Happy Halloween

We wouldn't even know it was Halloween except the US embassy threw a party for the kids. This afternoon Spiderman, Susan (from Narnia) and Snow White trooped around the embassy and got loads of American candy. Then they chugged sodas and ate brownies and cupcakes. Spiderman bobbed for apples, successfully, Susan knocked the death blow into the pinata and Snow White came so close to winning hot potato while simultaneously chomping an apple (won by cheating at bobbing for apples).

Sleeping

Last night we switched our sleeping arrangements. Meaning, it is now cool enough to not need an air conditioner at night. Meaning, the kids are now on real mattresses and we aren't all in the same room. From mid-April to late October, all five of us sleep in Henry's room. The strongest a/c unit is in there and it is the least-used room otherwise. To us, this has become quite normal while I realize that to a typical American (including ourselves up until six years ago) the whole family sleeping in the same room is quite odd. Usually the only explanation needed is this: Sleeping in one room means running one a/c unit which means savings of $6-800.00/month.

Henry has a day bed with trundle bed underneath. I sleep on the top bed, Tom slides the trundle bed half-way out and sleeps there. We take Lucy's mattress of her bed and put it on the floor in the far corner, she sleeps there. Henry and Maggie each sleep on a furesh, which is a local floor cushion about 18 inches wide and six feet long. They don't quite fit in the room between Lucy's mattress and Henry's closet, so they overlap in the middle but, according to Henry, that makes a perfect pillow.

For six months out of the year, Henry's room is transformed into one big mattress. He steps on, around and over everything in order to get dressed (after kicking the rest of us out). For six months, Tom and I read by flashlight before going to bed because we want to be cooled off but don't want to wake the kids. For six months we wake up to alarms.

This morning we woke up to cats screeching, the 4:30 a.m. call to prayer and the 5:30 bread man honking his bicycle horn. We woke up to natural sunlight streaming through the windows, no need to set an alarm clock.

The girls are supposed to be sharing a bedroom but Maggie and Henry haven't yet gotten the hang of separation. After tucking Maggie in, she snuck into Henry's room and slept on the furesh in the corner. I guess some habits are hard to break.

The picture is, obviously, an old one. It is our house in Somaliland, the kids were 2 1/2. In the back is one of our furesh. Take the big pillow-cushions off and they make great foam mattresses.

What Are You Reading?

I'd love to hear what you are reading these days. Book clubs? Study groups? School work? Personal pleasure?

I'm in the middle of:

Pure Verite (I know, I know, I need to figure out the French accents on the computer. My excuse - I'm lazy and don't really care! Maybe I will someday. Maybe.)
Racisme Explique a ma fille
Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes
The Time Traveler's Wife
Runner's World magazine

Recently finished "Say You are One of Them". I guess it was a recent Oprah book club pick and usually I don't like her books. But I bought it before she did! Fabulous, horrible, well-written, accurate, wrenching book about Africa.

Also just finished "Nojoud, divorcee a 10 ans", about a 10-year old Yemeni girl who was awarded a divorce by the courts after her 30-something year old husband beat and abused her.

We don't have television this year and I need something to check out with at the end of a long day. Its helpful to read French before going to bed because then I'll dream or think in French, but sometimes I need to stop thinking. Sometimes my brain just needs to go into sleep mode, in which case the magazines or English novels come off the shelf.

Pet #15, Cat #6

We got another cat.

Tom was in Yemen, the kids were bored, I was lonely...

The last cat we had I got while Tom was in the US for five weeks two years ago. If you missed the previous cat saga, check out the older postings. I won't drag it all out of the closet again. Suffice it to say: we started with one, she gave birth to four and we ended up with five dead cats.

Most animals who come to chez Jones die. It isn't that we try to kill them or anything. We've had a diseased dog, an already dying deer we were charged with reviving and a mother cat who preferred the air conditioned bedroom to feeding her newborn kittens in the kitchen. (Okay, yes, Lucy did toss two of them over the second-story veranda but she was only two years old and wanted to watch them fly. She can hardly be held accountable.) We did manage to keep a hamster alive for 6 weeks in France and left 3 out of an original 4 chickens alive when we evacuated Somalia. Not sure what happened to them after we left. We've had 14 pets and four survivors. I'll let you do the math.

When I agreed to take this baby cat from our American friends I could see apprehension on the faces of their children. I had to warn our kids, before they got too attached, to remember our history. They promptly named him Seth, after one of the teachers at Family Camp this summer (if anyone reading this knows how to get in touch with Seth, I'd love to tell him about his namesake but don't have his email).

Every day for the past four mornings, the kids rush out of bed and run downstairs to 'see if Seth is still alive.' They race back upstairs to inform me, with awe and breathlessness, that Seth is alive and likes them.

