looking intently (or, trying)

I used to write in places where I was anonymous or alone. Coffee shops or my kitchen table. Now I write in a garden where guests and friends interrupt me, even when I wear my headphones. I write less this way, but most of the time I have more fun.

A man today told me God will bless me with a well-paying job after my time in Kenya. The other week, a guest told me God has a gentleman set aside for me. I wonder if these words are from the Spirit of God; I wonder about the spiritual lives of these bearers of blessings, if I can trust the blessings to bring their fruit. Either way, can't I trust that there is something good and full in the words they have spoken -- a wish for a full life?

I was supposed to teach English at a community center today, but instead I took the day off. Which actually led to deeper work than I probably would have done if I'd carried on with my schedule.

Kenyans ask me for things. They see a mzungu and assume I can help. It's not a magic wand they seek, but the advantage of privilege. Money isn't just money; to give is a sign of friendship. I am learning to respect that, and to understand the ways I really am able to help.

Kenyans are also extremely generous. Don't discount the treasure of a smile, a spoken blessing, friendship, English, welcome, tea.

At first, time here seemed long and slow. Just the other day, it turned fast and short. And a lot easier. Now I realize how the struggle of those early days demanded my attention, required intention. I don't want to float through these last few weeks and realize I still wanted to more. (I want to want more now, and go after it.)

I want to see need here the way it is to be seen, not through my own lens of what should be had. I want to see provision and help through the lens of those who will receive it.

abundance is what grows wild and free

I wanted flowers to fill the empty vase on the counter. This felt especially important since my move from a small, updated guest room to the back cottage. The space feels empty and impersonal, furnished with a few old, mismatched pieces. Hooks and nails jut from the wall wear past inhabitants might have hung a painting or a framed photograph -- but I had none of these to add. My first day, I opened all the cabinets to take stock of what was available and what I might need. In one of them was that vase, which I pulled out and set on the counter. I would find flowers.

The green grocer I sometimes visit sells bouquets, and there are stands I've seen with buckets of flowers for sale. But I live in a literal garden. Surely I could cut something from what's already here? Tom is the gardener, and a self-appointed Swahili coach. I approached him as he re-potted a red stalky thing and bumbled through our typical greetings. Then I asked, can I cut flowers to fill my vase? He laughed, not understanding at first why I was asking. I told him I didn't want to ruin any of the plants or cut at something I shouldn't take.

He laughed again. They are all wild, he said. You take what you want. To him, I realized, nobody owns what grows freely. His job is only to cultivate what's here.

I went for my scissors and the vase, looking around for something that would fit. Only a few cuts and it was filled with green leaves and a few purple flowers. I once thought abundance meant knowing I could spend money on things like flowers, and perhaps that lesson is an important one to understanding the concept. You can buy and not be afraid. And yet now, having been invited to find all that I needed from what's around me, for free, and so simply, I realized there's more to abundance than buying. There's also recognizing what you have around you and seeing that it's more than enough.

like a new dance that stirs old feet

Nairobi requires a new set of skills. I have been training at killing the mosquitoes buzzing around my cramped room before I go to bed each night, which requires quick reflexes as well as an ability to spot them, and patience. I am also learning how to tuck my mosquito net and position myself just right under it so that any remaining buzzing pests will not be able to bite my skin. Any failure shows itself in the morning, red dots pocking skin left exposed or (I didn't know this was a liability) touching the net. 

I am learning how to walk. Most roads are wide enough for only two cars. The edges are torn and cracked, like the smoldered edge of a paper set to fire. Pedestrians walk on these craggly edges, but then side step onto the dusty paths when cars hoot their horns and speed past. From what I can tell, there is no right or wrong side, wherever there is room is where you might walk. My feet and shoes are covered in a thin film of brown dust, which I wash off only for it to be replaces by another on my next walk.

I walk to the bus stage and learn to ask the names of the places where I go, learn to crouch down so I can see out the window and discern where I am by the landmarks that are becoming more and more familiar, learn to signal when I need to get off, sense the rhythm of when the conductor (is that what you call him?) will reach over and tap my shoulder to ask for 20, 30, 50 bob (shillings) for the ride.

I walk to the duka and learn to ask for fruit that will be ripe one or two or three days out. I walk past people calling out mzungu on streets where I am still unfamiliar (always in the informal settlements) and learn to look friendly but keep walking. I learn to push past men who try to touch my skin. I learn to give my passport to the policeman asking why I am here, to smile and tell him I'm enjoying my stay in his country.

I am learning that rains come when I am sleeping, that the sun is hot but the shade always offers its relief, that rocks are preferred to mud, mud to the dust that gets stirred up and settles on everything around it. I learn to put more minutes on my phone, to cross a highway of traffic, to bite mango from its skin and let the juice cover my hands as a child would.

