observations of the day

Observed around Gone West today:

1. Some sort of trash/construction/demolition truck that tried to cross the median on the highway. It was captured by the cables that are intended for exactly that purpose, but I'm not sure I like how far those cables turn out to stretch. 
2. A bus that had been in an accident (the police cars had left and the bus turned onto a side road by the time I inched my way up to the scene).
3. One block further, someone in a Saturn had t-boned one of the police SUVs as it left the bus accident. The officer leaning over to knock on the window of the Saturn did not look pleased.
4. A flat cart tossed down the hill toward the water at the waterfront park. I liked the wheels. If it doesn't get removed, I may take it for the wheels. They seem like they'd be useful someday. Maybe I can make a sidewalk taxi* out of them.
5. An office chair, just hanging out among the benches along the waterfront.
6. A guy on a skateboard with a sword not very well hidden under his shirt, the point sticking up on his shoulder. I didn't say anything, nor did I call the police. He wasn't doing anything but hiding a sword. Totally normal.

Then I came home and made quinoa for a butternut squash salad but ended up eating most of the quinoa out of the pan while the squash was roasting. I was hungry, and the squash was taking too long.

...

* A sidewalk taxi is a thing we used to make as kids in Liberia, where there were no sidewalks.** Naturally. It is a flat piece of plywood with wheels attached. You sit on it and your friends push you around. You can steer it by pushing on the front axle with your feet, the front axle being exposed beyond the end of the plywood. It's hard to explain. I have a picture somewhere, namely, in the Mitten.

** There are no sidewalks in the town where I grew up. Monrovia has some sidewalks.

absurd

Gone West felt like Liberia yesterday. 

That is an exaggeration, of course. It is never as humid in warm weather in Gone West as it is all the time in Liberia, but I stepped outside yesterday into hot air smelling of burning wood. 

In Liberia, people burn the jungle to clear fields for planting, and the air fills with smoke and the smell of burning wood.

Sometimes I struggle to imagine explaining to modern parents in the US exactly what sort of playing we did as kids in Liberia. Example: after a field was burned, we loved to go play in it, in the soot and the still smoldering bits. While wearing rubber flipflops. 

Safety first, guys. Safety first. 

Somehow we did not get hurt. Sometimes I think kids live up to what you expect of them. 

...

I am beginning to be seriously annoyed with my shoulder nerve impingement situation. 

I re-injured it on Friday. 

Would you like to know how I re-injured it? Because it was ridiculous.

I was in a cafe with a friend, and a woman came in with a baby. She set the baby's seat down on the floor next to me while she hugged an older man. Meanwhile, the older man's wife tried to take the baby out of the seat, and couldn't figure out how to unlatch that middle latch across the baby's chest - the one that you push in the middle button and pull the pieces out to the side.

I braced my right arm against the table while I leaned over and pushed the button with my left.

Bam. Re-injured right arm.

It's completely absurd. This is absurd. The situation is absurd. Arms should not be that wimpy.

So I'm annoyed.

little me

When I was growing up, computers were just starting to be widely available. We had an Apple computer in our dry room in Liberia (the room with air conditioning and no windows to keep things from molding in the edge of the rainforest, one mile from the salty ocean damp). I would sit at it and laboriously type out answers to the questions asked by girls in Sunday schools at churches back in the US. They always wanted to know how the weird missionary girl lived over there in Africa. 

"Yes, I like M&Ms. I like the green ones best."

Then we would print out the letter on the dot matrix printer and I could make chains out of the side paper with the little holes in it.

Also, cameras involved film. We still have very few pictures of my little sister as a tiny baby, because the rolls of film got lost in the mail on their way to my grandparents in the US. 

The pictures from when I was really little are still those old ones that came in squares, and the color is all a bit yellow. 

The first time I remember being recorded on video was in junior high, when my friend and I interviewed my Oma and Pops about their experiences in the Netherlands when it was occupied during World War II. 

I never imagined seeing myself on video as a little kid. It just wasn't a thing that was possible, so I never thought about it.

Enter the Dutch relatives. 

I know that we US Americans like to think that we are on the cutting edge of technology, but my experience is that the Dutch relatives have us beat every time. They are also way ahead of us in fashion, but I digress.

My mom sent out a video this morning from one of our Dutch relatives that was made for my great-grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary in early 1983. I was three. 

