without further ado

I declare this blog Officially Closed.

nongqongqo (to those we love)

I've been asked a few times whether I'll keep this blog up once I leave Moz, and the answer is: I don't know. It's been an essential way for me to process my time here (and let's be honest, my life in general), and it may continue to be useful for that, occasionally, once I'm home. There's still a lot I never talked about: for example, the role that music played over these years. Some of the more harrowing vehicular incidents/accidents. Also, one particularly amusing anecdote about 5 china teacups and a pregnancy gone mysteriously awry.

But then, I may be so busy eating giant double-chocolate muffin tops and visiting free public libraries with Wifi and drinking water straight out of the garden hose and leaving a large carbon footprint (as Americans do) and flirting with men in my own language and calling AAA when my car breaks down, that I simply won't have time to write anything more. You never can be certain about these things.

So, a few words to my invisible, mostly unknown readership:

Thank you for being interested in what I had to say. I certainly enjoyed describing things for you. I know I can get verbose, rely too heavily upon the hyphen and semi-colon, and habitually overuse references to the "wide open", "eternity", "grass" and invisible forces floating around the "universe" - but you stuck with me anyways and left such kind, encouraging words. Until one has spent a few years away from friends, family, and your home culture, it's impossible to appreciate just how much those little contacts mean to a person. For me, it was simply knowing that someone is listening.

I spent a lot of my time here feeling very lonely and overwhelmed by what was going on. Some people died that I cared about, my personal life went astray very early on, and a few of life's most difficult questions concerning God and faith went from mere dalliances in my mind to full-on bedfellows. I had too much time to think in the evenings, alone, which never helps a person to get a grip. Also, there's no Mexican food in this part of the world. None, at all.

But I loved it here. Could you see that? I think I wouldn't have loved it nearly so much if it hadn't so difficult and required so much from me, if it hadn't kicked me in the butt one moment and then bowled me over with sheer joy and amazement the next. God, what a country, what a place! I miss it before I've even gone. It's cliche to talk about Africa this way; but she's burned into my being, and what a privilege to be in this way scarred.

I leave here really happy: glad about what I accomplished, at peace with what I didn't, and heartened that when I imagine coming back to this continent, it's sooner rather than later. Much sooner.

(But I think I need to become a nurse-midwife first.)

I fly away on Tuesday. Farewell! If you'd like to be in touch, any of you, please do write me an email. I would love that.

if i may

This is rather exciting.

(Click to enlarge.)

This article, co-authored by my lovely adviser Lisa and myself, came out of the master's research I did in southern Zambia back in 2004. I never went the path of academia, but it feels good to have something come out of an undertaking you worked hard on and enjoyed.

These are some of my favorite pictures from that summer living in a tent, surrounded by dry grass, and open sky, and many hopeful dreams, hours from the nearest source of electricity, running water, or proper roads. When it wasn't dead boring, it was marvelous.

Quite a spectacular example of feminine multi-tasking as well as the incredible strength under hardship displayed by so many African women. I spotted this young mother harvesting cotton while simultaneously breastfeeding twins.

Me covered in pricklies after an ill-taken foray off the beaten track and up a giant anthill.




My research had nothing to do with infants, but I did witness these baby health checks conducted beneath an enormous acacia tree, and it must have sparked something inside, though I didn't realize it at the time.

One of the more dismal examples of a primary school classroom out in the bush.




I loved this little drummer boy, Buishmo, one of the sons at the homestead where we set up camp.

This incredibly wealthy man, on far right, had taken 13 wives, the youngest of which was a teenager. They subsequently formed their own women's association. Here he is dancing with 10 of them.





Our research team, somewhere in a big blank spot on the map, Southern Province, Zambia.

Anyways - this is the first time I've been published and it is fun. Of course, I'd be happy to sign your copy at any point.

amateur african almanac, 29 March 2009

Transcript of text messages, 11:56 am.

Heide: Hav u heard,cyclone warning f moz,from madagascar

Me: !!? Epa [this is a Mozambican expression of surprise and dismay]

Heide: Just got ph.call fr Jacq.s sister,this morning on news

Me: [forwarding message to Jen]

Jen: Oh dear. What does that mean? Do we need 2 evacuate?

Me: Yes. Immediately to tahiti. Where international red cross-supplied margaritas will be waiting.

Jen: LOL Guess that means we're not taking it seriously?

There's a lovely bookend symmetry that this should arise in my final week in Moz, since Cyclone Favio welcomed me to the country, a couple weeks after my arrival, in early 2007. Then, I was living with a host family about 1 kilometer from the coast; this time, I'm at Marina and Jen's apartment, about 500 meters from the beach.

What Cyclone Favio looked like, on left; its (presumed) eponymous inspiration, Fabio, on right.

I wasn't sure whether to take this morning's news seriously, since at the time, we didn't have internet access; that goes down about anytime someone clears their throat too loudly. What I did know was, the wind was whipping around so frenziedly the veranda door slammed open and shattered the glass in it. Also, the roads were looking more akin to rivers than streets. A lot of rain was falling. A lot a lot. Some of it was creeping into the house.

To be honest, I was glad something was happening today. Because last night Jen, Juliana, and I were out at 11pm in a crumbling outdoor stadium, huddled with umbrellas, waiting for my man Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi to come out and give his concert, which was - I kept squeaking - a magical dream come true for me. Except that it didn't come true: someone finally came out and announced the concert was canceled due to "conduções natural", natural conditions, the rain. This sparked a brief riot as people demanded their money back, but we did get reimbursed. After being wet and out so late, I slept in this morning until 11:56 am, when I was awakened by a text message from Heide alerting me of a "cyclone warning f moz".

But now it's nearly sundown, and all the day's fury has petered out. The sky looks dramatically subdued, like me after a big cry, Nature's equivalent of red eyes and a puffy nose. I know coastal birds are chirping, trading tales of their adventures, but I can hardly hear them over the din of Mozambicans cheering for the Mozambique vs. Nigeria World Cup qualifier game broadcasting on TV. Oliver is probably hot-footing it back to Zimbabwe.

And that's how it goes here. Life swiftly goes on.

more than worth these longings

"Those who sow in tears,
Will reap in joyful shouting..."

I can’t write the final posts of this blog without testifying to the entire truth, its depth and color, which is that for every child who is lost, many others are saved. FACT: the waves swoop in and grab some of us, but FACT: for yet others of us they inexplicably freeze, rise but fail to crash, and we pass on by, as on dry land. I like to profess that the world is full of mystery yet: this is one of the greatest.

Today a new child was brought in, Maria, our first patient of the day, and she weighed only 2.8 kg, or less than 6 lbs., though she is 1 year and 5 months old. Her mentally ill mother had been living in a cemetery, often leaving her for days at a time, until she finally ran off and never returned. A granny took her up and came to us. Looking at Maria this morning, I wanted to diminish the humanity of a creature so small, but it was impossible to do, because at a year and a half years old, there is already so much tired awareness in her eyes. All you can do is lean in, ashamed, and murmur, “I’m sorry.”

Then I turned away from her, pulling out more patient files, and as I did, I noticed a mom sitting outside that I knew I remembered, though I hadn’t seen her myself for many months. She'd always been seen by one of the other nurses, and in the busyness, I'd not noticed.

This was what I wrote about her little girl, Fatima, the last time I saw her:

The final baby happened to be a new patient, and it was with uniform dismay that we realized this 2.3 kilogram baby (or 5 pounds) was already four months old. She was in a state of severe malnutrition, sprawling naked before us.

The sweating mother holding her had a crazed sort of look in her eye, one which said in a silent heartbeat: I love this baby. I have five other children, I am HIV+, but this baby, I love this baby. As Heide said afterward, it was clear that was the reason the little girl was even still alive.

It wasn't just a matter of getting food into her. Heide is a genius nurse, honestly, and right off she noticed that the child had a cleft palate - or something like that, the opening in the back of her mouth was not formed right, too big, too high, and the net result was that nothing went down. She couldn't suck. Her stomach was full of air, a lymph node near her vagina was enflamed, absurdly swollen, and there was simply nothing to her, her little chest heaving, fluttering like a hummingbird, suffering to stay alive. Her mother patiently tried to pour milk down into her with a spoon... - look, I'm going to stop here. It was painful.

I looked at this same mother today and was dumbfounded: the brown little baby she held in her arms met my eyes and beamed, light coming from within, beamed with flirtatious smiles, beamed with health. Exclaiming my disbelief – I had truly expected her to die - her mother nearly broke down and wept for the joy and miracle of it. She looked up, locking eyes with me, but neither of us had anything to say, just wonder.

I lack the artistry to make manifest what it has meant to be part of this world, to have lived in Mozambique, to have known these women, men, children. Right now the sky two feet out my window is thickly striped in dusky pink and purple, and lush canopies of green leaves rise and fall beneath it. The bell of somebody’s bicycle is clanging down on the street, the giant lorries are blasting past, and I can’t even type for the fullness of holiness all around me. Do you get that the holiness is the molecular glue of so much rudeness and imperfection? How can it be? - things are so crappy! - and yet it’s clear it is.

I don’t know how the world works. We live in a time of plague, called HIV, we are swept along by seasons of hunger, and yet the story we exist in is bigger than either. Than everything.

The page turns. After a month, 5 months of death, life pushes back up. You should see this country now – the final rain, three days long, at last has subsided – the fields are bearing fruit – everywhere is the fragrance of cut grass, as men clear away the rioting green which is now higher than the top of my truck. Every day at the clinic, we are loaded with the harvest offerings of grandmothers and peasant women, now thanking us with their sudden excess: plastic bags of long sleek maize, okra, bananas, squash, football-sized avocados, spiny wild cucumbers, even a giant gerbil. (!)

Maybe the furtive advancement of life is the inevitable force, after all, not the other side of it: not the despair and suffering or fear. I don’t have tidy resolutions about Belusha, or Maria – oh God, Maria. Except what a heart-stopping honor it was to have known her, precious child Belusha; and to have acknowledged Maria, to whisper those words.

There’s a universal power I imagine as racing flat, invisible, and a resounding surge that it makes – ca-foom! – when our wholly disparate lives intersect, mine with Belusha’s, Maria’s with that granny who quietly brought her in to save her. We have looked in the face of horrible blackness, have we not?? But then the holiness, pinprick dots of light, shimmers into physical sight for a moment, renewing our courage, and we know what holds together even the molecules of pain. We know.

And sometimes the waves freeze.


Mankind has forgotten about the surging power; we don’t know much about it. But it exists, it sees, and it knows. It tells the fuller story; it testifies to the breadth and depth and color of what we are living.

2 Chronicles 16:9 For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.

You cannot deny there’s more than meets the eye when you work at a place like the baby clinic. Today was my last day working there, and the goodbye didn’t involve a Hollywood soundtrack cuing us that it’s time to start crying. There was simply the natural rightness of a thing come to its end, and the bittersweet, deep satisfaction of having passed through it together. If any music played unheard, it wasn’t a mourning song. It was music as when the rains finally end, and a harvest dance begins.

I remember at the AIDS Indaba I went to in Swaziland a couple of years ago, one of the tenacious, Big-Mama African women leaned into me at one point, and she confided:

“To sing is in Africans’ blood. But to sing without dancing…ah! is to not have sung at all.”

Sores like these are solely from malnutrition - eating food without any nutritional value, without vitamins.

Heide and Jacqui thought this baby's feet might have to be amputated.

Instead, healed.

This is the father of one of the twins I wrote about once, here looking more as a baby ought to look.

Nowadays, they're even about 5 times fatter.

After the fires last year.

Now.






Some of our amazing single dads, fallen asleep, while waiting to get milk for their kids.




The road out to Belusha's house.




My heroes, Heide and Jacqui.

twilight

In the new house where I am temporarily staying, an apartment that is almost completely empty (though just shy of echoing), I have discovered something marvelous, which is:

In the dusk of day, or deep of night, I can step out onto my veranda, arrange a thin cotton South African Airways blanket on the floor, sit on it, lean up against the wall, and nobody can see me at all. The veranda is on the second floor and it overlooks a busy highway road just a few feet away, noisy with passersby and lorries; but up in my niche, it’s just me and the moonlight, which is too busy making shadows of the curlicue grating anyways, so it isn’t much of a bother.

There’s nothing else on the veranda: dead leaves, my tennis shoes drying, an empty clothesline. I slip out the door, resisting the urge to crawl, and sit on my blanket. I put giant padded headphones over my ears, or maybe I just listen to the crickets when it’s late and the town has gone hushed. But the part I love best is that I’m sitting in darkness. I’m sitting beneath a low balcony wall and nobody – not a living soul – can see me. All kinds of people are passing by below, I can hear them, but they don’t have a clue. This is one of the best feelings in the world for me.

I was talking to a German lady the other day, and discovered that she used to build forts as a kid too, elaborate mazes of chairs and tables and blankets draped overtop. We both blinked at the memory of it, just remembering back to such grand times. What I love is that this empty, high-up veranda is my fort.

I’m outside but no one can see or talk to me. No one can glimpse my laptop, want it, and rob it. No one can do anything. I’m present but invisible. I could sit out here all night, faintly aglow with lamplight, my feet tucked into the stolen airline blanket. I dream about sleeping here, though I’d probably die of malaria shortly thereafter. The temptation is strong and I know it’d just be for satisfaction of sleeping outside where nobody knows where I am, and nobody can get me.

rueful admission

This is what I can't stop laughing about lately, by the incomparable, magnificent former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. I have it on audio file, but found a version of it here on YouTube.

Listen to it with your eyes closed; poetry is meant to be heard, not seen, especially his. That voice. I don't know how he can read this without laughing outloud.

if you please

I would like to draw your attention to a blogger I've drawn your attention to in the past; but this time to his newest blog: Pediatrician In Botswana.

I really appreciate the things Ryan has to say, and maybe even more how he says them. I appreciate that, from my little viewpoint, he... gets it.

It's a good blog and I hope you read it.

i'm coming too

I don’t know if I’ll forget what it feels like to hold a malnourished child in my arms, or not, when I return home. The one I hoisted today smelled of urine. Her unsmiling eyes and caricature-cartoon cheeks occupied too much space on her too-heavy head, wobbling unbalanced atop a mismatched skeleton, those tiny rib bones, legs clinging koala-like to your torso (the length of her enfolded into your body), that coarse, rusted hair, vapid breathing, her silence. The tight and shiny skin on her baby feet, swollen to bursting, is ugly and when you look at it, it feels like an off-key vulture screech.

I used to thrust myself forward in time, dream a moving picture of me shuffling around a refugee camp, working at a starvation center in a foreign place. I know now that that mostly means sweating with people who badly smell, of urine and waste, of infected breath, of cells disintegrating, of third-world medicines, of fear I think, of the energy it takes to die. Maintaining human life begins to feel like a factory effort. There’s just too many of us in this forsaken world, and so many are lost eventually in the tossing and upheaval of disease or poverty or abuse or not enough food.

I am unsettled that no one is holding them. I am bothered by the cloudy half-vision of this present world.

After breaking up with Patrick, in the winter I lived quietly in the city, it dawned on me for the first time that the older I grow, there will be less and less keeping me safe. Fewer people, and then none. This realization comes when you are an adult, when you are alone: it isn’t anybody’s business to care for me. It shocked me, like taking a final, irrevocable step out of childhood, like waking up for the first time at age 25.

I lay down on the carpet in my room, beside the bed and space heater, and I felt scared. I fingered all the beautiful half-pieces of faith I had, but I couldn’t figure out how they fit together, how in the misty half-vision I now possess, how it all works out. I still don’t.

I used to write a lot in those days.

Came home today, alone in the house. Doorbell, drunk older lady with a child. She’s the mother of the woman, Rose, who lives downstairs. Rose: I don’t care, what the fuck, take her to jail, call the police, she can live on the streets I don’t care! So I get my car, we pile in - the woman, whose name is Jean; the child, Lydia, who is in 6th grade; and I – and we make our way to another relative’s house across town, except we can’t find it because, duh, Jean is drunk, squinting and breathless in the backseat. Call 911: Where’s detox? Shouting from Jean, cursing. Driving in circles around south Minneapolis, spinning tires in dirty urban snow. Jean: more shouting, whining, running away from the detox center. Me begging the unsympathetic cops to find her, fretful, impatient: She’s going to hurt herself, I’m afraid! Don’t want the young girl, Lydia, to hear what is said, but she is nonchalant, more at ease than I am. Afterwards we go to McDonalds, she informs me that her uncle Tim – Rose’s husband - was caught sleeping with Rose’s best friend. No wonder all the yelling downstairs lately. She tells me about her Grandpa, who is one of those guys that panhandle on the corner near our house, holding the cardboard sign: Please help, homeless, God bless you. Later, back at home, doorbell, it’s Lydia with Sasha, Rose’s daughter, two giggling cousins: Can we borrow your jump-rope? Then Sasha, more serious: Mom and Dad are fighting again. Mom is drinking, and she’s not supposed to, she spent two years in therapy!