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, bright and glad. I agreed with it. Though learning can be wearisome, I think of all that I didn't know and now I do, like a new dance that stirs old feet, like a candle re-lit on the table of a couple long married.

only rumbling over potholes

I sit in the taxi with Peter. I sit in the passenger's seat on the left side of the car, which still mixes me up. Peter has driven me before, and he has a kind smile, and a lazy eye, which makes him seem more friendly somehow. I try to carry on a conversation, but I run out of things to ask, and I know that in this culture, taxi drivers are not accustomed to being friendly with their customers (even if we are regulars). In the silence, I think about how I wish I had more words -- more things to say to people, more Swahili words to say it in a way that expresses a deeper commitment to their culture. I also think about how I want to write more, but the words are just not there yet. All I hear is rumbling like this van over the potholes in the road we are driving. And then I remember a writer's advice, how the lack (of details or information or whatever) is sometimes what you build the story around.  

***

We had an hour training on language acquisition. It's about culture learning and relationship building, too, not just memorizing a list of words and stringing them together to make sentences. You start by listening and pointing, not even saying a word. The idea is that listening in context, paying attention, finding language in its home and making that home more and more yours will be what shifts your thinking and fire new neurons until you produce new words. This means you will be quiet at first, and maybe for a long while. But when the words come, they may flow.

***

I am making lists of words I learn in their context, which stick more easily that the ones on my flashcards. Mtoto, child, who were invited up for prayer during church. Bwana asifiwe, praise the Lord, a refrain in worship songs. Hatari, danger, the name of the security company whose name is posted on all of the surrounding compounds. Lipa, pay, on my M Pesa account. I brainstorm ways to be around Swahili more just to hear it and put life to words and words to life. I am not ready to speak yet. When the staff speak to me to help me learn, I look back at them blankly, and then we laugh.

I'm hoping the language acquisition training was right, that the words will soon flow.

more than lists

I am in Nairobi now, living at a guest house. Travelers lodge here for one or two nights, or for weeks scattered among travel around the region. The place has a rhythm I am slowly learning. I introduce myself to people but rarely say goodbye. If I see them before they leave, I wish them safe travels or blessings on their work.

I am also acquainting myself with staff, who I hope will be my friends. There are some cultural norms to navigate there, since I am seen as an authority figure of some sort to most of them, and friendship wouldn't typically be appropriate. Still, I want to know about their lives and understand what it is they do when they're not working here.

I have started the habit of writing names in my journal, along with a list of at least three details that help to identify them. These short lists of words create a sort of image of the person by which I can remember and pray for them in what are becoming daily habits of prayer (morning and evening).

Last evening, as I was waiting for my dinner, I spoke with Joshua, a server at the guest house. From our conversation, I have a long list of facts: Mombasa, coal carrier, married, 9 months, 2 buses and about an hour (he worked in Mombasa carrying coal, he is recently married, he has worked at Amani for nine months, it takes him an hour and two bus rides to get home).

These lists give me something to hold on to. But what I realized this morning is that more than lists, I want stories. So far, most of my interactions with guests and staff have been fairly brief and have consisted of introductions and some questions. List-making. Stories take longer and require different questions as well as a bit more trust.

Yesterday, I met Abby at breakfast. She is a white American woman, around my age, single, working overseas on a small island. I felt an easy connection with her, probably at least in part because of these things we have in common. After I met her, I walked to the store, and I regretted not thinking to ask if she wanted to join (she had mentioned possibly making the same trip). Then, this morning, after praying for her before breakfast, I had the opportunity to hear her story (or part of it): how she got to that island and what it's been like to live on it. A story that's changed her, and impacted many people.

There's fire under there! She told me that was how she'd responded the first time she hiked around steam vents on the active volcanoes on the island where she lives. The steam could warm your hands, and it can also melt a bottle meant to capture some of it. As soon as she said it, I knew there was some metaphor there, and maybe that's one. What's inside these people, just below the surface, is a substance that can bring warm, comfort, change the state of things. It's beyond the lists, it's in the stories.

***
(photo: outside my window)

what's happening inside and how to like it

If I were to be honest with you, I’d tell you it started even before I went to Kenya. But I keep using my trip as the before and after, the reason, the tipping point. The start of a season of transition. Because it was after I came that I found myself strolling into work later than usual, forgetting about important things and not really caring about others, wanting to eat more sugar than I have been lately (and not exercising much restraint). It was difficult to muster up much energy do things I don’t like doing or have much discipline. I cried at odd things, including in front of my boss. Strange things were happening.

I felt unfamiliar to myself, which is a scary place to be in, at least for someone like me who thrives on control and structure. So I searched for a metaphor to give me a picture or framework for what was happening. Unable to understand it myself, I asked the Spirit and the thought that came to mind was those early stages of pregnancy, when a woman’s tastes change so dramatically. I once worked with a woman who could only stomach McDonald's in those first few months. Another friend had craved only Swedish Fish. I get it, I thought. I knew that not all my behavior was helpful or healthy, but I had so little energy to redirect myself. They both told me they ate what they could to just keep going. I understood that what they were saying is this: You might think that living with respect to the thing growing in you means eating healthy, but sometimes it means, at least at first, just hanging on. Because that thing growing in you is going to change everything.