Whoever made the video had filmed my Oma and Pops and their kids and grandkids at their house in the Mitten, and suddenly there was a little blonde bob of hair above a red plaid overall dress, mostly ignoring the camera to play. For a split second, when my cousin D. looked up at the camera, three-year-old me turned toward it, too, unsmiling, just looking.

It was the weirdest sensation. I didn't know that little girl was still out there. 

I remember being her. I even remember that party in the Netherlands, I think (unless we were at the 65th anniversary - was there a 65th anniversary party?). I remember crowds and stairs and being small among a bunch of Dutch relatives and playing with other kids. 

I just never thought I would see her again.

My mom said she cried when she saw it. 

endeared

Now that I am commuting to State City, I am rarely in Gone West for more than a few waking hours a day during the week. Today, though, I went downtown to run a couple of errands in the afternoon, and I walked around like a newcomer, looking up at the buildings around the square and thinking, "I will never tire of this city." 

I am in an appreciating-Gone-West sort of mood in part because it is African movie time again. Seven years ago, just after I moved here for the first time, I discovered that this town has a whole month of African movies. There is possibly no better way to endear yourself to me as a town than to play African movies. 

Friday night, the movie involved fleeing from a war. 

"I see what you mean about the movies sometimes being a little intense and hard to take," my friend said as we left the theater. 

"Yeah, that was a little too reminiscent of Liberia," I said. 

I cried, driving home. For a long time, leaving Liberia and not going back was my primary memory of the country. Almost 25 years have passed now, and the central spot in my brain's Liberia quadrant is now filled mostly with memories of what came before the evacuation and of my two return trips, but after watching a family run from fighting in a movie, it all came back. 

Last night's movie was a horror movie. (Note: film noir is code for blood and gore. I should have realized this sooner.) Flashbacks of it kept coming back to me as I tried to take a nap late this morning. I really cannot handle horror movies. I have been known to walk out of them, but for this one I just closed my eyes and plugged my ears during the bad parts. That did not eliminate the creepy factor.

"Did you notice that the main character did not say one single word for the entire movie?" I asked afterward. No one else had. We mitigated the lingering creepiness by gathering around a wood fire in a restaurant nearby and talking about life and how to be happy.

Today, finally, the movie was my favorite kind: a little bit funny, a little bit romantic, a little bit musical. Oh, Democratic Republic of Congo. I've barely visited you, yet I like you a lot.

Ebola fury

I slept for 9.5 hours last night, and I momentarily feel human again (momentarily because on Monday I am going to jump right back into the second half of a two week long Major Work Event and then I will be exhausted again).

I am so busy with this Major Work Event that I can't even stop for more than a second to lose my shit about the fact that so many people are dying in Liberia and rather than give one single fuck (swearing absolutely necessary here), the entire United States is up in arms that one single hospital in Dallas didn't take enough precautions with one single Ebola patient. 

How the hospital was allowing staff to treat an Ebola patient without coverings for their shoes is a legitimate question - had no one even googled Ebola? I am not a health professional, and I know better.

But I know! (Here comes massive sarcasm:) Let's freak out and waste our time blaming the Obama administration and try to get them to close our borders to people coming from that part of the world (really? really? when most of the people arriving in the US from West Africa are US CITIZENS, how are you going to enforce that one?), when what we should be doing is STOPPING PEOPLE FROM DYING IN WEST AFRICA, starting with basic things like oral rehydration salts and gloves and clean water and doctors.

Sometimes it truly drives me to fury how lives in Africa don't seem to matter.

Let me put it this way: if your child got sick, and you took care of her for days while she vomited and had diarrhea because there was no hospital to take her to, and then she died in your arms, would you be sad?

Why do we think of it any differently when the child dying is in Africa? Do we somehow think that the mother who just watched her child die in Liberia cares less than we would?

Yeah, let's think about that for a while, while we ignore the thousands of real people who are dying in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. 

There is this: Where's the Empathy for Ebola's African Victims?

sick feeling

What happens every time I start attempting to write something here lately is that I want to talk about Ebola, and the sick feeling in my stomach when things are going badly in Liberia, a feeling that I felt most of my teenage years and only lost c. 2003 when the war ended.

The sick feeling is back.

Oh, Liberia, Liberia, Liberia. Why does Liberia seem to get the worst end of every tragedy?

That question is basically the reason why I studied community development in undergrad and why I went to law school. I still don't have an answer.

