There’s been some upheaval in my heart, which is my excuse for not writing. I made some plans in America, but after a month in Sudan I chose to set them on fire. In the recesses of my palms they burned slowly. I’ve never seen anything take so long to turn to cinders. After the fire itself died the residue floated up into the air and blended with the ashes of the fields. Eventually I couldn’t distinguish the remnants of my thoughts from the remnants of the flesh of the land.
This was meant to be.
This is the dry season. This is the time to watch fires skinning the horizons at night and to feel, in the observation of the trajectory of flames, a bleak kinship to the man in The Road, even though he’s a work of fiction. I feel an affinity for the character because the pain by which he was formed is authentic. It’s as real as it gets.
II.
You wake up in this season and find ashes have come to rest on your sandals, your books, your shaving kit, and the clothes you’re wearing today. The wind brings these unwanted decorations in through the windows. The wind brings in all sorts of things that fly and drift in the dark. In the afternoon you find a small bat sleeping upside down in one of the upper corners of your room. You talk to him. You tell him he doesn’t have to leave, at least not right now. You tell him you know it’s still daytime and you tell him you know the sunlight would probably make him go insane. The bat opens his mouth and seems to tremble. From his tightly shut eyelids to his rodent lips to his folded wings – the passage of a shudder.
You tell him not to cry. Just don’t start crying. Seriously. Don’t get hysterical. I mean you don’t have to leave right now. Later. When it’s night time. Then you can go. If you start crying right now I might start crying, too. Just find someplace else to sleep tonight, OK? You can’t sleep here anymore. You can’t. I won’t let you. So listen to me, because I don’t want to have to kill you. The bat closes it’s mouth and adjusts it’s tiny feet and seems to understand and accept your heartfelt advice.
III.
I’m not saying things are bad. It isn’t the apocalypse after all! So what if I’m talking to a bat. People talk to their dogs all the time; I talk to a bat. Perfectly normal everyday stuff.
There’s always enough food on the table and there’s a wealth of joy and singing within the church. There are sky blue tiles covering the hallways of the children’s new home and soon there will be glass windows filling up the empty spaces in the walls. There are five new sisters and one new brother and each one of them is a blessing. In less than a week I found myself forgetting that they hadn’t always been here, that we hadn’t always had a Sharon, a Judith, a Dorothy, a Joyce, a Michelle, and a Drichi Emmanuel.
IV.
Most of the new kids have thick eyebrows that express both their shared heritage and their shared loss. The person who gave them those eyebrows isn’t alive anymore.
Apart from the concise and lovely and tragic narrative written in their brows, each brother and each sister has a smile like a perfect couplet. When they stand together you might see their mouths – one after the other or in unison – alight with happiness. A series of verses on their faces, each one similar, yet distinct. The way it’s meant to be. A way a family remains a family even in the wake of death.
I’m sorry I’m so late in posting these photos of Christmas. I hope they make you terribly jealous. I hope they make you want to spend some time in Sudan.
I’ve been back in the States since the first of the month. I went into hibernate mode in Kansas for about two weeks (morning coffee in the afternoon, happy/sad ventures into the land of junk food, limitless, brain-liquefying access to tv and internet, penetrating questions of self-worth and existence resulting from a casual investigation into the lives of my parents’ numerous pets), then I emerged from my zombirific condition and traveled to Colorado to be a part of Seth and Sarah’s wedding and to see my sister’s new baby, Mason Patrick Black. The Day of the Knot was extraordinary for at least five reasons: 1) Seth and Sarah’s handwritten vows brought me – and many others in attendance – to tears; 2) The weather could legitimately be described as heaven sent; 3) At the reception I got the chance to catch up with a handful of our most esteemed visitors to Sudan while enjoying a plate of outrageously tasty Indian food; 4) Near dusk two of the guests stood up in the pavilion and executed an electrifying rendition of “Business Time” by Flight of the Conchords; and 5) I succeeded in not getting drunk. However, the real revelation in Colorado wasn’t the wedding, the mountain vistas that still captivate prairie folk like me, or the medical marijuana (not that I tried it or anything). The real eye-opener is Mason Patrick Black. He’s my new BFF and I told him so and he replied, “Gwaagoo!” after which I’m almost certain he farted.