This morning, when I was turning some of these ideas around in my head, I kept confusing the word transition for transformation. Maybe that word is more fitting anyway. It’s not so much a moving from one thing to another but instead, being changed inwardly, taking on a new form. The metaphor is overused: a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. But I can’t get away from that idea of being able to ride the wind.

I’d like to tell you that this transition/transformation is the result of circumstances around me. There are changes at work, new friendships, some after-happenings from Kenya that have me busy and excited. But I go back to that metaphor I was given and remember that pregnancy speaks of something new inside. It is the inner shifting and growing that I want to follow and allow to shape the circumstances, not the other way around.

I started this post thinking I’d put together some kind of fun or smart list of things to do in transition. Good habits to keep, things to consume, things like that. I’d share the podcasts I’m listening to or the dietary habits I’m (failing at) keeping. But I’ll be honest with you – I’m still in that McDonald’s-Swedish Fish stage where I’m keeping down what I can, not sure when I’ll feel as if I’m being tossed around on a boat in the middle of a storm. This thing growing in me, it’s hungry with desire, and I’m following it, trusting that it knows what it needs. 

***

(photo: pennsylania farm, taken a few days before Kenya)

friends, here are some books i read

Friends and books: two of my favorite things. I like to read with friends, about friends, talk about reading with friends. Today, as I play catch up on blogging books I've read, I see a theme and I'm going with it. These books reminded me of how good writing will sound to you like a friend's voice, how friendship will inspire our reading choices, how good friends will give good books, and how one of the most enduring stories we will tell is how we found our friends.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

Well-known memoir by a widely-loved writer. I read it on the way to the writing conference I went to back in April because I knew he'd be speaking, and because I found it for five dollars at a used bookstore a few weeks before. The book was good. Here is my favorite quote: All my life I had recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Yes.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About a week after my birthday, I came home to a mystery Amazon package on my doorstep. It looked like books. I got excited. In it was this book and another - both books I'd been wanting to read. They were sent by my sister. The woman gets me, even if she doesn't often understand me (which is probably the case a lot of the time because I can be crazy and text her a string of emojis that I expect her to interpret). That might be my new definition for friendship.

The book sat on my coffee table for two months until I decided I'd pack it for my trip to the east coast and Kenya. I started reading it in a Starbucks with my nephew. He wanted us to close our books and play cards, but I kept telling him to read another chapter so I could keep reading, too. It was good. Then I read it on the plane flying over the Atlantic, and in the van weaving in Nairobi traffic and struggling over the rocky, dusty roads that led to Maasai Mara. I read it while America was arguing with each other about why police were still killing black men and in between long looks out the window traveling around Kenya, trying to understand the country by what I could see.

I don't have the book with me (it is already lent out to a friend). If I did, I might give you a quote. Instead I will say that I loved her writing about Nigeria, and wondered what I could learn about writing about Kenya. I also loved her insights about Africans in America and how they relate to African Americans and to America in general, about what they love and what they find strange, about the ways that language and accent and hair and clothing and weight and food and love and the way air feels on skin all make moving to a different country so disorienting, and coming home, even after so many years, like encountering an old friend.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

One thing I love about books of compiled stories or essays is that, if they are well-edited, reading them can feel like sitting around a table with some really smart friends. That's how this book felt. The writers invite us readers around their table to learn from them, to start a dialogue, to acknowledge our shared humanity. Each essay highlights the specific voice and experience of the writer, which makes the books feel like a collective, a community - a gathered group that, together, is something more than just the sum of its parts. My favorite themes were writing to remember and the emphasis on the physical experience of being black in America (and, really, our world).

I can't choose just one quote to share with you. Not one thought or sentiment would sum up what the book made me feel or think about. But I am still thinking about it, which is good, and I hope I will be for a while to come. Mostly, I hope what I read will stay with me and help me be a better friend to some very dear people in my life, and to people I have yet to meet.

***
(photo: books! though not the ones i read)

learning their names

I make it a priority to learn about names on this trip. I ask names and look hard at faces to commit them to memory. I listen to names and try to understand how people here understand their names by how they use them, by how they respond when called. But whenever I start to ask questions, I feel as if my words come out in a backwards language. Maybe it is because the people here always return questions with a shy smile, which makes me thing they’re amused by me. They likely are, but I know they are also shy, and probably unaccustomed to my direct inquisitiveness.

Maasai are given both English names and traditional names? I ask, even as I realize that it might be more appropriate to call them Christian names, like James and Jemima and Jonathan. Both of those terms carry tricky connotations and I don't know if one is better than the other. Yes, I learn, they have both. The Christian names are easier for me to learn and remember, but I want to learn the Maasai names, too, or at least allow my ear to become accustomed to them. Where do these names come from and what is their meaning? are questions I still have and will eventually learn at least partial answers to. 