I'll let you know if Seth survives the Joneses.

A New Season

It rained last week. Thunder and lightening style, which I have only seen one other time in Djibouti. Almost immediately, the humidity dropped, as if the clouds had been gathering up moisture for weeks and were as relieved as the rest of us to dump it earthward. Now the weather is pleasant, almost. I still sweat through my shirts but only after being in the sun for a few minutes rather than while sitting in front of the a/c. Although mosquitos will be out in full force and nasty colds will sweep through town (due to the sudden 'chill'), I look forward to these four months of respite and try to enjoy each day for all the coolness it has to offer.

This is the good season. The season for working.

Maggie and Henry have been called in for soutien, which is extra tutoring on Monday mornings before school. Most non-native French speakers get called in for a few weeks a year, so I wasn't surprised. I was surprised, however, by how low their scores have been. Other mothers warned me that this would be the year the French system kicked in full steam and sure enough...The last two years Henry and Maggie were getting above average grades, the equivalents to A's and B's but this year they are barely passing.

Enter home school. We had considered doing English in the afternoons but decided to stick with French so they could master one language rather than be mediocre in two. Mothering is, in any country, a lonely occupation but even more so in Djibouti. By turning my heart and focus to the home, I've had to abandon almost all of my other activities. There are no home school co-ops, no museums or zoos to meet other moms at. No libraries. Just me and the kids. Its been a lonely turning but a good and necessary one. We are learning how to work together. I'm learning how to teach, how each of them learn, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to motivate and challenge them. I'm learning more about dying to myself, learning to give up certain activities, or at least put them on hold. I'm learning in fresh, deep ways how unique and precious each of my kids are. I'm learning how fleeting these years are and how passionate I am about my family.

This is the good season. The season for loving.

Ooftah

Tom is in Yemen and, as seems to happen when he is gone, I have seven kids in my house. A typical weekend has six kids here but this time I decided what's one more?

Three Americans
One Yemeni Djiboutian
One Somali/Afar Djiboutian
Two Somali/Eritrean/Ethiopian/Italian Djiboutians

They speak French, love chocolate chip cookies (even burned ones) and ice cubes and fight like siblings. Six of them live here. Three with Tom and I (can you guess which ones?) and three in the house below ours. The other is Maggie's best friend from school.

To Give or Not to Give?

The house behind our house must have been a palace during colonial days. More than eight rooms, a massive piece of property and a large, deep swimming pool mark it as the home of someone wealthy. Quite possibly someone who used to torture dissidents in pre-independence times. Our neighborhood was one of the torture sites. Now, however, the house has no roof, the walls are full of cracks and gaping holes, the yard is a mass of random debris and dead thorn bushes and the pool is the neighborhood garbage dump.

A refugee family moved in about two years ago. I don't know how many people are living there, but at least four family units including a couple of new born babies, a severely handicapped young man and some elderly women. Its not a bad set-up for them, they have relative shelter and are protected from the police who gather up refugees and ship them off to the border during regular 'rafs'. Only once have they asked us for anything. One of the women gave birth via c-section and received a few packets of pills but they couldn't read the French instructions. I visited, helped her understand when to take them and went home. Somehow they get enough to eat and I suspect our landlord's family (who lives below us in our duplex) helps them out.

Henry noticed them last year when I delivered some blankets from the US military base over the fence made of thick thorn bushes and plastic bags between our yard and theirs. Suddenly I wouldn't be able to find him in the mornings before school. I would call his name and he would come running around the corner of the house and jump in the car. Eventually I asked what he was doing.

"Giving the poor people money," he said. Or candy, or hand-me down clothes. He did this for a few weeks, then seemed to forget about it.

Just this morning, Henry came running into the office and grabbed his box of allowance money. He doesn't have many franc left as he used most of it in MN this summer and the rest of his money is Turkish, Emirati, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Somali, Malaysian, French...He managed to pull out a few Djiboutian franc and bolted for the back veranda.

"I'm throwing money to the poor people!" he shouted to me when I asked what he was doing.

I thought about stopping him. There is something slightly uncomfortable to me about the image of a white boy standing on a second-story veranda tossing coins to the starving masses.

There was no way I would stop him. There is something awesome and humbling about the image of a little boy who doesn't speak a common language with our neighbors but is filled with compassion for them and acts generously, giving with joyful abandon.

Presents in My Flour

This is what I find in my flour after sifting. I used to buy flour at the little dukaans on every block but it was worse than this. I buy it at the French grocery store now, at a higher price. I knew it had bugs in it when I bought it - they were crawling around the shelf and I could see them in the folds of the one-kilo bags. A French woman tried to stop me from buying it but there isn't any other way to get flour. Unless I wanted to pay six dollars for two pounds.