I haven’t experienced a full-on American Autumn since I lived in the Delta. I saw pieces of it in and around Portland, Maine back in ‘07 before hastening my return to Africa, but nothing quite as uncut and cinematic as this. Showers for days then sudden and glorious sunshine, the trees all dolled up in their changing fashions and the perfume of wet and burning leaves. The boastful and gaudy approach of Halloween, the quickening night, the panoply of heartfelt sentiments and images that aren’t any more mature than the ones I might have composed for a high school writing assignment. A return to innocence perhaps? No, innocence will have to wait till death. Coming home tends to necessitate a kind of capitulation to the mercurial nature of reality, which (surprise, surprise) doesn’t remain static while I’m off in another reality. We’re all part of the same fabric, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way in Sudan. It feels like the 18th century with a few anachronisms peppering the scene – radios, cell phones, motorbikes, and toothpaste. Or it feels like a ruined future. Interstates and Wal-Marts got vaporized long ago and replaced by goat paths and mud huts. Luckily, you can still get your hands on some tech-relics from that mythical age of monstrous consumerism. Not everything was destroyed. You can SMS your friends, so what else do you really need, right?
Arrival in the land of the free – the Best of the Best in Authentic Reality since 1776 – usually demands I empty my pockets of any presuppositions, then submit to the process of accepting the strangely everyday things along with the transformed and broken ones. And this time I’ve found there’s more damage at home than ever before. Collapsing marriages within my family, an early and bittersweet Halloween party for my youngest cousins, and no idea when I’ll see them again. No ideas at all from the guy who doesn’t live here anymore.
I’ll be around until the end of November. There’s extensive and exciting paperwork before me (summaries and reports that I couldn’t pull together in the midst of my sixty children) and there’s a grad school application waiting to be written.
Contact me if you get the chance. I’d loved to hear from you (and I might even send you an immediate, unsudanerated reply)!
Matt Kynes, who spent a delightful three months with us last year, sent me a recent report from the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). Lise Grande, whose title rivals the Mississippi River in length, authored the report and describes the situation in the South as a “humanitarian perfect storm” that has developed as a result of three main factors: 1) spiraling inter-tribal conflict, 2) a massive food gap and 3) the budget crisis. He also has some frightening numbers to share:
o More than 90% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day;
o 1.2 million people in Southern Sudan are food deficit and will need assistance during this year;
o One out of seven women who become pregnant will probably die of pregnancy related complications;
o There are only 10 certified midwives in all of Southern Sudan;
o 92% of women in Southern Sudan cannot read and write;
o Only 27% of girls are in school and there are 1,000 primary school pupils per
teacher;
o 97% of the population has no access to sanitation;
o Polio, once eradicated from Southern Sudan has reemerged;
o Some of the deadliest diseases in the world are prevalent in Southern Sudan,
including Cholera, Meningitis, Rift Valley Fever, Ebola, Haemorraghic Fever and Guinea Worm; Polio has re-emerged.
o And perhaps the two statistics that capture it all: a 15 year old girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing school;
o The maternal mortality rate is the highest in the world and the child immunization rate the lowest.
I’ve been trying to create a link to the full report, but Firefox keeps crashing and I really don’t know why it’s so hellbent on wasting half my day. So, in light of the fact that I have a few other things to accomplish this afternoon, you can e-mail me if you’re interested in the report and I’ll forward it to you.
