This happened today

There are many amazing things that happen in the international schools. Here is one.

Yep, that's my animal-crazy, environmentally-minded kid. And that is Jane Goodall.

I keep telling the kiddo that she's doing so much in her life that many people dream of doing (whether she wants to or not), but today she believed me.

Oh, Mama!

New Baby Year came at last! 

Pregnant mom and firstborn moved back to the US, we changed schools, and had a new baby overlayed with the foreign-service issue of technically living (and hubby physically residing) in a

How can my heart not burst?

place that is different than where we had the baby. In our case, we are extending this period by several months.

Here are some highlights:

• Reveled in living in a place that belongs to us – Home is where the House Is! - despite the lack of furniture and household goods, check (Nov 12)
• No. 1 daughter strong-armed into attending excellent local public school despite her fears, check (Nov 23)
• Thanksgiving with dear US-based friends but without hubby, check
• 40th birthday celebrated while being really, really pregnant, without hubby, check (Dec 5)
• Amazing baby girl born after 2 weeks of “pro-dromal” labor and one hour at the hospital, with hubby, check (Dec 30)
• Comings and goings of parents and hubby, most notably husband’s paternity being up and heading back to Nepal, ouch (Feb 22)
• A bunch of stuff I barely remember, such as getting up 3 to 5 times a night for one child or the other or both; feeding baby while watching it snow; cold bus stop waits with a screaming newborn; cold shopping trips with a precariously sleeping newborn; piano lessons with an amazingly good newborn; library visits while shushing the newborn; skyping to Nepal; cooking dinner with the baby in the sling and the girl sprawled on the kitchen floor doing homework; before school breakfasts with my girl at my own kitchen counter; laundry at 1am; and snuggles in sunbeams with both my girls. . .check
• A visit from a dear friend who folded the 3-load-tall mound of clothes in the borrowed papasan, alleluia and check (March 22)
• Mom arrives, and the house is picked up, eldest dear-one has company during feedings and baby bedtimes, dinner dishes are magically done, bathtubs are usably clean, la! Thanks Mom, glad you’ll be here a while. 

Type A's Plan

More than two months without a blog post! My two avid readers have been making occasional queries bugging me incessantly.

Many, many families at our post will be leaving this summer. Today marks the first in a round of "leavings" of families that we will noticeably miss. Lovely people with kids, one of whom is an occasional buddy of our daughter, they are most prominently remembered as the owners of the swingset our daughter fell off of to fracture both her wrists last year.

It's nice, actually, that we'll leave at peak leaving season. Enough friends will be gone that we'll all realize it won't be the same here without them, yet enough will still be here that someone will care enough to say goodbye.

As I think we've made it clear by now, we are anxious to go, with the clear exception of having to pull our daughter out of a wonderfully positive experience and education at Rosslyn Academy. The hubby has been unflagging in his scheduling efforts - between the many logistics of getting our stuff packed up and shipped out, and likewise getting consumables purchased, packed, and shipped from the States on to the next post; as well as our one-week mini-Euro tour; and finally our extensive cross-America 5-week trek, it has been quite busy. Though not nearly as busy as it'll get once the packers start coming.

What have I been doing during all this? Sitting back and simply watching him plan, nodding and smiling at the appropriate times? Mostly yeah.

We have our last and very much anticipated guests arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow! I have been scheduling their local excursions, as well as tying up end-of-year room-mom, Girl Scout leader, and regular mom stuff scheduling playdates, practicing for the first-ever piano recital, and cooking for the many events that keep popping up.

But on the whole, I have a very sluggish feeling. I'm excited about getting to leave - getting out of Africa for a few years, going on vacation and visiting family and friends, as well as settling into our new post. I'm also sad or even discouraged about leaving -- it's very hard on the wee girl, there is so much to do and organize, and without really knowing what we are getting ourselves into at the next post, I can't help but reserve judgement.

