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War on Thursday Mornings

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On February 26, 2015

In Other

The sun is still rising at 7:30, and it casts palm tree shadows on the soccer field.  The students have all jostled their way into their classrooms, a mess of lunch boxes and castle projects and blue polo shirts.

We sit on the picnic tables under the roof made of thatch, everyone in their classes or offices except a few lone gardeners sweeping, raking, watering.  And us.

The sun hasn’t yet reached its feverish intensity for the day.  The Indian Ocean blinks in the distance.  The light filters through the leaves.  It is indeed our Haven of Peace.

In a little while, all the elementary kids are on the basketball court, singing their hearts out.  They are our background music.  Oh happy day!  Happy day!  You washed my sins away!  

We are a lowly band.  It’s usually just Santosh, Melissa, Laura, Tracy, and me.  We spread the lists out in front of us–every student, every teacher, every gardener and cleaner; and each Thursday morning we sit and we do battle over the names.  Each week we tick more names off the lists, and by June we will have conquered them all.

And I can’t help but wonder, as we sit, relatively unnoticed, under the thatch, with our lists, what is going on in unseen places and hearts, as we battle for Peace in this Haven.

Sometimes Fairy Tales Come True

By

On February 21, 2015

In Other

Once upon a time, many years ago, in a large city called Dar es Salaam, there were these foreigners living in the far northern part of the city called Mbezi Beach.

They felt left out.  They felt rejected.  All the people in the center of the city, and the southern part of the city, had all sorts of great restaurants and markets and shops.  Most importantly, they had a place called Shopper’s Plaza.  At Shopper’s Plaza, you could buy bacon and cheese and broccoli and all sorts of wonderful things that you couldn’t find anywhere else in the city.  And those things are pretty important to foreigners.

But those poor folks out in Mbezi Beach?  Well, they could buy things like flour, sugar, and beans out in their area, but if they wanted yogurt, tortilla chips, or Oreos, well, they had to drive to Shopper’s Plaza.  And that usually took about an hour each direction.

It was very sad.  As the years went on, Shopper’s Plaza got bigger and better, and another Shopper’s Plaza opened in Dar es Salaam….but it was still nowhere near Mbezi Beach.  All the Mbezi Beach folks had to drive that looong distance and no one seemed to notice or care.

Mbezi Beach friends would wistfully wish that one day there would be a Shopper’s Plaza in their area.  A couple of years ago, rumors started circulating that a Shopper’s Plaza was being built in Mbezi Beach!  But they were used to having their hopes dashed, so everyone just kept saying, I’ll believe it when I see it.  

And then, on February 21, 2015, a miracle happened.  A Shopper’s Plaza did indeed open in Mbezi Beach!  It was a dream come true!  No more empty dreams of bacon!  No more ice cream melting in the hour trip home!

It was wonderful and beautiful.  All the Mbezi Beach friends went to the brand new Shopper’s Plaza on February 21st, because it was only 10 minutes away, and everyone needed to see it for themselves.  All the friends jumped up and down and were positively giddy and spent way more money than they should have.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The End.

24 Hours (A Day in My Life)

By

On February 21, 2015

In Other

This was not an exciting day.  But I chose to write about it because it represents a fairly ordinary day of my life here.  



Friday, February 20th

6:15  Wake up.

6:30  Wake kids up.  Make peanut butter toast and kefir smoothies.  Begin making lunch for kids.  They come to the kitchen and beg to buy lunch from the snack bar today, and I relent.  So instead of making sandwiches, I hunt down exact change for three snack bar hamburgers.  Cut up apples for snacks.  As I’m working in the kitchen, I holler out reminders:  Grace, did you fill the water bottles?  Lily, did you find your library book?  Josiah, do you have your shoes on?  


7:15  Everyone piles in the car.  Drop off kids at school.  Gil and I head to the Reach Tanzania center, where he is finishing his class on Worldview this week.  Drop off Gil.  I take the car back home.  

7:45  Eat my breakfast.  Pile dishes in the sink for my house helper.  Strain kefir.  Get on computer and finish up some projects that need to be taken to the printer today.

8:45  Head to HOPAC to help in Grace’s class.  I love this; I get my teacher fix and get to know the kids in her class.  Today it’s all about using descriptive words.  

10:00  Off to the main task of the day:  Find a printer who will make business cards.  There’s a big company in town I’ve used for printing before, but I really don’t want to drive that far today.  I know there’s lots of little places that advertise business cards, so I decide to give one a shot.

I drive to a place not far from our house and find a little print shop.  It is approximately the same size as most American’s closets.  The shelves on the walls are crammed with paper, folders, and other office supplies.  There’s barely room to move, but I see a computer and a couple of large printers that look as if they are in working condition.

I ask a few questions.  Yes, they print business cards.  How do you cut them?  She pulls out a contraption that looks like a business-card hole punch.  All righty then.  Let’s do this.

I choose the paper I want.  She sits me down at the computer; I pull up my file.  I click print; I can hear the printer whirring and…….the power goes off.  

I sigh.  She laughs and shrugs her shoulders.  What to do?  We exchange phone numbers and I ask her to call me when the power comes back on.

10:30  I start off on my other errand of the day:  Find powdered sugar.  Yesterday, I had made a cake for Gil’s students, and a batch of cupcakes for Lily’s kindergarten aide’s birthday.  Then I realized I was out of powdered sugar for frosting.