What do you even do with it all? Lydia with her dark Indian hair dyed a god-awful golden color, her auntie putting out cigarettes in my back seat, fumbling, falling, cross-eyed, confused, can’t remember her own name. Jean kissing Lydia, all boozy and sentimental. Lydia, whose mother sent her away for the weekend with a drunk relative, ordering her: Don’t you leave your auntie, Lydia, not for one minute! Jean dashing across a busy four-lane street, shouting into the wind. Lydia, straight-faced, bored, as her auntie is swallowed up into the back-alleys: Can we go to get some food? I haven’t eaten all day.

I’m shaken up by it, is the truth. I’m not naïve, but I’m still shaken. I feel vulnerable, unshielded. I feel like I am walking around without anyone watching, no one protecting me from behind. Let me steady the arm of an alcoholic grandmother; but let there be one behind me, one holding me under my armpits, one who is over, bigger, stronger, more secure. I want to pretend I am not frightened by this, our world; but I am, deeply. I am not paralyzed so that I cannot or will not respond; but I am not impervious to the raw fear underlying such brokenness ‘out there’.

What if I am lost to it all, washed out to sea? Who will hold my hand, tightly?

Who will pull me back, hold me fast?

***

I am still bothered by this.

I am troubled that not everyone is shielded. I watch our babies and moms at the clinic, and I see that some are lost. They are washed away. Why isn’t the safety and holding for everyone, me, them, 100%, all of us?

I know faith says we ought to hold each other. And I do hold them.

Ah - but only for 20 minutes. That’s all I can manage. Jacqui beats back the waves, shields them with her entire being, furiously, but can only do so for as long as they show up to the clinic, weekly, for a year, three years, five. It’s something, huge even – but it’s not enough. That’s what unsettles me.

They go home. They get hit by their husband. Or maybe he’s a good man, but can’t find work. Or dies. There’s no food. The moms and babies go home and it rains, walls of water, and their mud-walled home collapses in on itself. Or their toddler accidentally burns it down. Or their seven-year old is admitted to the hospital with dehydration, and while they are there, being saved, thieves steal everything in their house. Every blanket, every potato. Rats eat the nipple off their baby bottle.

TB goes untreated. Their children are kidnapped, thrown into pits, sold to South Africa.

I am speaking in specifics, not generalities.

I see the young mother on Tuesday, the 22 year-old with an endearing lisp and stutter, and her son with cerebral palsy, luminous prince of Africa, we smile, hold hands, laugh, and then next week both she and the son are dead. Just gone.

Though the feeling of having held them stays with me.

Being so close to their ‘raw pain’, as I wrote back then, scares the heck out of me. It scares me for me, and it scares me for them. I dredge up more fears from within myself, circle warily, irresistibly, around faith, finally go home, make a chicken sandwich, eat a chocolate bar, bathe away the urine smell of the disappearing child I picked up, and listen to Ben Harper while I type out modern-day lamentations all evening long.

I got a text message today, while riding a jolting Mozambican bus away from the afternoon glare, that dearest Belusha has finally left us, has passed away imperceptibly at home with her mother, in their empty, white-washed home set deep on the Mozambican prairie. I close my eyes to picture the grass expanding out from there, into forever, perhaps all the way to heaven. I think of her pain.

I thank God it's finally gone.

I am worried. I am returning home soon, in one month. And what if I can’t remember it - all of this, the babies and the glances, the jokes of old women, burying our cat beneath a mango tree, the interminable distance of Africa when hitch-hiking, how burnt bean stew smells like coffee, all the potential, so many torments, pink fog resting on the backs of fishermen, the feel of Belusha's hand in mine - when I am back in America?

i am awake/to feel the ache

If any of you out there still check this: I am back.

But even as I reenter the blogosphere, I am saying goodbye to a lot of other things.

First it was my parents, who flew from Joburg back to China a week ago Sunday. We had a wonderful time. One particularly hilarious moment involved two members of the family drinking a lovely rose wine straight out of the bottle, giggling in the back seat, while the third member zig-zagged around rhinos in Kruger National Park. Classy.

(I had to crop out incriminating identifiers, such as our faces.)

Today was my last day with Sampson. Jenny and Joel are moving to Chimoio, but their second-floor apartment in Gondola is paid up through September, so I'm moving in to save costs. It's also much closer to the baby clinic for me.

Dear Sampson is going to William, our Zimbabwean mechanic, who will put him on his isolated farm to guard... I guess plants and goats. I don't believe this will be a good job fit for Sampson, who prefers goofing off on night shift, for one, and two, would rather be compensated with loving-human-touch rather than food or the thrill of adventure. But there's nothing to be done. William will be kind enough.

He drove away, late this evening, with Sampsy in the back of the truck wildly looking around, and I knew in my heart the dog didn't understand. And now, whenever he saunters through my mind, my heart gives a pang. There is something transcendent about a good dog, even a smelly, amorous, weirdo like Sampson.



I am bidding adieu to my chickens, whom I promised to João, my colleague in Beira. This, on the other hand, I feel quite good about, as João is earnest about mastering the art of poultry-keeping and I couldn't think of a better recipient.


Which also meant, a grand farewell to their capoeira, their home. It underwent several inspiring design changes over the past year: a tin roof, an indoor second story, a flash flood emergency side exit. It was only a 2 mile drive to move it to Paula's house, but the police pulled Vumba and I over anyways, vagrants that we are, and dramatically threatened me with a $200 fine, which made my kidneys dance the macareña. Then grimacing, he waved us on, and I could almost hear him thinking as I drove away: "What an idiot muzungu."


I said goodbye to the hot water heater in my shower, which burned out today in a dazzling flash of smoke and fire. Fortunately I'd already put the nice pear-smelling conditioner in my hair, so all I had to do was quickly rinse and wetly exit.

(Jen always called the heater a "widow-maker". I'm trying not to read into the fact that it burned out before it killed me. What that might imply.)

I also said goodbye to electric lighting in my kitchen, which was probably related to the hazardous happenings of the water heater the same day. The electrician said he couldn't mend it without replacing the whole light fixture - so, So Long Kitchen-Light, it's been swell.

Now I use these.

And with this prosaic conclusion no one is probably reading, I hereby announce that soon I will also be taking leave of Mozambique itself, which is why I'm disassembling my life here: giving away the dog, the chickens, the nice things. I even already have a plane ticket: April 7th. It's time to go home.

I am ready for this. It feels right.

Though I know this goodbye will be a lot harder than all the others.

come, they told me

The situation: I don't have internet at home anymore, it's been broken since Thanksgiving. So though I have much to write about, my time online is limited to frustrating moments at an internet cafe once a week. I'm doing all I can to fix things.

The rains continue to come and go in furious sprints.

Babies and moms continue to ficar doente (get sick), engordar (fatten, or get healthy), and sometimes die at the clinic. Too much to say, too much to think, too much to feel.

I made falafel and pita bread last week in a last ditch effort to maintain healthy eating habits by taking the time to cook real food for myself. It turned out so well I made it all again the next day and froze it for later.

Mom and Dad arrive in one week exactly.

Here's how I spent Christmas Eve at Lake Malawi. It was short on O Come O Come Emmanuel, but pretty nice anyhow, especially biking.


And on Christmas Day I went sailing with a Malawian man named Captain Kenneth.

Weird.

nightswimming deserves a quiet night

The rain came. Today's the fourth day, and it still hasn't stopped, save a few, short, misty intervals when we all poke our heads out to survey the damage (and glory). Yesterday I ran out in the downpour to save my chickens from a watery death, rigging up a wooden perch for them to huddle on above the waves. One of their uncollected eggs floated past me as I did.

Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink - the same day the rains started, our water tank broke, leaving me without running water. So I've been bathing in the rainwater, and boiling it for drinking.

Despite the leaking walls and ceiling, the mold which is growing, the nagging smell of wet dog, there is something glorious about so much water falling from a dark rolling sky.

But don't get me wrong, I am jumping at the bit to get out of a damp house and on to Malawi, which I imagine as a sort of sunshiney Christmas paradise. And so things go...

i hope everything is going to be alright

Here's what I am doing in the next few weeks:

On Saturday, Dec. 20th, I am leaving to spend Christmas in Malawi. It will take one full day to reach there, headed straight north. I am traveling with Marina and Laura, and we've all agreed not to get each other presents. Lake Malawi is said to carry bilharzia, but we only wish to sit and look at the water, not necessarily lark in it, so it should be okay. The following Saturday I will come home.

Malawi has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, but I am not going to dwell on that here. I may, however, become a midwife in the near future, which is exciting to daydream about. Perhaps next to my blood fluke-laden Christmas lake?

I've been saving all my vacation days since May because my parents are coming to Moz on January 15, direct from Hong Kong. They'll stay for three weeks, half of which time I'll continue to work, and half of which we'll go traveling somewhere else.

My only requirements for where we go are that it be: 1) out of Mozambique, 2) an English-speaking country, 3) someplace very beautiful, 4) someplace with menus that resemble the menus of countries that aren't Mozambique, and 5) named South Africa. We have two years of catching up to do, so it really needs to be good. And it will be.

So don't forget me. Posts may be sparse the next two months, but hopefully I'll come back refreshed, able, ready to do life and work here with a little more gusto, until I leave. That's the idea.

(Please pray for rain. People are starting to die of starvation here. It happens when you're already immune-compromised (very ill), and then go 3 or 4 days without eating. We need the rain.)

My December rose (which sounds like an '80s love ballad with electric guitar) - the only bloom. Paula sadly picked it the next day, but then she put it on the table, and surprise guests popped by, and it looked lovely, so pink and fine in December, and I was glad.

Merry Christmas and much love in the New Year.

on my mind

All sorts of bugs are turning up in unexpected places lately, expired bugs.

There was a scorpion - dead - that fell out of my Guardian newspaper when I opened it, somersaulting through the air onto my chest as I lay relaxing on the couch. There was a large, delicate gray moth - dead - within the folds of my new, clean bed sheet after a coffee stain necessitated changing the old one. There was a deer fly - dead - jumbled headfirst and upside down in the private confines of my red Clinique toiletry bag. There was a cockroach - dead - on his back in the tiny alley between the bathroom shower and a turf-colored rug. And finally (but never really finally), there was a curled up species of centipede - dead - which fortunately I spotted lazily floating inside a half-used bottle of antibiotic syrup seconds before I passed it over to a mom at the clinic.

What I don't get is why they're already dead, all. And why, forensically, I can see no apparent cause of death. I read once about cockroaches living in South Africa's gold mines, grim and terrible spaces two and a half miles beneath us, scrambling around in dark dungeons pulsating at more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A hardy species, if ever... so what is it about the 1/2 inch gap between my bathmat and shower that was so perilous to a cockroach he suddenly cashed in his chips and flipped tits up, just like that?

I don't understand. Was the tiny scorpion already ill with lupus and simply chose my October Guardian as a pleasant place to pass into the next life? (And is it meaningful that he kicked the bucket between an article on the Bush administration's torture of detainees and an article about the changing face of cricket in Sri Lanka?)

Or are there unseen chemical hazards in my toiletry bag, fatal to the fly species, that are a clear warning I ought to quit bleaching my upper lip and finally accept the mustachioed heritage of my strong German female forebears? Is the centipede in the syrup mocking our Western overemphasis on the biomedical tradition without honoring indigenous knowledge?

What does it all mean?? Is mankind on a fatal trajectory to ecological destruction "in the same way the Mayan collapse was accelerated by the competition of kings and a chronic emphasis on erecting monuments"? Is Plato's philosophy truly encapsulated by "disagreement, debate and provisional answers rather than unshakable dogma"? Why has Canada had little exposure to sub-prime loans? Are all those dead insects saying I'm fat??!?

Life is such a mystery. And I've been working on next year's budgets for much too long.

What you get when unpredictable electricity doesn't affect the phone lines.

Mozambique is full of enigmas.

if this were the last

Remodeling the Bathroom

If this were the last
day of my life, I wouldn't complain
about the shower curtain rod
in the wrong place, even though
it's drilled into the tiles.
Nor would I fret
over water marks on the apricot
satin finish paint, half sick
that I should have used semigloss. No.
I'd stand in the doorway
watching sun glint
off the chrome faucet, breathing in
the silicone smell. I'd wonder
at the plumber, as he adjusted the hot
and cold water knobs. I'd stare
at the creases behind his ears and the gray
flecks in his stubble. I'd have to hold
myself back from touching him. Or maybe
I wouldn't. Maybe I'd stroke
his cheek and study
his eyes the amber of cellos, his rumpled
brow, the tiny garnet
threads of capillaries, his lips
resting together, quiet as old friends—
I'd gaze at him
as though his were the first
face I'd ever seen.

(Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love.)

in the name of love

I had just been planning a post in my head about some of the best things people have given or mailed to me here, when I went to our office (in Beira) and there sat two packages, one small, one not (which is to say, it was colossal and heavy), both from the same giver, dispatched the same day, and the combined price to post them from Fresno to Mozambique was one hundred and seventy-six American dollars and forty-five American cents.

!

Today I had a 6 hour staff meeting at the orphan day center I work with (during which renegade beads of sweat kept muddling my notes); stopped to pick up some groceries; bumped into a grinning pastor friend who sneaked up on my truck and successfully RAWR!-ed me; hid the red wine I'd bought for tonight; gave him a ride home; suddenly realized the extent of my dehydration; frantically drove back to Marina and Jen's apartment; locked the truck up; lugged everything up to the third floor in one trip; gulped 16 oz of water; squinted appreciatively through the cold water of a shower; and finally sat down in a Crayola-green camping chair to investigate these two surprising packages I'd received from a girl named Melissa.

In truth, we hardly know each other. We met at MCC orientation, which was two (blissful) weeks long for me (since I was going to Moz), but just one for her (headed to backwater rural Florida). I remember a particularly frigid and merry walk we took together, stopping at the swings in a winter-faded park and trading our perspectives on Africa and men. We exchanged a few handwritten letters since and some emails. She very often responds to my blogs using the initials MB. If you peruse a few dozen of these comments, you will see that she is unfailingly encouraging. Turns out she also does a slam-diggity job on care packages too.

(What was inside: 9 tops, just about doubling my shirt wardrobe, 13 movies and 27 books, tripling my personal library here. Oh, and a shower plug, which is what I'd originally requested.)

Thank you Melissa. Your astounding generosity came at the perfect time. Though it was already proven long ago you have a beautiful, funny, expansive soul.

I know 'Tis better to give than to receive, but it's pretty sweet to receive too.

The best ever gift I got here was from my sister. I'm normally all global-citizen yah yah (oh man, that makes me remember the time, in a particular fit of foreign policy angst, I heatedly told my family we'd do better flying the Mexican flag on the Fourth of July. And I meant it.) - but when I received this incredibly compact brush-and-mirror-in-one (so diminutive! so perfectly constructed for bush living! a marvel of engineering! I even like the pink!), I spontaneously flushed with a tremendous sense of love for America. "Look at this!" I shouted to Sara. "I bet it only cost a dollar! Only America could come up with something like this! " And that's true on a symbolic level. Because technically it was made in China.

(A girl can change a lot in a few years here.)

What on earth could that tiny speck of a dot be? Why, it's a brush AND a mirror!
Bid good riddance to trying to maintain oneself in a rearview mirror. Because saving the world is no excuse not to look your best.

One of the other best presents was from my friend about whom I am forever effusively enthusiastic, Sarah. I know her because she is the wife of Patrick's first cousin Kevin, on his mom's side. It's kind of quirky we're such good friends, but I love her so much. She and her family live in eastern Kentucky, where illiteracy and poverty can be as debilitating as in parts of Africa. They are sort of poor, too, intentionally so, having chosen to make their lives reaching out to kids at a small experiential Christian boarding school, the kind of place where students plant big gardens for science class and canoe through the dusky blue hills of Appalachia for field trips. She and Kevin have two kids of their own, Nathan and Hannah (just like Wendell Berry's Nathan and Hannah Coulter, which you should read), and two in Liberia, waiting to be released to go home, Courage and Margaret.

(One of my favorite photos) Nathan on left, Hannah in center;
Margaret in front, Sarah, and Courage hanging out behind, on the coast of Liberia

Sarah has sent me several packages over the past two years, but the best item was Bath and Body Works Shimmer Lotion in Tropical Passionfruit. Because sometimes even an HIV-talking girl in Mozambique wants to feel a little sexy.

And then there was the Petzl E+Lite headlamp Rebekah gave me before I left. I still remember the restaurant we were sitting in when I unwrapped it, grateful for her foresight. Last May I used it when I cut and removed stitches from Sara's foot, which thrilled me with the perception of being like a real dentist, if not an actual doctor. (Clarinho, the Brazilian expat dentist in Beira, uses just such a headlamp to peer beyond his patient's cavernous lips.)

Unless you want to live your life in darkness and despair, you really can't last a week here without a strong, long-lasting headlamp. Like this one.



And now I shall listen to U2, which is what all the cool development workers listen to, and twirl around my stash.

dimming of the day

The person from whom I have learned the most about grace is my Dad.