I am fighting the urge to up and go to Liberia and spend my days giving Ebola patients oral rehydration salts and maybe persuading them to try statins? (Have you read the stuff about statins and Ebola? I would try them if I got Ebola.)

It's very strange how life just goes on here. At least now there is the internet, while in 1991 I was cutting out tiny snippets of news about Liberia's civil war from the newspaper and pasting them into a scrapbook.

Now I can read an article about Ebola, shoot it off in an email to interested parties, and go get dressed up for a date with a cute guy. It is very disorienting, and also very sad.

childhood

You know how you don't think about things for years and then suddenly they pop into your head? 

I just thought about how, when my brother and I were little but old enough to do things like the dishes (so I was maybe 8 or 9 and R. was 5 or 6), my parents would go for a walk in the evening and leave us to do the dishes. I mostly washed, and my brother dried and put away. I suspect that my sister was around there somewhere, toddling about.

The sink in the kitchen in our house in Liberia faced setting sun and the road and, much farther away beyond the trees, the ocean. We would watch to see when our parents came into view again.*

R. and I would sometimes sing as we did the dishes (or possibly I sang and he humored me):

hurry hurry hurry hurry come on the run

hurry hurry hurry hurry day is begun

come along and hurry now there's work to be done

when you are finished there'll be time for fun

alright I come now, alright I come

don't be so worried, my little one

if I should work hard out in the sun

I'll be so tired that I cannot run

Mostly I was singing so that when my parents came within hearing distance they would know how very hard we were working.

Even before we were old enough to do the dishes or be left home alone for half an hour, we used to clear the table. The floor was cement, but that didn't stop us, especially my brother, from piling all five of the Corelle-ware plates on our heads and trying to carry them to the kitchen without our hands.

It's a really good thing that Corelle-ware plates are just about indestructible, is all I have to say about that.

* I feel like I remember, when the war started upcountry, that there was a curfew, and part of my watching for the parents to come into view was hoping that they would beat the curfew. It may have just been the memory of the earlier curfew in 1985, though, combined with knowledge of the problems in Nimba County in 1990.

...

While writing this, I looked up our old house on google earth, again, and noticed that there is still a path behind the house to the other house that was on the road between the office and the high school. The path no longer cuts from the right side of that house, though. It has moved over the years, as dirt footpaths do, and now it cuts from the left side of the house.

One time, as I was riding my bike on that path home from school, I looked up as I rode under a tree and saw a green mamba lying along the branch I was just going under.

I have even more vivid memories of the other path, from our house to the office, especially the corner by the office:

Trying to push an old bicycle wheel with a stick, only to get it caught somehow and jabbing myself in the stomach.

Jumping over the inevitable ditch between the path and the road next to the office.

The time that the G. family daubed their house with mud and we got to help.

Looking at the scab on my arm that finally taught me which hand was right and which was left.

Watching the clouds and thinking how wonderful it would be if I could just get up onto one and nestle into its softness and tell it where to take me.

mud puddles

When my brother and I were little, we would play in the mud puddles outside our house in Liberia. They were truly mud puddles, there, because the road we lived on was mud.

When it really rained hard, the ditch along the road down past the field in front of our house would flood deep enough that we could kick our feet off the ground and pretend to swim. It was supposed to flow away through a culvert* under the road, but sometimes it got backed up. 

The water was brown-red with the dust of the earth it had picked up. It barely resembled water so much as thinned out mud, and yet we called it our swimming pool, we neighborhood kids, and we swam and waded and laughed in it until the evening summons.

I thought of the mud puddles in Liberia today because I caught myself deliberately wading, in my flipflops, through the mostly-clear puddles of Gone West. I was on the phone, walking in little circles so as not to stray too far from my computer that was on a table inside the tea shop, and I realized how familiar was the feeling of water flowing around on flipflops. 

So then I swished through a few more puddles, for fun.

* Culvert is a word that I always liked the sound of. I remember rolling it around in my head when I was small. Culvert. Culvert.

We rarely call them by name here in the States, but in Liberia we did, and they were usually made of heavy corrugated metal. In severe rain, they would wash out and the dirt road over them would be swept away, and the whole thing would become a morass of mud and tire tracks and stuck vehicles.

The culvert on the road to school washed out once, and I remember picking our way around it through the creek where my brother and his friends used to go fishing.

