize with a thrill of delighted shame just exactly why former colonists were just so reluctant to leave.

We spent the next four days sunk deep into wicker chairs in front of a crackling fire (Naivasha is chilly) reading and drinking from steaming mugs. Annabelle scared off the skittish dik-diks who would tiptoe up to our front porch or, when we walked down the path labeled “To the Farm Animals”, would pet the rabbits and chase the chickens and guineas and dubiously let the calves suck her fingers. She even rode a saddled donkey named John on the trails around the lodge, scattering a family of indignant warthogs across the field in front of her. For lunch and breakfast we walked about ten minutes down a muddy trail to the clubhouse where we ate four course meals that always included bread and butter, both homemade. Supper was brought to our cabin on a huge tray and we ate in front of the fire in our pajamas. After Annabelle went to bed Bryan and I stayed up far later than we intended to, not as often playing scrabble or reading as much as just talking. Not about the future or even the recent past but about childhood memories we had never shared for one reason or another, or that professor in college that forever changed the way we see the world or why we didn’t fall in love with the people we knew before each other. And why meeting each other was different.

On one day we took a picnic lunch to Hell’s Gate National Park (which is far more inviting than it sounds) and took Annabelle on her first game drive. There are no big cats in the park making it open to mountain bikers and we had fun reminiscing about the day we biked across the park through herds of zebra in a weekend celebrating the discovery that Annabelle was just a few weeks old inside of me. We remembered that weekend as we drove instead of biked this time, our firstborn nestled up sound asleep in my arms on top of her pushy little sister.

On the day we left, we drove down the escarpment and took a boat ride, Annabelle’s first, across the lake. We slid across the salty green water, disturbing swarms of pelicans and pink clouds of flamingos. Along the banks we nosed up to great pods of hippos sunning like mounds of wrinkled wet rocks. The biggest ones would sink beneath the surface in a snort of bubbles as we floated by only to resurface closer to the boat minutes later. Annabelle was annoyed by my death grip and kept “moo-ing” at the hippos to get their attention.

The final hours of our holiday were tearful for me, and it’s hard to say exactly why. My emotions have lingered through the weekend and though I suspect they are the kind best sorted out by a long lonely run, I am long past fast movement of any sort and am left sifting through my heart with an idle body. Nostalgia is the word that comes closest to describing what I feel, though it alone cannot carry enough nuance to hold my strange self these days. But something like nostalgia is what I felt as we drove back across the Rift Valley and home (“home”, home? home…) again.

Nostalgia for many things. Nostalgia for pieces of my own childhood. Nostalgia for the stomach-dropping romance of falling in love for the first time. Nostalgia for the sweet intimacy of marriage without babies and nostalgia for these precious priceless days of becoming parents of our first baby and being just three. And then even in some strange way, nostalgia for what hasn’t even come yet much less passed us by. Nostalgia for being parents of two little girls (maybe more?), for the nights we will sit around fires and play board games and stay up late talking about what they will be when they grow up or retelling the story once again of how mama and papa met. In some strange time warp of the heart I find myself cherishing and grieving all the sweetness of life, both that which has come and gone and that which is still ahead.

Something about last week was briefly perfect and as such it was unable to hold itself all in. And I think some of its sweetness must have sloshed out of place, splashing time both ahead and behind it. And the overflow of goodness and the sweet stains it leaves long after it has passed has left my heart thoughtful today.  

Ordinary

I’ve just realized that most of my friend’s blogs are really good at keeping me up to date with their day to day lives. I read them and know how their baby is adjusting to the addition of solid foods into their diet; how they feel about their new workout routine; what they thought about The Hunger Games movie; how a new Pintrest recipe turned out. Of course from time to time there are thoughts on bigger life changes like a family illness or new jobs. But generally there is just lots of news about the fairly ordinary.  

And I love it.

In a world where I often feel a million miles away from their day to day lives, I like knowing the mundane.

I’ve realized that I, on the other hand, am often bad about the day to day. I think this is for several reasons. For one, my day to day tends to look pretty different from one week to the next so sometimes its hard to know what to explain and describe. For two, the bigger stuff can sometimes, in some weird way, be almost safer, can’t it? I don’t mind that there are complete strangers out there who are reading about my spiritual journey with adoption, but it’s odd that some of my own loved ones probably don’t even know what country I am in right now, much less what I ate for breakfast. I’m not completely sure why this is. We all have our own kinds of guardedness, I guess.

So for what it’s worth, I’m in Kenya right now. I was in Uganda last month and Tanzania a couple weeks before that. I will be in North Africa next month. But for now I‘m in Kenya. Oh, and I had pancakes for breakfast.

I broke down and read the Hunger Games trilogy a couple weeks back. If you ask me about it in public I will maintain my literary snobbery and tell you how over-inflated all the hype is. But if you catch me in the right mood in private, we just might have a long talk about war and peace and the nature of true love. Maybe.

I have started driving in Nairobi. This probably seems like a long-overdue accomplishment, but with a perfectly functional public transport system in a writhing mass of humanity in a city of 4 million with about three working traffic lights (observed only certain hours of the day) all overseen by corrupt policemen, I have been perfectly happy just taking the bus or letting Bryan navigate the chaos. But with a feisty one-year old a belly that only fits down matatu-aisles with increasing difficulty I finally bit the bullet and got behind the wheel. And guess what? SO fun. I love it.

I haven’t been working out. Period.

The hormones that relegate memories of sleep-deprivation and comatose exhaustion to the darkest recesses of your mind have kicked in full-swing making me deliriously excited about meeting my MaryKat in just a few more months. My back is starting to hurt and I can’t breathe and bathe Annabelle at the same time anymore, but every time she moves I feel such a surge of joy.

Annabelle…oh, mercy where do I start. Annabelle is all little girl these days, complete with pigtails and fits to put on Mama’s perfume. She has two or three Hello Kitty band-aids at any given time, most of which are from actual injuries. She likes to talk to my tummy, which tickles, and frequently says, “Oh my ness!” when something surprises her.

I don’t have a Pintrest account. Should I? Can’t decide.

I’m happy to have Bryan with me again. He’s taken two trips up North in the past month or so leaving us apart much more than we prefer; the time we have been together has been full of branch meetings, team-building retreats and lots of reporting and paperwork and logistics to prepare for our transition back North. So on Monday we are taking our first family getaway as a family of three to a cottage on a Lake Naivasha. I. Can’t. Wait.

In Nairobi, the land of every fresh fruit and vegetable you can imagine on every street corner for dirt-cheap, we have been eating lots of delicious salads and stir-fries. And ice-cream.

So there is a glimpse of my mundane these days. It’s a good day to day. A happy ordinary. One that is soon to change to something entirely different. But in some ways, knowing everything is just for a season makes the present even sweeter.    

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.