The work shut down for a spell, but it’s about to restart. Two truckloads of materials arrived late last month. Santos spent three weeks in Kampala gathering the stuff and processing the necessary documents to get it out of Uganda and into Sudan. At the tale end of his trip he was robbed at gunpoint and we lost a sizable (but not crippling) amount of cash. He was heartbroken and saw the incident as partly his fault. I told him we don’t blame him for anything. The devil has been running up and down for the past several years, endeavoring to prevent the home from being built, and yet, time and time again, he stands back from his toil, horror-struck and scorched by our relentless failure to give up. The Lord’s work will go on and we’re beginning to believe that the kids will receive the gift of the new home by the 25th of December. You can pray with us that this will come to pass.
As one group of missionaries (Emily, Adella and Christian) were preparing to head back to the States, another team arrived. Murielle along with Sarah, Ini, Alie and Drew devised a completely insane two week love festival. There was one sunset, early in their stay, in which love abounded so abundantly that I thought everybody might just start throwing up from the pure, unadulterated something or other that was going on. There was hugging and laughter, feats and signs of love. Children spun and lifted and turned upside down until they were happily worn-out, but wanting more. The chronically delightful sky falling all over itself in reckless violets and giddy yellows. A guitar being strummed by the nimble fingers of a kid called Tombe Justin Victory. Inappropriately loud choruses. Restless feet. Off the cuff dance numbers. Reason after reason to be alive.
Our extended family arrived from Nigeriorado (Nigeria-Ohio-Colorado) and this was their first Saturday in Nimule. Members of the church brought their best dishes for a late lunch and we all got fattened up before the big welcoming ceremony that involved gifts and gospel songs, a performance by Mandela’s alter ego Lucky Boy, and a decent amount of dancing in the name of the Lord. Upon exiting the church each and every one of us was pleased to discover a lovely conspiracy of favorable conditions, even if we weren’t consciously aware of all that went into its making: a mildly flirtatious breeze, a setting sun hinting at the wine and plum undertones in the children’s skin, a spirit yearning for us to manifest on earth the untamed affection it experiences with the Father and the Son.
Murielle and I smiled at each other and laughed; we were both being embraced by several kids at once. I think she called it a love fest. I called it an outbreak of love. We were infected. We were very, very sick.
I feel I owe you an apology. I haven’t written anything in months and my silence is a great source – a Parisian fountain in fact – of personal guilt. I know I ought to be telling you about my life, but my life seems to constantly be getting in the way of the telling. I’ve come to realize that one person isn’t capable of managing so many accounts (a school, a children’s home, a construction project), nor caring for so many children (just shy of sixty now). I don’t mean to suggest that I’m completely alone in my ministry. God knows I’m not flying solo. However, the everyday operations – the immediate responsibilities – rest on my relatively thin shoulders.
I’ve come to discover that one person in charge of so much will burn out and he’ll break his own heart and every once in a while he’ll allow himself to fall into a dreadfully precarious romance, an ill-advised invention that will lumber to its end in two months or less. Rapid obsolescence, dismal phone calls and disconnections, trembling circuits of regret that must be cut or hidden. He’ll try to remain cool. He’ll try to preserve his peace of mind…
He knows he needs to receive as much as he gives, but he forgets that Jesus provides more than he could ever conceive of or contain within himself. He forgets that the Lord of Lords has made an open invitation to his table, and his table can be set anywhere and at anytime. He has to write down the instances where God shows up, because otherwise he’ll disremember. He’ll quietly go about erasing the facts.
Joseph was discharged from the hospital in early July and now he’s living with his sister’s family. His health is far from perfect and his living conditions are far from ideal, but he has a home. The goodness in having a safe place to rest is immeasurable, and he has this comfort (even though he lacks so much else).
Emily, Adella, and Christian spent two and half months with us and I’ve not written a one word about them, and yet they were a great blessing to the kids and to me. I’m ashamed at this meager praise, but I know they don’t need it. They didn’t spend the summer in Nimule in order to receive a flowery tribute from me. They spent it in the grip of a living God, serving his people and nurturing his earth. (Besides teaching at the local schools and hanging out with our kids, they reforested half of South Sudan.)