It’s him, just how he is, that always made me feel the most that it was okay. Just ok. To not go out for volleyball anymore, as if that were an indicator of my worth. To fail in a relationship. Or a job. Some aspect of my faith. To leave Africa, when I do, because I can't handle it anymore, the aloneness mostly, so much built-up loneliness, and the dying. He’d just say, a far distant tinny voice whistling in wires across the expanse of Asia, submerged through the Pacific Ocean – or leaping across outer space I guess - landing on Mozambique’s coastline, traveling inland and upward in elevation until it arrives at… me, a short, anxious figure sitting on a beat-up couch in the veranda of a little house, desperately figuring things out. “It’s alright then honey. Just go home if it’s time.” Or, “Well, $600 is a lot of your money to drop the class now. But it’s just money.” Always: “Do what you gotta do.”

It’s so immediate, his reaction, as if proffering a daughter grace is his default modus operandi. There’s no hint of irony or manipulation or theatre. No blighting footnotes. No pregnant pause. Just simply and immediately, Okay. He means it.

What relief is in that. So much grace it makes me want to weep. It imbues freedom to keep going, to rise after faltering, to continue on. It takes a long view of living, when that’s what is needed. It’s as rousing as a battlefield speech. I’m fed up with struggle, which is what life is; but I keep from drowning because of grace, and what I know of it, intimately, comes from my family, all of them, my mom and my sister, and especially, from dad.

if only in my dreams

It may be close to 100 degrees today, I'm wearing the thinnest tank top I can find, and the banana tree out my bedroom window is gently shifting in the breeze. But I [skipped Mannheim Steamroller] and am listening to the Elvis version of Silver Bells at this moment. And just finished putting up what will be the extent of my decorations for Christmas, thanks to my dear friend Rebekah, who mailed me pretty Ikea ornaments last year. I am simultaneously preparing for a World AIDS Day presentation on Monday.

Weird weird weird.

But good.

Mele Kalikimaka

wade in the water

I don't really know how to ease back into this after being absent so long. Though is 20 days long?

I remember once, I was in second grade and my mom was the eighth grade teacher at another school. Her students had a field trip (?) to a large, fancy indoor pool in town, and she brought me along, I can't remember why, but it was exciting and special to go. All the giant eighth graders were splashing and palling around with me, I felt like a million bucks, and then a group of them shouted for me to come into the water where they were. It was the deep end, foreign territory, but standing there in my purple two-piece, complete with miniature ruffle, I wanted to be bold so I plugged my nose and jumped in, a gangly streak of false bravado. And here I am, twenty odd years later, and I can still remember the shock and sensation of plunging down so deeply, the dark warm water accepting me, sinking sinking sinking, the blinking red alarm in my head screeching When will the down part stop?! It was scary and I got a noseful of chlorine - despite my efforts - which is the worst feeling in the world, tangy and painful, water where water should not be, too close to the brain.

Choking and coughing, I surfaced and flailed for the wall; some of those kindly pre-pubescent Lutheran kids hefted me up back onto the concrete deck where my towel lay. A harrowing experience but I lived and - in any case - had breached the Deep End.

So here I am, in like manner, already three paragraphs in - which is to say: It may not be pretty but sometimes you just gotta jump.

When things are most difficult, my muse fails, as March - June 2007 will testify. This past month has also been a tough spell, I had no will to write, (and then my internet died for a week.) The nice thing is I can let myself off the hook because I don't have to account for everything, even if it were possible.

I'm pleased today is Thanksgiving. I got off the phone with the Buschena family just now, all lovely five of them. They made me smile and laugh and reminded me - today, right now, at this moment - all is okay with the world.

The Game:
Last year I was in Beira, lying on the spare bed at my British friend Marina's house, and looking up articles on the Onion.
Two years ago I was home in Minnesota, preparing for my sister's wedding and waiting to hear if I would get the job in Mozambique. That's a possible lie, I have no idea what or where I was for Thanksgiving 2006. It must have been something like that.

This year: I had forgotten about Thanksgiving until two North American friends - Laura and Dara - stopped by in the morning and wished me a happy one. It all turned out beautifully, actually, because yesterday evening, son of a gun, the neighbor’s renegade dog killed my black hen, Branca. Nearly killed her, I should say; she was dealt a mortal wound to her back, so I had to ask Vumba to finish the job for me. I cooked and deboned her last night, which meant that this morning - on the very day in which we consume birds to illustrate thankfulness - I had just such a bird in my freezer, ready to eat. For lunch I whipped up some mashed potatoes and biscuits, opened a can of corn, and it was as lovely a meal, with two very dear friends, as one could hope for. Dara had even picked up a package in the mail this very morning which contained Thanks Be To God cornucopia napkins, at least four-ply. Verily, there are some instances, raising our wine glasses of water to the sky, admiring the Zimbabwean plum jam, in which life impresses upon you an indelible sweetness. The goodness of little touches.

(Such as when Laura did all the dishes afterward.)

Keeping on. Moving on. We must continue to move on. That's what Elizabeth Whatshername said after Amazonian Indians killed her husband on a sandy river beach in the 1950s. She looked around, in the aftermath, and said to herself: I must do the next thing. It may have been pruning the garden. I think that was the point. I think of that often.

Here in Mozambique, this is what is coming soon... though it's not here yet. Some say it's late. I made this clip last year and saved it for the end of the end of our dry days, right now, to remind me of what is coming very soon. I captured most of this footage at the orphan day center I work with in Beira, during a soggy training we put on for their preschool teachers.

On the way. Soon.

Happy Thanksgiving all my good friends.

blessed to be a witness

I think people make it here if they can find hilarity in really-not-so-funny situations. It's too intense if you can't. Eventually, your head will melt out your earlobes, and chickens, who can sense when you're in Overload, will have squawked their way over and scratched dust over your puddled remains faster than is respectable for someone experiencing moral and emotional anguish. You can imagine, I walk on the edge of a knife in this regard, being such a lover of depressing human suffering, always on the lookout for poetic analogies to make sense of things. I don't mean poetic in a Shel Silverstein kind of way either, unfortunately.

It's still the dry season here. Each day the wizened heat wends around us, nudging the thermometer a fragment higher than the previous, but cholera has already returned. "How can it be?," I wonder, a little green in these matters, for I can clearly remember the day just back in June when they finally dismantled a little tented community I had irreverently christened "Camp Cholera".

I used to walk by it daily, its recycled UNHCR and USAID tents flapping in the wind, sitting like a canvas island in the center of a grassy field, all of it contained within a sturdy ocher concrete wall. It was where the provincial hospital quarantined its cholera patients, people deemed too dangerous in their infectious state for regular care, and thereby compelled to pass the course of their illness in an empty, scrubby field a couple of blocks from our house. I heard the Beira Camp Cholera was huge and sprawling, full of men in containment suits and people dramatically jerking between dead and alive; but our satellite location here in Chimoio always seemed pretty low-key, though there was a lot of cholera going around last season, especially in nearby Gondola.

"Must be arts and crafts time now, haha," I'd chuckle, making the same joke every time we'd stroll past it, necks craned for any glimpse of movement, though of course that was pointless, because at Camp Cholera there isn't Capture the Flag, just puking and diarrhea for three days, dehydrating out both ends until you're dead, unless you've sought help in time and then you're fine. "The summer camp you never want to go to," I'd murmur, and jump on a crowded sardine-tin chapa headed for downtown.

So its back already, this waterborne assassin, and the reason of course is because we ARE still in the dry season, the tail end of it, the hard time. Only 43% of Mozambique has access to clean, safe drinking water, which means a lot of people, rural people, are running dangerously low on what they do have, and - here it is - now are accessing water which isn't clean, isn't safe. Cholera-infected water, dirty water that kills.

We received word last week that upwards of 39 people and counting have already died in an intense, localized cholera epidemic at a small village where we work (constructing sand dams for clean water, actually), in the north of Manica Province, a poor, isolated region called Mandie. I'm not directly involved, so my details are fuzzy, but someone told me that many, many people are sick and the whole area has been quarantined, all roads closed, no one in, no one out.

We host groups here occasionally called Work and Learn Tours, which are made up of supporters from the US and Canada who come for a couple of weeks to see our projects firsthand. There's one that's been planned for months now, a group of Canadians meant to arrive in two weeks, who are flying across the world to see our sand dams in this exact community where these people have just lost their lives, so quickly, entire families! Mother, father, all the children, just like that. I'm not sure what the group is going to do now.

It's hard to wrap your head around some of this stuff. Hard to Shel Silverstein stuff like this.

I've been sick too for the last week, for exactly seven days laying in bed with a mixture of (possibly) strep throat and (possibly) malaria. After 4 days, when the terrible cold and sore throat wasn't going away, Heide insisted I begin malaria treatment, and it has seemed to help. But the point is, it signals the restart of malaria season as well. Johnny Raincloud though I be, yes, this is terrible news. It comes every year, but it's terrible news, every year. More people die of malaria than anything else here - the end.

Maybe its all perspective, but do you see what I'm saying about high potential for head meltdown?

Buckle up.

The last day before my body broke down and requested sleep for a week, Elizabeth, Heide and I were wrapping things up at the clinic together one afternoon. We were down to our very last baby of the day. The last child is always a gentler time, slower, welcomed with relief, when the sweeping and tidying in the clinic has already begun, when it is finally quiet enough outside to hear the thud of blue-gonaded monkeys throwing papayas to the ground, bolder than ever (for these are hunger months for them too).


The last baby happened to be a new patient, and it was with uniform dismay that we realized this 2.3 kilogram baby (or 5 pounds) was already four months old. She was in a state of severe malnutrition, sprawling naked before us.

The sweating mother holding her had a crazed sort of look in her eye, one which said in a silent heartbeat: I love this baby. I have five other children, I am HIV+, but this baby, I love this baby. As Heide said afterward, it was clear that was the reason the little girl was even still alive.

It wasn't just a matter of getting food into her. Heide is a genius nurse, honestly, and right off she noticed that the child had a cleft palate - or something like that, the opening in the back of her mouth was not formed right, too big, too high, and the net result was that nothing went down. She couldn't suck. Her stomach was full of air, a lymph node near her vagina was enflamed, absurdly swollen, and there was simply nothing to her, her little chest heaving, fluttering like a hummingbird, suffering to stay alive. Her mother patiently tried to pour milk down into her with a spoon... - look, I'm going to stop here. It was painful.

You don't do any good to anyone if chickens are kicking dirt over your puddled head. You don't. I'm serious.

One of the things I love most about helping out at Jacqui's clinic was the discovery that every day is filled with riddles, or is like a high-stakes game of Clue. I help out with everything there, I even see patients by myself sometimes on the days when we're really bombarded - (I'm talking up to our eyeballs in babies and caregivers. I refer them to a real nurse if they complain of anything wrong, otherwise its just checking their weight, taking notes and handing them their milk) - but the main thing I do is translate Portuguese between patients and Katie, a wonderful British nurse who doesn't speak it yet. I've also picked up just enough Shona that a few odd words and phrases are usually thrown in the mix too.

You know how one of the funniest realizations you have the first time you travel overseas is that animal noises are not universal? For example, in America cows go "moo", but in India they may go "rawl-ruup!" Or our frogs go "ribbet" but in Honduras maybe they go "yooo". Those are all made-up examples because I can't remember the actual noises people have demonstrated to me; but the point is, sick bodies also make much different sounds in other countries. We have rumbly tummies when we have diarrhea, but here they have burbly ones, with occasional fips! fips!, like popcorn popping.

Don't worry, I don't get it either.

This makes medical translating, particularly for unschooled patients, extremely challenging sometimes. (And that doesn't even go into all the euphemisms people use too, either because they're embarrassed or just because it's how people say things here. For example, hemorrhoids: "a thing that comes out like meat". AIDS: "this thing which it is said which we have".)

So, while sound effects can make translating very confusing, they can also make it uproariously funny. You have to see it that way. The toddler's grandmother is looking me in the eye, balling up her fists, shaking them like wet noodles, and uttering high-pitched trills like a... I don't know, a vacuum cleaner sucking up Saran Wrap?

"So what's she saying?" Katie will ask me innocently, the grandma with a face like crinkly fudge now pausing and peering at us expectantly.

"Okaaay," I'll reply, shifting in my plastic lawn chair and taking a few warm-up laps in my head. "So she's saying that little Franque here" - at which the toddler on her lap yanks my eyeglasses off the table and chucks them a few feet away - "after he's done eating, about once a month, he stands up and goes like this" - here I ball up my fists and imitate the vacuum saran wrap sound - "and then all the other kids run away, and then I think she's saying that he then" - [attempt at sound of semi-truck smashing gravel] - "and then... well, it sounds to me like maybe he's..." - wracking brain for correct English words - "falling over? Convulsing? Oh! Wait, what's that called? Um, that thing... epilepsy!! Maybe epilepsy? What she's describing sounds like he's having convulsions that kind of remind me of epilepsy. Could that be it?"

Then Katie, expert pediatric nurse, asks all the appropriate follow-up questions, which do, indeed, seem to point to epilepsy in little Franque, who has by now wandered over to the other baby being looked at by Heide, has squatted down politely, and peed on the floor.

Ok. So. Nothing funny about epilepsy for Franque. Nothing funny about kids coming in with terrible, painful burns because they convulsed next to a cooking fire and seared half their arm. But on the other hand - Yes! Hilarious! Grandma making a sound like a vacuum sucking saran wrap? I mean, by the end of the whole conversation, all three of us, Katie, me, and Granny, have tears running down our faces laughing, all of us balling up our fists, all of us flailing our arms like wet noodles, and Franque there, grinning up at us as a fragrant puddle of wet, Franque-pee enlarges and spreads across the floor of the clinic. Then he plops down on his bottom and starts splashing in it.

It's either Franque's puddle or my head in a puddle. And my head in a puddle doesn't help Franque one bit. Or that 2.3 kg malnourished HIV+ daughter of God. Or the people hunkering down in Camp Cholera for yet another season. Do you get what I'm saying?

What a thing. What. A. Thing.

I swear that's why God gave those otherwise normal looking monkeys bright teal-colored balls. What other reason could there be? Maybe He looked down, foresaw where things were headed, and sighed:

Yeah. Things are gonna heat up down there. That one there, yeah, the monkey - make his balls blue. Just his balls. Perfect. That's hilarious!!

And it is.

What a thing.

Katie with one our grannies

sweep down early

This is a serious post.

WANTED: One canoeing companion, male OR female, previous rowing experience required, prior Africa background mandatory, crocodile-avoidance and fishing expertise preferred, knowledge of African vermin helpful, Portuguese and/or local dialect very useful. Trip will commence just past the Cahora Bassa dam, follow the entire length of the Zambezi River through Mozambique, and end – in glory and fireworks – at the Indian Ocean. We’ll know because there’ll be big waves and the water will be salty. Tiresome babblers need not apply.

I have been planning this trip in my head for months and months. More accurate would be to say I have been planning it for two decades, but the exact geography was never firmly in place back at 8 or 9 years old. But now I live here, and some day I will leave, and before I do, I want to do something wonderful. I want to canoe the length of the Zambezi River in Mozambique, for days and days, for weeks, until it is done and only the thick mist of a briny dawn on the edge of an inarticulate continent fills my nostrils. Sara mentioned it first, I think, lighthearted, with a twinkle in her eyes on an exuberant day. How easily we throw around aspirations! It was seed flung on good soil. In me, it took root.

Just the packing list can obsess an hour-long walk, wandering as I do solitary and engrossed in a long list of tricky logistical considerations. They are not insurmountable. If I don’t go, it will only be because I did not find a suitable companion for the journey. It seems so impossible to find one that I am actually a bit hopeful, because I am attempting prayer, petitioning one into existence, and I do believe in foolish wonders. Once I was in Ghana, at 17 years old, and for one reason or other hadn’t washed my hair in a couple of days: I was oleaginous, disgusting, toady with West African sweat and grime. The water tank at the guest house where we were staying was broken or empty – you cannot imagine how depressing dryness can be - and that day, there were no bucket baths to be had. Then my slender, free-spirited friend Jasmine and I stood together under a star-punctured night sky, in a courtyard fragrant with frangipani and moonlight, both of us laughing, silly and sincere, and we asked God for water. Then - I am not making this up – the pipe suddenly shuddered and coughed, spit, choked, sputtered, and water burst out of the faucet in front of us. It lasted only long enough for us to run for shampoo and wash our hair. Then it flipped off, dry. I almost never tell that story, but I have always thought it a spectacular example of romantic love.



Here’s all we will need: an aluminum (or anything, just not wood, see title of blog above) canoe, two paddles, one small fogao (iron Mozambican grill), one frying pan, two tin cups, two spoons, one sharp knife. Small sack of charcoal to get us started, a kilo of rice, some cooking oil, curry powder and salt. A water purifier, one small first aid kit. One tanktop and one long sleeve shirt, one pair of shorts and one skirt (for me, anyway), 3 pairs of underwear. A capulana and one book per person – I plan on bringing good, tangible, occasionally funny poetry, maybe Billy Collins. One tent. Sleeping bags or blankets. Fishing poles, that will cover all three meals in a day. A hat. A headlamp. One map of Mozambique. Depending on the time of year, rain gear. Camera optional, but if brought, only one and a cheap one. For luxury, binoculars. 6 bars of sultry dark chocolate, hidden and wrapped twice in Ziplock bags. One small bar of all-purpose soap.