So I head out to look for the sugar.  First shop:  No luck.  She points me to another shop.  Do you have powdered sugar?  I ask in Swahili.  Yes, he says, but it’s ngumu.  Hard.  I take it anyway. 

11:00  I get home and discover the power is out at home as well.  So I fuss around at home.  Read my Bible; do some chores, answer some emails, eat some lunch.  I fret about the fact that nothing I had planned is getting done today.

12:00  I really need to make the frosting now so that I can deliver the cakes on time.  But the shopkeeper wasn’t kidding when he said the sugar was ngumu.  I’m not going to be able to mix this up by hand, and the power is still not on.

I ask our gardener to turn on the generator so that I can use my electric mixer.  Even then, it’s like trying to turn chalk into frosting.  I pound away at it.  By the time I’m done, the kitchen and myself are covered with powdered sugar, and it still has lumps in it.  But it will have to do.  

The lumpy frosting gets stuck in the decorator, making the cupcakes look like they are covered with piles of…..yeah.  Oh well.  At least kindergarteners only care about sprinkles.  

1:00  I head over to the ministry center and deliver the cake.  I head back over to HOPAC to deliver the cupcakes and help Lily’s teacher with the party, since Friday afternoons, cake, and kindergarteners are not really a calm, quiet combination.  

2:20  School is over.  I visit the library; I visit the office.  I know that Gil will be getting home soon and will be exhausted, so I decide to let the kids play at school for a while.  

4:00  We head home.  I stop at my favorite fruit stand.  I buy 5 pounds of onions, 2 pineapples, 5 mangoes, 1 papaya, 6 apples, and a large bunch of bananas for about 10 dollars.  

The power is still off at home.  Gil is lying on the floor, trying to get cool.  I help Grace with some homework.  I start dinner by blanching 5 pounds of tomatoes to get the skins off.  I turn half into tomato soup for dinner, and the other half into spaghetti sauce for another day.  The power finally comes back on at 5:00.

6:00  Dinner, baths, kids to bed, and Gil and I watch The 100 Foot Journey.  

Saturday morning (now):  My task for the day?  Get business cards printed.  Hopefully today will be more successful than yesterday.  Except the power just went out.  Literally.  Just right now.  

Setting Out in the Dark

By

On February 15, 2015

In Other

Even though they are both amazing stories, I wish someone had warned me that it was a bad idea to read Unbroken and Blood Brothers back-to-back.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Unbroken, since it’s a best seller and now a movie.  It is most definitely as mind-blowing and incredible and redemptive as everyone says it is, but you have to get through years of torture and abuse and starvation to get there.

So picking up Blood Brothers right after was probably not the best choice.  This book was a best seller in Germany, but only recently translated to English.  It was written by an MK I knew in Liberia, who grew up on the same compound as me.  I loved the descriptions of a childhood that paralleled my own, but when it got into the Liberian civil war, with its depictions of cannibalism and unfettered rape and children’s heads indiscriminately smashed against walls, I was just about undone.  These things happened on streets that I had walked, to people I had known.

In the middle of this, I read an article on Auschwitz, where 1 million people were murdered.  How is that even possible, that one million people could be murdered in one facility over a period of just a few years?  And then I read another articletitled “ISIS militants are using mentally challenged children as suicide bombers and crucifying others.”

All week, my world was grey.  I felt like I needed my own PTSD counseling.  How can I go about making the bed and watersliding with the kids and dicing up mangoes when such evil exists?  “We have to watch The Office,” I told Gil.  “I can’t sleep with this stuff in my head.”

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t deal with this reality, of what one man is capable of doing to another man, to a pregnant woman, to a baby.  And I can’t deal with the reality that the same depravity lies in my own heart, because we’re not talking about isolated incidents of psychopaths.  We’re talking about the realities on every continent, in every generation.  We can watch The Office all we want, but this is not going away.

And then another book cleared the grey.

I’m reading C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair to the kids.  There’s a scene where the evil queen is trying to convince Puddleglum and the children that her black, ugly, hopeless Underworld is the only reality there is, and using her dark magic, she almost succeeds.  At the very last moment, Puddleglum snaps them out of their stupor by announcing:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only one world.  Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.  And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it.  We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right.  But four babies playing a  game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.  That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia….We’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland.  Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

Yes.  We put up our heads and we set out in the dark.

All these people were still living by faith when they died.  They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.  And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.  People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own…They were longing for a better country–a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.  (Hebrews 11)

Louie, Michael, and Ben–the main characters in Unbroken and Blood Brothers–they put their bets on Aslan.  Me too.

Six

By

On February 13, 2015

In Other

Milestones are important in adoption.

Last February, when Lily turned five, that meant she had lived with us for the same amount of time that she had lived in the orphanage.  

So last week, when Lily turned six, that meant the scales have tipped in our direction.  She’s now spent the majority of her years as a Medina.  That’s a good feeling.

As amazing as her orphanage was, she still was without a family for two and a half years.  We still feel the effects of that, and she is still struggling to overcome some of that learned behavior.  But we see progress, and it’s always worth it.  

Lily doesn’t do big crowds very well, so we celebrated with just one friend and her family.  She also doesn’t do well with all eyes on her, as you can see below.  

She’s a beautiful little girl, and she’s ours. 

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