Love Wins.

http://charterforcompassion.org/

something i stumbled upon when i finally visited Speaking of Faith’s website today, after too long away.

let me be clear: though i’ve only barely scratched the surface of this project and need to read more about the Fetzer Institute, i deeply appreciate movements like this one.  however, i find the fact that we need a Charter to educate about and advocate for Compassion strange and puzzling and, honestly, somewhat sad.  so much of what they lay out in this Charter reads like common sense to me.  it is threaded throughout my upbringing, my home life, my church background and personal spiritual development.  it is a cultural basic, in my experience.

to me, “always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves” makes perfect sense.

now.

as i write this, i realize that it didn’t make perfect sense when i was a little kid, and i took what i wanted when i wanted it.  and i wanted it most particularly when someone else had it.  it didn’t make sense when i was an angry pre-adolescent, when i punched my big sister in the stomach–one time only because the beating i received from her when she launched herself back up the stairs was, well…– in retaliation for some real or imagined wound inflicted.  it has never made sense when i’ve seen close friends, male and female, stooped under the weight of physical and emotional manipulation and abuse from those they trusted.

i dare say Compassion–”putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other,” as Karen Armstrong describes it–might never make sense to me if, for example,  i lived under the heel of an occupying foreign presence positioning itself as an authority; nor might i find Compassion fathomable, in a divided country, for the men and women standing in the way, as i see it, of freedom.  Compassion would not make sense to me if my family members had been murdered in the name of a religion or a God or an ethic or a vision of government unfamiliar or outright unintelligible to me. maybe Compassion would seem unrealistic, even outlandish, if i’d been born, raised, and–by chance, systems, or personal choices–kept within the confines of poverty; then asked to forgive, understand, and have patience with the insufficient money-power or people-power of those who want to “help” me.

so, when i say that Compassion seems like less of a high-falutin’ ideal and more like common sense to me (now), it is, in part, because nowhere in my past or present have i experienced any frustration, betrayal, injustice of this magnitude; really, i’ve had scarce personal experience with the immense human capacity for evil.

and i’ve never been asked to transcend those experiences or that evil.

when i pushed the “new post” button earlier this evening, my intent was simply to slap that link on this sight as something of interest.  but as usually happens when i write, i end up writing my way INTO a concept and finding out that for me it remains just that, for now–a concept, not a reality, not a necessity.  that i know so little, in fact.  that have so much more thinking to do before i speak about something that seems “simple” to me.

at the most basic level, though, let me say that Compassion makes perfect sense to me now, if for no other reason than that its alternatives, like willful ignorance or hatred or violence, do not.
Compassion requires stubborn  insistence on the human capacity for good–despite ourselves.   and, at the end of the day, it is first an effort of the heart and the head and the imagination.

Little Bird

this weekend, i jumped around central Indiana, snagging brief visits with friends i haven’t seen since i up and married and moved and left the country.  and oh, my:  it was refreshing.  necessary.  not only for reconnecting with dear friends (and meeting a 3-weeks-new soul, Grace!), for the miles-deep conversations and the shared meals, but also for the familiar, comforting act of getting in my car and driving for hours by myself, with people as my destination.

i used to do this kind of thing all the time–throwing a bag in the back of Lolita, my Buick, and taking off for a few days for a visiting spree.  quite frankly, i enjoy being on the move, and for the past several years of my life, my ability (and my desire) to pick up and take off at a moment’s notice has come in handy, to say the least.  i was the family member, the friend, who could almost always be anywhere i was needed in a few hours precisely because i was the one without obligations to a particular place or person that would keep me from doing so.

when my Grandpa Marty got sick for the last time, for example, for the better part of one year, i was in Ohio every other weekend or two, showing up to help clean out their old house, sort and pack, or just be present–a hand to hold at the right moment, maybe.  i remember when, not long after he died (after the week my family spent gathered by his bed, patting his papery hand and blotting out, if we could, that awful rattling breathing, sleeping at my grandparents’ apartment–empty of Grandpa– and on the hospital floor, greeting visitors, shedding tears, going on), my father and i were sitting together in a his car at Baskin Robbins in Muncie.  i don’t remember everything we talked about, or exactly what he said, but i do remember that i was surprised when he pointed out my privilege and my lack, to me:
that in all of this, i was the one most available because i was the most transient, and i was also without what they all had.  at the end of the day, he and my mother could go home together, back to the grinding, welcome distraction of work and church, he pointed out, and Jen and Jeff had Charli and each other, and my family members all had some comforting presence or some place for the strange energy of grief to go, some relief in obligation, oddly.

“I didn’t think,” he’d said, “how difficult all of this would be for you in your particular situation.”

well.  neither had i.

when Grandpa died, i was at the end of my college career, exhausted, stretched tight and very thin–my jeans have never sagged so much–and i was essentially single, although at that time, i was cautiously seeing Ben.  i was finishing up a major, English Literature, in which i spent an enormous amount of my time inside my own head.  i slept very little, and i rested, as strange as it sounds, by running, pounding any grief into the pavement.
if in the past several years, i’d grown increasingly more transient, it was without regret.  though i dated–if i can actually call it that–on and off in college, i sidestepped real romantic commitment after a freshman year of hard, ugly lessons.  there’s no way i would have traded my perceived freedom for the security that i saw in some of my friends’ relationships.  (i admit, though, to envying them.  only every once in awhile).  i was comfortable without a place i could uniquely call home.  i had, and still have, homes tucked away with family and dear friends who are scattered all over the world.

there in the car, without meaning to, my father dug up a fresh sadness:  a moment’s pause in the middle of mourning my grandfather to feel sorry for myself.  not pathetic–not that kind of self-pity.  just achingly lonely, and very young.

not long before he died, i’d asked Grandpa if i could come with a borrowed DAT recorder and sit and talk to him for awhile.  he said yes, of course, but by the time i finally spent one of those traveling weekends on this, finally got around to sitting down with him, he was small in his canary yellow bathroom, and he had far less breath and energy to give me.  still, we sat for precious hours together while he combed over memories, some of which even my Dad had never heard.  i’ve taken out those cds so many times since then, and i always grin when i come to the end of them, and he’s telling me how thankful he’s been for Gramma Marty, how good she was with the kids, “and we keep wondering,” he says, “when you’re going to fall into that trap!” and he chuckles lightly.  i can practically hear myself blushing, laughing, “i don’t think that’ll be anytime soon, Grandpa…”

Ben and Grandpa never met.  Even after driving Grandpa’s Ford station wagon out to Washington with me, Ben only had one foot in my family picture by the time Grandpa died, and this is still a source of regret, for me.  it’s not difficult to picture them, two engineers, laughing at the dinner table, Grandpa mercilessly whipping Ben at Scrabble.  they’d have loved each other.

never to be disrespectful to Grandpa, or to any other happy couples, but if you’d told me two years ago that today i’d be checking my schedule against someone else’s–heck, that i’d be consistently organizing the details of my daily life, in fact, around the existence of another person–i’d have laughed outright.  i’d have found the idea unlikely, inconvenient, even annoying, maybe.

when i left Ben for Indiana this past Friday, it was the first time i’d traveled without him since August, and that night at Claire’s was the first bed i’d crawled into without him, too.  he’s my companion, in every way–my best friend, really–so it was strange to be on my own again for a few days.  strange, yes, but really nice–like an old friend in and of itself.   i passed a few long, golden days with folks i consider family (including three who were invited to our family-only wedding).
i’ve missed all of this, and i’ll miss it regularly, i’m fully aware, when time and constraint and commitment keep me from doing everything i want to do, on my own time, at a moment’s notice and absolutely my way.

didn’t miss it enough not to speed most of the way back from Muncie to Tremont, Illinois and straight to Precision Planting, where i interrupted my husband’s workday for an enormous hug.  don’t miss it enough to tell Grandpa he didn’t know what he was talking about.  this is, as Andrew Peterson says, “so much better than.”