One razor. Think how easy it will be to shave my legs in a canoe. The water’s just right there at my fingertips!

Zit medication: optional.

And here’s the magic clincher, the extraordinary key to the whole Wonderland: One live chicken.
(Feet tied, stuffed between our gear in the middle.)



Here’s how the chicken thing will work: We’re going to need to ask people if we may camp on their land every night, because there will be small communities all along the way. They are going to let us do this, and will even be excited about us being there, because that’s how awesome Mozambicans are, especially rural folks. Be that as it may, we’ll still want to thank them for their kindness and hospitality. So we’ll give them a chicken, with a warm smile and much Estou agredecer-ing (“I am so grateful”). And then before we shove off the following misty morning, we’ll buy another live chicken off their neighbor. To be used at the next homestead down the river, of course.

So we also only need enough money to get us through a month’s worth of chickens, for purchasing basic necessities like rice and tea, and for momentous opportunities to grab a cold Coke when passing through bigger towns. Mmmmm… (Really, in Africa the horrible multinational Coca-cola Company is practically a public service. I don’t like Coke that much, can’t even drink a whole glass bottle in one sitting - but every so often, on one of those days, a chilly cold Coke is incomparable.)



The fear of robbery will be much diminished by the fact we have almost nothing with us.

Yes. Crocodiles are plenteous in the Zambezi. We’ll have to be careful.

We will surely see hippos. And that will be a wonderful, deep-belly laugh of wonder.

The sights will always be changing as we float lazily with the current, leaning back and our feet up or while maintaining a steady, natural rhythm of rowing. There’s no reason to talk much. The beauty of this Earth will just submerge into us, on a cellular level, binding with our DNA, igniting into our souls with a white flash. We don’t need to talk about it. The grace of Africa is.



I’ve given this a lot of thought. A passing perusal this evening through a friend’s book left face-up on her bookshelf confirms it for the 10,000th time.

I know it will be hard.

Yes.

WANTED: One canoeing companion.

I’m serious.

***

"Here is something I found to be true: You don’t start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were…and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is that your story will be about changing, about getting something born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out. I want to repeat one word for you: Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."

-Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller

courage

I just can't seem to write lately. I've been busy, which is good, but also processing a lot in the midst of the busyness - things I'm unable or unwilling to put into words. But I have been well. Surprisingly. Maybe it's part of the mystery. I feel I am entering untested currents, those, say, in the mighty, unstoppable Zambezi. I don't know anything about where they take me. I feel very sensitive to what life is turning up along that African shoreline, grubby, fragrant it be - smelling it and digging my hands in. A bit wide-eyed.

Sara's mom passed away this morning. Sara was still about four hours away when it happened, on a train headed for the open spaces of North Dakota, her home. And what comes to mind is: We see in part...

I believe so much in this, first given me by Michelle (1, 2, 3), in late 2005, the year her father was killed:

"Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try and find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn't fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What she left: a photo Sara took in Feb '07, in Npango

i'm that voice you're hearing in the hall

I could not stop laughing at this, thanks to my hilarious friend Jen, who lives with my other good friend Marina in Beira.

1952, 1958, 1960



1962, 1976, 1978



1980, 1986, 1990

And finally, 1994, when I actually was in high school:



I definitely could have got Homecoming Queen in '86, don't you think?

blaze of glory

(In order to detract from my gut-honest, melancholic last post), I'd like to report that tonight, her final night as my roommate (in the literal sense, we share a room), as a final triumphant act of communion between us, Sara set fire to our bedroom curtains.

We'd just wrapped up a little festa (party), replete with Lynn and cake, everyone left, and then the electricity went out. Which is common. So we lit some candles in the bedroom and in the bathroom. 5 minutes later, the electricity came back on. It was about 1130pm.

Then 20 minutes later, our night guard Joao - who now wins Best Guard in the Universe - started shouting to me: TIA BREWK, TIA BREWK, ESTA ASCENDER UM FOGO NO QUARTO!!!

Which means, more or less - WHAT THE HECK, YOUR HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN!

Sara ran out of the bathroom (with her pants on backward) and I ran out of the office. Flames were streaming up our bedroom curtains.

We put it out only seconds before Sara's mosquito net would have started on fire, and then her bed, and then all her clothes folded there, just waiting for her new life in America. Which would have been interesting, as then she would have had to fly home naked.

One final thrill - just me and BFF.

on the 5km-long bridge crossing the magnificent Zambezi river at Sena

old Lynn


festa Lynn

I realized I don't have any pictures of Joao, HERO,
but I will take one and post it as soon as possible.

sure would help a lot

By far, by far, by FAR the hardest part of living here is loneliness. It's not the seasonal heat, its not food, its not language, its not poverty. It's feeling lonely, the oldest malady in the world.

I am sick with a cold all weekend. Sara is teaching a seminar these days, gone till 9pm every night, and her absence in the house initiates me for her final leave taking on Thursday. I lie in bed, sniffly, tired, and again read Wendell Berry, whom I'd set aside these many long months, who much embodies my longings for better living, who exhales his unadorned poetry in my ear like a sigh of relief. Eventually, reading him makes me feel lonely. I take up a reflection on keeping kosher, food as a connection with God, an interesting book; this too makes me feel lonely. I watch an episode of LOST to stop being so damn serious - but... no. The water tank outside our window begins overflowing, the excess water flinging off the carpet of mint growing beneath. It sounds like rain, but isn't, and rain which isn't is a sad lonely sound, especially when it stops.

I don't have any Mozambican friends. Acquaintances, yes. Not friends. Those I know best are from work and they're married men, all, except for Elizabeth who is not much older than me in years, but much older than me in feel, a widow, with three sons; she lives 25km away. I visit sometimes. Its nice. It's very much a friendship, but not a friendship. You know. Maybe I'm missing the point, but most female expats I know here struggle with this too. It does seem to make some difference if you live in a big city and, of course, speak good Portuguese.

Grand total number of girls my age (28) that I have met without children, regardless of marital status: 1. (Our interaction lasted 25 seconds but I haven't forgotten.)
Approximate age of childless women showing any interest in speaking to me: 19 years old.
Number of times a female from church my age (regardless of child status) has invited me to do something (or even really made eye-contact): 0. (Including the pastor's wife: 2.)
Number of males (married or unmarried, of any age) that evidence intense desires to be my very, very close companion: Sigh. So many.

Sara has a few younger guy friends from her church I feel comfortable around; we laugh and joke when they stop by to use internet or for a rare birthday party. I will call them if something goes wrong in the house, I think, in these coming months and it's a bit reassuring to know I can.

I really love talking to Mozambican women when there's a context for doing so - for example, those who come to the baby clinic every week for formula. We respect each other, smile, greet, chat. I like women in general, have realized I love women's health, women's issues, women's challenges. What I understand, however, is that for these Mozambican women, I am not really a woman like they are women. I am a de facto man.

Of course, to Mozambican men I am WOMAN. Possibly this would be gratifying if it weren't so isolating.

When I am busy with work, which is roughly Monday - Friday until 5pm (and Saturday/Sunday too when traveling), no problem. There is plenty to do, plenty to take in, ways to contribute, people around, and the uniqueness of Africa always grabbing you by the hand, whirling you around. It is for this that you attempt to make a life in a foreign land amongst a foreign people. Because when its good, its really good.

It's being alone during the closing of each day, the Sabbath hours, and - as I am shamelessly demonstrating - in times of sickness when the walls really press in. I secretly call them The Lonely Hours. Your spirit falters. You re-realize:

I am very far from home.

This is how I described it last January:

This is all I ever wanted to do. It's how I shaped my life, tried to, so that I could. And I do love it. I love walking out in the fields by myself, seeing the woodsmoke rise up and women carrying their harvests, hearing crickets and singing, the distant drumming, looking up in the sky, endless and blue, and thinking with immense satisfaction: I live in Africa.

It's kind of addicting. But it's also really lonely.

I'm not sure why I hate to say this, but sometimes not even the allure of Africa is enough. Writing for your dingy blog's not enough. You make your choices and live with them, but - Sometimes you just want friends.

these october days

It was 80 quadrillion degrees out today. Three days ago, Sara asked me to put another wool blanket on her bed at night; now, it's so hot I couldn't even vote. Honestly. I tried.

(in the interest of peace and goodwill, I have obscured the candidates' names)

Part of the problem was I took too long searching for a stirring soundtrack for so critical a task as marking my absentee ballet. I flipped through shuffle on iTunes a long time - pausing briefly at a worship song called "Thank You for Saving Me", which made me laugh but is heretical - and finally gave up two minutes later, sticking with "Wrecking Ball" by Gillian Welch. You could squeeze some political symbolism out of that I'm sure, but I choose it simply as a beautiful specimen of Americana. And because it was so dang hot. I was starting to suffocate.

So I set up a fan. An equally useful option would have been to plug in the hairdryer and point it at myself.

Then I needed to educate myself about all the other (non-Presidential) candidates on the ballet (Senate, State Rep, etc.), via a little wonder called the internet. This should have been easy but I couldn't find any decent candidate guides and every page was loading at a pace which did not complement the weather. I tried Skyping a trusted friend who just paid several tens of thousands of dollars to study Public Policy, so she could simply tell me outright who to vote for but she didn't answer the phone. Increasingly frantic, I switched the song to Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy. I tried calling again. Then I felt ashamed. The heat! The heat! I resisted the urge to fill out the ballot at random.

Finally I gave up and walked into the kitchen, stuck my head in the fridge door for a few seconds.

The only positive point in the least about Sara leaving is that she will be able to mail in my ballot for me. It would not arrive if posted from Moz. I will work on it again another day soon.

some things are just funny, even at 98 degrees and not a whiff of breeze. Ah, democracy.

voices

.

Here's the way my life progressed:

2002 - Finished undergrad.
2003 - Moved to Kentucky.
2004 - Crashed $1000/plate John Kerry fundraiser to suggest global AIDS be campaign priority. Ridiculed by reporter for asking who the blond playing piano was. (Carole King)
2005 - Finished grad school, moved home.
2006 - Lived in north Minneapolis.

(2007 - Moved to Mozambique.)

I got an email today that made me remember everything stuffed inside that cursory line for 2006: "Lived in north Minneapolis". The problem with looking at a life's bare facts is we miss all the accompanying sweat and grime and emotions holding it up. My little biography there, for example, obscures that I spent that entire year getting over a broken heart, listening to this song on repeat for hours, and this song, and especially this one, the most aching tribute to love-lost in the history of music. (Or, as an old friend said once, while getting divorced: "'what a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be'... what else could they possibly have to say past that line? what is left? could they try to say it better? NO! different maybe... but for me, that line. that first stark line has haunted me forEVER.")

Living is so ridiculously difficult sometimes I can hardly believe we're supposed to do it.

I lived in inner-city Minneapolis in 2006 as part of a beautifully idealistic group called Urban Homeworks. Five of us lived in the top half of a low-income housing unit in the core of north Minneapolis. I deeply loved my bedroom, which was small and full of light, with bookshelves built into the wall directly above my mattress, a room which overlooked our Hmong neighbors' small vegetable plot, a room full of quiet and healing. I spent a lot of time in there, in the raw Minnesota wintertime wrapped in a tatty teal bathrobe and blankets, my space heater whirling, not doing much of anything, just hurting and being.

Though I did do a lot of writing - the loss of someone to share it all with brought out the muse in me, desperate as I was, much like being here has - plus we five women were experiencing a lot living where we did. Right before I moved in someone was murdered on our front lawn late at night; one roommate called the police as the dying man shouted for help, the same roommate, I believe, that was mugged and pistol-whipped on her way home from the bus stop a few weeks later. There are a lot more details I could add. The neighborhood was impoverished and sprawling and disintegrating. It was full of people every color besides white, except for the highly-educated gay white men looking to establish their own little space in peace, the invisible white elderly folks too penniless and tired to move, and us, all born-and-bred white surburbanites, curious and full of convictions.

I didn't discover the hidden beauty of the inner city because that would be so cliche to say it would make me puke. There's nothing glamorous about urban poverty and cycles of oppression and addiction and rich members of the middle-class pulling up in their middle-class cars to buy pot and coke and scurry back to their safe outer-ring suburbs to vote for politicians that will protect their middle-class interests. I find it really hard to talk about a subject like this without demonising someone or other, so please forgive any glimpses of self-righteousness. It's a complicated world. Race and class in America are important. And minefields.

So it was a hard year. But - yes, cliche - I loved so much about it. I think we all did. There are snatches of beauty to be found everywhere, especially in friendships. And I absolutely could not have healed my broken heart any other place than that ugly corner of inner-city Minneapolis. You never can tell about things.

The email I received today was for Urban Homeworks alumni, asking us to invite people to a fundraising function they are holding in a few weeks. Getting people to care about the gross, scary American inner-city, especially low-income housing therein, can be a hard sell. But like so much of life, if people'd just listen to Over the Rhine, they'd get it!

(P.S. - This is fascinating. The crowded blue, dotty area is where we lived.)

From March 10, 2006 -

Today I came home in the middle of the day, unexpectedly, at a time I'm not ever usually home. None of my roommates were home either: Michelle, taking a break from grad school, was showing off her barista skills at the unlikely coffee house/liquor store a few blocks away; Mikhal was employing her business-savvy in a gleaming skyscraper downtown; Ann, wearing one of her 36 colorful turtlenecks, was teaching immigrant kids how to read at Hopkins High School; and Julia, ah Julia, one of those joyful, perpetually irresponsible people for whom it always works out, was gone to Colorado because she decided that, well, this week she'd rather be in Colorado.

So I came home to an empty house, at least our half of it, and happened to trudge up the musty, creaking stairs at the same time the garbage truck screeched to a stop in the alley out back, its gears grinding and rubbish clanking noisily. In other words, my arrival went unnoticed by anybody that might be in the bottom half of the house, where our neighbors live.

Tim is the undisputed head of the household downstairs. He is a large, early 30s-ish American Indian guy, trying to hold it together with a lot of kids: Aaron (7), Justin (8), Sasha (9), and Clayton, sweet quiet Clayton, who is also trying to hold it together as the oldest child, only 12, whom I'm sure has seen far too much for his age. Then there is Rose, Tim's wife we think, from the same reservation as Tim, who is missing several teeth in front, a tiny wisp of a woman. Even when she's present you don't really notice. She'd only just returned home after months in rehab when she gave birth to their fifth child, Sianna. Tim celebrated, in good faith, by buying Rose a pack of wine coolers, which he honestly did not see as a problem.

When I stepped into their crowded three-bedroom apartment right after the baby came home, I asked Rose what her name was and she answered softly: "Sianna." And then, after a pause, she added: "How do you spell that? We didn't know what to put on the birth certificate at the hospital because we don't know how that is spelled." And I bumbled at first, embarrassed and caught off-guard, then finally replied: "You can spell it however you like. But it sounds to me like SIANNA."

"Thanks," she mumbled, and headed out for a smoke in our entryway.

Tim is a good guy at heart, I believe; he's got a lot on his plate. He smokes weed pretty regularly, late into the night, and the odor wafts up into my bedroom as I lie in bed and read. (Much enhancing even the worst books.) He subsists on energy drinks like Red Bull. He's trying to make it on one (occasional) income – his, shoveling snow, and it's been a dry winter – with 5 kids. One day as I bounded out to my car, in a rush to get where I was going, I bumped into him, sitting on the stoop chain-smoking; he looked like a wreck. "Everything okay?," I called out glibly over my shoulder, hoping he wouldn't answer. Instead, he burst into an uncharacteristic 10-minute, 100-mile an hour monologue about his own alcohol recovery (which sounds like a work in progress) and a multitude of other concerns (including Rose's aunt recently found dead in her house up north). Tim has a terrifically ugly temper: knowing some of this information about his life helps me at least when I overhear him shouting at the children to get their fucking stupid selves out of the room.

So, today I slipped into our empty house unnoticed. And I was standing stationary in the kitchen eating cold pizza and daydreaming when my ears caught hold of something strange coming from downstairs. It was someone sort of singing, but it sounded odd, maybe like chanting. And I can't help it, my initial reaction was: My God, someone is in a trance and channeling evil spirits.

But that was just my YWAM-past resurfacing; it was a stupid first assumption. After a few more moments eavesdropping, I realized it sounded strange because it was coming from Tim: Tim who must have been alone in his apartment; Tim who must have assumed he was alone in the house; rough enormous Tim who sounds like he is hacking up a lung (and all other internal organs) when he tries to clear the cigarette crap out of his system so he can breathe; raging sometimes-alcoholic Tim, crooning an off-key, made-up love song:

"Si-aaaannnnnaaaaa, Siannaaaaaaa, SiannaSiannaSianna, I love youuuu Sianna, Siaaaaaaana..."
[and then in that funny baby voice people use]
"How's my big girl doing today? Si-annnnnnaaaa..." [more indistinct singing]

I was stunned, really. I'd never heard him even mention the baby up to this point. Also, the kid was tiny, though not premature, like holding a subway sandwich with all the fixings, and she never, ever, ever cried. I'd NEVER heard her cry. I was beginning to think she didn't live there anymore; or worse, that she didn't live anymore. But the family just kept to itself is all; and here now was Tim, as my mom would say, "filling up Sianna's love tank", loving on his newest little girl in the shameless, slobbery way people show their love when no one is watching.