During our introduction session, in which my plan is to get to know the students and, yes, learn their names, I decide to have them write their Christian names on one side of a piece of construction paper, their Maasai names on the other. Settled in the classroom, nearly fifty tall, lean students with dusty feet and ankles cram three to a desk with the colored paper before them, a bright contrast to the mostly monochromatic world they live in during the school week: wood beams, brown floors, dark skin, faded and dusty blue uniforms. (A day later, Saturday, I would see them again in their Western clothing – all yellow and red and blue.) When I give them the instructions, they start to write their names small in one corner of the paper, and I realize I should have made an example for them. Bigger, I tell them. Take up the whole page with your name.

Then I tell them that we’re going to line up outside the classroom in alphabetical order by our Christian names. The teachers lend order to the activity, sending out the As and Bs while I indicate where they should stand and shift the line up when we need more room. Then I see it: the line of students holding up their papers with names written across. It hits me that I have spent a few months thinking about these kids and wondering about their names. Call them out, I tell them. I want to hear you say your name loud, I say, because even though I know this is a people who speaks softly, I have been waiting to hear these names.

Ann. Dickson. Elizabeth. Esther. Isaac. Jacklyn. James. Lillian. Titus. I'm still trying to remember them all...

***

First draft from a longer essay about names and being named.

(photos: learning their names; because I couldn't pick just one) 

literary, lately: what in the world edition

I'm back in LA but my heart is elsewhere (mostly, still in Kenya). I jump between trying to snap out of it so I can get on with life and looking for ways to transport myself back. Maybe that's what a lot of us are doing now - simultaneously busying ourselves with both remembering and forgetting. Here's some wonderful and beautiful and touching and powerful stuff that's helping me remember (because that's usually the way to go).

Read this story. It's about refugee poets, about not remembering but trying to remember, about the intricacies of language, both tongue and heart, about empowering young people, about so much more.

How could anyone look at Trayvon's baby face and not see a child? And not feel an innate desire to protect, to cherish? How? ... I needed words. It's been an(other) difficult summer in America. I have few words for it, but thankfully others are strong, bold and fearless enough to write some. I read this essay and am now reading the book it's from. Good stuff.

A poem by a friend in East Africa. Yes.

For hope, listening to these words. Truth.

Watching this to keep feeling Kenya. I will always love the melody and poetry with which they speak the English language. (Without thinking too much about the history or politics of it anyway...)

***

(photo: bringing in the goats for the night, Kenya 2016)

what do you do with more

Emotional jet lag is for real. I texted this to two of my Kenya-team-sisters and we commiserated about how hard it’s been to muster up the motivation to get back into our normal routines. Work feels dull, regular schedules are burdensome, and – the worst – making small talk about our trip seems impossible. “So how was it?” is a question without an easy answer.

I’ve been hard on myself about all of this, partly because it’s just made life difficult and I wish I could snap out of it and just get on with things. Instead I find myself moving around my apartment without really getting anything done and sitting in front of my work computer staring at open files, not remembering why I opened them. My journal has been mostly untouched over the past week because I can’t find words to put to anything. I need to make time to sit and stare at a wall, is how I followed up that first text to my friends. Ugh, me too, they both texted back. At least I’m not alone.

More than we ask or imagine is a phrase that, leading up to the trip, repeated as I felt prompted to pray and ask for things, and that now I use to describe the trip. I got to do things I never even thought to ask for: interview a young Maasai girl around her boma (homestead) for our documentary, and shape her story and that of another boy we’re featuring into scripts for a monologue and coach them through reading it for our audio. I looked at photos taken by students I’d met just hours before in a school in an informal settlement and felt such intense pride and honor at the opportunity to know them and watch their creativity at work. I sat at a table with my friend and our mentor who leads our partner nonprofit in Kenya and while at this moment I don’t remember her specific words, I remember what peace and power I sensed in her presence and know that I gained something from just being with her. I received a new name: Nosotwa, which in Maasai means peacemaker, and also means that a people with a strong and isolated tribal culture has welcomed this tall white girl to be part of their community. I learned a deeper love, the kind that trumps all the half-good things I was somehow able to pull off and lasts after I leave a place and a people. Yes, is all I could say in response to each of these things. This is what more feels like.

Now, afterwards, more feels like this: disorienting. The ways I learned to move in Kenya don’t fit the paths I know here. Everything is still getting re-routed. Because more than we imagine is a greater good than sometimes we’re ready for. My friend keeps telling me that all she can do in this phase is give thanks. Yes, I think, although there’s so much I don’t know where to start. So much more than I imagined…

***

(photo: writing monologue script with Benson, Kenya 2016)

back but not back yet

Back from Kenya a few days now and feeling a bit like this tree (blurry, small, off-center). Will be back with words when they come.

***

(photo: maasai mara, kenya, 2016)

literary, lately: Kenya edition

I'm using the term "literary" loosely in the title of this post. Really, it's just an excuse to share some of the things that are helping me gear up for Kenya.

Issues are addressed institutionally, programatically. People are addressed in their story. Watching Poverty, Inc. and was especially moved by the portion about a family helping orphans by helping parents who might have been forced to give up their children. Love this quote about the person to person way of addressing poverty. (Streaming on Netflix!)