16: memory

I feel like I remember getting a bath when I was a baby, on the counter in the house that my grandparents lived in when I was born. I can't be sure, though. I think it's impossible, because I was only three months old when we left for Liberia, and when we came back, they'd moved. But I have a picture in my head of the underside of the cupboards and a vague impression of that gold color that was popular in the 1970s. And I remember being cold.

 

The first thing I remember for sure is sitting on the cement porch in our first house in Buchanan, playing with a little plastic school bus, looking back over my shoulder at my mom in the doorway. I was not yet 1, my mom says.

I think I remember my mom reading books to me just about as far back as my memory goes, back when the books were Little Golden Books.

I remember sitting on the bricks on the side of our next house and the older girl next door telling me, when I was two or three, that white skin like mine was ugly and black skin like hers was beautiful, and running inside crying to ask my mom if it was true. ("Both black skin and white skin are beautiful," my mom told me, and I believed her, because she knew everything.)

There is a big cluster of memories around our first trip back to the US and my brother being born, which may have been before or after the skin color incident. I remember going to Meijer, and riding the mechanical horse, and picking out balloons, and the laundry chute, and riding in the kid seat on the back of a bike, and the dead pumpkins on the street (smashed jack-o-lanterns), and the lonely feeling of trying to fall asleep on the pullout couch at the B.'s house when my parents went to the hospital for the birth, and seeing my little brother through the nursery glass.

I remember getting my newborn brother out of his crib in his dark room when he was crying, and the shocked expressions on my mom and Oma's faces when I came down the hall, pulling him by his head, his body dangling between my legs. 

I remember being young enough to go to the nursery at church in the US.

I remember being in a Sunday school class at the Open Bible church in Liberia, with the bigger kids laughing at me because I couldn't write my name, and thinking (maybe saying), "I don't know how to write my name! I'm only three!"

And then there start to be a lot of memories: my brother pulling my hair out in chunks, my fourth birthday, my brother trying to escape the house via the locked screen doors (he would climb the horizontal slats to get to the hook), trying to learn to tie a bow on the waist strings of my jean skirt, really reading for the first time.

...

My Spanish teacher today asked me if I dream, and I said yes, but I'm usually too tired to remember the things I dream.

But then, driving home, I remembered my dream from last night. It's gone again, now.

Memory is a very funny thing. I have very clear picture memories of when I was young, but when I went back to Liberia, the pictures weren't always in the places I thought they were. I suppose when you are little, when someone else drives or walks you everywhere, you don't need to remember how the pieces fit together. 

Sometimes, driving home at night in Liberia, I would lie in the back seat of the car, looking up at the stars in their brightness that would never happen in light-polluted North America, and I would try to guess when we were making which turn, when we would get home.

11: cold

I'm not sure why it feels so very cold to me here in the Mitten. My roommates in Gone West keep the heat on 55 degrees - I get to turn it up to 60 for my shower - and while that is cold, it doesn't feel unbearable.

 

But here, for some reason, when it is 66 degrees in a house, I am downright freezing. Freezing. As in, give me a blanket and a comforter and I will sit on the couch in a huddle.

 

I think it's the outside walls. My parents' house is not so bad for this, because it is reasonably new and efficient and the walls are not icy to the touch, but in an older house, I literally start shivering. INSIDE THE HOUSE.

 

This leads me to something I have thought about many times in the last few years: how entirely different one's wardrobe is, depending on where you live.

 

I've been spoiled, in the last few years, living in a place that doesn't get that cold and where I have a car.

 

I don't need the snowboots I need in the Mitten. I don't need the many thick layers. I don't even have a good warm winter coat.

 

On the other hand, it rains, and so I have many pairs of waterproofed leather boots. I have lots of cardigan sweaters for work. I have sweatertights. I have varying levels of rain gear.

 

When I lived in Rwanda, I didn't have any of that. I had skirts and trousers for the day. I had a light raincoat. I had a fleece for evening. Other than running shoes, I had almost no close-toed shoes.

 

But right now, I live in a place where it rains and it doesn't get that cold. And I kind of forgot, coming to the Mitten, that it would be so very cold. I need to re-think the clothes I bring with me when I come here, and maybe I need to buy some warmer ones.

rehab

The other night, as I was coming home from J.'s birthday party, I saw a man with a walker beginning the long, slow trek up the hill by my house. It was 11 pm and about 30 degrees F, he wasn't wearing a coat, and I knew where he was going - to the rehab center about 1/4 of the way up the hill. 