Then I made the mistake of shifting my feet and our kitchen floor squeaked. And just like that, as if a switch had been flipped, the singing stopped. I froze mid-stride, hoping I really hadn't broken the magical spell, but after that no sound at all floated up from downstairs.

Ahh... but now I know, Tim!, I winked at him from inside of my head. You can't ever fool me again.

Then I sat down, in an inviting patch of sunlight on my bedroom floor, to the soundtrack of a ticking clock and tin windchimes outside my window, to think about it and write about it.

the boys

Sasha and her friend

You know, I really believe that maybe the main thing we're supposed to do in life is share with each other what we've created. I don't know why that is; it seems miraculous, profound. Well, anyways - that's why I put this here.

(Linford gets it too.)

letter to a friend on a rough morning

i put the picture of your family holding all those little oscar statuettes as my background photo.

i feel really far away right now. it seems like ages since we've talked, though it hasn't been that long.

i am freaking about sara leaving. october 19. i'm back at the freaking stage.

writing you still feels too far away. i think because i know you don't have internet at your house, so you won't get this until monday (!). and then you'll be at school, and busy, and we'll still be disconnected.

i feel very conflicted in my soul right now. africa is making me a little bit crazy. i don't know how i am going to adjust to being back home. i also have a huge fear of the here and now.

maybe that's why i put the picture of the oscar statuettes as my background. it makes no sense at all to my life. but the people in it are so kind.

argh. this letter isn't working. i'm writing all my fears. if you were here, you'd make me sane again. i miss you.
b

baptism at a river

light enough to travel

.

I meant, three times the length of California. 3,590 km (2,230 miles) - that's what I drove. No radio, no other drivers. Lots of Mozambique.

(So much to say but I'm so tired.)

I may have taken a video or two along the way.

The church is several hours off the main highway on this path. The part where I had to put it in 4WD and make the 9 Mozambicans with me get out and then climb back in and then get out and back in, etc., etc., is a good story.

Once we arrived, this is how they greeted us.

let him fly

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams

Tomorrow I leave for the first leg of a long trip. These are busy weeks for me. I got back last night from 1 day down in Muxungue, which is where they grow pineapples and cashews, and 1 day further south in Zove, where they count the cars passing by on the highway, and 1 day even further south in Machanga, where they sit on their verandas and drink beer. It's exactly like Oklahoma, Machanga.

Incidentally, Machanga is also where I snapped the photo, last year, of the impressive canoe-eating hippo at the top of this blog. I found it painted on a musty, cracking wall of the shacky little pensao (motel) we stayed in.

And tomorrow I go to Beira to exchange trucks, to stockpile fuel and food, pack a tent and lots of water, withdraw a thousand dollars from the bank, shave my legs for good luck, and then head off early in the morning for Pemba. Beira is in the dead center of Moz on the coast, Pemba is at the very top, near the border of Tanzania; the distance between them is like driving the entire length of California (on mediocre roads). And we all know that California is long.

I'll be gone a week, including two days travel up, two days back. Then straight back to Beira for two days of team meetings and a goodbye party for Sara. I try not to focus on the dim prospect of Life After BFF.

I'm doing a pastor's seminar out in the bush near Pemba, if you're curious (and you must be): teaching about HIV, generating discussion for strategizing on a national church response (for that denomination here in Moz). We have paid for the HIV+ bishop of Malawi - a remarkable man - to come out and talk about life as a positive clergyman, stigma, what it means to be the church in a world of HIV, creating open communities, caring ones. It's worth trying for anyways.

What I was just doing (in Muxungue, Zove and Machanga) was: accompanying community HIV activists as they made their presentation in a hospital waiting area (there aren't waiting rooms, per se, just open areas outside with benches), meeting with a potential partner to see what she does (preschools for orphans) and if it's something we want to get behind, meeting with the director of a vocational center we support (which teaches sewing to orphans) to plan for next year's budget (and just to chat, he's so likable), and, finally, hanging out with 40 12-21 year old girls at a rural boarding center we support (so they can attend school, 6th-10th grade), musing aloud on the vagaries of Life to them (at night, along with Sara, who stole the show) and teaching about HIV/AIDS (the next morning, under a huge beautiful Bilbo Baggins cashew tree).

What I'm really thinking about though, is this:

There's a friend of mine who has an older sister, a really incredible woman I've never met but my friend speaks about her in awed tones. And this older sister went to college (nearly 20 years ago now), and later fell in love, and married a good man. And then, after a few years together, this man turned out to be mentally ill. They had children, 3 beautiful ones, but his illness progressed, and finally life became so difficult she and the kids had to move out. But she didn't leave him by himself. She found an apartment where he could live and she continued to care for him, cooking, coming over to clean, bringing the kids to visit. For years now it has been that way. She works full-time, he is unable to work, she raises their kids, she cares for him. And then he had a stroke, he needed even more care - and she just keeps doing it, caring for this unpredictable man she married who is so different from what he was. She has lived, in actual fact, for nearly 20 years as a married woman but without a husband, at least not what you dream and hope for when you marry at 25, bursting with every prospect in the world. This sister is made of flint, my friend says, and I nod silently. She doesn't leave him, she doesn't embitter. She just keeps on keeping on.

Amazing.

"So much depends on the red wheelbarrow," Williams tells us, "glazed with rain water."

The coolest girl at the boarding school, Amelia. She has a humped back, though she hides it well here, a spine all jumbled and very wrong. Both of her parents died; she's been at the center for 6 years. She is a loner, I think, naturally quiet, often sits alone, but possesses enormous self-respect. Her favorite subject is geography. She wants to be a nurse. She was a pleasure to talk to, a genuine lady. She is 19 years old.

It was too dark for the camera to pick up anything, but the girls came to dance for us. This is their song.


This looks like a college brochure photo, but I swear it was un-posed.

Playing the Telephone Game, renamed Jogo de Fofoca (Gossip Game) for the HIV teach.

into the breaking

It's easy for me to over-romanticize Africa, even the difficulties, because I tend toward that inherently but also because there is, genuinely, so much scope for the imagination here. It is what I hold dear about it even when I am often lonely or tired or frustrated. Like today.

From Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There:

This is a true story. The man who picks up the towels and mops the floors in the gents' changing-room of my gym is an African - a diligent, friendly man. An American banker came in the other day with his bag of air-soled good intentions to work off a little personal surplus, and while he changed he engaged the janitor with that easy chat which seems to come with an American accent. 'So, you're from Africa, an African. Well, there's a lot about Africa in the news at the moment. It's complicated, isn't it?' He said all this in capital letters with a slow patronage. 'You must be really happy to be out of it. You know, to be here.' The African's eyes flicked round the changing-room. He smiled. 'Which country you from?'

'Liberia.'

'Oh, that was a colony, right? Whose? Which country ruled it?'

The African waited a beat before replying: 'America.' The American's face was a picture, the African's a carving. 'Really? The United States of America? You're kidding me.' The janitor went on folding towels. The banker went to jog off his newly acquired colonial guilt.

Africa is not what most of us think. To the northern world it's still a dark continent as impenetrable as it was 200 years ago. Full of unspeakable horror and unfathomable fear. The news reports, those two-minute trailers, drip blood and bathos. The myths and misconceptions about Africa may have changed emphasis over the years, but the sense of its otherness hasn't. The sotto voce developed consensus is that Africa's woes and suffering are of a separate order from those of the rest of the world. Africans have buckets of sympathy but thimbles of empathy. Because the lion's share of starvation, disease, corruption, ignorance, hardship, premature mortality and sheer heartbreaking loss rains of Africa, then by implication, and because they bear the unbearable, Africans can't be like the rest of us. Their suffering must be muscled by familiarity, their feelings deadened by repetition. In the arguments about the rights and wrongs of debt aid, trade, political reform and charity, Africans slip through the cracks between good intentions. They become merely ciphers, slices of pie chart and exclamations in an argument that turns out, surprise surprise, as ever, to be about us, our money and our conscience, our fine words.

One of the world's great experiences for an affluent westerner is to wake up in an African village - the sinuous smell of wood smoke, fat, sweat and dust, the crowing of cockerels in the chilly silver dawn, the long shadows of thorn trees, the twittering of weaver birds, the stretching dogs, the first buckets of water pulled from a wheezing pump, blowing on charcoal fires and, as the air warms, fat babies washed in enamel basins, men shaving in little mirrors, the scratching and nose-blowing, the hawking and pissing, toothbrushing and greeting, the treble rackets of tinny radios, the winding and wrapping of babies to backs and scarves round heads, a handful of mealie meal, a mango. A bicycle loaded with tools or onions, or a bed, or a grandmother, or a flock of hens that wiggles down the dusty red road to meet the day. Nowhere I've ever been starts each morning with such optimism as Africa.

So here, to set beside the catalogue of competing woes and misdemeanors for which Africa is pitied and accused, are a few other truths. Most Africans are not dying of AIDS or starvation, don't want to kill their neighbors, neither are they venal or corrupt. Most Africans work hard, are multilingual, are spiritual, kind, and love a joke with a passion, even a bad joke. Most are poor only in cash. Most seem to be very happy most of the time. Happier about less than we are. In fact, I don't know anywhere where you will hear so much laughter spread so thickly, and so few tears. You rarely hear African babies cry. Experts study African babies to discover the secret of their frankly perverse contentment. Perhaps they could sell a book about it to guilty, fretful western mothers. And most Africans have a huge respect for old people. Of course, you meet age halfway in Africa, but when you get there you're a person to be revered, because though most Africans have so little stuff, they have each other. They have their families, their villages, their tribes, their religions. I've been to a lot of hospitals in Africa and I've yet to see a patient who had to eat hospital food. Everyone is looked after by family or neighbors. We think of Africa as the great wishing well of charity, but they are creditors when it comes to giving.

I don't want to claim that all the other stuff, the pitiful stuff, is exaggerated. It isn't, but what makes it worse is that it happens to be a continent of such ragged joy and simple brilliance. The quantity of the problems obscures the quality of the lives they fall upon. One of the great poverties of our lives is that so few of us go to visit Africa. The constant news commercials of misery and death elicit pity, not tourism, but you should go. It is the most astonishingly engaging and addicting place and it's less frightening than the south of France in August.

This is another true story. I was once in the Serengeti and I came across a minibus-load of Japanese tourists. They were wearing disposable paper anti-contamination suits with face masks and booties. They brought their own dried food and the water to cook it in. They stayed in the bus as it was driven past animals and they'd spent four days in Africa never having touched it, tasted it, smelt it or shaken its hand. The average Japanese girl born today can expect to live forty years longer than her sub-Saharan sister.

This is the one place where travellers come and actively avoid meeting the locals. An African market, an African street, is far more exciting than any pride of manky old lions. You should visit Africans at home for all the usual touristic and economic reasons, because its good for them and good for you, but you should also visit them because familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It is the antidote to contempt. Familiarity breeds greater familiarity. Africa and Africans deserve to be included not just in the big stuff of the world - trade, medicine, politics - but also in the small, intimate, one-to-one stuff. They've had a lot of sympathy. What they deserve, what we all need, is empathy.

My first trip to sub-Saharan Africa was to write about big-game hunting in the Transvaal. The Boer white hunter drove me in surly silence, bouncing and grinding through a land that looked like God's rubbish bin for six hours. Finally we stopped and I got out, throbbing and furious, and he looked over the scrub and said: 'Welcome home. This is where you come from.'

We should all go home more often. Africans aren't some other benighted, desensitized 'them' from the darkness. They're us. They're family.

(A.A. Gill)

I spent two years in graduate school learning, very well, how to deconstruct something until all there is left to look at is a cold diminutive pile of ashy cynicism. Insightfully ripping something apart is a useful skill but it can morph into a bad habit, instinct, lightening quick because it makes you feel sophisticated and smart, which is to say smarter (than those poor sods and their flabby thoughts). It's the crack cocaine of academia. And life, maybe.

Like real drugs, you don't feel good afterward though. "This is your soul. This is your soul stuck on scorn. [sizzle of frying egg] Any questions?"

My final year in undergrad, I had an advisor I practically worshiped: she was young, an anthropologist, smart as a whip, a tinsy bit edgy but also respectful. She cared. (Once I wrote in a Christmas card to her that I wanted to "sit at her feet".) Her office door showed off the best perk of being a professor: it was a trove of papered fascination for passersby to read, taped from top to bottom with book excerpts and pictures and headlines ripped from journals. I remember in particular this funny Paula Poundstone quote:

"What moron said that knowledge is power? Knowledge is power only if it doesn't depress you so much that it leaves you in an immobile heap at the end of your bed."

I am half-way to 29, which was about her age then. And in light of having more or less survived my 20s, I say: Hallelujah, I couldn't agree more. There are a lot of paths to choose. I did smug a few years back. It's not cool. I'd rather choose this: to error on the side of exuberance over superiority. It feels good to really love something. Jumping in deep is what romance, hoop dreams and all the best radio songs are really about. And life, maybe.

The book excerpt above is what got me thinking about all of this. Mystery is, yet, as I like to say. I'm asking you to believe it.

the Vida Manjate family: four generations

the one thing

The number one rule in regard to dishes in Africa is: NO.

Question:
Can I finish those two last sips of water in that glass I left on the kitchen table overnight? It looks fine.
Answer:
NO.

Question:
Are you sure I can’t reuse that coffee cup with the valuable chamomile teabag still in it, even though it has been sitting by its lonely little self in an unsupervised room for 4 or 5 hours?
Answer:
NO.

Question:
I’m going to eat another peanut butter sandwich and the dirty knife I used for the last one is…
NO.

It’s not that I don’t do these things, I do, all the time. I have lived here over a year and a half but the temptation to break the number one dish rule is still overwhelming. Its such a drag washing dishes all the time.

Question:
Can I pour just a little more cereal into the pretty porcelain bowl I left in my office all morning?
Answer:
NO. Or – okay, but if the dark gritty thing turns out to be mouse poop and not a raisin, its you that broke the rule.

Question:
Can I put on the electric kettle, which has a nice plastic lid, and use the water already in it from yesterday?
Answer:
Miniscule boiled ants aren’t a nice addition to coffee, even fake coffee.

Question:
Can I pick up the frying pan which is stored on the kitchen shelf and set it on the stovetop without giving it a second glance?
Answer:
NO. NONONO. You must first wash off the spider eggs. Also, two cockroaches had a square dance competition on it last night, you just can’t tell.

The same rule should apply to toothbrushes, but I still leave mine out. Finding another routine feels too complicated. I try to think of it as building up my immune system.

This is the frog I used to talk to in the shower, until I found him sleeping on the bristles of my toothbrush.

This is the rat I found comatose and without control of its bodily fluids, but not yet dead, on my living room floor after it ate 1/3 of a bar of soap in my kitchen.

This is the scorpion that tried to eat me, until I smashed his ugly son of a gun head into the floor.

This is a really mangy-looking dog I met in Sena.

This is Sara with an inflatable plastic monkey she loved as a child.

This is the gingerbread Cyclops I made last Christmas which won the prize for Most Historical at our southern Africa retreat in Zambia.

for me, you are the one

I currently have 2,599 pictures (or videos) saved on my computer, and I know this because I just had to scroll back a very long ways in order to find a photograph of my sister. The last time I saw her was at her wedding; the last moment, when she turned back to wave before driving off with her husband for their honeymoon in upstate New York. She got married on Saturday, my Grandpa's 80th birthday party was on Sunday, I flew to New Orleans on Monday, got engaged on Wednesday, flew home on Thursday (also my mom's birthday), packed for a whole new life on Friday, and flew to Mozambique on Saturday. That was a very full week.

In the time since I last saw her, my beloved and only sister Ginger, I went swimming in the Indian Ocean (many times), learned to drive on the left-hand side of the road, attended my first Mozambican funeral, got de-engaged, discovered a gecko sitting on my toothbrush, learned the Shona word for diarrhea, drank a gin and tonic on an empty stomach much too fast one sweltering day in Swaziland, and began raising chickens, among other things. It's been a very full 19 months.

My sister wasn't there for any of those events, not literally, but still she kind of was. This is not because every week or two she calls me, faithfully; or because she once sent a care package that cost $119 to mail; but, rather, because I love her a lot. She's in me.

I need to explain an essential quality about my relationship with my sister: I am selfish and she is not. I could expand and add that I am a better cribbage player and know more about the Lord of the Rings books than she does, but beyond those details, she is a much better person than me in almost every way.

One easy out is that I behave so badly so often to her because I love her so fiercely. This is one of the eternal contradictions of family, especially sisters, and maybe its partially legit. With her, what is my greatest instinct - to express myself - often melts into something unrefined, brutish, even primal. I fly willy-nilly by my emotions with her; I leap into my forever role as younger sister; what I seem to do is, I regress.