The mzungu who is cringing right now, reading this, afraid to be like all these others and yet who fears it might be inevitable. That was me, reading my friend's kick-ass essay on all the shades of foreigners in east Africa.

Remembering how books are a large part of what inspired me to go in the first place.

A Kenyan fav.

A friend posted a photo on facebook from our trip last year that made me look scarily similar to white savior barbie. Imagine a long skirt, Maasai jewelry, one young girl hold each of my hands. Been thinking about how photos are often too flat to convey all of what's true (there is more to what was happening that day then getting photo opps with children), but also how to act and see in a way that embodies true partnership and love.

Edited to add: I love their reading lists. (Fitting, since reading about the founder of PIH is what made me want go to Kenya in the first place.)

Be back in a few weeks with stories from Kenya.

***
(photo: morning safari ride at Lake Nakuru, summer 2015)

how much i still have to learn

Near the end of our stay in Endoynolasho, I asked one of our translators how to say the word "beautiful" in Maasai. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it earlier, when over and over I'd searched for some way to communicate with the mothers and babies who had come to our clinics. If I had learned the Maasai word for beautiful earlier in our stay, I’d have used it many times more. It would have been circling in my head when I sat in a room full of thirteen and fourteen year old girls from the school in Endoynolasho. This was earlier in our stay, after a full morning clinic and then a round of health trainings with students and teachers. The women on our team – four of us – had decided to extend our training with one more session just for the girls. We would give them the chance to share their experiences of being girls in this community, and a chance to ask us questions. We would share our wisdom.

We gathered the girls in one of the rooms of the small clinic. The girls sat on the patient exam tables and in chairs pulled into the room. A few put an arm up on the shoulder of a girl next to her. Each wore her blue-gingham school uniform and had hair cut close to her head. The girls were shy, and, unprepared, the four of us stumbled with our questions, which were likely culturally skewed to our American understanding (or misunderstanding) of what being a girl in rural Kenya might be like. Still, we wanted to make up for an obvious lack of female leadership at their school and in their community. All their teachers are male. The government will not post a female teacher in this remote area for safety reasons. And while the local community also sponsors a few young teachers at the school - young people who had come from and still live in that same community - no female in Endoynolasho had ever continued schooling past class eight. That means no woman in the area has an education past fourteen years of age.

Eventually, a brave girl broke their silence and our awkwardness by telling us, “We need sanitary napkins.” A few more girls joined in. We pieced together the story: the school provides every girl with a package of eight pads each month. But none of the girls had received a package since the beginning of May. Now, it was nearly August. We didn't ask them what they did without the pads. I’m not sure that any of us had expected to hear such practical concerns. I nodded slowly as one of the other women promised to work with the local NGO we partnered with, who would be able to provide the girls with a regular supply of sanitary napkins.

Here is what I might have been expecting to hear from these girls: boys try to have sex with me against my will. I am worried my father will marry me off young. I want to keep going to school even though my family tells me I should marry or stay home. None of these are concerns I have had to address in my own life, and yet we – the four of us women, all of us now middle-class Americans who were either born in this country or to immigrant families who successfully settled here with reasonable ease – we all assumed these worries were tantamount to anything else in these girls' lives. Instead, the girls expressed needs that are practical, bodily, universal among women: I need something to absorb my monthly bleeding. Now, I am pricked by my ignorance and wonder at their faith in us.

After we had talked a little while longer, all of us stood on the porch of the small clinic to have our photo taken together. Now, when I look at that photo, I think of how much I still have to learn. When the translator had tried to teach me the Maasai word for beautiful, I'd botched it. A few hours later, I realized I'd been saying the wrong syllables and sounds. Unfamiliar with having the language in my own mouth, I thought I heard letters that weren't there, and made it one word when really it is two. Later, one of these young girls wrote down the words for me. And when I look at the photo, I always think of the Maasai words for beautiful: ira sidai.

just kinda hanging out

hanging out before church with the girl who wanted my sunglasses

During our 12 days in Kenya, we held only four clinic days - two in Nairobi and two in the rural area of Kajiado, what I lovingly (though maybe somewhat ignorantly?) refer to as the bush. What were we doing during all the hours in between? That's a question I'm still thinking about. Here are a few of the things we were doing: packing, planning, preparing, traveling, meeting, painting, cleaning, and celebrating (i.e. launching a bricks and mortar clinic).

The rest of the time, were just kinda hanging out. There was that Sunday in the bush, right in the middle of our time there, when we lingered over breakfast and then drove a short distance to have church under a tree. Some sat on the few backless benches staked into the ground, with woven reeds that served as seats. The rest of us sat on old plastic chairs that the kids had run to their homes to find and bring for their guests. We were the first to arrive for the service, along with our young preacher. While we waited for the handful of other church goers to arrive, we sat and played with the kids. One particularly bold girl took my sunglasses, which fell lopsided on her small face.

