Sweet Rice and a Sleepless Night

Last night we had a small party at my house. Emily and I had been planning for a long time to make sweet rice for my family because it's kind of similar to bouillie, and we thought it would be fun. We finally decided to do it last night because Emily is leaving in a few days. We got all the stuff together, and we invited lots of people. It ended up being Sarah, Jason, Stefan, some of the kids from Jason's family, my whole family, Emily, me, and two random visitors who are staying at my house right now.

I never realized how much work it takes to make rice here. Before Emily came over, I started sifting the rice and picking out all the bad pieces and the little rocks. It took a long, long time, and thankfully, Jason and Emily came and helped wash the rice after it had been sorted. Then we put it on the charcoal fire to boil.

While the rice was cooking, a bunch of the guys played Uno, and Sarah, Emily, and I played with puzzles with the kids. It was really fun just to play and talk with all the kids. Emily kept talking to my kids in Nangjere (which is funny because they don't really speak a lot of Nangjere) and saying, "Do you want problems? Come here, fight me." Her family has taught her how to say some really funny things...

Then Emily and I seasoned the rice, and dished it out. There was a lot of rice. We served up one huge bowl to the six guys, one bowl to Sarah and the little kids, and then Emily, Berthe, Ruth, Pidi (13 year old from Jason's family), and I shared a bowl. Every once in a while, Emily an I would start talking in English, and Berthe would say, "Talk in French. We don't understand English, and we want to know what you're saying." So we would translate into French, which turned out to be funny because once we had been plotting against Berthe in English...

After rice, most of the visitors left, but Sarah and the kids from Jason's family stayed because we had invited them to spend the night. The kids continued working on the puzzles, while Sarah and I talked to Pierre. First I asked him how he became Adventist, which was a fun story to listen to. Then Sarah asked him to tell how he had met Hawaa, and how he decided that she was the one he wanted to marry. This proved to be a much less interesting story than it might sound because Pierre would just laugh and tell us little things like, "Well, we grew up together," and, "She just interested me." It was still fun nonetheless, and just being together socializing was great.

Finally, we all decided that it was far too late (9 pm) and we all needed to go to bed. Bruno and the two visitors slept outside Bruno's hut on a mat, Pierre went into his hut, and then Sarah, all the kids, and I put out a mat under our hangar. It was more than a little crazy. There were nine of us all on one big mat. Sarah and Dorcas shared a blanket on one end, Anne, Esther, and Romerick (10 year old from Jason's family) shared a blanket all squeezed in the middle, and finally, Ruth, Pidi, Berthe, and I with a blanket over our feet on the other end.

It was really fun to lay out on the mat with all of them and look at the stars. At first there was a lot of giggling and squirming, but everyone finally settled down and drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately, I didn't really sleep much. I was on the very end sharing a pillow with Berthe, and she kept on rolling over and pushing me off the edge of the mat into the dirt. I was kind of uncomfortable and woke up every hour or so because my neck was stiff or my arm was numb again. Finally, at 4 am, I woke up cold and realized that if I was going to get any good sleep at all I would need to go back to my hut. So I did. Of course, at 4 am, this decision was a little late because there were only 2 more hours left for me to sleep.

In any case, it was an awesome night, and I hope that there are many more nights under the stars on mats with my family. And I hope that they pass a little less crowded and more comfortably.

Homesick

It seems ridiculous to still be homesick after 6 months of being here, and maybe even more now than I was when I first came. But I am.

This morning I was cleaning up in my hut, and I found some letters and pictures that my Mom had sent me a while back. So of course, I started looking through them. I came to a picture of my brother, Stephen, sitting on the couch with our sister-in-law, and I don't know why but it triggered something in me, and I just wanted to go home. It made me just want to be able to sit on the couch at home with my family so close that I could touch them.

After cleaning my hut, I took some time out to talk to God. As I was telling him how I felt, how much I just want to be at home, face to face with my family, I had another of those deep impressions that this is how my God feels too. It just hit me, that God's heart aches like that to be face to face with us, for us to be so close He could reach out and touch us.

Yet, as homesick as I am for home, I think being here has also made me more homesick for heaven than I ever have been before. And I think that in a way, God is homesick too.

Philippians 3:20

Odd Night

This whole month I've been scheduled on night shifts with almost the same people-- Enock, Hortance, and the third person changes from night to night. Last night I was working the night shift, and Hortance came up to me and asked, "Kristin, where are you going to sleep tonight." I was a little confused, but I told her, that I would sleep where I always sleep-- on the floor in the first partitioned area in Urgence.

"Ok, we'll sleep together tonight; after the midnight care, we'll put down the blanket and sleep some," she informed me.

Now, there's something that I should explain about Chadian culture; in their eyes, it's not good to be alone. Period. It's considered one of the most awful things if you eat alone, and heaven forbid that anyone should have to sleep alone either.