This photo is four days after buying the bag and it has been in the freezer since I bought it. With flour and batteries and huge bags of ice in the freezer, its challenging to get much else in. What you can see are live black bugs. What you can't see are live transparent worms. What you can't smell is the stale, musty stink of old flour filled with bugs and worms.

Taxi

Last week I took a taxi home (from the cussing French musician field trip). Grabbed the first green and white cab I saw. The driver spoke English surprisingly well. He drove in the opposite direction I told him, swung around the block and stopped at the new Oil Libya gas station to fill up. There was a bus in front of us and after they were fueled, the driver stayed to chat with the man pumping his gas until my driver shouted and waved his fist at them.

After the car had just enough gas to reach our neighborhood, we drove away. A few blocks later my driver stuck his head out the window and shouted to a friend. We backed up (on the main road through downtown in peak traffic time) and stopped in the middle of the street. An elderly man with a walking cane and wearing a macwiis (man-skirt) climbed into the front seat and a younger woman, presumably his daughter, got in back with me.

"Hello," she said. "How are you?" Perfect English.

"Why didn't you say 'bonjour'?" I asked.

She shrugged. "You look American." Maybe because I had left my short shorts and tight, strappy crop-top at home. Or maybe because I wasn't smoking. Or because she couldn't see my tattoo. (Just kidding, mom!)

Again we turned in the opposite direction of my neighborhood. Less than three blocks from where they got in, the Djiboutian couple got out of the taxi at a photocopy shop. They needed change for their purchase so I gave them my taxi fare. The driver said they would work it out later and we left them behind.

During the rest of the ride, the driver praised his English skills, boasted of the three months he worked for UNHCR (during 27 years of driving a taxi) and complained that he spent his entire salary on qat. We both agreed qat was a waste of his time and money and that he could better provide for his seven children if he would invest in something other than drugs and he asked me to find him a job.

I remembered our old co-worker's bus ride with a woman and a goat. By comparison to her story and to most other taxi rides, this one was a low-key, non-adventurous, predictable taxi cab ride, especially considering that I felt inches from death by car accident only two times.

It's So Cold!

Thursday morning at 7:30 Maggie came running in from the yard.

"I need a sweater!" she cried. "It is so cold outside."

I checked the temperature, it was 103 with 79% humidity.

Today, however, was the first day I didn't drip sweat from the tip of my nose while waiting outside the kids' classrooms. I still soaked through my shirt, but less sweat on the face is progress. Yesterday we picnicked in Arta, a town in the hills 45 minutes from Djiboutiville. At 5:30 p.m. with a shirt soaked in post-run sweat and a brisk breeze blowing, I almost felt chilled.

I heard it snowed in MN this weekend. I don't know if we could handle snow anymore, you people must be crazy! But seriously, too cold and too hot make me think about eternity and I feel grateful. So if there is anything good about uncomfortable climates, it is a thankful heart. Maybe not thankful for this very moment, but thankful for an eternity of moments to come. In perfect climate control with no power cuts or wild winter snowstorms.

There Was an Old Lady

Lucy's version of "There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" (wish we had high enough speed to post a video clip, but you'll have to imagine her singing in a high, dramatic voice punctuated by giggles at the end of each verse and the word swallowed comes out more like smawowlowed)

There was an old lady, she swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. She has to die.
There was an old lady, she swallowed a spider. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. She has to die.
There was an old lady, she swallowed a cat. Fancy that! I don't know why she swallowed a fly. She has to die.
There was an old lady, she swallowed a dog. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. She has to die.
There was an old lady, she swallowed a cow. I don't know how! She has to die.
There was an old lady, she swallowed a horse. She has to die.
She died!

Then we look in Lu's belly to see if she swallowed a horse. She thinks she might have swallowed a fly, but is pretty sure she didn't swallow any of the other animals.

Chaperone p.s.

I looked up the main word in the singer's swear-word song from yesterday's post, just to be sure I had understood him. Sure enough, it translates in English to two swear words and an insult all wrapped up in one neat little word. At least the French are efficient.

Chaperone

Maggie volunteered me at school to be a parent chaperone for an outing to the French Cultural Center to hear an acoustic musician. Her reasoning as to why I was available: "You are just sitting at home all day watching us."

She wasn't exactly correct, but I did go along because I had Tuesday morning open.

I arrived during recess and took the chance to talk with Maggie's teacher about math. The French formulate their division and subtraction problems differently and I wasn't sure Henry was doing it correctly. The teacher walked me through a few problems, using graph paper and a ruler to make sure everything was straight. When I scribbled down my problems and passed on the ruler he was a bit put out. My lines weren't perfectly straight and my numbers were kiddy-wompus.