He was walking in the road. On the edge, but in the road. I worried that an on-coming car would hit him there in the dark. 

I ran through the checklist in my head: police? Silly, when I knew right where he was going. Rehab center? I doubt they would come out into the cold for him.

And so I swung my car into the next driveway and turned around.

"Do you need a ride?" I asked. He first declined, but I insisted, not wanting him to be hit by a car. 

Plus, look. I grew up in a place where our Peugeot was not infrequently filled front to back as we drove up-country. My brother and I would start in the middle seat and end up in the back-back as my parents picked up random people on the side of the road. It isn't often that I feel safe giving rides to men in the US (I have given a ride to a girl in this town), but he was a rehab patient with a walker. I wasn't exactly worried.

It wasn't until he had ever-so-laboriously lowered himself into the car and I had folded the walker and stuffed it into the back seat that I realized that the combination of hospital smell and cigarette smoke was going to seriously alter the air quality of my car, possibly forever.

And it wasn't until he got out of my car, ever-so-laboriously, at the rehab center, that I remembered what I had seen at the beginning and forgotten: only half of his rear-end was covered by sweatpants. The rest was enjoying the cold winter air and had been enjoying my passenger seat. 

"Do you want a hug?" he asked, and years of politeness training lost to the instinct not to be touched by strangers.

"No, thanks!" I said, setting his walker in front of him. "Be safe!"

[26] brussels sprouts

I have always despised brussels sprouts. In my opinion, they are pretty much the worst of foods. 

When I was a kid, they were somehow available in Liberia. (HOW? HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE? THEY ARE A COLD-WEATHER FOOD. IT IS 90 DEGREES IN LIBERIA EVERY SINGLE DAY.) Maybe they were frozen?

My mom would serve us boiled brussels sprouts, sometimes (whyyyyy? They have perfectly good potato greens full of delicious iron and vitamins in Liberia! Why the brussels sprouts?), and I would sit there with the brussels sprouts in front of me, trying not to throw up as I ate them. I know I gagged on them, most of the time, and they sat in front of me long after supper on multiple occasions until I could force them down. 

(See also: that cold oatmeal that one time, the green beans that I threw in the trash as a high schooler and my mom made me fish out and eat before I could go skiing. Yes, stubbornness runs in the family.) 

(See further: my sister once sat in her baby chair attached to the table all day long because she refused to take her chloroquine pill. She was two or so, and we have a picture of her taking a nap with her head on the table, a little white pill in front of her nose. Which is fair, because chloroquine has the most bitter taste of any substance known to humankind. It's hard to explain the need for it to a toddler.)

In law school, my roommate S. loved brussels sprouts, and she would roast them and gobble them down. She offered me some and told me they were a thousand times better roasted than boiled, but I distrusted even the non-boiled version. I would not touch them.

For Thanksgiving last week, one of my friends made roasted parsnips, garlic, and brussels sprouts, and I braved up to try them. I think I managed three brussels sprouts. They were better than my childhood experience (no gagging occurred), but I have reached the conclusion that brussels sprouts contain the same bitter taste as cooked broccoli (ew), and my delicate taste buds cannot handle that bitter taste.

Excuse me while I go coddle my delicate taste buds. 

[19] flood

I was really hoping it wouldn't come to this winter nonsense. This morning I was thinking that this weather reminds me of Halloween in Michigan: cold rain falling on brown, dead leaves.

Then it started pouring, and I regretted wearing flats when I had to walk down the street. For a city that experiences rain most of the year, this one is remarkably unprepared. On my way back to the office, the corner was flooded and my only choice was which shoe to douse first. I sloshed back to work with water-filled shoes. And on the way home from fighting class, I drove through at least six or eight flooded sections of road.

Did I ever mention the time the road flooded in Liberia? The last time I was there; obviously it flooded many a time when we lived there in the 1980s. Witness: the mud pit on the way to the LAC hospital when my mom was in labor with my sister.

But anyway, in 2006 I dropped off a couple of other law student interns at the airport in Liberia. I was driving a little sedan that was not fit for dirt roads, but the road to Robertsfield from Monrovia is paved, so one would assume not a problem. Except. 

