Flooded: Me and Zambia

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Peter left early Sunday morning for meetings in the southern part of Zambia. I thought the time with him gone would be terrible, given how it started. The night before Peter left, Jason woke up at midnight coughing and crying. He had forgotten what it feels like to have a cold and thought he was dying. Between his sore throat, coughing, crying, and earache, he was inconsolable. Since Peter had to be up early and was traveling the next day, I had him switch beds with Jason so he could get a bit of rest. Two hours later, Jason fell asleep, his legs flung over my waist. At 5:30, I got up briefly to say good-bye to Peter and then went back to bed. A little later I realized he was still here because the taxi hadn’t shown up so I got up and took him to the bus depot. I was worried that Jason would be really sick all day but he perked right up and we had a good day together. To relax on our Sabbath, I put together a puzzle while the boys watched a movie with friends. The power went off in the evening but I managed to put together the rest of the puzzle with the help of my crank flashlight!

It would have felt very different to have Peter gone shortly after we had arrived, but at this stage of the game, things went pretty well, at least for the most part. Having a car, friends, and an established routine helps. Carmen and Scott came over one evening to keep me company. And then Carmen and I had two new Norwegian gals over for a Ladies’ Night. Following dinner, Kristin, Ida and Carmen were playing a game with Brendan and Jason while I tried to do a few dishes and bake cookies for our dessert. In the middle of this, I heard a knock at the door. Soon I had a new family to MEF, as well as Gideon and another black kid who had escorted them to our house, in our living room. Reverend Khongwir, his wife Apple, and son Yobel, are from India and are living here for a year. Yobel will attend Lechwe School so we arranged for us to carpool. While I was trying to have this conversation, the kids were playing with Jason’s cars and Jason was about to lose it. Gideon and his friend aren’t allowed inside usually and tonight confirmed why. They went crazy with Jason’s toys and wouldn’t listen to what Jason was trying to tell them. Meanwhile, Brendan sent a text to Peter to call him so Peter did, right in the middle of all this chaos. Two Norwegians, 3 Indians, 2 Zambians, 4 Americans, a phone call, and cookies in the oven: a recipe for insanity. I managed to end the conversation, escort them out, console Jason, get the cookies out of the oven and the boys in bed, and not lose it myself. Once things quieted down, Kristin, Ida, Carmen and I played games for awhile and then they went home. I ate an extra cookie because I felt I deserved it, then went to bed.

The day Peter was due to arrive home, Wednesday, we had a HUGE thunderstorm. This is nothing new, but it usually doesn’t happen right when I am supposed to go pick the boys up from school. It was raining buckets and the road out of MEF was a huge muddy river. The ditches on either side of the road were overflowing and where the road usually is there was a river of water instead, making it difficult to see where the speed bumps were located. Thankfully, I have most of the major potholes memorized and missed the majority of them. My windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the torrent of water coming down. I put on my hazard lights and drove slowly down the road to pick up the boys. The sidewalks at the school were flooded as well so I waded through them and gave Jason a piggy back ride to the car. Gotta love my Crocs – the water just flowed right in and through them.

By the time we arrived home, the waters had receded at MEF and we could see the road once again. But we returned home to no power. It stayed off for the next fifteen hours. Jenny invited me over late in the afternoon for a cup of tea. She had started a charcoal fire to heat a pot of water and still had coals hot enough for something else. So I ran home and fetched my leftover soup and heated it on her charcoal. We enjoyed a romantic candlelight dinner at her home along with Adrian and my boys. Peter arrived home safely in the evening after having traveled over 12 hours. The buses here can be quite scary, passing blindly on hills and driving way over speed limit. So I was glad he came home in one piece.

Once again, I am reminded that the thunderstorms and power outages are a nuisance for us but nothing more. I heard on the radio today that 56 homes in Kitwe collapsed after yesterday’s storm. There is severe flooding in the southern part of Zambia. Crops are being ruined. Things aren’t good for much of Zambia. Not to mention high unemployment, poverty, and AIDS. Please pray for Zambia.

Friday, February 1, 2008

You can only hold things at bay for so long. I managed to keep things together for awhile but the day after Peter returned home, I pretty much lost it. Things are not working out with Ben, our sweet dog. He digs holes under our fence and gets out. This is not a good thing for two reasons: 1) Zambians are terrified of dogs in general, and 2) Ben has been known to kill chickens and there are a number of chickens and now turkeys that roam the MEF campus and it would be awful if he killed someone else’s livelihood. As much as we like Ben, we have made the decision to take him back to Diz at the orphanage. I didn’t want to make that call and asked Peter if he would do it. Not knowing that my precarious emotional health depended on him making that phone call, he said he would rather not. It seemed to me that his refusal to make one little phone call was actually saying that he refused to be invested in our marriage, was abdicating his responsibility to parent our children, and therefore I was left to do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING around here. I was a bit under strain from single parenting for a few days. After I explained through tears that emphasized my instability, Peter apologized for his insensitivity and inability to see all that hinged on this phone call, and got the number to call Diz. There is a lot swirling in my mind and heart these days: difficult conversations that I need to have with certain people, parenting issues that need to be addressed, possible ministry opportunities that need to be thought through, and the hurts of different people that are weighing on me. Later I was able to process with Peter and also with Carmen. That gave me a bit of perspective and I feel a bit more balanced. Let’s hope so.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Bye, bye Ben. So our first real pet only lasted six weeks. We thought our boys would be distraught but they seem to understand the necessity of it. This week, with Peter gone, Brendan took over the responsibility of blocking the holes under the fence that Ben digs. He would come in so proud of his work and a few hours later, I would hear him saying, “Bad dog!” Must have found a different way out. I think this was helpful for Brendan to see what Peter has to do every day and how ineffective it is. But still everyone felt sad. As we ate dinner and talked about it all, Brendan said he had something stuck in his throat and it was hard to swallow. At first we thought the chili was just too spicy, but then Brendan said it got that way when he thought about taking Ben back. Ah, that kind of lump in the throat. Jason expressed his sadness a bit but it came out more in tantrums the rest of the day. Every little thing set him off this morning. I figured it was probably sadness underlying this string of bad behavior so Peter and I attempted lots of holding time. We talked about it more at lunch and Jason seemed to feel a bit better. I think they will be OK. But I also think this one will come back to haunt us and Peter and I will be teased mercilessly by our boys twenty years from now about how we finally got them a dog but then took it away after only six weeks. It will join the great teasings of the family, like Mom Smith’s shrimp creole recipe that everyone hated, and Dad Dueck’s famous line that is spoken every vacation as if for the first time: “What I’d really like is a nice fish dinner!”

In the afternoon, I invited Adrian to come over and sing worship songs with me. He has two songbooks from the UK that he brought along, as well as his guitar, and we had a marvelous time going through the books and singing together. Many of the songs I knew from our IBTS days and it was wonderful to sing them with someone who also knew them. Some of the songs even went back to our time with Youth Mission International way back in 1994. There were one or two that we sing at Pasadena Mennonite Church as well. So it felt like my various worshipping worlds were brought together this afternoon. Salve for my soul.