Photo #8 and…oh, what the hell. not finished yet.

The kids are up and scrambling about the playground, again, when I head out to unlock the building early this morning.  A few of them wave frantically, and I wave back.  Marita runs my way, slowing just before she reaches me, and she takes my hand, swinging my arm back and forth in front of her.  She’s wearing an apple-green tshirt and a long jean skirt.  And no shoes, of course.  We’re both barefoot this morning.  “What are you grinning about?” I ask her, studying her features closely for the first time.  She has enormous, almond-shaped black eyes, set wide apart and gleaming in a small, pudgy face, and her pointed ears seem curiously large, compared to the rest of her.  She smiles with her whole body.  The corners of her mouth, her big ears, plump cheeks, and wide nose, even her shoulders, all seem to lift at once, as though she’s suddenly filled herself up with happiness like helium, and she might just rise right off her toes.  And when she grins, as she’s grinning at me now, she takes me with her.

It’s disarmingly charming.  I put my other hand on her head and dig my fingers into her wiry black hair.  Little tufts of it poke out everywhere, and she shakes her head furiously, laughing and flapping her free hand at me.

She follows me through the back door of the school, still holding on to my fingers.  We turn right, away from the classrooms, and head towards the opposite end of the building, and we pad down a short, dim hallway that empties into a kind of foyer.  It’s a spacious, clean room, and the walls are bare, except the portrait of former president Levy Patrick Mwanawasa, which hangs next to what looks like an old, retired brick fireplace.  Businesses and schools are required to display pictures of current presidents, but Mwanawasa died suddenly last July.  Dru tells me that they haven’t yet been able to buy a photograph of Rupiah Banda, the current leader.  She doesn’t seem too upset about it.  Many folks in Zambia, including my friends, held Mwanawasa in high regard, even loved him.  Particularly, those who were working toward greater peace, prosperity, and wellness in various communities seem to have considered him a friend and partner.  It hasn’t been difficult for me to sense that Banda is simply tolerated, more than anything, even amid the allegations that he rigged the recent elections.  At the very least, he leads under Mwanawasa’s long shadow.

Marita and I turn from the portrait of Mwanawasa toward the front of the foyer, where a large bank of windows floods the room with thin morning light.  To the left of the windows is the door to the sickbay, which Lucy has already unlocked for me, apparently.  From the doorway, I scan the room.  It’s a small, tidy box with white cement walls and tile floors.  Immediately to my right stands a single tall storage closet.  To my left, shoved against the wall, are two twin beds, each one a simple wooden frame with a flowered mattress, bare and covered in plastic.  At the head of each bed is a plain white pillow, and folded at the foot is a heavy woolen blanket, muddy brown.  Marita and I step into the room, and I shrug out of my backpack and perch on the edge of the closest bed.  Marita stands next to me, uncertain, her hand on my knee.  Considering the room, I’m uncertain too.

This room is homely, numbingly bare and white.  But it’s a sickbay, not a classroom.  I remember when I was a sick kid, feverish and miserable, I wanted to bury myself in the soft, blank comfort of a room with curtains drawn, or to curl on the couch in our dim, cool basement, wrapped to my nose in a quilt.  I wanted my mother and my father to slip in and put the dry backs of their hands on my forehead and my cheeks, and they did.  I try, now, to imagine myself small, exhausted, and wracked with malaria.  Here in the sickbay, I can lift my burning face from the pillow and train my eyes on the low set of windows cut into the wall across the room from where I lie.  The windows are covered, partly, by bushes planted along that corner of the building, so the sunshine filters through the green and spills across the pale walls, cooling as it goes.

Far more than a classroom, I realize a sickbay should speak entirely to the needs of the children, and to a very sick child, this room must a kind of haven, soothingly simple and empty. For the first time in my life as an artist, maybe, I can’t meet a need, my own or someone else’s, with color.

I glance at Marita, and in her face, I have my answer.

I bounce off the bed, drop to my knees next to the window, unzip my bag, and begin handing Marita bottles of paint.  She examines each one before gently setting it on the tile, arranging all of the colors against the wall like she’s designing a bed of flowers.  When she’s done, I hug her and exclaim my thanks.  She plops on the floor, pleased with herself, and watches me for awhile.  I set aside bronze, gold, and copper, crimson, orange, yellow, and brown.  I’ll need black, white, and purple, barely a bit of each.  I unroll my brush carrier and slip my pencils out of their pocket and stand.  Just barely below my own eye level, I start to sketch, and I spend the whole day, from then, about the business of making kids smile.

 

The giraffe unfolds under my paintbrush as a patchwork quilt of warm colors—mahagony, sunflower yellow, and pumpkin orange, all stitched together down his long, elegant neck and shoulders, which stretch to the floor.  Here and there, he glints with gold, copper, and bronze.

He’s quite magical, really.  Even I’m surprised.  Of course I had a rough idea in mind, as I almost always do.  But truthfully, I generally know very little about the final personality of any subject, as I’m painting it.  When I lay down the first brushstrokes of color, I usually feel the whole thing’s out of my hands, from that moment on—when the work draws its first breath, I suppose.  I’m always pleased when the colors tell me what to do as I go, not the other way around.  Practically speaking, it’s a risky business.  (Acrylics and cement walls, in particular, aren’t forgiving.)  But strangely, in my experience, it’s one of the few processes I can trust implicitly—the coming-to-life of a painting, in pieces.  I’m rarely disappointed, always surprised, and usually deeply satisfied.

I swipe and swab for long hours, barely aware.  I mark time only in the progression of color and trickle of children and staff in and out of the sickbay.  At some point, Marita wanders off, and it’s late morning, I think, when Lucy bustles into the room, then stops abruptly. “Ah!”  Startled out of my stupor, I turn my head at her small, surprised cry.  Her fists are planted on her hips, her eyebrows are raised, and her wide, smiling lips are parted slightly.  “It’s a giraffe!” she exclaims, softly, like someone afraid to wake the baby.  I’m relieved that her face conveys wonder—at least I think it does—instead of the indignation I thought I’d heard in her “ah!”

Slowly, slowly, my eyes focus on her, and I notice a small, dingy swatch of yellow tucked behind Lucy’s legs—a dress.  No, a little girl in a yellow dress.  She’s peering out at me from behind her teacher, her eyes wide, and she says nothing.  Her lips are pursed, and her small fingers clutch at Lucy’s skirt.  I glance up at Lucy for an introduction, but she’s still staring at the giraffe, smiling now (thank God), and nodding.  “Mmm-HMM…”

“Who’s this?” I finally ask, and I smile at the little girl.

“This,” Lucy turns and bends to the girl, sweeping her up and settling her on the nearest bed, “is Mwela.”  I wiggle my paint-smeared fingers at Mwela in greeting, grinning.  The corners of her mouth bend upward just slightly in response, then wilt down again.

She can’t be more than six, I think, but she has bags under her eyes, and she seems droopy—uncertain and exhausted.  Sad all over.  Her dress, a dusky, once-yellow cotton shift covered in tiny pink flowers, hangs off her left shoulder, exposing her jutting collarbone and soft, fragile neck.  She’s lightly built, small-boned and angular, except for the smooth, elegant roundness of her skull under a thin carpet of closely cropped hair. Her slim legs dangle off the bed, and her small, fine feet are a long way from the floor.  They’re bare, of course, and dusty.  The tip of her big toe on her left foot is shredded, exposing a pink, tender layer of flesh, and seeping blood.

She reminds me of a whipped puppy, I think, and I groan silently at my own crude comparison.

“She stubbed her toe,” Lucy says matter-of-factly.  She clucks her tongue sympathetically and bustles to the supply cabinet, unlocking doors and searching inside.  She produces a bottle of antiseptic liquid and cotton balls, a wad of gauze and some tape.