She takes it all in stride though. Par for the course. She loves me.

“For our first meal, they sat together on one side of the rough table, Frannie and I sat together on the other, and Uncle sat at the end of the table facing a small window. From my bench, it was easy to watch the two sisters, and I rather regretted I did not myself have a sister who was a friend and with whom I could compare myself, the better to understand both my singularity and our commonality.”
(Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund)

Right now I am sitting on Sara's bed in our semi-darkened room, laptop on lap, and I am thinking back to the old days, when Ginger was always catching crickets in boxes, caring for disheveled farm kittens on my grandparent's scruffy patch of flat farmland in central Oklahoma. I was the younger one in red overall shorts, more timid back then, watching closely, learning her ways. In those early years, I obeyed when she said Go, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker when she told me that water towers have an office, right in the center of the tank, where water tower caretakers keep their desks and telephones and files - and yes, even fell for the old "Let's see how fast you can clean my room, Brooke!"


She was a sneaky one.

She did outgrow her rougher, more violent tendencies of younger life (e.g., thumping the neighbor kid in the head with a hammer), and blossomed into someone more defined, peaceful in her softness, a woman who knows her path. To understand my sister now, as an adult, you would have to dig inside her heart, for from there is where she most lives and acts, with great generosity. Sometimes I want to treat her like a delicate child because of this (though she be far from fragile) and sometimes I just want to whack her really hard, in impatience. (A terrible thought is that I live, by comparison, mostly in my head, a dark counterpoint to her goodness.) Again, I'd like to say that my responses to what she has become and how she lives, when they are wrong, selfish responses, are out of longing and fear for her, my love gone complicated. (Or really really simple. Maybe some of it amounts to just plain missing her.)

Because her husband is from China, and that is where she lived (for four years) right up until their marriage; and because I've spent about a week total in his presence; my brother-in-law remains to me a disquieting mystery. If the two really do become one metaphorically, as the Bible says, my sister has now morphed into some entirely new being to me. Ginger still, yes, but also GinPeter. This is a sticking point for me. When we talk, I can already hear it in her. I'm having trouble adjusting to the idea.

- Psychotherapist: Aha. You have to share her now. You sound jealous.
- Me: Well, that's because I AM! [growl]

I don't profess that these emotions make any logical sense.

circa 1992

Let me describe to you what she is like.

My sister is a genius at making up games, especially when we were kids. She has always taken the role of mediator, peacemaker, in our immediate family, gently translating ourselves for each other. She's more calm, tactful, like my Dad is. She bubbles over with silliness, infectious until it becomes annoying, and even then it is pretty endearing. She set herself down to the task and - a million hours of study later - actually learned Chinese. Once while furiously riding her bike for a charity fundraiser, some sort of college triathlon relay, she accidentally ran over a poodle who ran in front of her on the sidewalk and she yelled back over her shoulder: I'M SORRY LITTLE DOGGY!

She loves Dairy Queen ice cream cakes, the quirky Australian movie Strictly Ballroom, and geeky Asian pop bands. She has a smile a mile big. She is so earnest, contemplating faith, a spiritual Sarah - Abraham's wife - as that old woman must have been after laughing and then, in wonderment, giving birth. That would change a person forever.

Once she saved an immigrant family from a burning house - well actually, the father had been stripping their wood floors with gasoline and the daughter flipped a light switch and the whole house house ignited in a flash, burning them both from head to toe. Ginger (who is a nurse) ran inside, called the paramedics, cut their clothes off, and helped them into the ambulance when it arrived. No kidding.

Her birthday is on Tuesday, September 16. She will be 31. I want her to see this now and know how much I think about her, and need her, and am sorry, and can't wait for us to be together again. She is a fabulous friend, my sister: the funniest, truest, most loyal there is.

With her husband Peter who, despite all, I am forced to believe must be a very good man.

This really expresses so much about our early life together.

With joyful spirit, as is her wont.

Happy birthday Ginger. I love you.

amateur african almanac, 1 sept 2008

It's burning season again. One of the most extraordinary feelings is driving at night through the snaking terrain of Manica Province, and all around, as far as you can see - all you can see - are illuminated islands of low intensity flames casually eating up the landscape. It's like a night sky of comets, in slow-mo and 3-D, fallen to earth. Once Joel, Jenny, and I were heading back from Beira together and dusk fell while we were still winding through the foothills of the Mvumba mountains. The fires and smoke grew denser and denser, our headlights barely piercing through the haze, until one point flames were licking both shoulders of the road at the same time, the heat pressed in on us, the crackling and popping muffled our conversation and - in a courageous burst of speed - we hurtled through it, all of us screaming, exhilarated, like fire jumpers at a circus. If you could package an experience like that, you'd make a fortune.

It's really creepy outside today. The sun is extinguished beneath a heavy curtain of ash and dust, like Apocalypse has come, the sky casting a deathly, rusty pallor over everything. All the color has been sucked out. The wind is strong but not fresh or life-giving, raising a frenzy of dirt, whipping around anything not staked down, painting everything gritty. Just looking out the window makes my eyes water.

A window carelessly left ajar could be the death of your computer on a day like today. Jenny's chapa broke down just outside of town and she walked back to our house on foot, about 20 minutes. Stepping inside, hair in a furvor, her skin was tinctured the unnatural hue of fake tanning lotion. We're back to twice a day showering, though for reasons of choking dust rather than humidity.

Mozambicans burn to easily clear their fields before the rainy season, to flush out small game (read: cane rats), out of an aesthetic preference, and (we deeply suspect) because its kind of fun. It's super dangerous on a tempestuous day like today though: fires can leap so easily, zagging and zipping out of control. A tragic sight is passing somebody's small mud and stick house burning to the ground, rebellious flames streaming from its humble thatched roof like the very battlements of Thornfield itself.

I think its wily how Mozambicans approach group psychology, actually. They glance out over these coming months of hunger, such dry, wild days of ever-rising temperatures, and with a cool flick of a match, render it even worse by scorching everything to the ground. The net result, however, after so many months of desolation, is a collective feeling akin to ecstasy when the soggy unrelenting rainy season finally erupts over us in December. Think the scene in Shawshenk Redemption when Tim Robbin's character finally escapes from prison.


Genius.

Until then, though...

I guess its good I don't mind the smell of smoke.

who can tell?

Yesterday, my good friend Marina (who just flew back to Mozambique on Tuesday from a four-month home leave in England), Sara, and I were all having a chat around our kitchen table. I can't remember now what started the conversation, but at one point Sara, who was standing in the doorway, made the observation that it would be fun for the three of us to go somewhere to watch the Olympics together. I was sitting at the table, nodding my head enthusiastically in agreement when Marina, who was also standing, nearly spit out her juice guffawing. "But they're already OVER!", she exclaimed loudly, and slapped her knee laughing when Sara and I replied in unison: "They are??" "Yes," she chortled. "About a week ago!"

Oh.

This is one of the drawbacks to living the lifestyle we do here. We're far from isolated, but we don't own a television and mostly get our news via a subscription to The Guardian, which is a left-leaning newspaper from the United Kingdom. This normally arrives in our mailbox one month late. So, because the latest edition of the newspaper we had was still raving about this or that athlete performing wonderfully/terribly/illegally in Beijing, I guess we both assumed they were still going on. Marina's pronouncement left me crestfallen, as I had therefore seen exactly zero minutes of the entire 2008 Olympics - a great disappointment, being a person who cries at both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. (It's kind of how I imagine heaven, minus the patriotic flag-waving: all those different kinds of people, everyone hopeful, bursting with pride and goodwill, peace on earth, tragedies and miracles side-by-side, plenty of fanfare, dancing and flowers.)

Just tonight I had The Guardian from 08/08/08, was reading about a clean needle exchange program in Mexico and water found on Mars, when I flipped the page and my jaw dropped again: "Dissident writer Solzhenitsyn dies at 89", the headline announced. I couldn't believe it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn meant a lot to me as a reader for a lot of years; he is my favorite Russian author, even more than Tolstoy, even more than Dostoevsky (I cannot get through The Brother's Karamavoz. I understand this is akin to heresy. I understand I must now sit on the reduced price shelf in the Thoughtfully Deep People produce section, with all the rest of the bruised eggplants.)

I ate up all the Solzhenitsyn books I read. I loved Cancer Ward. I loved The Gulag Archipelago. During a short, rapturous hour in a Joburg bookstore last year, I picked up The First Circle, which wasn't quite as good as the others but still wonderful. The worlds he writes about are so foreign to me, so seemingly antiquated now, like when you visit a Civil War museum and they have on display those crazy-looking steel surgical tools used at that time, making you gasp and squirm. But Solzhenitsyn was a great writer because his books actually weren't dated even though the geopolitics have changed so drastically. He knew the human heart; he relayed painful truths; he told spare and beautiful stories. To me he seemed misplaced in time, like the final relic of a past, glorious age of Russian writers; it always seemed incredible to think he was (until now) still alive [and for years living in Vermont (!)].

There was plenty of controversy about him, but there is no doubting that he was a man of immense courage. To have finally lost him is Russia's grief; and the whole world's.

a word about our chickens

The problem with using a blog as therapy like I do is that, as Sara pointed out, it all ends up sounding a bit manic depressive. (She also diagnosed me, early on in our relationship, with late-onset autism [sometimes I really can't stand having anything touching my skin, no eyeglasses, earrings, ponytail holder, bracelets, rings, or tight clothes] - but I know she's quack about that because I'm A.A.R. in a major way (All About Relationships).

I'm also not manic depressive; I'm not even depressed. The main culprit for my rollar-coastery blogs is that life here is extreme: mundane to the point of nose-picking boredom, or eventful in a way it never is in America: i.e., a 14-year old boy with a scrotum inflamed to the size of large melon. That, and the fact I have no social life.

But in honor of a determination to be more even-keeled, I'm devoting today's post to my feathery friends.

I had no idea I would love raising chickens so much, not having had many opportunities to try before. This is only one of the multitudinous benefits of moving to a new country. I've already invested well over $10 of my personal money into their comfort and upkeep, which is about 16% of my monthly salary, but the flush of pride I feel in holding their little colored, homegrown eggs makes it so worth it.

The names of our chickens are:

Mbhava - who somewhere along the line misplaced his left foot. He used to have it but it didn't work and he'd hop around with it tucked up into his feathers; today, though, I looked and noticed that the lame foot is now gone completely. There's only a stump. Where he could have lost it is beyond me.

Fudza - our original chicken. We kept him inside an overturned basket for a month or two until Joseph built us our magnificent casa das galinhas and, in retrospect, this may have provoked anti-social behavior, perhaps a result of post-traumatic stress disorder. When we first transferred him, he was downright cruel to all the other members of their coop (especially Mbhava who is of course special needs), pecking them ruthlessly, stealing all the food scraps for himself. Like any new parent, I quickly realized that yelling did no good; finally, I was forced to remove him altogether. He now lives free-style, quite happily it appears, out in the yard; but as we have no fence, there is no guarantee of his continued safety from predators (including Sampson, whom I'm beginning to suspect of having a penchant for chicken foot).

Mafigo - who is a duck.

Branca - our first unwed mother. This is so exciting. Though I tend to refer to the chickens in the masculine, they are, like all chickens, women. The neighbor's rooster kept coming around and I finally decided it was time to expand operations. I let Branca out for a day or two, and she and the rooster did some serious cavorting; now, beyond my greatest hopes, she is faithfully sitting on 8 or 9 eggs in the back corner of the coop.

And last but not least,
Lynn - our newest addition, what Mozambicans call a galinha do mato (literally, bush chicken). She's actually a guinea fowl. It was like a divine, celestial plan that we got her; on the very day I'd asked Joel to please bring me one back from his next trip out to bush, Sara came home with her. Then, the next day, I lost her. What happened is that I crawled into the coop to retrieve some eggs and, chicken-raising novice as I was, left the entrance in the roof open. Lynn, who is no dummy, flew out. For 45 minutes, I ran around in all our neighbor's yards trying to catch her. Several neighbor kids and two guards helped me, but we could not match her sheer speed and flying prowess. I had no idea. Guinea fowl are nothing like regular chickens. I felt terrible for having lost her - but a week later, we woke up and found her back in the coop. I'm still not sure who did it. "Touched By An Angel"???

Here's a video I took of them a couple of weeks ago (before we'd acquired Lynn and before my camera battery died).

They are good chickens, on the whole. I am learning a lot about their likes and dislikes. Example of Like: carrot peels. Example of Dislike: leftover macaroni and cheese.

Branca, doing her motherly thing.

Lynn, who might be termed as ugly, except she's not.

Mafigo likes to sit in a basin of water.

Mbhava. Note her leg disability. She's got fantastic balance though.

I couldn't find Fudza to take his picture. This is his old house. It still functions as a good place for time-outs.

The rooster isn't ours. He's big and bold and brawny, a real lumberjack. Like a world which has experienced nuclear fall-out, all of our hopes for future generations rest with him, and him alone.

lazy love

Today I got done from working at the clinic, and as I walked along a 2 or 3 kilometer dirt road out to the main highway, to catch a chapa back to Chimoio, I wondered to myself: My life is so good.

The temperature was just so. The sky was blue. The cottonwood trees had dropped their downy, seeded snowballs onto the path, and the sound of the breeze drifted down to me from the tall heights of eucalyptus trees, gentle watchmen, lemony, soft.

I was by myself, walking, and the aloneness was like a icon I keep beside my desk of the Virgin Mary, dressed in black but at ease, composed, smiling, against a rich red backdrop. I am a person who needs people tremendously, but there are times when the easy solitude of the earth, not human beings, is the biggest gift in the whole world. Today I was pleased to Let it be unto me as You have said. And the crispy golden grass reaching over my head responded: YesYesYesYesYes.

I thought about how I get to do and see the most amazing things.

How I work alongside the most extraordinary women there at the clinic.

And how Moz is more beautiful and painful and satisfying than people who don't live here realize.

I get to pick up and weigh naked little brown babies, who frequently pee on me.

I get to hold Belusha's tiny hand when her bandages are changed every two days, and now the tumor is progressing so aggressively that her face is even more misshapen, her nose almost gone completely, her skull visibly changing shape, and she cries as the cloths are removed even though she is on pain medication, even though she has no eyes from which tears can exit. We laugh and sing to her, call her Belusha Bonita, rain down affection, all of us clucking around her, flapping with devotion - but really we are silent on a starless night. I look up at her sweet mother, whose heart is gripped now, hovering on a dangerous cliff's edge, staring, mirthless, into the face of tribulation. Belusha, who is blind, disappearing, wordless, who normally is motionless, suddenly squeezes my hand, not in pain, but in gentle recognition. Time suspends. -Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me?

I get to help treat a young man with elephantiasis, which I've talked about before, me, except this time it is located in his testicles, and he suffers - oh! so - and I go home and cannot shake the trauma of what I've seen. The nurses bring me a book of tropical diseases, all no-nonsense photos with lots of of succinct text, and then we discuss his treatment together, though I contribute nothing to this conversation except nods and murmurs.

A meter long snake, emerald and slender, venomous they say, slithers up to the side of the clinic. There are more than 45 people milling about in front, half of them under two years old and padding around barefoot, stuffing rocks and sticks and each other into their mouths. Jacqui, Heide, Elisabeth and I gather to watch the elegant curvy creature, frozen with his head erect, and communally flinch as the workman deftly chops him in half with a rough-hewn shovel. "Nothing to be done," Heide sighs.

And sometimes when I'm sitting organizing a patient file - shaggy piles of regular notebook paper filled with handwritten notes - Jacqui reaches past me to grab something else and as she does, she rests her hand on the back of my neck for a second. It's such a fleeting thing. But I look up to and admire her and Katie and Heide so much - these South African and British and German women, such nurses, such "tough minds and tender hearts" as MLK Jr said - and her plain touch somehow conveys gratitude and even a whiff of love, a mutual understanding of what we're trying to do, faltering though we be. And I feel sisterly interdependence in that hand, and exasperation and anger at the world with all its sicknesses and mankind stumbling to wade through them. I do not forget it.

And when the day ends, I step out of the small clinic and walk the 2 kilometers to the highway, by myself in the thin forest of Mozambique, and a bird which is not a lilac-breasted roller though I imagine it to be, flitters on some branches a few feet in front of me. The field rustles with small creatures unseen. And, this time, on this day, today, there is no loneliness in the aloneness. Just gladness.

banks of the Rio Zambezi, in Sena, Sofala Province

tuck each other in

I like this poem a lot. I think about it sometimes as I'm falling into bed, exhausted. I sleep much more here than I do at home. It's a huge relief.

Sleeping

Whether you think it’s trampy or not,
when we are not awake,
we really are all sleeping together.
Sawing logs, snoozing,
getting a little shuteye,
some sacktime,
heading to slumberland,
doing the blanket drill,
the bunk habit,
having a siesta fiesta,
a pajama party
or just getting forty winks
and a good night’s rest

We’re all setting alarms, reading a bit,
warming our feet and spooning in,
stealing the covers, hogging all the pillows or
taking up the whole bed, grass mat,
hammock or our bit of dry earth.
Whether the satin sheets, fur or flannels
are on the futon, floor or igloo ice
whether we are naked, night gowned
or wearing what we wore all day.
We have been doing this a long time together, alot.