One of our girls – a choir leader with a voice as clear and incandescent as the stars above town – was nearly deceived by a married man in his twenties. We put an end to the liaison before it became life-altering, and since then we’ve been working out what forgiveness looks like. On a teary Monday night, we forgave her as a family, and I believe we’ve been strengthened by our head-on collision with darkness and our subsequent encounter with a bountiful and fiery grace.
There’s a big red roof on the children’s house now and it’s August and it’s been four years since we started this gig. Watching the roof finally take shape was like viewing live footage of a dream. It was happening in real time, but it didn’t seem real at all. I sometimes find myself just staring at the house. Often at dusk after I’ve turned on the generator, I’ll stand there in the slow loss of light and I’ll take in this massive building, from the verandas to the eaves. I think about how many people have played a part in its rising. I think about Jason and Robert and that easy camaraderie we felt in the first year. If they were standing here now, what would they say? They probably wouldn’t say anything; we’d gaze at the work and wonder about the lives that will be lived out inside of it, all the joy and all the sorrow of growing up, all the possibilities. We’d be at a loss for words, which is the finest sort of failure that anyone can ever hope to achieve.
You touch the boy’s face to try to get his attention. He presses his temple into your palm and he looks up and he flashes a smile. This is the closest thing to a hello that he’s given you since you arrived in the TB ward fifteen minutes ago. Your teenage daughters laugh and say his name. He doesn’t look over your shoulder at them. He’s almost looking at you, almost looking at death, sitting patiently in a corner of the long rectangular room.
His smile is as fragile as a first poem and you’re afraid it might disappear. He’s still very far away, his eyes focusing and blurring. The surface of a lake that calms down for a moment, then shimmers and stirs with the wind. So you say his name over and over. And you caress his face and tickle his ears and tell him to eat the food that’s been cradled in his fingers for over ten minutes. He’s not eating these days and he’s not talking. You’ve been away for two weeks and in that time he’s grown imaginably thin.
In high school a student teacher once told you not to compare anything with the victims of the holocaust, the skeletal black and white bodies in history books. It was such a singularly horrific event that the people who suffered and died cannot be paraded out in the present for a mere simile or metaphor. All these years later you still feel the righteous heat in the teacher’s sentiment, and you feel you ought to find another, more politically correct comparison. But there are none.
You met Opoka Joseph about a month ago. Some missionaries from across town asked you to go and see him at the hospital, and you said you would. You ran into the two Americans on the dusty highway that hollers through town. It was Mandela Day, and the namesake of this particular 24 hour period was walking beside you with a camera strapped around his neck. The day had nothing do to with the former South African president. It was all about Mandela Joseph, the Houdini of Cornerstone, always disappearing and making you hold your breath for days (or weeks). He was newly arrived after a long absence from home, and you wanted to express to him how much you loved him so you were taking him out to lunch at one of Nimule’s finer dining establishments. You told the missionaries that it would be easy to remember the name of the sick boy in the hospital, because your kid – this cameraman here with the big grin – happens to be graced with the same name.
You’ve noticed these repetitions in your life before and they’ve always meant something, or you believed they must mean something but you weren’t able to put the significances into words…
A week passed and you caught wind of the missionaries departure for the States. Now that you had no one to impress with your good deeds, you finally made the time to visit the boy. He was in a ward full of adults, white bandages across his birdlike chest and smaller bindings taped to his lower abdomen. His eyes stared through you like twin portraits of lost wolves. His mouth was slightly open and you imagined all the light and color of the world diminished into the act of breathing, the lungs straining against a wounded chest. What did it feel like to be him?