One of the low-lying areas was flooded a good 18 or more inches deep, and some enterprising young men had set themselves up as a ferrying service. The problem with driving a low car through water is the engine, of course. The big Land Cruisers with the snorkel intake have no problem with it because they are not taking water into their engines. 

I turned off my car and put it in neutral, and these guys pushed us straight through the water. On the other side, I paid them a dollar or so, started up my car, and drove off. We did the same thing in reverse when I came back through.

(worst photo ever - it is hard to take a photo while steering through deep water)

One of the things I miss about living in Africa is having people around to just literally move your car where it needs to go. Dropped a wheel into a random hole*? People will lift it out. High-centered your Prado on a rut? People will lift it off. Sometimes they will accept money for the help and sometimes they will not. I miss that.

* And oh, there are many random holes. I have done that in two countries.

stupid, miserable book

I can't remember how this came up, but the other night I was telling my friend D. about this book: Preparing for Adolescence.

When I was nine or ten, just before we left Liberia, my parents were reading this book to me, and I hated it. Hate is too gentle a word, actually. I despised it. I don't even know what I despised so much, except that 1. I was deeply embarrassed to have both of my parents sit down with me and read me books about sex and dating (keep in mind, I was TEN), 2. I never could stand having someone talk down to me, and James Dobson is the king of talking down. I never did like him, for that reason, even when I was far, far less liberal than I am now.

On one hand, I was only ten, and mortified at the idea of sex and dating. On the other, one of the neighbor boys had already asked me to sneak off with him to have sex. I told him he was rude and excluded him from any neighborhood games over which I had any say from them on. And I had say over a great many games considering that our yard had the treehouse, the swingset, the only mom who would give us real food to cook, the bikes, and the soccer ball. My parents were both too early and too late. 

I'm sure someone credible recommended this book to my parents and suggested that reading it with your kid would open up conversations. Or in my case, due to embarrassment: cut off conversations, permanently. I notice that they never tried to read it to my younger brother and sister. The oldest kid is always the experiment.

Given my personality, though, they would have been better off just giving me the book, or leaving it among other books for me to find and read. I would have despised it much less, although I still would have noticed the grating tone of the whole thing.

I despised this book, and the experience of having my parents read me awkward, moralistic stories about adolescents and their supposed problems, so much that even though it somehow came to the US when we evacuated from Liberia, I promptly hid the book deep inside the couch in my grandparents' basement, betting that in the confusion of evacuating from a country and deciding where to live and whether to send us to school in the middle of the school year, the book would be forgotten. 

And it was. I felt very guilty about it (I was not exactly a rebellious child), but I hated that book enough to live with my guilt.

Years later, after my parents had inherited that couch, the book reappeared. By then, though, I was long past the days when my parents might have tried to corner me and read the rest of it. I had escaped. 

I can still feel the disgust and embarrassment I felt back then, though, viscerally, when I think of that stupid, miserable book.

I still shudder at the sound of the word adolescence.

I went to the Hunger Games movie with three guys, which is why I had to pull my hair forward to hide my face when Katniss covered Rue with flowers and saluted District 11. It was Rue, yes, but it was also the faces of the people in District 11.* I am a sucker for the people who stand up against injustice.

I never used to cry in movies. I never used to cry at all, except when I was mad.

And then sometime in my early twenties, all those grown-up lady hormones kicked in. I am still not a cryer. I don't cry at sappy movies. But I do, sometimes, cry. I almost cried when Katniss volunteered for Prim, and I did cry for Rue.

I still remember the first movie in which I cried: Rules of Engagement. That doesn't seem like a crying type movie, but it was the embassy, and the evacuation, and the people left behind.

I had just barely gotten to a place in life where I could allow myself to remember that I had a life before trying to fit into an almost entirely all-white suburban high school. It had been ten years since we left Liberia on 48 hours notice, but in all that time, I didn't think about Liberia much. I couldn't afford to, not if I wanted to survive high school with anything resembling friends.

It wasn't until I got to college and met people who were not All The Same that I dared to remember that I, too, had once been someone else, someone not from just exactly the same place as everyone else.

The leaving that other place I came from was hard. So was the shutting down of the person I was.

And so, when I let myself start to remember and then I saw a movie where people were evacuating a country, I cried.

...

* And then there is this. Really, people? REALLY? Sometimes, I am left speechless. That casting was perfect.

snowed in

It snowed about six inches two nights ago, and I woke up to a delightful world of white. It was pretty.

