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.

The joys of the season

What a lovely escapade we had traveling to the US for Christmas. Aside from the 30 to 35 hour gruel of the journey --during which I learned that Kenyans are much kinder to a mother traveling alone with a kid than Europeans or, especially, Americans-- it was fun delving back into the land of smooth, wide roads, shopping galore, and wide blue cloudless New Mexico skies.

Well, yes, the skies are like that in Nairobi too. The difference being: when you are looking at the sky in New Mexico in December you are bundled from nose to toes and still shivering. Or at least you are when you've gotten used to thinking that 60 degrees F is cold.

Highlights of the trip (excluding the food factor, because those are too many to list) include:

• Seeing my mom direct the children's choir at church with my daughter timidly singing in it
• Working at home, and overhearing:
• My daughter: Grandpa, would you like me to do your hair first or buff your nails?
• My father: Let's to my nails first, I haven't had them buffed in much too long.
• Watching my daughter play in the snow with her friends, her dad, and my dad (I enjoyed this much more than when I played in the snow with her myself)
• Having my daughter and her two visiting friends, whom were a highlight all on their own, tromp inside with red noses and bright eyes, gushing about the fort they made out where I used to play 
• Going out to a new movie, at night, with my husband, while grandparents babysat
• Visiting with "my people" - friends whom I have known for way, way longer than 18 months, by this time we have affirmed that we can pick right back up from when we last met
• Visiting with my aunt, whom I haven't seen except on Skype in a few years, and now that she is, ah, up there in age, seeing how much her spirit and manner remind me of my grandmother

Then, there was the coming home to Kenya. What really blew me away was that I really felt I was coming home after a month way. This thought is quickly followed by, "Oh crap! We're moving in 6 months!"

C'est la vive.

Impressions of home

Eight days ago, my daughter and I arrived in the States for an extended Christmas holiday. (Hubby will be following shortly for a less extended vacation.) Immediately we notice a few sublime differences, unabashedly pointed out by my 6 year old in that way that kids have.


1. Thee road is so smooth! There are no potholes, no speed bumps.

2. It's COLD! (Followed quickly by, "SNOW!" and much running around inside and out)

3. You can drink water from the tap??

4. While watching the Grinch on TV, with real actual commercial breaks..."Why do they keep saying, 'buy this' and 'you need that' all the time?"

5. At the store: Can we get cherries? (yes.) Can we get strawberries? (yes.) Can we get toaster waffles? (yes.) Can we get fruit bars? (yes.)..... et cetera.

6. (2 hours after sundown in a parking lot) It is not dark out here! It can't be night time!

I for one, am enjoying the sedate style of driving and am getting over my shock at being able to safely and easily go out at night to run errands and do Christmas shopping.

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!

My, what a nice generator you have

Outages are a fact of life in most of the developing world; power outages, in particular.

Imagine this scene: sitting in a friend's living room with after dinner coffee or standing around with a beer at someone's house party, chat chat chat. A sudden and complete blackness descends as the power is knocked off up and down the street, but conversation doesn't even hitch. Sometimes someone will give a complimentary comment on the speed at which the generator kicks in, as the lights flicker back to life (a clear bonus of being a well-heeled expat).

Streets go dark in a power outage.
Wait, we don't really have these
things anyway...

A more frustrating outage is the internet. Despite the company's bogus claims that it operates at a speed of 5 Mbps (when in reality it struggles to reach 1.2), it's really quite annoying when it is not there at all. I mean, my GOODNESS will we ever survive if we miss an email, fail to catch someone on Skype, or don't have the opportunity to post a timely comment on someone's Facebook post? OK, the Skype thing may be true for us, but the rest we don't get too antsy on. However, it is amazing how cut-off from "the world" we feel when we don't have internet. No news (our limited viewing TV channels usually go out when the Internet does), no researching activities to do, no daydreaming via websurfing about the next place in the world we might end up. The worst outage was 4 days. Which has happened a couple times. I have finally succumbed to buying a USB modem as a backup.