You met his caretaker, Moses, who isn’t related to the boy, but lives near the boy’s sister. Moses knew how the family of the wife’s husband feared the boy, his abscesses, his constant coughing – how they were certain Joseph would eventually infect his sister’s children. And so he took it upon himself to bring the boy to the hospital and to stay with him night and day. The hospital in Nimule is so understaffed that the relatives and friends of patients will sometimes remain with their loved ones throughout an illness, feeding them and sometimes bandaging them, doing the work of the nurse, because the nurse has twenty other patients to attend to…
By the time you met Joseph he had already spent a month sleeping on a forest green mattress in the middle of a childless ward. He’d been staying with his sister, because both of his parents had passed away. The story you were given by the Moses and the sister was simple: Joseph’s mom and dad grew very thin and very sick, and then they died. The day after you met the boy, the pieces of his family’s history came into brutal, unchangeable alignment; Joseph’s bloodwork showed he was infected with HIV. Though his parents were never diagnosed with the virus, all the details of their deaths screamed its letters.
Jospeh was also found positive for tuberculosis. The test results were revealed to Moses and the sister on Friday, April 17th, and when you came that day to visit the boy you found his bed stripped of it’s sheets. Your imagination didn’t have the time to consider the worst possible scenario, because a sick old lady smiled at you from her place of convalescence (or eventual departure) and she pointed you in the direction of the TB ward. You found him there, still the only child in the room, still coughing, and still wonderfully and fearfully made. Sometimes you can see the beauty of God’s creation more strikingly in the weakness of a child’s body than in its strength and health. You are torn apart by the fact that no child should ever have to suffer such pain, you touch the gulf between what should be and what is, you see the immense value of life when that life is verging on death.
Somehow you managed to live in Africa for almost four years without coming face to face with a child living with HIV. And then Joseph presented himself, and you were delighted to have the opportunity to bring him food as the sun set each day. Your haphazard heart, divided by so many obligations and emotions at any given moment of any given day, felt at peace when you were with him in the evenings. You discovered his love for mangoes; he sucked on the things for several minutes even after all the edible parts appeared to be gone. You discovered his need for contact; he liked holding your hand for interminable spells and saying “how are you” every now and then. It was the only English he knew. One night he surprised you and greedily pulled your hand so that your palm rested on his face. You could feel his smile against your lifeline. Some of your girls, Jane and Janet, were there and they asked him in Acholi what he was trying to do. He didn’t answer, but just sighed and laughed a little. You knew this was dangerous. You knew you were falling in love.
Oftentimes you went to hang out with Joseph and found him drugged up and half asleep. On one of his pharmaceutically challenged days, you went to see him with the other Joseph, the magician with the unpredictable disappearing act. He volunteered himself and you were glad to take him along. At the hospital, in the two-tone ward (blue and grey), you laid your hands on the boy’s head and prayed for him as he drifted in and out of consciousness, and Mandela Joseph stood beside you, his hand on the boy’s arm, his mouth also issuing an amen when “amen time” arrived.
Then you left for a holiday of sorts, and asked Pastor Santos to keep sending the girls with pots of nutritional support to Joseph. You went to Adjumani in Northern Uganda to see a dear friend say goodbye to the place that she and her husband poured their common heart into for the past seven years. Then you traveled to Kampala to meet Pastor Juma and Mandela Joseph. You were finally taking the magician to see a child psychologist – a plan you meant to enact almost two years ago, but were persuaded against. To make a long story short, you were wrong to wait and worry that there wasn’t enough money. Now everyday is Mandela Day, because the kid hasn’t escaped from the home since he got back from his time abroad.
And when you finally returned to Sudan you had to attend to new visitors from America and dive back into all the random and not so random tasks of running a children’s home. You had all these excuses and you kept yourself from visiting the hospital until today.
You are still touching his face when his smile starts to fade along with the friendly sparks in his eyes. He seems to lose all awareness of you, his pupils like analog TV screens shutting down. The sorghum posho remains forgotten in his hand and it hangs halfway off his fingertips until Moses takes it away.