Mwela winces in anticipation, and staring at her, I see myself, blonde and pigtailed, all scraped knees and bare feet, howling in the next bed… That was the time I was racing into Wawasee Middle School—it must have been for swim practice, or maybe one of my sister’s competitions? Anyway, I couldn’t have been more than seven.  And somehow, in my hurry, I pulled one of the heavy, metal front doors onto my bare big toe.  I stood there and screamed as a group of swimming dads tried to pry my toe from where it was wedged between the cement floor and the base of the door.  When it was all said and done, and they finally pulled me out, they said they could see the white bone of the knuckle in my bloody, gashed toe.  (I didn’t want to know that.)  I just sat on the cement floor with my back against a bank of lockers, shivering and wailing, as they bandaged me up.  I still have the scar, a tender, pale swipe of puckered skin on the knuckle of my right big toe…

Inside, I’m wincing for both little girls.

Mwela looks stricken, her eyes shining with pain, but she doesn’t move or make a sound. Lucy finishes packaging the child’s toe and steps back to survey her work.  The gauze and the tape are a harsh, antiseptic white against the dusky, deep brown of Mwela’s skin.  The bold contrast catches me by surprise.  It won’t take more than five minutes of walking barefoot on Lifesong’s playground or traipsing home on the red dirt roads of Kitwe for Mwela’s bandages to turn a dingy, rusty brown, too.  Suddenly, I have an overwhelming urge to reach into my wide-mouthed backpack and produce a pair of shoes—like Mary Poppins drawing necessities and frivolities out of her bottomless carpet bag, meeting the needs of any given moment.  Sometimes, when I unzip my backpack here under curious, excited, watching eyes, I feel like the nanny. There’s a touch of magic in my fingertips as I pull out bottle after bottle of jewel-toned paints.  But no shoes.

(It’s entirely possible for me to provide shoes for this one barefoot child, obviously.  It would take a single trip into town.  But because it’s impossible to shoe every barefoot child I come across, I admit that I don’t buy shoes for any of them.  Not one.)

Lucy leaves the room without explanation, leaving Mwela and I to consider each other silently.  She looks down at her new toe, miserably.

“Mwela.”  She lifts her eyes, slightly, and gazes at me without speaking.

“What do you think?”  I nod my head at the giraffe next to me.  “Do you like him?”

She stares, lips slightly parted, and nods.  “He’s good?” I ask with a grin, knowing she probably speaks little, if any English, like most of the youngest kids here.  “Good so far, at least?”

Slowly, so slowly, a smile spreads across face.  She puts her hands in her lap, tilts her head, and nods again, and my heart leaps into my throat.  What a smile.  She’s beautiful.  I reach down into my bag and grope for my camera.  “Mwela, can I take a picture of your pretty face?” I coax her as I stand, and I hold up the camera so she can see.  She nods again, slowly, still smiling.  I uncap the lens, step closer, and focus on her.  “Okay, say cheese!”  She tips her head to the side and presses her shoulder into her cheek, peering demurely from under her eyelashes.  I press and hold the button, and the camera beeps, clicks, and snaps.  Her image flashes onto the screen, and I stoop and show her.

“It’s you, see?”  Her eyes are twinkling, even dimly, so I egg her on. “Another?”  I hold up one finger, and she nods, so I step back and focus in again.  “Smile!”  In a moment, her whole face breaks wide open with an enormous grin—pink gums and yellowing teeth bared, eyes crinkling, cheeks dimpled, face upturned and filling my lens.  It’s all I can do to contain my laughter while I snap the picture.  I didn’t expect that.  Still giggling, I sit next to her and thread the camera strap around her neck and situate the camera in her small hands.  It looks like an anchor tied to her fragile neck, but she’s clutching the camera like it’s a brick of gold.  I show her how to push the buttons to switch back and forth between the two pictures.  Her eyes are wide, fixed on her own face on the screen in front of her.

“Mwela.”  She looks at me, and I point at her bandaged foot.  “Can I see your toes?”  She lifts her leg straight out in front of us and frowns at it, like it’s a problem she’s working out in her head.  I press a kiss to my fingertips, reach out, and touch them to her big toe—once, twice, three times.  I’m close to tears, and I have no idea why.  Still, she doesn’t say a word to me, but she’s smiling shyly again, and that’s enough for me right now, I think.

“I’m going to keep painting,” I say, and I point at the giraffe and stand.  I kneel and pick up my brushes and turn my attention back to my work, or try to, with Mwela watching me from the bed.

a bit of an update, for those friends who read this:

y’all:

for those of you who’ve communicated with me within the last year, you know that life has, to say the least, been one giant stew of happenings, including but not limited to:

living in Zambia for three months,
being hospitalized for a still-unsorted fluey-whatnot,
interviewing (and blowing it) for a fellowship with NPR,
deciding on and applying to MFA (creative nonfiction) programs,
becoming engaged and (two months later) marrying my best friend Ben,
moving to Illinois,
getting accepted to Antioch University Los Angeles’ low-residency MFA program,
living in New Zealand for a month and a half,
moving back to Illinois,
prepping (re: writing and reading my face off, figuring out how the hell to pay for grad school) for my first residency in LA this December…

which brings us to November 5th, today.

i am tired and only very slowly absorbing and adjusting to all of this happy chaos.

but now you know why!

i’m keeping this blog basically to post new writing and occasionally to post updates like this for my friends.  comments and critiques are always welcome, of course.
mostly, it’s just nice to stay in touch with a small but hardy community of folks who share our writing and our lives, even from a distance.
that’s irreplaceable.

that said, folks who know who they are and ought to know they are irreplaceable:  i miss y’all today.  every one of you.

Photo #8 and…5/8ths?

Back in January, I listened to an interview with a young Kenyan intellectual, Binyavanga Wainaina, speaking with Krista Tippett about the ethics and efficacy of global aid and development work, particularly in Africa.  (Maybe the wrong interview before coming to Zambia to work and learn for three months.  Maybe the right one.  I don’t know yet.)  Wainaina says that people tend to treat the continent of Africa as a kind of vast, blank, empty space on which each of us can inscribe and live out our wishes and fears and needs and fantasies.  He argues that so many development projects are irrelevant, vaguely-informed, or half-assed efforts, often unaccountable to the communities they intend to help—in short, misguided desires to satisfy goodwill and guilt.  “Here, I will solve it for you,” he mimics.  “I will fix it for you.”  To Wainaina, those heroics and the prevailing attitudes are hardly different from those of the first colonial enterprises in Africa.  The morality and means are just as questionable because aid work is often justified and funded by engaging the public appetite for the horrible and outrageous, using media images that represent Africans, at their very best, as backward and inept or without dignity, and the continent, at its worst, as heaving with violence, disease, and corruption.

Wainaina is not gentle when he scolds.  Africa has never been a monolithic story of poverty and despair.  His words are a sharp slap on the cheek, a raised voice, how dare… I can hear him again, barely containing himself, “This should not be a way human beings deal with each other!”

I was nodding off at the table, listening to Tammilyn and Dru talk.  Now, curled on my bunk, my mosquito net drawn around me, I am stretched out quiet and listening to the night sounds and I can’t sleep for all the noise.  There’s Wainaina, scolding.  There’s John Mumba, booming.  “So!”  Flashing a mouthful of white teeth at me.  “What is your vision for our school?”  I’m unsettled, again, by the premise of his choice of words.  If I had a vision for the school, and I don’t, how could it possibly be more important than his vision, the teachers’ vision, and the children’s vision for their school?  John, Lucy, Albertina, and the others are intimately acquainted with what they and the students need on a daily basis.  I’ve already seen them in the sick bay, applying bandages and spooning cough syrup and pressing hot foreheads.  I’ve seen the careful arrangement of their classrooms, the effort to use small spaces efficiently, and I’ve been in their locked cupboards, which guard meager supplies of crayons, books, and pencils.  And I’ve scurried around Kitwe on shopping trips with Dru, where she does magic tricks with the school’s money, stretching kwatcha thin across each month.