The third outage is water. This happened last weekend, when our water main broke and we were advised to conserve water. There is a tank in the attic which holds an indeterminate number of liters, but the chances of the fix being quick were low, since it ironically kept pouring rain so that no one could get into the ground to fix the pipe.

Upon considering our options, we decided that if we were given a choice for a 24-hour outage, we'd rather have internet than water.

How a Housekeeper Helps a Marriage

Everyone knows it takes work to have a good marriage, although it isn't always enough. If you want to put your marriage through a potentially life-long series of high pressure life changing situations with no end in sight and see how it comes out, the foreign service is a good option. There's nothing that says "uh, do I love you?" like dragging a spouse plus or minus kids (aka EFMs, eligible family members) off to a foreign developing country where there isn't even the retail therapy afforded by Target or Williams Sonoma, and leaving him/her to figure out what to do with themselves while the person who counts (the Direct Hire) gets on with their career. I actually have started another post on the brutally honest aspects of this, but I'm going to leave it... it's a soft underbelly that all of us out here have but - at least us USG types - don't really talk about.

Let me instead expand upon one of the clear marriage advantages of settling into a developing country. And that is, The Housekeeper.

Working moms the world over have the same problem. Feminism be d----ed, you know that when it gets down to it, even when your man is useful in the kitchen or occasionally helpful with other things, he never does enough. I will not go into detail, as my dear hubby is one of my few faithful readers and I would hate to run him off, but working wife/mother people out there can probably hear what I'm saying from my soapbox without me having to put it in black and white.

BUT, friends, with the miracle Housekeeper installed, like magic, all you have to work out between you is dinner and kids (and you don't have to do those, either, if you get a cook and a nanny, it's a personal preference thing though, we like cooking and we often like our kid). Suddenly, your lot in domestic life might seem like a fair trade off for his normal level of effort.

Not only this, but your sense of unity increases. Now, in the same tradition used by great military leaders over the centuries, you have a common enemy. When items in your sparkling clean kitchen are put away in the wrong place, or you can't find your shoes, or the light is left on in the hallway... It is always the Housekeeper's fault! You mutter to each other and address issues with her to no avail, but at least you are not turning your pet-peeve venom on your spouse.

This, dear USAID and missionary types, is the distinct advantage we have over those swanky, dry-martini-drinking, coat-and-tie-wearing, "our next post is Rome"-spewing  State Department rats colleagues.

Have fun with your fine local wine, high quality cheese and delightfully edible meat. But when you are done eating, you guys have to bicker over who is doing the dishes.

Home is where the stuff doesn't matter

So, my daughter being an only child and a sweet but rather indulged one, is really into this phrase that - upon turning 6 - seemed to go from the occasional thing tossed out there to one of the most frequent phrases that pass her lips. The phrase is, "I know." But not just "I know"... it's "I know" and is usually followed by the enunciation of "Mommy" or "Daddy" with an undertone of sincere and deeply felt irritation.

Most days, I can handle one or two of these, but after that nothing is more guaranteed to turn said Mommy into a fire-breathing monster with fangs and smoke coming out her ears.

The other day, however, it actually made me smile.

We were doing the kiddo's hair before school, and the key element of the ritual on that particular day was using the new sparkly pony tail keeper that she picked out of the classroom treasure box as a reward a couple days before. She was sitting, holding the pony tail keeper, while I wrestled with getting the hairbrush through her hair, and the conversation went like this:

Her: You know, sometimes, when there is something you really want, once you get it, it's not such a big deal any more.

Me: Like things from the treasure box?

Her: Yeah, like I really wanted this hair band, and now that I have it I'm like, eh, it's OK, but it's not such a big deal.

Me (practically jumping up and down to have such a teachable moment presenting itself): Well, we all like to get "stuff", but having things is not what makes us happy--

Her (interrupting): I know, Mommy.

Me (not deterred): Sometimes we feel like if we could just have this, or have what someone else has, we would be happy, but it's not about the THINGS we have--

 Her: I know, Mommy.

 Me: --it's about being content with what God has given us, because we know He loves us--

 Her: I know, I know, I know, Mommy!!

Me: OK.