in the name of love

I was writing a post in my head about some of the best things people have mailed to me here, when I went to our office in Beira and there sat two packages, one small, one 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 cents!

I had a six-hour staff meeting at the orphan day center I work with (during which beads of sweat kept muddling my notes); then 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 orientation, and overlapped for a week. She was leaving to volunteer in backwater rural Florida. I remember a particularly frigid but merry walk we took together, stopping at the swings in a winter-faded park, trading our perspectives on Africa, men, food. We've exchanged a few handwritten letters since and some emails. She often responds to my posts using the initials MB, and is unfailingly encouraging and funny. Turns out she also does super job on care packages too. (What was inside: nine shirts, just about doubling my wardrobe, thirteen movies, and twenty-seven books, tripling my personal library here. Oh, and a shower plug, which is what I'd originally requested.)

Thank you, Melissa. Your generosity came at the perfect time. I know "'Tis better to give than to receive", but it's pretty sweet to receive, too.

The best gift I ever received 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 at Sara. "I bet it only cost a dollar! Only America could come up with something like this! " That's true on a symbolic level - but technically it was made in China.

What on earth could that tiny speck of a dot be? Why, it's a brush AND a mirror!
Good riddance to using a rearview mirror... saving the world is no excuse not to look your best.

One of the other best gifts was from my friend about whom I am forever enthusiastic, Sarah. It's kind of quirky we're 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 Appalachian foothills for field trips. They 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 into their care, Courage and Margaret.

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

Finally, there was the Petzl E+Lite headlamp Rebekah gave me before I left. I was so 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 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.


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