Of course he wasn’t asking me about the school.  Just pictures on the walls, but even that, I think—those aren’t my walls, John.

I roll onto my stomach and rest my head on my crossed arms.  I stare at my books on the floor and at my journal, all my scribbled notes.  I wonder how it must be for someone like John—a brilliant man, highly learned and with many years of educational administration behind him—to have people always traipsing in and out of his life, a few weeks at a time.  In and out of his business, giving their opinions, dispersing what they think is needed.  What must it feel like to be beholden all the time?  In exchange for the goodwill and help and the cash flow of others, to always accept their visions or decisions?

I wonder what becomes of orphaned and vulnerable children.  Always taking what they’re given, for better or for worse…

Dru has already explained the ultimate goal to me: the school will eventually sustain itself—no longer funded by a nonprofit an ocean away, and locally run, completely in the hands of capable, equipped Zambians like John Mumba.  I think that sounds like the ideal of any honest development work, actually, but I’ve paid enough attention to enough to know that it’s a painfully, tediously slow process of trial and error.  I know it frustrates Dru that she is still so needed.  She spends most of her time running around for Lifesong because she has the only car available to the organization.  She and I made the whole circuit on our way over to Kitwe this week: went to the bank, bought the school’s groceries, paid the school’s bills, dropped off Lifesong’s weekly share of bananas that the corner grocery store sells for a profit… She takes all sick children to the clinic, handles the accounting, pays the small staff, and still makes many of the administrative decisions in conjunction with John.  She’s the only liaison between the school itself and Lifesong headquarters in Gridley, Illinois.

For Dru, it’s all a someday and a sigh.  I know that she and most of my friends here and abroad live for the small triumphs that are the daily bread of anyone involved in this kind of work.  A child manages to kick a cold.  Someone’s guardian finds a job.  The fruit trees on the school grounds are heavy with guavas.  Earlier this week, Dru and I watched Marita, Precious, and Blessing scramble through the limbs, barefooted, to pick guavas and toss them at me.  We walked through a corner of the field of maize that the students planted months ago.  It’s growing so beautifully, robust and hopeful.  Dru’s researched a particular tree, a sustainable source of food, medicine, and fuel, and she intends to plant some near the guesthouse. And Lifesong is partnering with Kafakumba now, trying to raise and sell fish to generate an income for the school and for the children’s guardians.  If Lifesong can afford drinking aloe for some of the aunties and uncles and grandparents, and they can live even five years longer under its influence, the students will have a better shot at finishing their studies, better chances all around…

But for Dru, the ultimate goal is to spend more of her time with the children.  They are her bread and butter.  I’ve watched her perk up under their influence this week, like a drooping plant under water.  Craving, like me, their uninhibited love and affection—“vulnerable” children, little people whose trust has been abused so many times that they ought to know better than to remain vulnerable, but they refuse.  Their hurt little bodies are bursting at the seams with love, trembling with need for the same…

…and I’m wilting, finally sleepy…

“Go on,” I hear John Enright say to me, again, on one of my first days of painting at Kafakumba.

I bury my face in the crook of my left arm and cover my head with my right.  I’m not a visionary, I think, drifting.

“Go on and paint the wall and busy yourself and pretend you’re doing something useful, and while you’re keeping busy, keep your eyes and your ears open.  Have conversations because you and I both know you’re here to learn what it takes to do something like this.”  He had made a wide gesture with his arm, indicating the grounds of the training centre.

I’m glad I’m not a visionary.

A month later, John saw the mural, and for once, he was quiet—pleased, I could tell, and surprised.  “One of these days,” he said to me later, “you’ll start to understand that what you did was, in fact, incredibly important and valuable.”

I’m only a friend, acquainted with color and shape and line…

(…and it’s good to share our secrets…that we desperately need to be needed, that maybe we, like so many others, use the poor to satisfy our own gaping, greedy, needy consciences…)

Photo # 8 and one-half…

At the guesthouse door, I swat the kids back to the playground—“LUNCH!” I holler—and head inside to make my own.  I watch out the kitchen window as teachers and kitchen staff pass out plates of nshima, vegetables, and kapenta.  Kapenta are dried fish, each one about the size of my pinky finger.  Dru buys them in big bags, packed tightly, one on the other.  Their glassy, dead eyes stare at me in Shoprite, and I can always smell them from the end of the aisle.  Nshima, or mealy-meal, is the staple food here.  It’s a blend of cornmeal and sometimes ground cassava, and it cooks up like rice, only thicker.  The staff heap large, solid lumps of it on each child’s plate and spoon vegetables and kapenta beside.

The kitchen employees are all women.  I think the youngest is my age, early twenties, and the oldest might be in her fifties.  They’ll spend Women’s Day this year cooking huge, bubbling vats of mealy meal, cleaning and chopping vegetables, and scrubbing just over one hundred plates and cups.  When they’ve served the kids and teachers, they’ll eat.  They’re paid to work at the school during the holidays because the kids come to the school during the holidays.

Nothing in my own experience ever led me to believe that school, on holiday, becomes a magical place of wild playtime and gourmet dining, but Lifesong is the place to be on break.  It’s where the children have fun and where they are fed.  To stay at home might mean hours of work.  Maybe on the family farm, if they have one, and more than likely, on an empty stomach.

Lifesong’s students are all orphaned or “vulnerable” or both, which means they usually live with a guardian, often in extreme poverty.  There are about 175 students, total.  More than one hundred are having their holiday here at the school.  Nshima and jelly and biscuits aside, I realize the kids have come simply because they love being here.

And, I’ve noticed, they are loved here.

The children sit on the ground and eat with their hands.  They roll balls of nshima in their little palms and scoop up the relish—anything eaten with nshima—with their fingers and pop the whole mess into their mouths.

Nshima is incredibly filling, at least for a few hours, but it’s a mess of empty calories.  Still, it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner here.  I’ve asked my Zambian friends, and every single one has told me that no matter how big a meal they consume, they don’t feel full if they haven’t eaten nshima.

My American friends don’t prepare it because, according to Nathan, “it tastes like cardboard.”  I actually like the stuff.  Well, I like it with relish, that is.  And Nathan would live on McDonald’s hamburgers every day if he could, anyway, so his opinion isn’t worth too much to me.

I spread a bit of peanut butter over a piece of bread.  I slice a banana, arrange the coins on the peanut butter, and remember elementary school in North Webster, Indiana.  Each morning, before I caught the bus or rode with my parents, I ate bowls of cereal and milk.  Maybe we made oatmeal covered in brown sugar…

I watch the students fill their tiny bodies with food.  Every day, Dru tells me, lunch is vegetables and beans, maybe kapenta, and mealy-meal.  It’s a feast five days of the week for kids who may go whole weekends with very little nutrition, or none at all.  “We have,” Dru jokes, “a Monday morning epidemic at this school.”  A sickbay full of patients complaining of headaches and stomachaches.  They heal quite miraculously, I’ve heard, after a bit of banana, bread, and milk.

At lunchtime, my classmates and I were a mass of well-fed white children in an untidy line stretching out the cafeteria doorway.  Each one of us clutched a plastic tray and chose from steaming vats of green beans and tater tots and lasagna, maybe sausage links and French toast sticks and hash browns.  We traded each other for bread and butter and jello or pudding for dessert.  By the time I was in fourth grade, my mother was packing my meals for me, stuffing a small lunchbox full of sandwiches, yogurt, granola bars, and fruit.  I used to beg for deli-sliced turkey at the grocery store, loved it on thick slices of my mother’s homemade white bread spread with mayonnaise and piled with cheese and lettuce.  But I’m a vegetarian these days, and I make my own lunches.  Ever since I lost my taste for all fish, fowl, or beast, I have to scrounge a little more for my protein, too.

