theme songs for the road

i've always been really good at losing things. i've lost homework, car keys, the left shoe from a pair of red flats. i've always been waiting to grow out of it. surely someday i'll be organized enough to keep a pair of shoes together! but i guess i'm still waiting. since being here i've lost a cell phone, a pillow case, 5,000 shillings, and about 9 pounds. maybe i could have anticipated losing those things. but what i never did anticipate was feeling lost.

i've amassed alot of road maps in my time. moving state to state. driving place to place. florida. illinois. oklahoma. tennesse and everything in between. all of the above and maybe more are in folds and wrinkles in the back seat of my car. i've used them all. i've read them in the rain. i've held them open over the stearing wheel. i've torn them in the open-window wind. they have gotten me from place to place to place and back again. little red and blue lines telling which way to turn and what to stay away from. this being the case, there can't possibly be any man out there more suited for me than mister rand mcnally. my knight's armor shines with tail lights and turn signals and he saves his damsel from culdesacs and cops with bad attitudes.

road maps are great. but i have to ask, where are the maps for getting around life? what about those potholes and police officers? rand darling, how could you have failed me?

i feel like i've gotten lost somehow. or at least i've gotten stuck. i'm sitting at the most unexpected intersection of all. there are no red lights here. nothing has stopped me. instead, i've come to a crossroads of all green lights, all go signs, all endless options. where do you want to go? what do you want to do? who do you want to be? go. Go. GO!

but maybe i don't want to go any further. maybe i'm too tired to turn the engine over. maybe i'm done starting again. maybe dave matthews said it best when he said, 'turns out it's not where but who you're with that really matters.' in which case... where don't i go?

more green lights. more people in more places. all of us dissolving like sugar cubes in warm water. slowly separating away in this direction and that, sweetening our surroundings but doing it with one less grain of sugar at our side. sugar cubes. how despairing. wouldn't we rather be like licorice? all twisted together, all sweet and all insoluble.

insoluble. maybe that's what i want my super power to be.

in the mean time i'll just cut all my hair off and get a pedicure...

when my khaki pants used to fit

i moved to africa in the month of july
i was eating bowls of rice by 7:00 am
and got used to it real quick

rice and beans
water to drink
lunch at 2 pm

i started walking to get around town
my shoes got covered in red dirt
my thighs got a good work out

up the hill
down the hill
back and forth through town

i do my laundry on the weekends
scrubbing by hand in a bucket
hanging them out to dry

pull and stretch
wring them out again
leave them on the line

i used to be meticulous about style
before i left home in july
that was when my khaki pants still fit

stone soup and other recipes

i found ants in my sugar bowl and a gecko in my t-shirt. i swept them both away and went about my business. i'm not often thrown by the little african quirks of the day around here. i eat rice three times a day, go without dairy, do my laundry in a bucket, and wake up the next day and do it all again. no big thing. but today i had a craving. today i looked at the clock, saw that it was nearly one, and had a vision. i saw a sandwich. i saw a sandwich of honey wheat whole grain bread. it was spread with trader joe's red pepper humus and stacked with green peppers, alfalfa sprouts, tomato, snow peas and avocado. it sat on a little ceramic plate with a cold clausen pickle next to it and a tall glass of 2% milk. when i woke from my vision i was sitting in the office with a bread roll and an empty coffee mug. i was real sad.

question: how does someone keep eating rice and pumpkin over and over everyday without their taste buds and tummy atrophying?
answer: because on certain mondays in october, they get a letter in the mail full of love and fruit snacks that taste like heaven going down and make all the rest of it worth swallowing.

i'm a lucky girl. with love and fruit snacks and sleep overs and skype dates and good morning coffee and even better emails that together make all the rest of it worth swallowing.

yum yum.

i hoped it would be easy to build

if you were the kind of person who wore a seat belt, you wouldn't be living in Africa in the first place.

deborah scroggins said that in her book 'emma's war.' when i first read it, i laughed. i laughed like a person who feels like they have a right to laugh at that. yeah, i know what you mean. and then i re-read the quote. i read how it began:

for whites, it's part of the mind-set: if you were the kind of person who wore a seat belt, you wouldn't be living in Africa in the first place.