Soon the service started. There was singing and dancing and clapping, then testimonies and a short sermon. Afterward, we all walked to a nearby boma (a homestead where an extended family lives among a few small huts). The bold girl - who still wore my sunglasses - and another who had brought me a chair earlier grabbed either one of my hands. Children gathered around most of my other teammates, too, eager to connect with us in some way. After we visited at the boma, a whole group of us sat just outside by a tree where a baby goat had just been born. Some sat on rocks; I sat on a large tin can someone brought for me. The baby goat practiced using her legs and finding her mother's milk. We waited for our van to come to take us back to where we were staying, which it did about thirty minutes later.

That afternoon, we ate lunch together, a few talked about a hike. I took a short nap on a patient exam table, then journaled. Later, our team played uno and ate pringles we'd brought from home while we waited for dinner.

I could tell you about other times when we hung out: that time I stood by Nathan, a teacher, while he taught me to make ugali (a much loved Kenyan dish); that time a few of us joined the students for a game of soccer; that time I sat by the breakfast fire drinking my coffee while Tonny told me about his grandfather's travels around Africa as a freedom fighter. Being with our friends and partners in the bush was easy and delightful. They hosted us generously and welcomed us completely and forgave our ignorance (probably more than I even know). They helped us to be ones who didn't just hand out medication to people in their community, but grew to know it, even if just a bit, in the short time we were there.

That is what sticks out to me now. When I think about the ratio of medical-to-other time we spent in Kenya this year, it can feel like maybe we were inefficient. But what I know now is that hanging out was likely the most efficient use of that time. Hanging out with people in a place helps you to put roots down. It builds an affection that requires slow time and shared experience, a knowing that a task-only mentality skims over. I would argue that this hanging out time was the foundation of everything else we did. It helped us to see our patients as our friends, it helped us to ask deeper questions, and it gave us the compassion and joy to serve when we grew tired or weary. It is also what makes us want to keep going back.

So what did we do the rest of the time? We laughed and befriended and asked and understood. We grew in love.

holding pictures in my heart

Our second night in Kenya, I didn't sleep. I knew this might happen. In my experience, the first night after more than 24 hours of travel, exhaustion covers me like a lullaby and heavy blanket. Then the second night my body resists the cues of dark and night, insists on its own internal timekeeping.

I slept (or tried to) in a tent with the seven others on my team, pitched in the middle of nowhere, Kenya, near the Tanzanian border. We'd staked it in a clearing of dirt next to the new clinic my friend's nonprofit had helped to build, a small three-room building a few hundred yards from the teacher's quarters, and then the small four-room school a few hundred more yards off in the distance. The ground surrounding the clinic had been mostly cleared of rocks and stones surrounding the clinic, though some stubborn rocks remained. By the light of our headlamps, we carefully felt around for a space that was flat and clear so that our tent wouldn't get a hole, and we wouldn't get bruised during the night.

First, it was my bladder that kept me awake, though I had peed just before settling into the tent for the night. I woke my friend, and with headlamps and baby wipes in hand, we unzipped the tent door and stumbled just far enough from the tent to not disturb the others. Back in the tent, we tried to not trip over the strangling limbs and curled bodies of those still sleeping. I settled into my space in the corner and hoped I'd still get a few hours of sleep. But then the wind started whipping the side of the tent, and some strange alarm that only activates my imagination when I am overtired in the middle of the night told me that an animal might be making the tapping noises I knew I kept hearing. Just as I drifted off to sleep, another whip or tap woke me again and reminded me of my irrational fear. I started to give up on sleep.

I turned from my side to lie on my back. I looked up through the mesh ceiling of the tent and, without my glasses, saw what seemed to be bright blurry dots poking through the night sky. I found my glasses next to me and put them on. The sky was more full than I'd ever seen it before. It burst with stars. And I did what I had been doing for so much of the trip so far - I reached for my phone to take a photo. But the light of the stars was too far away for a camera phone, and the image came up all dark.

I put my phone down and just kept looking. My teammates snored and shifted in their sleeping bags. They all slept while I tried my hardest to imprint this view of the sky in my mind. How would I describe what it was like to wake up to this incredible sky to my friends at home without a photo to show them? And how would I remember it for myself?

The truth is that even our photos are too flat, too still to capture the truest things about being in Kenya. I worry that the same is true of my words. How do I say what what it's like to look out the van window and see the red red dirt, the green grass and fruit trees, the women selling bananas, the same huge sky that somehow, amazingly, seems to stretch even further here? How do I tell you what it feels like to be welcomed so warmly by people who are so different, who laugh when we say their words and give us goats when we care for their children and mothers and sisters? How do I make you understand how full a heart feels, and yet how it wants to hold so much more, after being in this place? I try to hold these pictures in my heart and describe them to you the best I can.

what makes the food so good

Albert's goat and potato stew

At a party last night, I told an acquaintance about my travels to Kenya. Knowing some Kenyans here in California, this new friend related to me what he knows about Kenya culture: the generosity and friendship, and the differences in spirituality. And then he says to me, "And Kenyan food is really good."