You tell your daughters and the nearby TB patients that you’re going to pray now. They fall silent and you talk to God, asking him to stop by the ward this afternoon and fill up the kid’s devastated body with light. Then you say amen and stand up straight and gently say to the girls, “It’s time to go.”
The days rush by like crowds of unruly children at a summer fair after dark, and I don’t make the time to tell you about the some of most remarkable moments that occur in the hours between sunrise and sunset. But let me try to tell you at least one thing that is worth remembering, worth pondering.
Last week I saw Christine for the first time since I returned to Nimule. She came with her uncle and her mother, a decent old mom who happened to willfully deceive the original caretakers of our home into believing that she was an aunt. A common trick among the families who come seeking our help, but a trick that we have nonetheless grown wise toward.
In times of struggle – in times of heartache – the true familial associations tend to reveal themselves. When Christine began to suspect that she was pregnant last November, she didn’t tell us. She ran to her family’s home in the neighboring village of Mugali; she ran to explain herself to the very woman who had brought her into this world.
Christine’s face looked thinner than it did nearly four months ago, and her eyes seemed weary with thoughts and questions beyond resolution. She wore a black skirt and a loose white blouse dotted with tiny clusters of red, blue, and grey. For most of her visit she leaned slightly forward on the couch, and no stranger would’ve been able to recognize that she was pregnant. Only when she leaned back did the bulge above her waist become unmistakable.
To our surprise, she and her family had come to receive our blessing. The family had decided, in stark contrast to our presumptions, to give Christine to the father of her child. In fact, they intended to go to the father’s home right after our benediction. Whether or not Christine had agreed to be handed over to the man, I don’t know and I didn’t ask.
Betty, her mother, had fallen ill shortly after we met in early December, and she only recovered her health a week or so before she came see us, again. We were the bookends to her sickness, and in her temporary infirmity she decided not to let her daughter go. Maybe she knew her weakened heart couldn’t withstand the loss. Maybe she knew she needed all her motherly strength to witness her daughter’s final transition into womanhood. Whatever the case, the intervening months gave the family enough time to set aside a bit of money and a put together a domestic start-up kit of sorts (pots and pans, baby clothes and bedsheets). They didn’t want Christine walking into her new life empty-handed. They wanted her to have something to show besides the evidence of her fertility.
Pastor Juma spoke to the family for several minutes, encouraging them and offering Christine a few tips on living in a polygamous household. Pump water and cook and help the other wife whenever and wherever you can. This way she’ll be easily persuaded that you are a woman who will give, and not just take. I flinched inwardly at his use of the word woman. Sitting there on the couch, as quiet as a landmine sewn in an abandoned schoolyard, Christine didn’t look like a woman. She looked like a sleepless girl, a child on the edge of a dizzy spell.
When Juma finished speaking he asked if I had anything to add. I told Christine that we still loved her. I think I told her that. And I said that she and the husband, and by extension her husband’s other wife, would always be welcome at our church. You have nothing to be ashamed of anymore. You are still our daughter.
After I spoke we prayed together there in the hard, almost accusatory morning light that came in through the open door and curtainless window. Then Christine, her mother and her uncle stood up and left, each of them passing through the light saturated doorway, each of them finding their own method of descending the unreasonably high steps to the ground. Christine skipped off the final step and landed with a impressive amount of grace for someone in her condition. I wanted to follow her out and stand on the veranda and watch her walk away, but I didn’t move. Instead I stared at the vacant air that she had briefly traversed as if I was trying to see the currents left in the wake of her tiny, conclusive, and terribly endearing hop.
A few days later, I sat through a somewhat muted worship service and only afterwards did I realize that Christine hadn’t been there. It was Easter Sunday, and looking back on the day it seems that in the moment I raised my hand and thanked the Lord for all he gives to this loathsome, lovely world and to my own private enigma (the spirit he put in my chest), I found I was touching the cold circumference of what was missing, the residual shape of a child’s life, the limits of a deserted country.
How strange to praise him even with this grieving and vacant shell at my fingertips…
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