Then the power went out, which was fine. I don't mind getting ready for work in the dark. I have a headlamp.

(I know no power. I am familiar with no power. I had power about 40 minutes a day for the last few months I lived in Rwanda. I would leave the light on in my room so that when the power went on at, say, 2:10 am, I could get up and plug in all my electronics to take advantage of every minute I had power. And remember these days?)

So I got ready in the dark, thinking, "Adventure!" Life is so boring here, sometimes.

I had smartly started parking my car in the garage the last few weeks so that it would not be snowed/sleeted upon. We live just high enough in the hills that a sprinkling of snow or ice on a winter morning is not uncommon.

When I was all ready for the day, I piled things into my arms, hit the garage door button, and stepped outside.

Oh, ha. Ha and ha.

My house, I may have mentioned, is built into a steep hill. It is on stilts, essentially, and it goes down so fast from the road that even the driveway is a deck out over nothing. The garage is detached from the house, and the only door to it is the car-sized door, on the garage door opener.

"Just detach the chain!" people told me all day, and I had to explain again and again that the problem was not that I couldn't get the car out of the garage. I know how to detach the garage door opener. The problem was that I couldn't get into the garage. My car and I were parted by the garage door.

As I layered on my rain pants and gaiters and skiing gloves, I was infinitely grateful for the privilege of having spent money on waterproof gear. SHO and/or I commented earlier this week that money does not buy happiness, but not having it can make you miserable. On cold days, being warm and dry can feel a whole lot like happiness.

I set out by foot through a maze of snow and downed tree branches. It took me a while of walking to figure out that this warm, wet snow is heavy, and the trees here are not accustomed to snow, and so the pieces break off much more easily than they would in the Mitten.

A little girl showed me her snow child and snow animals in her driveway. A guy came snowboarding past me, all the way down the long hill. A wire hung low over the road in one spot, and the snowboarder, after offering me a chance at his snowboard, told me that the road had been blocked by a fallen tree on the longer, less steep route out of the neighborhood.

My coworker with traction tires and all-wheel drive (people in this part of the world have no idea how to handle snow) picked me up exactly 1.1 miles into my walk in the direction of work. We arrived almost two hours late. Most people didn't make it at all.

At 9 pm, after I'd gone home to pick up the stuff I would need to stay at a friend's house, my neighbor called me to tell me that the lights were back.

I haven't been that excited about lights since Liberia c. 2006, when Ma Ellen turned the streetlights on. Admittedly, it isn't so much about the lights here as it is about 1. sleeping in my own bed instead of someone's futon, 2. accessing my vehicle and being once again independent, and 3. warm water in the middle of winter. Cold showers in Liberia are not a problem. Cold showers in a house without heat while there is snow on the ground are an entirely different prospect.

needles

I take a break from the overwhelmingly large number of cookies I am frosting to tell you the following interlinked stories:

A couple of days ago, I somehow brushed against wood that deposited about eight or ten tiny splinters at the bottom of my right pinkie. They were too small and soft to get out with tweezers and I could not manipulate a needle with my left hand, so I had to leave them until they got inflamed enough that my body pushed them toward the surface and I could just squeeze them out. I got the last ones out this morning.

The whole situation reminded me of the jiggers we used to get in our feet in Liberia. (I am not even kidding. That is what they are called, even though it sounds off, somehow.)

One of my parents would sterilize a needle and dig them out of our feet, which didn't really hurt much, in my opinion, but my brother went through a stage where he would not allow it to be done. In the end, we (I say we. What I mean is: my mom) took him up to the ELWA hospital to have a jigger surgically removed.

The ELWA compound of my childhood memory is all little white houses on a road leading to the beach. We were staying in the guesthouse, and after my brother's surgery was finished, the doctor sent him back to the guesthouse to recover.

I think they actually put him under. It took him a while to wake up.

R. was sleeping on the bottom bunk of the bunk beds when my mom decided to leave to go get something. She left me alone with him.

Since we left Liberia when I was 10.5, I assume that I was 9 or less at this point, and R. was 6 or less. For some reason, I think he might have been five. Or, um, three. Or I don't really know.

While our mom was gone, R. started waking up. He was incoherent and thrashing, and I remember bracing my feet against the floor and my back against the bed to keep him from falling out. It seemed like forever before mom came back, even though it was probably only a few minutes, and I felt this great sense of responsibility for making sure that he was okay.

eggs

I was just talking to my friend D. about eggs. She likes them. I don't.