Terrorists and tyrants,
the embargoed, enemies and occupying forces
within a few blocks of each other
lay down everyday
not only their weapons but their bodies,
anger and ideologies.
They give up. They surrender,
not to overwhelming odds or power
but to being… tired.
They know they can’t win against it.
Something much bigger says,
“I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.
Now tuck each other in and go to sleep!”

(Daniel Sisco)

the blues are still blue

Car accidents are a big problem here. So is, for that matter, drunkenness. Even bigger, actually.

Today Jenny and I were walking together along the busy, crowded main road in Gondola - the highway - to meet with some visiting Americans who wanted to talk HIV stuff with me. We stopped for a minute along the shoulder because had Jenny pointed out some sandals for sale that she thought I'd like, and she was right, I did like them. They had tan fake-leather straps with bright colorful beads sewn on, exactly the kind of hippie shoe I go for. Jenny hates my current sandals because I've worn them into the ground and they look like... well, crusty, gross old flipflops (much like the sandals before them, which also aggravated her soul).

I had just inserted my dainty, feminine foot into the sandal to see if it fit, turning it this way and that so as to admire the singular contrast between my handsome ruby toe-nail polish and the tan fake-leather of the shoe when, suddenly, there was the sound of a loud THWAP. Jenny turned first and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, look!" I glanced over. A man had just been hit on his bicycle by a chapa (minibus), about 10 meters away from us, and was lying flat on his back in the middle of the road. I paused about 2 seconds, watching, but he didn't move.

Jenny and I both ran over to the man. Blood was pooling up out of his head onto the paved road. His face was slightly to one side and as I stood straddling over him, I could see one eye was partially open. I waved my hand in front of it to see if he would respond, and asked him if he could hear me - but nothing, no response. I touched my hand to his stomach and could see, relieved, that he was breathing.

The guilty chapa stopped, briefly, indecisively, the driver and all its 30 passengers wide-eyed and astonished, then quickly accelerated away. I stood upright and shouted "stop the chapa!" but I think I conjugated the verb wrong so nobody responded. Or maybe they just didn't know how to do it.

A crowd had gathered, of course. Some good folk forced a passing truck to stop, and a few of us lifted the man together, scooting ourselves into the empty bed of the small grey truck. Jenny had wisely divested me of my backpack. As we sped a few kilometers to the small hospital (more like a clinic), two Mozambican men were with me: one, a kind, raggedy-looking older man who probably owns 2 sets of clothes total is now down to only 1 set because he cradled the man's body and there was blood everywhere. The injured guy's head was in my hands, heavy and limp, his shaved hair feeling greasy and wet and prickly.

The short story is, once we got him lying down on a cot in the clinic, he came to but was living on a planet somewhere... else. When he finally spoke, nothing made sense. I couldn't tell if that was because he'd just had a major head trauma, or because he was absolutely reeking of alcohol, or both. I think both. I had to hold his head still while they gave him stitches just beside his right eye (without anesthesia, without antiseptic). For some reason he wanted his shoes off pretty badly, a desire I obliged because I didn't want him falling of the bed trying to do it himself. He was pretty banged up.

The police came in, impressive in their crisp uniforms and earnest faces, and took down the details. The man - Jacinto is his name - was then moved to another room where he promptly picked a fleeting, high octane fight with a squat, forbearing nurse who pushed him down onto his bed. "Boy," I thought, eyeing him warily as I prepared to leave. "For being the victim in this minor saga of woe, he's sure not very likable."

But he was drunk. And had just been THWACKED by a moving van. Everything about the incident was pitiable.

Jenny sat faithfully waiting for me out in the hall. The chapa driver had - it turned out - wisely headed straight to the police station, redeeming himself for what was certainly an accident and possibly the fault of the intoxicated victim lying inside, with his bare feet and bloodied skull. The driver stood, morose, full of consternation, talking to the police outside. I could see Jacinto's bicycle there beside them, the unknown whereabouts of which had much panicked him. Bicycles are not taken for granted in Mozambique. For some reason that small detail makes me feel so sad.

Jenny and I had missed our appointment: the Americans were already gone. We turned on our heels and kicked our way back up the gravel road in the direction we'd originally come, discussing all that had transpired. I commented, fake-wistfully, that I guessed the hippie sandals just weren't meant to be. Jenny obligingly (and with undue enthusiasm) offered to pick them up for me herself. I laughingly declined. After a minute or two, another rag-tag chapa pulled up and I jumped on, headed back home, back to Chimoio.

You can't be an HIV/AIDS coordinator in a region where more than 1 out of every 3rd person is HIV-positive, in a country with a healthy life expectancy of 36, and not see things with HIV-colored lenses. I can't. Every cough is HIV-induced TB, every prolonged sickness is an opportunistic infection. This particularity doesn't serve to scare me: I'm all about Facts when it comes to AIDS. I remember once during an American Red Cross training to become an HIV instructor, the teacher was making a point that we all have different, acceptable personal boundaries and asked who of us would theoretically be okay french-kissing an infected person. Saliva doesn't transmit HIV. I raised my hand. Only a couple of us, out of a roomful of people who knew a lot about the disease, did though. It made me pause, consider.

But maybe an ability to detach is part of the grace given me for this job, being submersed in such a weird thing, a pandemic, a fatal disease. I don't feel that it is bad for people to be uncomfortable around AIDS. (A little more discomfort could be useful sometimes, frankly.) I just mean, that for me it's... okay. Most of the time, my world can swim with this disease, so to speak, and I'm comfortable. With my personal safety I mean.

When I was holding that guy's head today, his blood flowed out freely, covering my bare hands, my wrists. It dried there, like a faded red glove, until a nurse noticed and wordlessly pointed me to a sink where I could wash it away with water, no soap. Riding the chapa home from Gondola, during those 30 minutes gazing out the window, quietly replaying the afternoon's events, I saw I hadn't quite gotten it all off my forearm and noticed the poor man's dark gummy blood still drying on my jacket cuff and sleeve too.

And do you want to know what I found myself doing for several minutes of that chapa ride?

Inspecting my hands for hangnails. You know, just to be sure.

It was a smart thing to do. "We live in a time of HIV." My old refrain. It means: Live. in. reality. That's what I was doing. Peering down, through my oh-so-Gen X black-rimmed glasses, turning my hands over, rubbing my palms, fingering the base of my nails, searching for tiny openings or cuts that - thank God - weren't there.

Inspecting my hands for hangnails.

Ah, but what a sad, silly world we live in.


.

best hair on a prime minister, ever

And the winner is...

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko

This seems to be a favorite style of hers. I cut an almost identical picture out of the Guardian about a year ago; it is still taped to our bathroom mirror. Political-savvy notwithstanding, that is hair to be proud of.

Though this is also hair to be proud of: our empregada Paula, whom I found one day brushing out her braids and persuaded to let me take her picture. I love that hair.

when you come back down

I've been in a minor funk the last few days, yes. That's still allowed in your second year.

Today gave me pleasure:

I haven't been running for a while because normally I run around the local football stadium (there is relative privacy there), but the last time I did so, my keys were stolen (long, irritating story). I had to make a big fuss and confront the thief in order to retrieve them, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Today, though, I just needed out, so I decided I'd get back up on the horse. I strapped on my old tennis shoes and started out rather unenthusiastically - what with a funk bogging me down - but as far as Sampson was concerned, we'd just won the lottery.

And then the first song came on my cheap-o mp3 player and it was N'kosi Sikeleli. Which, incidentally, is South Africa's national anthem, but more than that, it is a song which... I can't explain. Uplifts me utterly. Always. Makes me want to lift my hands and shout. It surprised me this morning, hearing it, and I looked over the disorderly field beside me, all trashy, its dust rising up into the golden sunrise, and suddenly I felt like I'd won the lottery too. God bless Africa, is what the words mean. I don't know how it happened, but before I was born, some of my soul got mixed up in the same dirt that produced this song.

Jacqui pulled me aside a few days ago and said that Belusha's tumor is growing again. Fast, noticeably. She's losing a lot of weight, and is in some pain, which will only worsen. They've been so happy at Maforga these past months, and Jacqui had made plans to build them a little house of their own there. I'd been asking whether Belusha could start school next term; she will be, after all, 6 years old.

But now Jacqui is stockpiling pain meds, morphine, for Belusha's palliative care. "I talked to a doctor in South Africa," she explained. "She said this kind of tumor is very aggressive, mostly affects children. There's not much that could be done no matter where she lived."

Though, of course, it never would have been allowed to grow so advanced in a developed country.

"I don't know how long it will be," Jacqui said. "But I wanted to tell you so you can begin to prepare yourself."

After my run today, I came back, showered, and went out to feed our friendly family fowl. Tony had left a nasty piece of pseudo-pizza from Shoprite in our fridge, so after feeding them the normal maize-feed, I threw in the pizza in too, sort of as an experiment to see what they'd do. The duck loved it; it was gone in a minute.

Then I threw in an egg-shell, and I couldn't believe what happened: Mafigo (duck) snatched it up and then all the other chickens began to chase him in a circle around the coop. It was a like a derby. Dirt was flying, there were some deranged leaps over the water pan, a lot of squawking, Mbhava (chicken) would get it, then Branca (chicken) would make a bold move and steal it, on and on. Three full minutes I was squatting beside them, transfixed by the frenzy, until I realized my fried egg was burning on the stove, so I don't know who ended up with it. The whole thing seemed weird, cannibalistic. They must have a serious calcium deficiency.

Lois is in Zim right now, since a week ago Saturday. She is, definitively, retrieving the sewing machine part and her daughter, Christabelle, whom she will bring back to live with us. It will be nice to have a child around, especially one I'm not ultimately responsible for. Lois was meant to leave on Friday last week, but that afternoon, I came home and found her sobbing in the living room instead. She'd walked to the busy bus stand and, on the way, a beggar (a mentally ill homeless man, what is called a maloco, or crazy) asked her for money. She gave him some and he asked for more. When she refused, he began to slap, hit her in the face and head. She fell over, and he kept hitting her there on the ground until some police ran over and pulled him off. Some kind women walked her home. She couldn't stop crying for hours.

Tomorrow morning Sara and I are heading out of town, driving about 6 hours up to Caia and then to a rural village called Sena, which lay along the sauntering Zambezi River, like a rebellious celebrity, always in the news. I'll meet with health activists in Caia and Sara has a preschool to check on in Sena. We'll be staying for a week in a tent. I need that. Time with BFF, time out of civilization, waking to roosters and goats (though we do that here too), outdoor showers, outdoor peeing, outdoor eating. I just need away for a bit. We'll bring the cribbage board, Out of the Silent Planet to read aloud, and I'll stand in the chilly dark and soak up the night sky. That was the first theme of this blog, December 2006, do you remember? Awake at Night. Very melodramatic, as befitting a blog that I would make.

Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth
again, and let the world go.

(Wendell Berry)

N'kosi Sikeleli Afrika.

the pizza

Joel watched this woman crossing another Mozzie river, the Luanha. (Nice explanation here.)

that girl

Sometimes, you just want to go home.

I'm tired of always thinking about and working on serious, depressing things. I'm really tired of HIV. I'm tired of having to be grown-up, when clearly, on the inside, I'm not. I know there is a way to be submersed in all this stuff and not have it tinge the essence of who you are, but I'm finding it hard to keep my borders lately. I know this post seems to contradict what I just wrote in the last one, but - both are true. A sexually-transmitted disease, that's not something a mere child - like me - talks about. Kids should be innocent, protected.

What I'm really saying is that I want to hide away.

You have to live in reality though. Don't you?

(Do you?)

My parents are coming to visit in February, I hope. It will have been two years since I've seen any member of my family. I could really use a week curled up on their couch, in front of their gas fireplace, with an afghan pulled over me, with my sister singing to herself in the basement and my mom reading in the recliner, and my dad chuckling as he half-watches The Andy Griffith Show in the bedroom while sorting paperwork on the bed. I could use bland, simple pork chops and green beans for dinner, and afterward, a glass of vanilla ice-cream with milk poured on top.

I really wanna go home home today.
Just for a while.

After Ginger's bridal shower, a few days before I left for Moz.

Dad and Mom are home from China right now, for a month.
In our house, maybe at this table, at this very minute.

Sigh.

living in twilight

Today I did an HIV teach in a place called Mbia Bungue.

I got home about 2:30 in the afternoon. Now its 6:30pm, and I'm still shedding off the suppressed emotion of the experience. It's always that way afterward but I can't get used to it.

There were 19 Mozambican adults at the seminar, both men and women, sitting in a polite half-circle against the bamboo walls of a low grass-roofed machessa nestled out in... nowhere. Mbia Bungue is about a half hour off the main highway, which is to say, I pulled off the highway and followed a dirt path up and down winding hills, deeper into the grass and interior, until my guide, Pastor Paulo, announced: Stop. In actual fact, you don't have to go far in Mozambique to find yourself in bush country; about 10 feet off the paved road will usually put you beyond the ambitious reaches of electricity. Assuming there are paved roads in that part of the province.

I think what's so stressful for me about teaching people about HIV and AIDS is what's on the line. I don't just mean life or death, though obviously they loom huge and menacingly at the forefront. Plenty of diseases kill you. HIV is one of the few that, in the process of holding a knife to your neck, also pulls in just about everything that makes life good: sex, childbirth, marriage, romantic love, children, religion, community standing. And those things drag with them even more compelling forces: hope, ambition, dreams, pleasure, so on. This all goes about a mile deeper than I'm talking about it, but my brain is too fried to dig deeper.

So I talked today to this Farmer's Association, which is what the group actually is, because I'd been working with their leader, Pastor Paulo, on orphan support for their area. And one day last month, over Cokes, he looked up at me and said:

You know, the government spends a lot of money to educate people about AIDS in this part of Mozambique because it is part of the Corridor [the major transportation route extending from Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean, with the highest rate of HIV in the country, more than 30%]. But in reality, the programs only help people in the cities and along the highway. Where I live, in Mbia Bungue, we are all farmers and we don't know anything about this disease.

So I set my Coke down and said I'd be happy to come out and give a seminar.

I have a lot of fun when I give these teachings. I enjoy talking about bodily fluids and sex and medicine and condoms and fidelity and infidelity and anatomy and orphans and facts and facts and facts instead of rumors and lies and gossip. I do. It doesn't embarrass me and I relish demonstrating a freedom to discuss it all respectfully. I like pointing out that God created everything. I love making everyone feel terribly, horribly uncomfortable and then loosening them up again by making them laugh. It is a deep joy to see the depth of people's kindness and humor and sincerity and desire for truth.

I know that in the end it is their decision how they will live their life. I say:

It's hard. It is not easy to hear. But we live in a time of HIV. This is the time in which we live.

I tell them all this and, anyway, they're already nodding their heads. They know it. It's scary realizing they might not be understanding as much of the facts as I think they are, or that if I teach badly it has big implications. Really scary. But merely being the teacher takes some pressure off. Their lives rest in hands much bigger than my own. I am talking about God.

HOWEVER.

It's the way they get somber, become quiet and distant-eyed, that drives it home for me, what's at stake. Men don't want to kill their girlfriends. Women don't want to infect their children. They also don't want to face a lifetime of bearing no more children. When I say there are anti-retroviral medicines which will keep them alive for many, many long years - until their heads are full of white hair - as long as they take them every single day without fail - they know that what this means is a whole lot of hardship. Because they live a good two hours from the nearest health post, if they're lucky (an hour on foot, an hour by chapa). Because they can't afford to take a chapa into town every month to get their free medicine. Because the side effects of that medicine often feel worse than the disease itself. Because it all depends on good nutrition and enough to eat, and they still live with meses de fome (months of hunger). Because their husbands won't use a condom. Because women don't like to marry men with a fatal transmittable disease. Because when you're HIV+, you're automatically someone who did something bad. The first thing you lose is your friends.

So - its not just about dying. What I'm asking them to consider, and reshape, and remove, is so much of what it means to be human. I put a brave face on it, I offer glimpses of hope, the reality of what hopeful possibilities do exist, and they're attentive. But in the end, AIDS is AIDS.

AIDS is AIDS.

Which is why I inevitably end up feeling like crap afterward, no matter how well it went.

lie with me, just forget the world

Gloomy mood in post-poll Zimbabwe, BBC News Africa says.

Boy, you don't have to tell me that.

Lois, or MaiChris (mother of Christabelle) as we call her, is Joseph's older sister, 31 years old. She has been living with Sara and I since February, which is when she and her husband left Harare and, like thousands upon thousands of other Zimbabweans, (ambiguously-legally) immigrated to Mozambique. Chimoio is only an hour from the border and, naturally, now swelling with people seeking a better life. Stiffly polite black Zimbabweans, dressed smartly, eager to speak English, stop me about once a week on the street to chat, even more anxious to ask for a job. Very casually dressed white Zimbabweans pull large fishing boats behind shiny SUVs and crowd the aisles of Shoprite (Moz's only Western-style grocery store), their carts overflowing with beer and bread and biltong (dried jerky). Their fortunes are vastly different but both groups are headed in the same direction: out.