Ah, if only I liked meat…

In a few minutes, I’m out on the playground, drawn into a clapping game with Marita and two other girls.  I can do the hands after only one or two tries: right palm facing down, left palm facing up, clap down, clap together, clap right to right and left to left, then second verse same as the first, a little bit faster and a little bit worse…

I give thanks for the uniformity of basic cross-cultural communication—smiling, waving, and the hand-clapping games of small children.  And for a strong, healthy muscle memory nearly two decades dusty.  God, I actually find myself thinking as I slap my large, rosy palms against tiny, cream-colored ones, am I that old yet?

The chanting, I can’t do.  Period.  It’s always been my belief that clapping games are the sophisticated weaponry of little girls worldwide, a vicious gauntlet meant to separate the nimble from the oafish—fingers and tongues.  I’ve never mastered chanting tongue twisters in my native language, let alone nonsense words in a language of which I claim to speak only a select few phrases.  I’m out of my league, and I’m reasonably certain that “Hello!  Good morning!  How are you?  I am fine!” aren’t going to take me there.

They’re calling phrases to each other that sound, to my ears, like DOH!  DOH!  DON’T  kill the dodo! Hack UP my own house key!  Oh, me gra-nola! A Chupa-Chupa!  Oh, my banana…I mutter and stammer and cough until we come to banana, which I shout gleefully.  (It’s the only word I recognize and can clearly articulate.)  Don’t get me wrong—I’m happy to keep making a fool of myself for small children.  But eventually, I make the only smart decision:  I just start humming along, and the girls dissolve in giggles.  I’m forgiven.

After several variations on the same rhythm, same song, I get up to leave.  “I have to keep painting.”  They pout and protest, so I press kisses to little hands and grin.  “You’re breaking my heart!” I say dryly, and gently pull my fingers out of theirs.  Walking back to the classroom, I sheepishly make a mental note to wash my lips and my hands well.  By and large, the fact that so many of these kids’ clothes and skin reek of urine doesn’t change my affection for them.  It just keeps me aware of my own hygiene.

Still, bending over the sink in the bathroom, I glare into the mirror—a bit taller, with a leaner face and the beginnings of crow’s feet.  Six years older than the last time I found myself doing this same damn thing.

Scrubbing away the eager, honest kiss and touch of children.

I remember how Dominique stood at my feet in a room crowded with cribs, gripping a bottle with both tiny hands, wringing the last bit of paint out of it, his whole body quivering with the effort.  Every time, he laughed wildly at that rich, satisfying splurt—the little burst of sound and color.  Together, we squeezed puddles of paint onto my palette.  While I worked, he flipped through my coloring books or picked at my socks.  When I climbed down from my chair and sat, he combed his fingers through my ponytail and took my paint-splattered hands in his. Sometimes we hugged and tickled and wrestled—me, sweaty from the day’s work, him smelling faintly of urine, the same as all the other children at the orphanage.  Neither one of us was cleaner than the other, I suppose, but I always washed my hands several times throughout the morning.  When I was done for the day, I walked back down Kabalenga Avenue to Ken and Deb’s house, where I soaped my dusty feet, my salty face and body, and my hair.

Now, hands and lips clean, I hate myself, as always, a little.

Back in the second baby classroom, I’m making pretty good progress.  I don’t have to be original this time around—Lucy and Albertina want the same numbers, letters, colors, and shapes in their rooms—and I’ve enlisted the help of Tammilyn, Dru’s friend, and Andrew, the school’s art teacher.  They’ll join me this afternoon.  We should have this finished by the end of the day.

I gather my brushes and choose my colors and indulge myself in one if only, but very few people, no matter how goodhearted, will find it in their hearts to take on the challenge of raising a kid with cystic fibrosis.  There were sixteen children living in the Ndola Adoption Agency, all under the age of two except Dominique.  He was six when I said goodbye to him on the front steps of the orphanage—finished with my work, ready to go home.  I have no idea where he’s living now, at twelve.  If he’s dead, no one has informed me.  Much to my own surprise, I don’t take comfort in this not knowing.

I squeeze and mix paints.

Splurt…

the mingling smells of urine and cooking nshima and acrylic…

slick, acrid, soapy lather…

and the laughter of children.

This has always been, I realize, the sensory soundtrack of my life in this particular country.

We’re losing daylight quickly, but the room is nearly complete.  Tammilyn joined me a couple of hours ago, and we’ve chatted almost nonstop as we’ve painted.  It shows.  Standing on the floor, hands on our hips, we survey the work.  Here and there, I see the ragged edges of a few letters.  The star has crooked arms.  That diamond’s a bit suspect, too.  Looks rather like a pear—a smaller top and a fat bottom.  So we love Andrew, with his steady hand and his keen eye for perfection.  He comes along behind us and cleans up our carelessness.  Just now he’s putting the finishing touches on his own artwork, a string of colorful stick children above the doorway.  Dru pokes her head into the room and turns in a slow circle and marvels at our accomplishment.  When Andrew finishes, we all compliment each other, pink with pleasure.  It’s not exactly fine art.  But it’s a bit of color, eh?  Andrew bicycles home, and Tammilyn and I clean up, capping bottles and washing brushes.  We put the classroom, a small space stuffed with low wooden desks and chairs, back into some semblance of order.

Dru and I convince Tammilyn to join us at the guesthouse for dinner, and we make a stew of our leftovers.  We cover the table with fresh bread and avocado, and the rest of the evening is food and conversation.  Mostly, my friends do the talking, and I listen.  Despite what I assume are our theological differences of opinion, and despite the fact that she’s my mother’s age, Tammilyn and I hit it off.  That’s hardly difficult because she’s warmly, winningly Southern—including her slight drawl and enormous smile—kind, and almost excessively bubbly.  She was married once, but it ended.  She has a daughter who’s my age and is, according to Tammilyn, ornery and fearless, her mother’s pride, and a close friend.  She had a blooming career as a pastor in a new and growing community in Georgia.

That was all before she came to Zambia as a missionary.  This is another life.  She’s only staying here for two years—long enough to just begin to live in a place before leaving it again.  (It’s taken Dru nearly a decade to build a life in this country.)  She’s been trying to work here, but for multiple reasons—and multiple people, including two other missionaries—Tammilyn’s been sort of limping along, helping when and where she can with development projects that are already in swing, including at Kafakumba and Lifesong.

I find her fascinating, but I know her too, in a way, instinctively.  I can recognize another bleeding heart do-gooder when I meet one.  I have enough friends, like myself, scattered around the world for study and service—in the Peace Corps, in graduate programs, teaching English—to have become acquainted with the worn-down voice and wary smile of a person who has traveled far from home with a bright belief in changing the world, or “just helping people.”  I’ve been sending letters back and forth with a PCV friend who’s been stationed for just over half a year in Mauritania, and I’m in regular communication with a buddy who’s teaching in South Korea.  Our writing all sounds strikingly similar, some days.  Our experiences are difficult to articulate, always.  We’re wordy people, but we’re always reaching for the right language, and it’s never…enough.  From the verbal clutter, though, I gather that often, they’re each deeply disappointed and frustrated, at their best, and cynical, at their worst.  Clearly (and of course it’s never clear, we’re all thinking, but what language soothes a frustrated heart more than white and black, us and them, free and faulty, and eventually, we’re all thinking, forget it, we’ll just wash our hands of all this…), it’s well nigh impossible for any individual or organization to affect meaningful change in the lives and circumstances of people whose attitudes and worldviews and ways of being in the world seem antithetical to change, dammit!