I didn't respond right away because it surprised me what thoughts came to mind. They were mostly disagreements, something like, "well, it's not spicy enough for me," or, "we ate a lot of rice" or "what I really wanted was to find some good Indian food when we were in the country" (there is a lot of good Indian food there). I asked him to elaborate on what kinds of Kenyan food he's had and we talked a little more about it, then moved on to some other topic.

Now, it's not that I don't like Kenyan food. I eat when I'm there - a lot. There is this dish called mukimo that is a mash of potatoes and spinach and corn in one dish, which for me is a combination I would imagine might be in heaven. For vegetables, there is lots of sauteed cabbage and carrots, and also some really tasty sauteed greens. My favorite are chips (french fries), which are so much better than here in America, I'm guessing because their potatoes are different and the oil they use is probably tastier, though possibly not that great for me. Still, I indulge freely. And then of course there's nyama choma, or roasted meat, most often goat in the places where we stay. It's especially good with ugali, which is a bland corn dish (similar to polenta, but less rich) because it's the perfect simple, starchy food to eat along with the fatty goat.

And this brings me to my point, because I've eaten nyama choma in a restaurant in Nairobi, and then I've eaten it around a fire pit where it was roasted by generous friends hosting us and hands down it is tastier around the fire pit. That's the whole point for me - it's about the food but it's also about the people preparing it for us and enjoying it with us. Albert is our cook (among many other roles he plays) when we stay out in the bush. There, the accommodations are a lot like camping. We pitch a tent, and bring bottled water from the city (there is no running water), and meals are cooked over a fire. The sun sets each evening around 7pm, leaving us to eat in the dark with the fire and headlights from our van as our light. Dinner in the cool, dark evening around a fire is our time to shrug off our long, full, hot days. We tell stories and laugh. Or, sometimes I find a quite space to myself and watch the fire as Albert cooks. The fire crackles and Albert moves quickly between pots and a bucket of water, and every once in a while we catch the smell of our food cooking.

We know dinner is close when someone comes around with a pitcher of water and a shallow bucket holding a bar of soap. One by one, we rub the soap between our hands as our host pours water and the dirt from the day washes away. Then come the bowls and spoons and the invitation to scoop rice and whatever it is that we're eating: lentils, cabbage, meat stew.

Albert is hesitant to give us his recipes, and maybe it's because he knows. He is clued into the fact that, though his food is very good, what makes it special is less about the ingredients he puts into it and more about the way that sharing a meal with people you love, in a place you love, is, when you get down to it, what makes that food so darn good.

traveling home through ten time zones

I am back from my second trip to Kenya. In the past twenty-four hours, I have done mostly basic things: sleep, laundry, mail sorting, unpacking, a to-do list, a few groceries to eat. I have also texted my teammates, sat and stared out a window, cried, and made lots of coffee.

As I walk around in a haze of jet lag and memories, I keep thinking about all of the ways that the physical adjustment of returning from a big trip mirrors what happens internally. The travel required to get home from being half way around the world - moving through ten time zones with two long flights, a layover, drives to and from the airport, not to mention checking bags and going through security and customs and... - all of this can feel cumbersome and disorienting, but I'm glad for it. With the long travel and accompanying jet lag, I remember that I have just lived in a space a world away from my every day life, and that to incorporate everything I saw and felt and desired will take time and intention. It is unpacking and putting all my things back in their places, it is telling my body to stay awake when I'd rather be sleeping, it is allowing myself a day off before returning to work. It is sharing photos of my trip and digging up words to accompany them. It is letting the stories start to take shape so that they can be shared. And it is knowing that what has just taken place these last two weeks isn't only in the past, it is also something I now carry with me, a precious souvenir that beckons the people I laughed and cried and prayed and walked with to be with me always.

portraits from Kenya, part 1

I have been wanting to share these portraits I took in Kenya. I took them on our second day in rural Maasailand. We had driven a few miles from Endonyolasho to a homestead, one of the many that suddenly appeared as a collection of sticks and mud our of the flat dusty horizon. People from the homestead came to where we parked the van under the tree and brought their children for vaccinations. One of the girls saw that I was taking photos of the children to distract them from the needle aimed at their arms. In her quiet accented English, she asked me to take photos of her and her friends. I was happy to oblige. 

The shadow from the acacia tree covers parts of their faces. At first I was disappointed by this, but now realize that the shadows belong there. I think they symbolize a kind of hiddeness of this isolated tribe of people. There are parts of them we will never be able to see fully, and perhaps that's how it should be. 

once you go you can't forget

children at Endonyolasho clinic holding up their Alabaster bracelets

In Kenya, we saw a lot of things that had been forgotten. On our drive back to Nairobi, an abandoned tour bus sat crookedly in dried up tire tracks, evidence of a struggle to get it out what had once been mud. In Shompole, the dispensary showed signs of one-time investments that had been neglected: a broken refrigerator, an empty pharmacy shelf, a falling-in ceiling which bats flew out of at night.