Last night we spent time with the family that is leaving today. This morning, at least I have the perspective that it's not supposed to be easy. It sounds silly - of course moving countries is not easy - but I kind of thought after a while you'd just shrug and go on. Despite the strong face and the really awesome next post for our friends, however, they are definitely feeling the weightiness of goodbyes. It's one of those times when you realize that home is what you are leaving.

I guess we do just shrug and go on, but not without feeling a few butterflies in the tummy and pulls on the heart.

The "stay bag"

Everyone in Kenya is joyous this week because of the post-election peace. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the final votes were tallied, revealing a Kenyatta victory by a margin of 0.07%.

A little later in the wee hours, we became aware that a victor had been declared.

Here's how we found out. Imagine it's 4AM, and our sleeping household is, well, sleeping.

Then, some kind of noise starts niggling on our subconscious. Now I have the mom-radar, so it doesn't take much for me to wake in the night, but the noise that resolved into masses of people yelling, shouting, singing, and honking in the street.... that even got Andrew's attention. Experience has taught me that when there are even a few people yelling passionately, it is not good, and if it's masses of people, it has potential to be Really Not Good. However, coming out of the grogginess, I realized that these voices sounded happy. Who is happy when they are awake at 4AM?

     Me (looking outside to make sure people aren't in our yard): They must've decided on a president.
     Andrew (face in pillow): Unh.
     Child (yelling much louder than necessary from her room across the hall): Mama! Can you close the window? I can't sleep with all that noise out there.

In the jittery pre-election period we were strongly advised to keep a "go bag". This would be the bag you can grab so that you can run out of the house in your curlers and robe and go catch a plane in the case of a Really Bad Event. It should contain travel essentials like passports and money, important documents, a change of clothes, and your great grandmother's lace tablecloth or whatever other small but vital items you would absolutely want. (Which is funny, because people in the foreign service don't keep anything...).

Since the weekend passed without a violent hitch, the only jitters really left this week are the early afternoon caffeine jitters. So I guess it's time to unpack the go bag (which we never finished packing in the first place).

However, now we actually have approved dates for departure from Kenya this summer. The go-bag still seems like a good spot to keep those important documents and great grandma's lace. So maybe we will just keep it there, under the chair. It can be the "stay bag".... or at least a "get ready" bag. A constant reminder that, while my kid is homesick but can't really tell me where she's homesick for, we are going to go on a really rockin' vacation soon.

Reflections of a first tour

A couple weeks ago marked 18 months of living in Kenya. Since we are here for one (2-year) tour, we are now beginning the practicalities of getting to the next post, including figuring out the best school options without having visited, scheduling home leave, and closely related to both of these, putting through curtailment paperwork such that we may get home leave completed before the new school year starts. In addition, we need to get through medical clearance; figure out how much and which stuff here to give away, sell, burn or otherwise get rid of; identify what is in storage that should be sent on to next post; and start mentally detaching ourselves from Kenya.

This detachment is perhaps the most complicated; and is also irritatingly predicted in books on third culture kids or global nomads. In some ways, we cannot wait to leave. The robberies, hijacking, and police hijinx are commonplace and it is only by grace that we personally have not had more problems. Larger safety concerns about terrorism and national elections loom over all our activities, such that there is a travel lockdown enacted and school is already canceled during most of election week. On the other hand, we have an idyllic situation. We have friendly neighborhood cookouts; the kids chase each other on the playground and set up secret forts in each others' yards; I know all the kids in my daughter's class personally and chat with their parents on the playground after school.

Between going to the States over Christmas and a recent spate of visitors that included both friends and a visiting prison ministry team, I feel we have done an excess of putting either a rosy blush on things or emphasizing a dour outlook, depending on the situation. I suppose there is no true objective view of one's personal and situational circumstances, and, as I was telling a vendor at the Masai Market last week, the truth is that no matter where you are there is good and there is bad. Being in the foreign service, the question you always come back to is, "Is this a better life for our family than we could provide if we had stayed in America?" That is the true rubbing point.