The irony of Moz now being the better place to live - us, poor redneck cousin to urbane, sophisticated Zim - is almost more than some can bear. It's humiliating. In 1980, the Zim dollar was on par, and even briefly surpassed, the US dollar. Mugabe was the Big Man back then too, but it was a whole different ballgame. Now they live with an illogical, murderous Mugabe. Same man, way different world.

BabaChris, Lois' husband, stayed in Moz only briefly and has been eeking along best he can back in Harare, (sometimes) working as an anesthesiologist nurse while dodging Zanu-PF henchmen shooting people in the head and bulldozing their homes. Christabelle, their 4-year old daughter, is living with Lois' sister and her family in Zim. Lois has only seen her once since February.

"Because this is Africa" is the title preceding most of the bullet points which follow:

• MaiChris can't begin working because her documents need to go to Maputo and
• there isn't a reliable mail system here
  
• so she has to wait for someone she trusts to go and deliver them to the Ministry of... Something or Other where they'll likely sit several months, who knows, and
  
• in the meantime she can't finish the numerous informal sewing projects people have offered to pay her for, because halfway through the gargantuanly tedious task of sewing 600 school kit bags for the Anglican diocese, our machine broke and
  
• the replacement part is not available here, only in Zim, and
  
• she sent money with two different people to purchase it for her, but neither returned with it, and
  
• one was her husband, but she has no way of telephoning him about it because
• telecommunications has more or less collapsed in Zim and
• I'm not even sure he has a phone because inflation in Zim is at 2.2 million percent, and that means
• it is cheaper for Zimbabweans to use their money as toilet paper than to actually purchase goods with it but it doesn't really matter anyways
  
• because there aren't any goods in Zimbabwe anymore
  
• because a man named Mugabe really, REALLY screwed everything up.

So there you go.

Sara and I genuinely like having Lois here. She's a wonderful person, helpful, kind, generous, friendly. But six months is a long time to live with two muzungus (white people), far away from your husband and young daughter, even if one of them is going to become your future sister-in-law. She gets by with Shona in this part of Moz, but not knowing Portuguese is tough. As time goes on, as the work papers don't come and the sewing machine part still doesn't arrive, we can see she is fighting depression. If it were me, I'd be long past the point of a stiff upper lip.


The other thing is, Lois' mother died, very unexpectedly, in March. It was at her funeral that Lois saw her daughter.

Gloomy is excusable.

Tonight, two little girls are sleeping in the bed formerly known as Sara's and lately known as Lois'. (Sara and I have been sharing my double bed for so long now I think I'd go through withdrawal if we went back to how it used to be.) One is Tia Liliana's beautiful little daughter Laura, who is back visiting her brothers and sisters for the first time since she was sent away (she didn't go to her mother's funeral). The other is Ivania, Sara's old host sister's daughter, who has come a few different times to stay with us. They're like best friends when together (see especially the video of them splashing in a tub, on that latter link), all bubbly and chatty; but tonight Ivania got overtired, probably, and Sara was gone for much of the evening, and anyway, about a half-hour after I tucked them in, Ivania reappeared, quavery and silent. Sara asked what was wrong. The poor little thing simply burst into tears, and cried out, "Mama!"

I was washing dishes, Lois was sitting across the table from Sara, who was cradling a sniffling Ivania, and all I could think about was my own crystal-clear memories of doing that exact same thing when I was a little girl. Homesickness was practically a chronic disease for me until I hit third or fourth grade. The Portuguese equivalent is called saudades.

All Lois could think about, of course, was her own young daughter, sleeping under somebody else's roof, a long way away from her mother's arms. I don't know what the Shona equivalent is called.

So things got very quiet in the kitchen tonight as Sara fetched her phone for Ivania to call home. Just me splishing around in the sink, gazing out at the dark night, and thinking about MaiChris thinking about her Christabelle. I sneaked a peek at her over my shoulder and she was almost in tears, slumped over the table.

Yes. Gloomy is excusable.

Mr. Mugabe, please.

Enough.

hail to those

Joseph wears underarm deodorant with Old Spice in it. I myself do not wear deodorant - (yes, and I am One with all nature as a result. Tiny butterflies and other gentle woodland creatures flock to me. I am their spiritual mother.) - so I'm not sure if the deodorant people simply dump a bottle of cologne into a large, boiling vat of anti-sweat goo to give it that aroma, or how precisely they accomplish such magic. In any case, Joseph is here this weekend and filling our home with a much-needed jolt of pure, unadulterated masculinity.

The man himself, in paradise, snoozing after lunch.

My life is 99.99999999% feminine. (A little known fact is that Africa is teeming with lovely foreign women, all of us single, overearnest, and saving the world). So walking into the bathroom today, and the kitchen, and the living room, everywhere suffused with such classic maleness almost made me fall over, incredulous. It was weird and wonderful, like I'd wandered into a happy memory of my chicken-farming grandfather standing in his Sunday suit, tall in gray leather cowboy boots, hair slicked back, and spitting chew into an empty Campbell's soup tin with the label ripped off. It is impossible for me to separate the scent of Old Spice from the sweet, tangy aroma of tobacco. Mischievous and kind, with weather-beaten skin, that is what he was. His name was Homer and he had very thick fingers.

American boys stop wearing cologne after high school, and that is a big mistake on their part.

The neighbor's rooster on the prowl. As usual.

Further compounding my associations (and raising the sheer density of masculinity per square foot to unheard-of proportions), Joseph also built a chicken coop for us. A big one. Fudza got some companions this week, so it was necessary to upgrade his accommodations. Sara's 5-year-old friend named the newbies: Mafigo (banana in Sena) for the duck, Branca (white in Portuguese) for the black chicken, and Mbavha (thief in Shona) for the orange chicken. We are rapidly turning into an eccentric urban farm, which is funny and fun; but when I wear Sara's suspiciously Amish-looking apron out in the yard to harvest sweet potato leaves while waiting for my bread dough to rise, I am sometimes alarmed by the thought I'm about a bonnet away from hitching up the covered wagon and marrying second cousin Ignatius, the 'ol preacher's son.

That's when I put on Lauryn Hill and polish my nose ring, for reassurance.

I personally wouldn't mind having a strong guy like this around.

sitting in the waiting room

I've stopped writing about the people who die, I realized. There was Helena, the mother-child who showed up at the clinic with a baby nobody in her family loved but her. They said he was cursed, and I think they believed she was as well. They certainly acted that way. I could nearly hold her son with a single hand. The thing about kids like him - malnourished, shrinking little people - is that they end up looking like old men; wrinkled, with skin a size too big, tired eyes, a struggle gone underground, inside, silent, wheezy. It's the irony of receiving too little life, those jumping live cells of milk and broccoli and hot whole wheat bread steaming out of the oven: that you die looking exactly like somebody who's had too much life.

Helena had HIV, no helping hands, and probably tuberculosis. After a few weeks stay at Maforga, Jacqui sent her to hospital for a confirming TB test and treatment. I visited a few times during the week she was there and it seemed good, that she'd be back to her baby soon, the little guy rapidly fattening under Jacqui and her workers' care. (The hospital doesn't allow infants to stay with their mothers and Helena's family refused to take him, which made Jacqui hopping mad). And then, just like that, Helena died, slipped away in the bustle of the women's ward. Which meant, of course, that in the same moment her son finally got a leg-up on life, he became less. Fatherless, motherless, belonging to no one in particular, because her family - his family - has never showed up to claim him. That was two months ago or so. They aren't coming. I was startled by Helena's death because there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, not overtly, but that's how disease goes in Mozambique.

Some other of our patients have died in the meantime too, a twin, a mother, a baby from way out. It's not that common - DEATHDEATHDEATH - but simultaneously, is very common. I don't know. It's confusing.

I also don't know why I stopped writing about them.

(The thing that killed me today was this new baby, a month-old twin weighing only 2.2 kg, or less than 5 pounds. Their mother was dead, and the father reported neither had eaten since the day before because the formula milk we'd given them had run out. I was cradling the one, so tiny, so hungry, and as I bent my head to kiss his cheek, I must have triggered a reflex because he jerked his head over to suck, mouth searching, giving me a sort of open-mouthed kiss of desperation. I can't get that feeling out of my head, like a phantom pain.)

When I'm riding in the back of one of those wimpy, low-to-the-ground pickup trucks (a toy you might buy at the Dollar Store), loaded up with respectable Mozambican businessmen in ill-fitting suits, fat grannys hoisting ponderous baskets of sugarcane and bananas, lanky teenage boys in torn yellow sandals (shoes wide and huge like their tremoring hormones), when we're all smashed in the back together, racing down the freeway, ducking our heads from the wind, making intermittent eye contact and chuckling at the absurdity of life, our little transport a mere fluke on a horizon long and distant with hills and African living - I feel very happy. Oh, to be alive and unimportant and figuring out not much of anything in a place like Mozambique.

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." (Mozart)

simple experiment

I know Leslie's grandma, and this is the best thing I've read in eight years.

open your eyes

Sara wrote a funny post the other day. I hate to perpetuate stereotypes about Africa, but... epa, sometimes they're true. It was the first time I had to put on my financial reporting:

toothpaste: 34 meticais
potatoes: 60 meticais
rats: 10 meticais

P.S. - those suckers were nasty.

in which the protagonist is interviewed.

So, what do you do on a Saturday?

Wellll… I bake bread. What else is there to do?

Isn’t that a lot of carbohydrates?

Sure is. I try to balance the bread-baking with walks or bike rides. There is nary a footpath in our area that I haven’t covered on one Saturday or another.

You began teaching English at your church each week because you wanted to “contribuir a vida da igreja” (contribute to the life of the church) and “conhecer pessoas bem” (know people). Why do only male youth attend your classes?

Because they are in love with me.

Outside your front door is an overturned basket with a chicken named Fudza trapped inside. Any comments?

[protagonist chuckles] Ah, yes. People, especially in rural areas, like to give gifts of live chickens or other fowl. However, this particular chicken - Fudza, as you said – was accidentally left in our truck by a woman Sara was giving a lift to. We discovered him later (the next day) and are now making a half-hearted effort to fatten him up before we consume him. Probably with batatas fritas (french fries).

But Fudza?

Well now, that’s interesting. BFF and I drove up to Niassa province once, a roadtrip that took about 20 hours - or maybe a million years - mostly on dirt roads, and at a stage in the journey when we had become silly beyond reckoning, we crossed a small river called Fudza. It made a big impression.

BFF?

Best Friend Forever (Sara). There could be alternate meanings as well.

At a recent party, you were spotted conversing quite seriously and at length with a total stranger. Was he giving cultural advice or perhaps offering his perspective on the abysmal political situation in Zimbabwe?

Initially I thought he wished to talk to me about the poverty in his community, but as it turned out, he only wanted to inform me that when he goes pee, it hurts a lot. Which sounds like syphilis, so I encouraged him to visit the local health post as soon as possible.

Your feet are so dirty. Why?

Because I haven’t bathed in three days.

Wow, it must be difficult to live in an area with so little water.

We actually have plenty of water. I’m just too scared to take a shower when it is so cold in the mornings. Kind of gross.

Why are most of your blog posts so intensely nerdy?

I can’t help myself. I’m sorry.

If you had to choose between: one arm so long that it dragged on the ground, or wheels for feet, which would you choose?

Arm. No question.

.

sweetest downfall

Life is so interesting sometimes: its ebbs and flows, the themes coloring it, how there are slow bits, climaxes, a playing out you only partially control. Transformation occurs inside ourselves, but mostly unbidden I think; how you feel, the way you understand yourself, what imprisons you, your earnest needs, everything making up your internal landscape can change in an instant, unanticipated. You have no way of knowing how long - could be months, could be years - you'll be looking at the new scenery inside. The unknowing is why our stories are dramatic, even though the actual events of a person’s life may be mundane.

(My mom hates it when I write this kind of veiled, symbolic hooha, and not because it gets boring so fast. It torments her.

"I read your last post," she states to me during our biweekly phone call.
"Ok," I reply.
"About the dream," she clarifies.
"Yeah," I rejoin.
"Is there anything you want to tell me about all that?" she inquires hopefully.
"No," I respond, like a monosyllabic teenage boy.
"Oh," she sighs, deflated by the near-miss toward insight into my soul. We move onto more banal talk about my sister's choice of birth control.)

Of course, our hearts and minds experience subtle or slow transitions too, like landscape passing as you canoe down a river. Either way, I don't think we control the changes much. They may be welcome, delight us (like soft rain on a perfectly sunny day, rainbows everywhere!) or they may cause pain (as simple grief). Sometimes they do both.

I went to Gorongosa National Park on Wednesday because June 25 is Mozambique's Independence Day and we had the holiday off. Mount Gorongosa is a regionally famous holy mountain - good for all types of cures and spiritual dilemmas, they say - as well as the former headquarters of RENAMO during the bloodbath of the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. It is beautiful, despite notoriety, and we wanted to climb it: Jenny, Joel, Sara, her friend Hannah who is visiting for a week, and myself.

As these things go, our plans modified several times and we ended up tenting Tuesday night at Sinhale, a tiny 5-hut community Sara works with only a few kilometers from the park entrance. I worked at the clinic until 2:30 that afternoon, caught a couple of chapas heading out of town and met up with the others around dusk.

Miraculous dusk when you're camping! Africa slays me for her beauty, camping frees my soul (no matter where I am), easy friendships make me silly, buoyant. I'd combined all three that evening; it should not have surprised me that something began stirring, a change, somewhere on the inside.

Imagine this, if you can: A distant valley, hills blue with nightfall, drippy orange with sundown, spilling one right after another beyond sight. Woodsmoke rising. Bats now swooping. An open tin of baked beans, masaroca - field corn - set into glowing embers, chicken hot dogs on a stick, four figures wrapped in blankets, swinging their legs off the back of a truckbed, star light star bright first star we see tonight, jokes about Joel and his harem of white girls. Crickets swelling, filling the universe with choruses. Joy in simple pleasures.

Then our neighbors, the good folk of Sinhale, pulled out their giant marimba and asked if they might play for us.


There isn't a good way to describe a traditional Mozambican timbila. They're crafted from gourds and wood, played in rural areas where little boys learn the art from old men. Musicians stand four-abreast, sweaty from their efforts, and pound out rhythms scented with cheap cigarettes and the air of their ancestors. It's amazing. Joel's photo helps to visualize, but reality is even better. Pair their melody with goatskin-covered drums, percussion (Coke cans filled with pebbles, impaled on sticks for handles) and one piercing referee whistle in the mouth of an extrovert Mozambican - and it's astounding.

Now add night.

Now add firelight.

Now add us...

I've written plenty about my life on this blog, but I'm not tempted to turn it into a public confessional booth, not about the particulars that reside deepest within me, hovering there sacred and covered. (Which is why, I once heard said, mankind needs poetry. Because it says what we are unwilling to.) Suffice to say, some timeless themes - righteousness, love, death - have lain heavy on me the last few weeks. They appeared from every direction, hoary albatrosses on a long journey, and came to perch on my shoulders and in my hair. Weighty creatures they, and somber. I wasn't sure how long they'd stay.

Marimba music, by utter contrast, is a cacophony of rhythms and explosions. How it works is: you stand in the dark of Sinhale, watching the players beat away the modern world, and you wonder about your own heart in its little prison. You're tired of it, so you lift up your arms and twirl in a circle because that's what makes sense. The players cheer and hoot, these African men with such muscles, such skin, rugged. You pick up your feet, you stomp, you thrust, the music requires it - and the children watching nearby laugh, like the ding of metal triangles in elementary school choir. The laughing is so clear, and they shimmy in front of you, shaking lissome bodies. You reach out both hands and pull others, adults, into the cloud of dust, the snakey conga line, and you all encircle the giant timbila in the dark, stooping and stretching, faces turned to the sky. The referee whistle crescendos, in a hurry now, and your sweat slides off you. You're holding the hand of a woman, a motherly young one with ancient breasts, moving in unison with her round the circle. You don't stop moving. Then, without even noticing, your albatross birds take flight; they extend their palatial wings, lift off your shoulders, disappear. The noise of the rhythms, the laughing, the dancing, the clapping, the rustle of feet and the universe, the goodness of a moment mixing with mankind, the very dirt in your teeth, masks their exit. You don't expect it or even realize it, not until much later, when the lightness of their absence begins to ache.

It did hurt afterward. The Sinhale men got drunk late into the night – it was a major holiday the next day - and I lay quietly inside my tent inspecting the transformation inside me, feeling both softly sad and relieved. The dance and the marimba didn’t inspire the new scenery, but they did consecrate it, in a time when blessing and dedication are as important as ever. It could have happened no other way, I think.

The way life proceeds, the unknowing of it, is a hopeful thing for me. I get bogged down, take life too seriously probably, but I have realized I hold a deep well of clear, cool hope inside. It surprises me every time. Changes come, for better or worse, and make the stories – all of our stories, mine – dramatic, shifting, worth living.

(Hannah)