It wasn't surprising to us, the things we saw, because Alabaster Mobile Clinic's mission takes its teams to those places where there has been forgetting. Shannon's vision for starting the nonprofit started nearly ten years ago with a conviction to not forget. She had lived in one of Kenya's slum communities for six weeks -- a short stint by some standards, but a lifetime when you're plunged so totally in a completely different way of life. She lived in a flimsy box no smaller than most American walk-in closets, walked the mud paths filled with garbage to get her water to bathe in, taught the women she lived around how to make spaghetti. Her "work" involved gathering stories and photos of women who made bracelets that would be sold in America. The story would be told on a tag attached to the bracelet to connect rich Americans to their Kenyan neighbors and, hopefully, cultivate not forgetting.

That kind of experience has a way of changing you. It gets into your bones. Shannon could not forget, and she didn't -- through nursing school, first her second bachelor's degree, then a master's program to become a nurse practitioner. Seven years later, she still remembered and started Alabaster Mobile Clinic. Its first site would be Kenya.

Shannon planned, raised money, found connections in Kenya, and went. Her first team included herself, two nurses and a doctor, along with two friends who took photos and video. That first trip and the next one a year later were so much about learning. She had never been to the rural Maasai communities that Girl Child Network (GCN), one of her nonprofit partners in Kenya, took her to. That first year, they slept under a mosquito net in the simple classroom of the school. Their only light in the deep darkness of night in Kenya's expanse of savannah were their headlamps -- to change at night, to see if bugs had gotten into their things, to find a place to pee. In its three trips, Alabaster teams stay in this area, in two different locations, for five days to run clinics and learn about people's needs. Few other medical groups have gone to this area to provide medical care for the Maasai. To GCN's knowledge, no others have stayed a night.

The thing that Shannon and her teams of medical professionals will tell you is that not forgetting is actually filled with much joy. Hearing about the conditions in some places in Kenya might make some people think the trip is just gritting your teeth and bearing it. But that's not the full picture because there are all those people there, and the things they are doing that you really can't forget. Like the school in Kangemi slum that started a nutrition program. At the side of the courtyard, beside the classroom buildings of blue corrugated metal painted with lessons (a map of Kenya, the digestive system, the alphabet) is a small garden of big black containers growing kale and spinach. And we met Celline, the young woman living in Shompole who is studying to be a nurse. She helped during our clinic and told us that she learned about how to assess patients better that day. And I really can't forget Michelle, the 10-year-old daughter of the health worker in Shompole who giggled a lot, wore my headlamp until the moment we left, and told us that she wants to be an neurologist.

That's the thing, once you go you just can't forget.

cultural learning in Kenya: misunderstanding the advances of a moran

Taking photos with morans at Lake Natron

“Oh my gosh. We are going to die.”

Albert leaned close to me and took my arm as he said this. He motioned to the two young men just ahead. I looked and saw the lean Maasai, dressed more elaborately than the Maasai we’d met at clinic the day before. The young men both carried long spears, upright, as if using them for walking sticks. Both had longer hair that was braided and streaked with dark red dye. They were decorated with white beaded necklaces and arm cuffs, and wore just a short cloth skirt.

Our team was hiking along Lake Natron, which was really more like a few large puddles in a barren expanse of dirt and rocks. Foothills rose to one side, dotted by sparse bushes that flowered pink buds. The sun was strong and persistent. The thin clouds drifting through the sky gave us relief for a few minutes, then moved on.

“They are morans,” Albert explained, still whispering in a dramatic tone. I knew only that this meant they were warriors, that they had killed lions to earn the name. It turns out that young Maasai men live apart from their community, isolated in the bush to learn to be men. During this rite of passage, they are considered morans.

Albert ran ahead to talk to them on behalf of our group, explaining to us that we would need permission before we took any photos. A few seconds after Albert started talking with them, I understood that he had hadn’t been entirely serious before.

In fact, a few minutes later, Albert was posing with one of their spears and asking us to take his photo with the morans. Someone suggested that our whole team get in the photos. I walked toward the morans, and was invited to stand in between them. They both put their arms firmly around me, then started to pinch at the softness around my waist and hips, laughing to each other.

I couldn’t be sure what the morans were saying, or what it was about my waist that made them squeeze and laugh, but it was the first time since being in Kenya that I had felt truly uncomfortable. I started to feel subconscious about my size and shape, a feeling that's familiar in America, but that I didn't think I'd have to deal with in Kenya.

“Please stop,” I said, as I elbowed their hands from my waist and took a step back. None of the rest of my team had noticed the interaction; they all stood posing for the photo or chatting excitedly to each other. I backed away quietly, eager to leave and walk back to our van.

After a few more photos, our team was ready to leave. As we started to walk away, Albert motioned to me to stop. “They want you to stay and be their wife,” he said so everyone could hear, his eyes as big and his voice as dramatic when we had approached morans. Our whole group turned to look at me and started whooping and laughing. I felt myself blush, then joined in the laughter.

As we walked on, I told Shannon the rest of the story, how I they had made me feel uncomfortable and I had told them to take their hands off me. She laughed again.

“You just told off a moran,” she said with pride and amusement.