Midnight came, I did the meds and vital signs, and then Hortance and I went to put down the blanket and pillow that I had brought. As we walked to the partitioned area that I usually sleep in, I noticed that Felix, one of our janitors, was sleeping on the table/bed with IV fluids running.

"Hortance, we can't sleep here. Felix is here," I protested.

"No, it's nothing. We'll sleep here."

So, we did. We laid down on the floor and shared a blanket and pillow while Felix slept next to us on top of the table/bed. As I laid there, I felt like I was in a strange dream, and it didn't help things that Felix had some odd, battery-operated flashlight that was blinking different colors through the night. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of sleep, especially because it was super hot inside. So when I woke up to check on the patients, I decided to go sleep outside on the cement benches in front of Urgence.

At one point, a patient's family member came outside and woke me up to ask me a question. I woke up so dazed; it was pitch black (there were no stars, no moon), my glasses were off, so I was blind anyway, and I couldn't figure out where I was or what direction I should go to get back in to the hospital. I asked him to repeat his question as I put on my glasses and looked at the time. 3 AM. He repeated his question, but I still didn't understand, so I thought it just better to put on my shoes and find the door. I stood up and nearly fell over. Right, Quinine, still dizzy. I zig-zagged through the hallway, despite my efforts to walk a straight line, and when I got to the patient's bed, I asked what the problem was again. I'm sure I was doing much to boost the confidence of the locals in the hospital staff's competency.

I fixed the problem and went back outside to sleep until the morning medications. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, and I was glad to see the light of day again. But what an odd night.

Setting up Shop

Ansley had a brilliant idea a little while back. She thought it would be fun to gather a bunch of random stuff, take it to the market, and sell it all for practically nothing. It would be a true African experience, setting up shop like the African women do.

Today was the day. We all put on our African dresses and filled grass baskets and a market bag with our goodies. Things ranged from little toys for kids to toothbrushes and clothes.

We began our walk to the market with Jolie, Emily's African mother. I'm sure it was a sight: three white girls in African dresses with bags and baskets on their heads. Yes, we carried our things to sell on our heads, and did a surprisingly good job of it too. We met so many people on the way asking us in Nangjere where we were going and what we were going to do. Laughter erupted from all present, including the Nassara, when we would tell them back in Nangjere, "We're going to the market. We're going to sell things."

It was such a fun trip to the market, and we took some good pictures. Jolie just laughed and laughed at us as we were going along, trying desperately to balance the bags and baskets on our heads. Once we got to the market, we set the things down next door to Jolie's little fabric shop. By this time, we had drawn quite a crowd, and I'm not sure how it happened, but as soon as Ansley sat down on the ground with her basket of things, the crowd engulfed her as people started grabbing things out of the basket to look at and ask how much it cost. I'm serious, Ansley practically disappeared in the swarm of people. It didn't take long for us to realize that maybe setting up shop was not such a good idea.

We were losing track of who had grabbed what, and the people were just smothering us. So we decided to pack up. We tried talking to them and asking them to back away and come one at a time, but it just wasn't working. We took our stuff and left, rather disappointed that we wouldn't be able to really get the full African experience of selling at the market. But once we got back to the hospital we just set up all of our things on our back porch and sold to a few of the hospital employees and people who live nearby. It was still kind of fun, still very African-- "bargaining" prices and people asking for a gift after they had bought something (that's customary; if you buy from someone, you ask them for a "cadeaux" or gift because you've just done good business with them, and usually they'll throw in something small). All in all, it was a success, but I still wish that we could have done it at the market.

Just a funny story

So, it finally happened. I broke the wall.

I've climbed the wall to our house so many times now that I've lost count. It's actually become somewhat of a tradition. But one night this week, I went to climb over, and one of the top bricks didn't hold when I tried to pull myself up. Luckily, I missed hitting my foot with the falling brick. I felt a little awful about it, but my family wasn't too worried about it the next day when I told them what happened. In fact, they just laughed at me.

Then I asked them how to get in the back way (why it didn't occur to me to ask this ages ago I don't know); there's a place in the back of our yard where random animals, mostly pigs and chickens, run through at will. So the girls took me around the outside wall and showed me the back way in, which is a little bit of a tight squeeze and comes out into the bathroom or shower. Unfortunately, there's a very, very low-branched mango tree guarding the back way. As I ducked under it, almost on all fours crawling on the ground, I felt something scrape my back. Ow. It would be my clumsy luck that there would be a broken branch jutting out.

After showing me the back way, Berthe started talking to me and said, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. A long time ago Pierre said that since you're usually the last one in, we'll leave the door open and you can just lock it behind you." Again, why this solution didn't come up a couple of months ago, I'm not sure. Whatever... TIA.

So thus ends my criminal days of breaking into our house instead of entering through the gate.