(And, in all the clutter, it’s good to share our secrets: that we’re very educated but very young, that we desperately need to be needed, that maybe we, like so many others, use the poor to satisfy our own gaping, greedy, needy consciences…)

But Tammilyn, well, “God’s got his hand in all this, I know,” she says, “and I know He brought me here, and this is teaching me patience.”  Honest to God, I think I like her because she’s refreshingly, stubbornly cheerful about the whole mess.  Sprightly, even.  Someone told me that John had said something to Tammilyn, something very John-like, about it being time for her to put on her “big girl panties” and accept the facts of the situation, which are that things are never what they seem in this place.  That assuming the very best about people, even assuming their job titles indicate they’re on your side, doesn’t guarantee anything, so you have to snap out of that, sweetie.  (Oh, John.  John and your clear eyes and no bullshit, but let’s have some mercy, could we?)  Even missionaries have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in the name of Jesus and in guarding their territories for the glory of God.  Who wants to work themselves out of a comfortable job?

In a clear and hopeful moment here at the table, I wish hard for Tammilyn, for a revelation over bread and avocado crumbs: you’re surrounded by people who do.  John and Kendra Enright do.  Ken and Deb Vance do.  Dru—hearty, steady, kind, she’s smiling at our new friend from across the table—Dru does, I know it, I know.

Photo #8, continued

After a couple of hours of painting and listening to chaotic chorus of playing children, I washed my paintbrushes and my hands in the bathroom sink, and I marched outside, straight into a game of soccer.  (Though I use that term loosely—it looked more like a game of hackey-sack, consisting, mostly, of bigger boys tossing the ball back and forth, each showing off his moves.)  I stole the flat ball, and we took the game to a mighty new level: we reached a glorified version of monkey in the middle, broken up by their fits of laughter every time I tangled my toes with the ball with the cement.  Then, a tiny voice, practically a squeak: “Auntie!  Auntie!  Over here!”  The little girl who had tapped on my window earlier was huddled uncertainly with two other girls in a corner of our cement soccer field.  Marita, Precious, and Blessing—I learned their names that night.  Three sisters, daughters of one of the school employees.  I whacked the ball at them, and we all played.  Marita, the smallest, spent a lot of her time bouncing around in the middle of the fuss while the big boys kicked it over her head.  I chased the ball and fumbled it in her direction so she would have a fair go at it.  She picked it up and took off with it.  I ran her down and swept her up, squealing, and kicked the ball back to the others.

The boys eventually wandered home, but the girls live on the school’s property.  They hung around the guesthouse while Dru and I made dinner.  We finally chased off the girls long after dark.  Before we ate, Dru prayed over our food, and among her other honorable mentions, she asked God for my time at the school and with the children to be enlightening.  Uplifting.  “And refreshing,” she finished, after a pause.  I love her quiet confidence, the kind I long for, the confidence prayed out of a loving relationship, not neediness.  She prays like she knows the difference.

It’s about 6:45, nearly light enough to work in the classrooms, now that I’ve already stumbled across the school yard to check my email, and back.  Dru is up and moving.  I yawn, put aside my book, my journal and pen, stand and stretch, and pad to the kitchen to put my teacup on the sink.  “I’m headed out,” I call down the hallway to her.  I hear water trickling in the bathroom sink.

“Be over soon!” she calls back, mouth full of toothpaste.

My backpack of supplies is waiting for me at the front door.  I sling it over my shoulder and step out the door into early morning cool.  And cutting through the quiet, from across the school yard, I hear them.  Scrrreeak, and a metallic shudder.  Scrrreeak.  Metallic shudder.

No way.  I blink and squint.

Two girls, small, dark shapes under a dimly lit sky, are working the swings, heads tilted back, giggling, and each one pumps her skinny legs furiously.  Scrreeak, shudder. A small handful of children are scattered on the playground.  Several of them kick another floppy red soccer ball back and forth, and three girls sit on the edge of a cement slab, bare feet in the scrubby grass, playing hand-clapping games.  Tinny voices chant in a language I can only assume is Bemba.

It’s not even seven yet…These children are warriors, champions of playtime, dedicated to their cause.  Or—

Home is not warm enough, safe and comforting enough, to make them want to stay.  School, apparently, is.

I shake my head, amazed, hike up my backpack, and walk to unlock the building.  I lock it behind me because I don’t know if the children are allowed in, on holidays.  I unpack and pick up where I left off the day before, with yellow letters.  I’m back to teetering on my perch, feeling whole and happy for the first time in weeks, completely immersed in color and shape and clean, bright lines.

By 7:30 or 8, the playground is teeming with, must be—what? One hundred? Maybe more?  Squirming, shrieking, raucous children, and the school staff are setting up shop as though it’s a fairly normal day.  The lunch-smells of cooking nshima and—unfortunately—fishy kapenta waft from the small kitchen through the window of my classroom.  The teachers and kitchen staff have already called the students to the front doorway for bread and jam and small mugs of milk.  I hear the soft clattering of plastic cups against plastic plates.  Out of the corner of my eye, I watch even the youngest kids eat enthusiastically and, if not tidily, then carefully, savoring the meal.  Dishes are discarded.  Play resumes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of Dru in jeans and a blue and pink tshirt, white ponytail swinging, marching across the schoolyard.  With each step she takes, small children latch onto any available part of her body.  If none are available, then they latch onto the child closest to her.  She’s told me that her kids don’t see her as often as she would like or, apparently, as often as they would like, and I grin as she approaches the school, wobbling under all her extra appendages.

She pries her hands and arms from theirs and puts her head inside my classroom to call me outside for singing and prayer time and an introduction.  I stick my paintbrush into my messy ponytail and scrub my hands in the bathroom sink.  I am used to the odd assortment of frayed, patched, dusty clothing that so many Zambian children wear; I’m quite comfortable surrounded by folks in brazenly mismatched outfits—winter sweaters and short, frilly pink skirts, green tshirts and wild orange and blue chitenges.  Still, I’m conscious of the gaping holes in the thighs and knees of my jeans as I walk to front of the school building and stand to the side of the crowd of children.

John Mumba has had them organize themselves in lines in front of the school.  A noble idea, that—like asking one hundred puppies to line up.  I’m surprised to see, for the most part, the kids have obeyed, with only a handful of arms and legs poking out the sides.  By the time I’m outside, they’re singing the last verse of their first song, and their eyes shift to sneak peeks at me.  I clap along awkwardly until Dru, bless her, stands in front of the children with her hands on her hips.  “Which song today?”  An excited murmur ripples the lines of squirming kids.

“Tikki!”  Little pleas burst from a few.

“Tikki?”  Dru raises her eyebrows, mock surprise.  “Ah tikki ta?” she asks, to delighted laughter, as kids poke each other in the sides knowingly.

Dru claps, and the kids follow.  “Ah tikki ta, ah tikki ta, ah tikki tat a TAH,” she calls, once or twice.  Then, “Arms OUT!  Chin UP!”  She sways back and forth as she sings, again, “Ah tikki ta, ah tikki ta, ah tikki tat a TAH!” Dru and her army of children progress through “arms OUT, thumbs UP, shoulders BACK, KNEES in,” each time reverting to ah tikki tah!

By the time we arrive at BUNS OUT!, the children and I are howling with laughter, hardly in tune or in time, hands and feet and butts wagging everywhere, and Dru is swaying and clapping with her thumbs up, arms and legs akimbo, and buns swinging.

It’s a trick to quiet the kids down, after that performance, but John settles them and gestures to me.  All one hundred or so wide eyes turn to me.  “This is Sarah,” John explains, beaming.  I flash a grin and wave quickly.

“And she’s giving us a gift.”  Another ripple of excited whispering, and I see smiles hidden behind hands.  Ah… I glance at him, startled, again, at his choice of words, but I warm to them.  He knows to articulate the situation using words that children will understand.  He explains that for the next couple of days, I’ll be painting in the baby classrooms and the sick bay.  He asks the children please respect my space and be kind to me and would they please welcome me?  They burst into wild applause.  My cheeks are hot, and I grin sheepishly at Dru.  She smiles sympathetically and claps along.  John holds up his hand, and the children bow their heads for prayer.  He prays quietly in Bemba, but his voice carries over our little huddle.  I hear my name and know his prayer is for us, which includes me.