for whites. which i am. and no, i don't wear my seat belt. but maybe i should. and tell me, what about Africa makes it more necessary to wear a seat belt than the next place? if a car crashes on a dirt road it would kill me just as surely as on a paved one. a gun would go off just as well in a banana field as it would in an unlit parking lot. and do just as much damage. the moon over me is the same moon over you. even though i could swear it's 10 times bigger here. but it's not. it's the same moon. in the same sky. over the same planet. all 6,602,224,175 of us are standing on the same round planet. it's not so big after all. we're not so different. people are people wherever you go. for better or worse, we all have failings. but bigger than all of it, we also all have feats.

the mountain we scaled in colorado. the piano we learned to master. the foreign language we fluently speak. the sport we dominate. the paintbrush between our fingers. our voice that gets a standing ovation. or maybe it's the courage to paint our toenails pink. the decision to shave our head. the joke that made our boss laugh. for some of us, it's feat enough that we got out of bed this morning.

today i wore navy pants with a black shirt. maybe that's the kind of person it takes to live in Africa. a person who puts on whatever's clean. or maybe that's just what it takes to make it through the day sometimes, wherever you are. mismatched clothes. spilled coffee. unexplainable headaches. the smell of honeysuckle outside your window. all those human things. all those people things. they happen to all people. in all places. which Africa is. just another place. where i live. where i work. and as it turns out, it's chock full of people i love.

i just realized i don't know where to go with this now. most of my entries these days have had a common thread. life. living it. this time i tried to think of something funny to write. like the dragon fly that floated into the office and spent all afternoon on the picture of my parents. or the day that i was greeted with, good morning, ann. you look exhausted. even wearing yellow. good times. but i think i'll just tell those stories later. today i'd rather tell this story:

little girl: the shop across the street is where my uncle sells. we sell from shops here.
marsha: i see! and what's that big pile?
little girl: that's where they make bricks. we make our own bricks here.
marsha: i know. i like that they're working by lamp light.
little girl: yes. we use paraffin here.
marsha: look! look at the stars. aren't they beautiful?!
little girl: yes. we have stars here. do they have stars in your world?

we have stars. we have stripes. we have banks and buses and brick layers. we have what they have. we even have seat belts. and some of us even wear them.

you start, bob. i'll sing the harmony.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

that's such a lovely quote. and so true and so real. poetry, beauty, romance, love. these aren't what we live for. they are what we stay alive for.

staying alive. it's nearly an entity of its own. p.s. i hate the bee gees. and i hate even more what they have to say about staying alive. trying to get high. trying to get low. trying to understand the new york times' effect on man. why? why try so hard to make things more than what they are? life is complicated enough. a mongoose is not a goose. it's not even a bird. lynyrd skynyrd is not a man's name. ring around the rosy is about the plague. progeria syndrome makes children grow old and kills them too young. people get fat and their neighbors starve to death. things don't make sense as it is. why rage against it all?

we've all been in situations and heard stories that have sucked the wonder right out of our bones. i've visited orphan villages. i've watched men dying of AIDS. i've heard testimonies that have made my palms sweat. and it's in these moments that my faith is that of a cynical old chain smoker suffering from insomnia and not a wide eyed child who dreams of sugar plum fairies. and i feel weighed down. yes, weighed down. but not always hopeless. it takes poets like dylan thomas and painters like william bouguereau to bring me back to life. it takes mountains like the rwenzori and theologians like g.k. chesterton to remind me that loveliness is essential to life and sugar plum fairies will set you free.

it's a relief to learn that my periodic childishness is part of living. it's ok to be creative. it's ok to think in iambic pentameter and remember faces in 3x5. it's all part of staying alive. yes people get sick. yes parents get divorced. yes buildings burn down. but sometimes even doctors learn to sketch. moms and dads make funny jokes. neighbors come together and build a new barn. life is good. even when it's not. and this goodness, these surprises, the poetry and beauty and love, this is why we stay alive. and wherever this all ends, wherever it goes and wherever it stops or starts over, i will be happy to have lived through it.

thank you for sticking with me, those of you who keep reading this. i wish you were here. and hey aunt beth, how can i get ahold of you?? i keep visiting your phantom blogspot and still have no way of saying hi!