In deference to my dear friend who recently told me, "I just don't want to mess up my kids!" I have been thinking about the "Kenya impact" on our daughter, who has now officially lived longer in our government housing in Nairobi than in any other location in her life.

• In the US, I would have walked her to the bus stop or driven her to the neighborhood school. Here, I walk her to school. Our school district in Virginia was a good one, but by its very nature and size would not have been as nurturing, individually-oriented, or parent-involved as our nearby Christian school here.

• In the US, Andrew's commute would have meant that our daughter almost didn't see him during the week, and here he is usually home at least 2 hours before her bedtime.

• In the US, having guards and soldiers would not be so commonplace that my daughter would express uncertainty if there wasn't one around.

• In the US, we would not have to rearrange our route home from lunch because students were protesting and burning tires in the middle of the main road, nor explain away why we are showing obvious concern at the number of people on foot rushing toward that site while we are trying to rush away in a locked car.

• In the US, our daughter would not have developed an ingrained sense of the need to visit and help orphans.

School  near Rift Valley / Western province borders so
rural the kids hadn't seen white people before.

• In the US, our daughter would not realize that the vast majority of people in rural areas of Kenya live in mud and dung huts, where they grow their food, herd cows and goats for a living, and collect water from puddles or muddy streams in jerry cans.  

• In the US, I would not feel the wrenching mama-bear need to protect my daughter from viewing the culture and non-urban attitude against women and girls that I have seen here with my own eyes and mourned in my own heart.

• In the US, I would not have looked into the faces of desperation, defeat, and hope which I have seen far more of in prisons here than I ever intended, and realized but for the grace of God it would be my husband in this place, the father of my child, and realize how much greater is the faith of others who can survive the intermittently applied justice in this country.

Prisoners in Migori, near Tanzanian border, enjoying our
ministry (and enjoying being photographed).

Honestly? If I'm really, truly honest: I'm tired of it. I'm tired of seeing how much need there is. In a country with bountiful natural resources, a thriving tourist trade, a huge port, and a populace that possesses ingenuity and understands hard work, why isn't it better here? (Reasons too numerous to count, we know). How are concerned Westerners supposed to deal with this? More specifically, how is our family supposed to deal with it? To our daughter, we are very matter-of-fact: it's just the way it is. Even for a 6-year-old, it's not a satisfactory explanation. On the one hand is my kid strapped into her safety seat in the diplomatic-plated vehicle with her coloring book in hand, and on the other is the dirty, barefoot kid on the side of the road carrying water on her head and her baby sister on her back. The difference between them comes down to which continent their DNA happened to be formed on. I am a woman of faith, and at some point I can hear my God saying to me, it's just the way it is.

I appreciate what we have been able to experience and learn in beautiful Kenya, but I think we'll be ready for a change of scenery.

And the winner is.....!

Ah, December. I love this time of year. It's not the roasted er, eh, goat?, or the spindly pine-like tree delivered by bicycle, or even the shockingly out of place "Feliz Navidad" at the local shopping center. It's the time of year when we finally have an answer to the oft-asked and casually tossed-out question, "So where are you going next?"

How well do you
know your flags?

How is it that every other agency seems to know ages ahead of us? No matter. By this point in our move-everywhere life, it doesn't bother us to say that we don't know. Except, now we DO know. "The List" came out two days early (and in the middle of the night for us). Andrew is sitting in an office with a different email account at the moment and didn't see the announcement. He was surprised when he walked the halls of work Wednesday morning and people started congratulating him.

We had a little fun with it, a wee contest among Facebook friends.

So, 2nd runner-up goes to PK's vote of Philippines and Juli/Mom's Malaysia, on account of the fact that their guesses took the first forays out of the African continent.

1st runner-up goes to AmyJo, who guessed India.

And the winner is...Laura who landed on Nepal!

We are excited!