We drove to the Cultural Center in a packed bus, all of us with sweat streaming from every pore. At the center the a/c was on, but only just enough to keep sweat from pooling. We joined the fourth grade classes which meets at the high school so there were about 120 kids. Henry and Maggie go to the fourth grade class at the elementary school simply so we don't have to drive to two separate schools every day for Lucy. Most of the native French kids go to the high school location as that is closer to the military bases. That means both Henry and Maggie's classes are made up of 20 Djiboutians, 1 American and 5 French kids.

The singer was an older French man with long, white hair. He wore all black and played a guitar. The kids had spent the previous week memorizing one of his songs but a lot of the French kids knew most of his other songs as well and sang along.

"You know that some of the songs have swear words in them," he said and the kids cheered. "I'm going to sing one of those now and you can sing along!" The kids went wild. He then sang a song in which every third word was a swear word and the fourth graders were screaming it along with him. The boys laughed so hard some of them were banging their heads on the chairs in front of them. Merci beaucoup, chanteur.

More entertaining than 'sitting home watching the kids all day' and I picked up some new vocabulary words.

We Have a Bully

Apparently yesterday Lucy knocked Ernest into the dirt on the playground. Her teacher then tried to call Lucy to come and talk about it but Lucy started crying and ran away.

I tried to talk to Lu about it on the way home from school but she was tight-lipped. I couldn't get one word out of her until after lunch. She finally confessed that, yes, she had knocked Ernest down.

"Why?" I asked.

"He was shutting the train door."

"You didn't want to shut the door?"

"No."

She doesn't have the French vocab yet so instead of words, she relied on her strength. This morning she apologized to Ernest (a pale, scrawny boy quite a bit smaller than Lucy) but I still have a feeling there will be more knock-downs in the future.

I Just Want a CD

I was at the grocery store yesterday, wait, let me specify, I was at the Nougaprix yesterday. There are six grocery stores I have to go to plus the market, plus smaller market stalls along the road in order to get everything. So, I was at the Nougaprix yesterday and wanted to buy a package of Cd-Rs. They are in a locked glass cabinet next to the cashier.

"Pardon," I said to the man standing (not working, standing) at the register. "Can you open this for me?"

He stared at me, then shouted, "Hussein!" into the vicinity. No one responded so I asked again. He yelled again. No one responded. Eventually another worker wandered toward us. "Go get Hussein," the first man said. The second man strolled away, then strolled back to grab a box of yogurt left on the conveyer belt (which doesn't actually convey anything).

As I watched, he went first to the refrigerated section and put the yogurt back. Then he swung his arms in a wide circle for a while, twisting his upper body and stretching. He poked his head into the back offices and returned to the front alone.

The first man had by now wandered over to another register where he watched a girl ringing up the items of the people in line. At least seven people stood in line while he and four other male employees watched her ring them up, watched them bag their own groceries and watched me wait for someone to unlock the cabinet.

Three more men came to the front. I recognized all of them as upper level workers in the store and asked them to open the cabinet for me. They were consulting with the first man about something else and none of them were named Hussein.

"Where is the man who can open the cabinet?" I asked and the first man pointed to the tallest of the three newcomers, the one I had already asked. He looked back and me, turned around and wandered away, calling in a low voice, "Hussein! Hussein!"

I left.

We bought our CD-Rs at a different store. It took about thirty seconds.

Wet

These days I wouldn't describe Djibouti as HOT so much as I would say it is WET. Which is much grosser, in my opinion. It means we change clothes three or more times per day and that I can watch drops of sweat drip from my chin while I exert the little amount of energy required to talk on the telephone. While sitting down. The temperature is, indeed, dropping but the humidity has been as high as 80 percent. Combined with a temperature of 110 or even 105, that makes things pretty uncomfortable.

Yesterday I was working on cleaning an apartment of some Americans who left recently and within fifteen minutes, my clothes were 100 percent soaked through, my hair as wet as if I had taken a shower. I came home and did take a shower. The second within two hours that morning. I took another one before going to bed so between sweating and showering, it's pretty stinkin' wet.

BUT...we have power! For the three weeks that we have been here, we have only had a total of three hours of power cuts and last night was the first one to happen in the middle of the night. Unbelievable! We are so grateful that even writing about how wet it is seems hypocritical. I wanted to write it so you could have a feel for the weather, but my heart isn't in the complaining. My heart is rejoicing that we have working air conditioning units in most of the house (not the kitchen or bathrooms or dining room or Lucy's room) and that we have been able to use our electricity almost 24 hours/day 7 days/week.

So yes, we are wet. But no, we aren't drowning.