I’ve had my MP3 player tuned to the BBC station out of Kitwe for the last hour.  My internet connection at Ken and Deb’s house is too slow and costly to load NPR or CNN regularly, and I don’t buy the local newspaper.  BBC is better for me, anyway.  Gives me a healthy perspective on world news, one I wouldn’t necessarily find in the States, given that the U.S. is so often making or involving itself in world news.  Besides, I was flying over the Atlantic Ocean while Americans inaugurated President Barack Obama.  I chose to leave my country at the beginning of what looks like a wild four years.  While I’m not hungry for news from home, necessarily, I don’t want to lounge on a little island of ignorance, living here. I suppose it’s ironic that I traded one hotbed of controversy for another.  I’m in the heart of a continent that the media loves.  Africans make such interesting news, eh?  Not Zambians, though.  Even after the recent elections, Zambia’s a pretty calm, stable country—like a leaky faucet, here it’s just the quiet, steady drip-drip of poverty. The search for day labor and minimum pay.  (I am already tired of avoiding accusing eyes and sidestepping outstretched hands.)  Nursing children with malaria, housing children orphaned by AIDS.  (It’s rainy season.  The sick bay at Lifesong already has patients.  Most days, it’s full.)  No fuss, nothing big or flashy.

Apart from rugby scores, the BBC doesn’t deliver sunshine and sprinkles, and I want to believe in something good today.

I turn off my headphones and, from my desk, toss my MP3 player into my backpack, mildly pleased that I sank the shot.  I raise my brush again and pause.  Tuning in: the steady drone of clapping and chanting, punctuated by happy shouts and indignant howls, the soft thwap of a soccer ball on concrete, and the screeak and shudder of swings.  I soak in the happy babble of playing children.

I’m no longer startled when I catch sight of tiny brown faces and wide, dark eyes peeking in the windows of the classroom.  Every time I turn around, it seems, they’re grinning (tiptoes on the desk!) or gasping (breaking the rules!), all watching me intently.  They scan the walls: letter A through letter Z, nine different shapes in nine brilliant colors.  The bravest kids point and shout the names they know.

“Cuh-lah red!”

“Cuh-lah blue!”

“HEART!

…AH ha ha HA!”

I’m working my way through the numbers, one to ten, when Lucy shoos the swarm of kids away from the windows.

By the time lunch hour rolls around, my hands are covered in paint and my clothes smell of nshima and kapenta.  I’ve finished one baby classroom and started in the other.  I’m ready to eat and after, I’ll be ready to play for awhile.  I put away my materials and close the classroom door, and as I walk barefoot across the schoolyard towards the guesthouse, kids race to my side.  Marita is at the head of the pack.  “Auntie!  Auntie!” she calls, and I hold out my hand for her.  This is, of course, an invitation for every other child to take my hand, too, or my arm, my pocket, my thigh.  It’s awkward as hell to waddle across the grass covered in children, but I’m content to try.

beginning of Photo #8, or Lifesong (the bit about being a cranky bugger)

In northern Zambia, birds begin clearing their throats at about 4:45 every morning.  By about five o’clock, the choir is fully assembled and warbling in harmony.  Most mornings, I wake with the birds, before the sun.  This morning, I wake the birds—eyes wide open at 4:30, mosquito net gathered and tucked above my bunk by 4:45.  I collect my clothing, pull on my wrinkled tank top and ripped, paint-smeared jeans.  Gingerly tiptoe to the kitchen so my footsteps won’t wake Dru.  I know she prefers to be up early.  Dru’s an American woman, like me, but if she hadn’t told me, I’d never know that she’s just a smudge younger than my own grandmother.  For nearly a decade, she’s lived and worked with street kids here in Kitwe, Zambia.  For the past few years, she’s been practically running the Lifesong School for orphaned and vulnerable children.  She exhausts me—the stamina she requires to meet the needs of each day.  Her own exhaustion breaks my heart.

I plug in the electric kettle, and when it begins to boil, I put one finger over my lips and shhh.  Ridiculous, that.  Scolding a kitchen utensil.  But I want Dru to keep sleeping.  My tea steeps.  I spoon in sugar and a splash of milk and settle on the couch in the living room.  March has been a soggy end to the rainy season.  No rain drumming on my windows this morning, though.  Clearest, coolest dawn.  Apart from the tuneful racket of the birds, quiet blankets the Lifesong School complex and the little guesthouse where Dru and I are staying.

Monday the ninth and Thursday the twelfth are national holidays—Youth Day and Women’s Day—so John Mumba, the school director, declared this entire week a mid-term holiday for the kids.  They have five whole days off from classes.  Which is why I’m here with Dru now, rather than next week.  Where I come from, during holidays, students and teachers tend to race in the direction exactly opposite their school buildings.  (In Indiana, for example, everyone migrates to Florida.)  The buildings left behind resemble Main Street in a ghost town: abandoned.  You can practically hear a lonely wind howling through the hallways.

I assumed I could paint the classrooms in quiet, without disrupting classes full of wiggling three and four and five-year-olds.  Really, though, it’s that I’m cranky.  I’m tired.  And I don’t want to be bothered.  I’m craving quiet for myself, a holiday from my own clumsy attempts to navigate the rugged intellectual, relational, and emotional landscape of living—of sojourning, really—in Zambia.  I’ve been here nearly two months, now, but I finished the mural for Kafakumba’s children a month ago.  For a hard-thinking, strong-feeling young American whirling with energy, this is not the place to be idle  I’m spending too much time inside my own fancy brain—that’s John Enright’s wry but sincere compliment—making the mistake, it seems, of trying to understand anything at all about life here, work here, relationships here.

(And to that, and to my tears, Deb Vance smiled grimly, one day last week.  “When you finally get it,” she sighed, “you let me know, okay?”)

For me, the bad days are those that feel the loneliest or the least purposeful, because I haven’t yet learned how to simply be here.  I go for long runs every morning.  Take long walks every day.  Sometimes I visit with folks and stumble into good conversations.  I keep my eyes and my ears wide open.  I read the books I brought with me and the books I’ve been given, writing my way through each day.  All of this throws light on my experiences in this place.  Then, thank God, I have my Mondays and Thursdays with the women’s group in Fisenge village.  I can whip my crochet hook back and forth and make something happen.  And still be quiet.  I can listen to the women chatter, or I can sing with them.  I can be with them.

All that light.  Still, it seems impossible think or to see anything clearly here.  Impossible to chew hard enough and long enough to finally swallow.  Then, I feel scraped raw on the inside, for all that feeling I’ve come through.  I pitied myself this week, yes, and my poor heart, bruised to uselessness, so I’m back to searching for meaningful work for my hands, at least.  That’s me—I work out my own sadnesses, maybe my own salvation, in color.

Yesterday, Monday, was the first holiday afternoon, but when Dru and I pulled into up the driveway and into the complex, there were a handful of kids, all ages, scattered across the school grounds.  They raced around, kicking a deflated, floppy soccer ball between them.  The ball connected with the side of each bare foot with a flat thwap.  The littlest kids zipped, one after the other, down a tiny slide that leaned slightly to the right.  Older girls pumped their legs, swooshing back and forth on a rickety swing set.  Its support system, standing metal poles, wobbled in the cement like loose teeth.  I cringed.  The swings squeaked.  The kids squealed or giggled or sang.

So much for quiet.

Within an hour, I had unpacked my paints and was standing, tiptoe, on a wooden desk in the first of the two “baby classrooms.”  I began in the corner, close to the ceiling, sketching lightly in pencil, bubbling-lettering a capital A.  Then lowercase a.  B. b. C…Slowly, stringing the alphabet like Christmas lights around the perimeter of the classroom, stepping gingerly from desk to desk.