Well-cooked is the only way I can handle eggs. They gross me out a little.

Eggs are useful. They are great in baking. I like them as a contributing factor to things. It isn't that I can't touch them, or that I don't use them.

And when I lived in Rwanda, omeletes were one of the few non-goat foods I could reliably get, and they had protein, too. I ate an omelete "bien cui" many a day.

Then I went to Liberia in 2006, and the eggs tasted off. Many people said they could not taste this, but I could. They tasted tinny. I could even taste it in baked goods.

But my slight distaste for egg goes back well before 2006. It may, in fact, be directly related to that one time as a kid in Liberia when we took an egg out of the fridge, broke it, and found inside a perfectly formed dead little chick.

Did you know that eggs turn into chickens?

Well, obviously.

Yet my mom, all through my teenaged years, told me over and over that THESE eggs, the ones we buy in the States, cannot turn into chickens, due to lack of fertilization.

But it turns out that once a kid has buried an unborn baby chick in the back yard after it died in the cold of the fridge, it is hard to convince that kid, or the woman she becomes, that eggs do not turn into chickens.

Trooper

I pulled into a parking spot next to an Isuzu Trooper. It felt weird. Those don't belong here, not at all. It's on the wrong continent.

We used a Trooper, borrowed from another missionary family, when my sister was born. We were staying upcountry, at Compound Number Three, not far from LAC, the Liberia Agricultural Company, that had a better hospital, but between us and the hospital was a huge mud pit in which cars and trucks got stuck.

Somehow, I got it into my almost-eight year old mind, as one does, that in order for the stuck vehicles to block the road, they had to have been stuck sideways.

I have since learned better, having maneuvered vehicles around stuck vehicles in mud pits on several occasions.

Anyway.

The Trooper got my parents to the hospital in plenty of time for a screeching little being to be born.

We thought she was going to be a boy.

I'm kind of glad she was who she was, instead.

in which i attempt to post a recipe

The jollof rice turned out surprisingly delicious, considering that I somehow managed to ruin the rice-cooking portion of the endeavor, and it took an hour and half to cook the rice. So it was slightly mushy jollof rice. It still tasted really good, and I enjoyed it for lunch yesterday and today.

Here is how to make jollof rice (I am doing this as much for me as for you, in case it is four more years before I make it again):

Cut up an onion, a green pepper, 4-5 cloves of garlic, and a chili pepper. (More peppers if you are guaranteed an audience who can stand them. One gives a nice flavor without being hot.)

Fry them in some oil. The internet claims that you can add other vegetables: carrots, green beans, cabbage. Up to you.

Fry some meat in the same pan with the vegetables or in a different pan. Whatever. I used Gimme Lean vegetarian sausage, and it had a really nice flavor, but you can use real sausage or chicken or fish or really anything. I think the package I used was the equivalent of one pound of meat.

Add some water and a couple of cut up tomatoes and some tomato paste (I used a little can of Hunts, but whatever. Whatever is a common theme here. This is a very flexible recipe).

Add some salt and pepper and some Maggi Cubes. I can't find Maggi Cubes in the US so I used, as previously mentioned, some vegetarian bouillon cubes and some Maggi Seasoning in a bottle. This mixture should taste pretty salty and bouillon-like.

At this point, you probably want everything in a big pot, because this is a family-sized recipe I am talking here.

Add some more water. If I were smart, I would have kept track of how much water I added in total and added a little bit more than half as much rice (i.e., 5 cups of water, 2.5 or 2.75 cups of rice). I didn't. Well, I kind of did, but extremely inexactly.

Add some rice. See above. Whatever. Stir.

Turn stove down, but not as far down as you would have turned it to cook rice alone. (This was my mistake. A mixture this thick simmers at a higher temperature than rice + water.) It should be just high enough to simmer.

Cook until you no longer get steam billowing out when you wiggle the lid. I have no idea how long this will take, because I had mine at sub-simmering temperatures for quite a while.

You can probably freeze lunch-sized portions and let them defrost during the day. I kept the pan in the fridge for a couple of days, and it re-heated really well in the microwave.

There you go. A completely incoherent recipe that somehow turns out delicious. Even I cannot ruin this recipe.