all my love
peace on earth
hope in hearts
food on tables,
annie

on you i just can't rely

i'm sick these days. a chesty, feverish, sneezing, coughing, nose-blowing kind of sick. it's pretty much par for the course at this point. stress, sleeplessness and an unwillingness to take a day off will usually knock you off your feet at some point.

other than that, i don't have too much to say today. maybe it's because the sloshing in my head has me thinking slower. i will say this: i love my job and i love this place. but i can say with utter certainty that this would be a nearly impossible position to hold for longer than a year and it makes me admire my boss and this office staff all the more. how on earth would you survive taking 30 or so lovely and dynamic people in your arms for 4 months only to let them go into the great unknown and have a whole new group come in to love and invest in before, yet again, having them taken from you? or maybe i just know myself well enough to know that i couldn't survive like that. it's only been about 3 and a half weeks since the students got here and i'm already madly in love with all of them. and i don't think it's natural to fall in and out of love so often.

on a car ride at 1 in the morning, someone once said, 

i do believe that the community of humanity has the singular purpose of existing for each other. for other people and their joy and survival. and if you're not existing for someone else, then you're just... existing. 

in the clarity of daylight, i can see the potential melodrama of a statement like that. however, i don't think the concept is false. man was not meant to be left alone. and for those of us who have gotten accustom to running away from home, i think we each have a moment when we look up into the sky over yet another temporary world wide travel destination and say, 

when do i get to claim a community of my own? when do i get an apartment whose walls i can paint and a neighbor who shouts at his dog? when do i get a diner down the street and a church with a steeple? 

and although i don't regret for a moment where i am now, i have started to wonder, when will i finally be content sitting still?

and do you know what makes that question so difficult to answer? it's that everywhere i go, i see a glimpse contentment there. i find a hill with a shady tree where i can watch the sun set. i find a coffee shop with free wireless internet and delicious monkey bread. i find a friend who can make me laugh or even let me cry. i find Grace. and Joy. and i learn a few more chords on the guitar. for me it has never come down to choosing between devils and angels. it's always come down to plane tickets and restlessness. and while the beginnings are exciting, the endings are just a bunch of goodbyes. i don't know when i'll be content sitting still. but i do know that i'm tired of saying goodbye. 

the thief he kindly spoke

i've just got back from rwanda. i love it enough to never leave. but that place is almost too much to take. the hills too beautiful. the people too generous. the death too rancid. all of it just so much. 

driving back to uganda, i recalled a memory i had not thought of for nearly 15 years. it was a sunday and i was wearing a dress. i was very young. or at least i remember being very short. i could only see the first two pie shelves in the glass display case. my family and i were waiting at a tippin's restaurant for sunday lunch. on our way to the lobby doors, there was a man alone outside. he looked tired and dirty. his hair was unwashed and his beard untrimmed. he was not wearing sunday clothes. i watched him with round childhood eyes as he staggered to and from the families outside, asking for money. before i could have much of a reaction, the restaurateur came out and made him leave. in the lobby, i sat down on a bench by the window. i had the strangest feeling. i wasn't sure what i was thinking or why i had to sit down. i was very young. but in a few minutes, my mom came over and sat by me.

what's wrong annie? why so quiet?

in the next instant, surprising both my mother and myself, i burst into tears. and through choking little girl sobs, i asked,

why couldn't we give him something? even 50 cents?

i don't remember what my mother said. it must have been comforting because i soon stopped crying and ate some pie. but i do remember that she held me. i remember her rubbing my back. i remember my face on her neck. and i remember for the first time being miserable because the world was unjust. did this man have a mother to hold him? why didn't he have any money? what was going to happen to him when he left? and why couldn't i help him?

murambi is a schoolhouse on a hill in butare, rwanda. 50,000 people were massacred there in 1994. since then, they've exhumed the bodies from the pile of mass graves that the killers left. they have reburied most of them in coffins and the rest they have preserved with lime. these bodies are laid out on picnic tables in the school rooms. you can't imagine the smell.

leaving murambi, i sat on the bus watching rwanda out my window wondering how many of the people i passed on the street didn't have families any more. no aunts, no fathers, no mothers. do they have enough money to eat these days? what's going to happen here in the next few years? and why, o God, couldn't we have helped them? i wished my mother were there. i wanted her to hold me so i could bury my face in her neck. instead, i put my head against the window and slept. i was just so tired.