Weeks ago, during one of my first visits to Lifesong, I was stunned when John Mumba came to the guest house where Dru was making tea, shook my hand for the first time, sat down with his cup, and with a wide smile, asked me, “So!  What is your vision for our school?”  I nearly choked on my tea before I managed to explain that, without seeing the classrooms or talking to the teachers, I could hardly patch together a “vision” for the school.  “With all due respect, sir,” I offered, “this school belongs to all of you and to the children.  I’m interested in your vision and your needs, not my own.  Then I can paint almost anything you ask me to, if I have enough materials.”  Later, I had asked Lucy and Albertina, two of the teachers, what they would want painted in their classrooms, if they could have anything.  They had hemmed and hawed and decided on the alphabet.  An animal in each room, maybe, a big animal—“a hippo!”—and laughed to themselves, at this thought.  They had showed me some textbooks with the material for the baby classes.  They wanted shapes and colors.

On the long wall above the door, just below the letters, I sketched the nine shapes.  Diamond.  Heart.  Circle.  Square.  Star…  I crept along the wall, desk to desk, until I finished sketching, then I hopped down.  I pulled out my brushes, squeezed paints—a small puddle of each of the colors of the rainbow—and returned to the corner of the classroom.  Slick and bright blood red, Aa formed under my brush.  I leapt desks to Gg…Mm… A tap at the window, and I turned and jumped, nearly falling off my perch.  A little girl was pressing her small, round, brown face against the glass, cupping her hands on either side of her eyes.  I lumbered awkwardly off the child-sized furniture, wiped my hands on my jeans and slid my brush into my ponytail, and walked to the window.  I crouched down.  She peered at me, wide-eyed, between the bars on the windows.  I stared back at her.  Then she grinned.  Smeared and blurred by the grime on the glass, her smile broke over me.  She was pure sunshine.  I put my finger on the glass where she pressed her nose and tapped it three times.  Thonk.  She slapped the window with her palm and giggled, and I motioned to the other kids, the swingset—anywhere I wouldn’t feel the weight of her tiny, watching eyes.  “Go play!”  She pranced back to the playground, and I stretched my legs, climbed my tower, and kept working.

Little Bird

Today, Franny and I went trotting around Barb and Martha’s pasture—she at a good clip, bright orange Frisbee clamped in her teeth, begging, BEGGING for me to take it from her, and I at a stumbling job, regretting the decision to venture out on sore legs.  We made two rounds before, three feet ahead of me, tucked in the grass, I saw a small bird.  I startled it, unable to slow myself, and Franny dropped to the ground faster than I reach out my hands to the bird.

“Franny!” I yelped, and I swatted her away.  No more than five seconds had passed, but with one quit pat of her over-eager two year old paw, she had done more harm than I could possibly undo.

I knelt to the baby bird, and its tiny gold beak opened wide, then closed, opened again with a soft creaking, then closed.  Its eyes were wide—terrified?—and its wings were shuddering.  How do you sooth a bird in pain, I wondered, and I gently took it between my fingers, wings pressed to its sides, and I picked it up to put it on the Frisbee.

Its eyes closed.  Its whole body went soft and loose on my Frisbee, its neck slack and doubled over so that its head nearly touched its wing.  I stroked its feathers for a few moments, hoping.  When it didn’t move, when it stayed soft and empty-looking, tears sprang to my eyes, and I groaned brokenly at Fran.

Stupid, stupid, natural puppy, I mumbled at her, and in my head, the phrase “bird-like” gathered and take shape:

Light, hollow, quick but not quick enough, fragile, helpless, a thing of the air and sunshine.  Easily grounded.

So I cried for the way things are, and I tilted the Frisbee into the high grass while Fran wasn’t looking. The little bird slid out of my sight.

Sniffling, I jogged ahead, and Franny lumbered along behind me.

sometimes a hunger for culture shock.

It is possible to learn how always to be a foreigner, not only to learn but also to grow an solid, comfortable, reliable identity out of your own otherness. I am okay in my own “different” skin.

Every time I’m in a new place, particularly one that is distinctly different from the U.S., culturally, I remember when I first started to drive. Early on, I learned to swallow my pride and admit defeat: to stop at any house that appeared to be even remotely hospitable, to say, “I’m ridiculously lost; can you point me in the right direction?”
I figured out that, in general, even if you’re a stranger, folks want to help. They may want something in return. They may not trust you. But in they probably wouldn’t wish you harm. I would even risk saying that people are generally kind, particularly when they recognize humility. (And there’s a difference between swallowing your arrogance and assumptions and abandoning your sense of self-worth and even your pride.
Humility will take a foreigner a long way.

Until now, most of my travel experiences have yanked me out of my immediate comfort zone and into the complex landscape of cross-cultural interaction, connection, and sometimes—if I’m lucky—understanding. There has been no pretending not to be a tourist. By necessity, I have been overtly, unabashedly, gloriously foreign. And after Zambia, after Mexico and Zambia and Rome and Thailand and Zambia, I now immediately recognize the onset of culture shock, and I’ve developed pretty quick reflexive responses to it (a bit different, a bit healthier and more mature than my responses at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen or nineteen):

1) I try to drop my need to feel and appear intelligent—“savvy,” maybe—like a veil.
2) With that, the words, “Can you explain, please? I’m new to this place / idea / activity…” come to me with little hesitation and rarely shame.
3) I attempt to keep my mouth shut, more often than not, and my ears and eyes are wide open for the taking in. I open my mouth almost exclusively for questions, and only after listening. I try to pay attention first, and once I’ve spent enough time doing that, I converse.
4) I keep a loose grasp on, or abandon entirely, my need for conclusions, particularly easy answers.

That said, I’ve grown quite comfortable outside my comfort zone. I’ve learned pretty well how to function and how to settle in, how to stick out awkwardly for awhile and to make friends and feel at home, eventually, despite that.
What do I do with New Zealand, then? It’s been, two and a half weeks in, so much to experience, so much to try to take in, and so difficult to articulate. But it has been remarkably free of culture shock.  It’s like I keep waiting for the rock-hard moment when we really, truly don’t belong here, or when we just can’t grasp some aspect of life here, and it never comes.  Yet.  Not yet.

It’s been quiet, contemplative, especially for me. I’ve spent an incredible amount of time in my head rather than in conversation, in libraries and museums , seeking conversation with books and relatively little with people.

Most of the towns we’ve stayed in—Hastings, Cambridge, Te Awamutu, Hamilton, and Tauranga so far—have been largely semi-affluent, upper-middle class New Zealand, with town centers tucking away small, colorful cafes, a few classy and slightly offbeat bookstores, and several high-end clothing stores. In Hawke’s Bay, especially, at the edge of each town, winery after winery, all with quirky names, sprawls along each of the main roads. In each city, roundabouts shoot streets out to tidy residential squares of squat house. Like any other place, some houses are shabbier, with tatty front porches and creaking trellises, and some glitter gaily in the sunshine, but most have bare stone walls, clean lines, and gleaming windows, flowering trees and climbing gardens and clipped lawns.
It’s all lovely and sweet and—mostly—far too pricey for my tastes or budget. And apart from some quirks of language and mannerism, Hastings, like Cambridge, Hamilton, Tauranga, and Te Awamutu, feels familiar. Like a trendy American town or The Village at the edge of so many college campuses.
I’ve spent much of my time here rambling around these towns, appreciating them for what they are, poking in shops and wineries, museums and bookstores, and after all that, I’ve come to a conclusion.

I like international travel with culture shock, at least spiced with it and preferably shaping the entire experience. I like the painful pleasure, the forced stretch, the hope of connection.

Apart from my occasional bouts of loneliness or lack of direction, this trip has lacked so much of the challenge of travel, I suppose, at least as compared to the others. Here, there are cultural distinctions to muddle through, blush about, or enjoy, obviously.  And of course, the space between New Zealand and the U.S. surely isn’t flat, culturally!  I can’t see for miles. But I can see a good long way, so far.