Iowadrift

Et Encore, Mali

So, the stuck Land Rover.  This is de rigeur: you have to drive out into the bush and get stuck: it's just the done thing, don't you know.  And we, always wanting to do the in thing, promptly got stuck on the fourth morning of our trip.

Let me back up a little.  We spent a day in Bamako after our night arrival, and shopped out the Artisans' Market downtown, which is where, on Mondays and Fridays, the mothers of twins are allowed to beg.  (You give them money with your hands crossed one over the other, so as not to favor either twin with your right hand, I am told.)  I trailed along after our host and enjoyed the odd sensation of being in a place at once completely new and completely familiar.  I've never been to West Africa before, so the faces of the people (oh, those gorgeous women!), the brilliant head-dresses, the languages, and the food were all new.  At the same time, the smell of rotten fruit and exhaust, the mix of mud and dust underfoot, the press of bodies, the molten copper sun, the glass bottles of Sprite, Fanta and Coke, the markets selling everything from shoelaces to sugarcane, and the riotous mix of traffic (donkey carts, Land Cruisers, bicycles, scooters, pedestrians, buses) on the roads felt completely familiar.  It was as though I'd stepped back ten years, to when I was single, childless, and on the road. 

I hadn't stepped back, though.  I could feel the umbilical pull of my kids at home all the time--not in a bad way, just in a THERE way--and I couldn't get over the incredible luxury of so much TIME to do things.  When we went out, I could just put on my shoes and go: I didn't have to put on anybody else's shoes for them.  When we came home, if I was tired I could lie down and read, or rest.  Oh my, it was the height of decadence, I'm telling you.

But I digress.  The morning after the market visit, we flew to Kayes, a town in the northwest interior, just over the border from Mauritius, and let me tell you, they don't call Air Mali "Air Maybe" for nothing.  We walked across the tarmac to a propeller plane which looked like the plane which carries Indiana Jones to Nepal in Raiders of the Lost Arc, and I wasn't at all reassured when we stepped inside and found ourselves squinting at signs in the Cyrillic alphabet.  A secondhand Russian aircraft: THAT's confidence inspiring.  Complete with Russian pilots, I might add.  On the other hand, they gave us fruit juice and croissants (handed to us as we boarded: there were no flight attendants), which is more than American Airlines deigns to do on transcontinental flights, so who am I to be picky about things like avionics?

We landed in Kayes after an hour and a half of deafening flight over red, dry country dotted with baobab and thorn trees, and, after the usual shuffle of officialdom (passport numbers recorded, etc: why?), we piled into a Land Cruiser and a Toyota pickup and drove through more red, dry country to the town, which lines the banks of the...wait, is it the Senegal river?  I'm thinking so.  We roosted at a missionary guest house overnight, and had our business meeting with Indielou that evening, going over his accounts, and his plans for this year, and his need for a four wheel vehicle of some kind, and his work in the clinic, and his new employees, and all that, and good grief, the man works SO HARD, and so does everyone else at his clinic.  I mean, this guy straps a portable vaccine cooler to his back and rides all day on a motorbike to go vaccinate the kids in these tiny hamlets in the Sahel, and then he rides back to his little concrete-and-mud house beside the clinic compound, and is essentially always on call.  So if grandma shows up with a broken hip (yes, they break their hips there too), he's got to stabilize her and organize transport to Kayes.  Which...drumroll please...consists of a TWO DAY ride on a donkey cart.  So, you know, we kind of think he has a point asking for a four wheel drive.

Oy, there I have to stop for tonight, because the Rooster-doo is whimpering in his sleep.  Again.  But he had a big day, because Rabbit's fourth birthday party was today, complete with a Thomas the Tank Engine cake, and ice cream, and six other small boys (and their very cool parents, who sat around and drank Anchor Steam, so I enjoyed the party a lot too), and a trip to the pet store this morning to pick out a hamster (because two cats, a betta fish and two turtles just didn't seem like enough, especially with the looming move).  And now either Roo is too tired to sleep, or too full of ice cream to sleep (most likely) or too working on an ear infection to sleep, or all of the above.  So off I go to the Roo-rescue.

Tune in tomorrow for the conclusion of The Perils of Pauline or Gunning the Land Cruiser Won't Get It Through the Sand Pit Any Faster Now That It's Stuck.

Mali

So, having spent all of ten days in Mali, here's what I have to say: drop everything and go.  Go now, so you catch the blissfully dry, clear, eighty-degree weather, before it turns into a 120 degree furnace.  Go and buy out the artisans' market in Bamako; go bounce around in a Land Cruiser and meet all the chiefs within a ten mile radius of the bush clinic you're visiting; go hang out with missionaries who've been in Mali for twenty years and speak local dialects and who have, as one missionary woman said, "feet like hooves" from walking in the sand for years.  Go feast your eyes, which are used to the greys of an Iowa winter, on the women dressed in billowing folds of emerald, indigo, cerise and canary yellow cotton.  Go eat fresh French bread (let's here it for Francophone countries!). Go, go, go.

As you can see, I fell a little in love with the place.  I hadn't been overseas since 2002, hadn't been in Africa since 1994, so everything was fresh and bright to me, and the trip was so short that the novelty didn't have time to wear off.  At the same time, back in the distant past, I did spend enough time overseas that to return feels like homecoming: the smells of hot dust and dung fires, the sound of a fan whickering overhead, the feel of a thin foam mattress, the diffuse gold and sudden dark of a tropical sunset.  Hell, even the millions of tiny plastic bags blowing around everywhere made me nostalgic, because there's ALWAYS tiny plastic bags blowing around.  Oh, I was pathetic, but so happy!

Really, everything worked out amazingly well.  I met up with my fellow travelers--Tall Dentist Guy and Talktative Pastor Woman--in Detroit, and caught an overnight flight to Paris.  The guy in the seat next to me, a bilingual French businessman about my age, was very easy on the eyes, but rather hard on the nose, since he smelled like a distillery.  Turned out he'd just dropped his daughter off with her mother--they're in the midst of a custody fight--I suppose hence the booze.  Or maybe the booze came first, THEN the custody fight?  Who knows.  Anyway, he slept it off during the flight, and we all disembarked at Charles de Gaulle in a cold and uninspiring grey dawn.

Or rather, we disembarked somewhere in the suburbs of Paris, because the airport?  Is entirely under construction.  I mean, seriously, they parked us out by a highway and rolled some steps up to the plane and we all waltzed off and took a bus through miles of construction (with no visible workers) to a terminal which was clearly in a dreadful state of temporary-ness.  We holed up there for several hours, then caught a flight to Bamako (the capital of Mali, a fact I didn't know until last month).  My seatmate this time was a woman from Mali who smelled delicious.

The arrivals hall at the Bamako airport resembled a rugby scrum, but never mind.  We eventually found our way out into the warm, singing night, and were in turn found by Indielou, the nurse we'd come to visit, and The Lovely Missionaries, who have lived there for twenty years, most of the time in tiny hamlets way the heck out in the sub-Saharan desert, and who let us hang out at their Bamako house for days on end, and fed us, and let us use their computers.  We drove through the night in that fog one gets into after twenty-four hours of traveling, and once in a while I dredged up some French and talked to Indielou.  But you know, with jet lag on top of social awkwardness on top of language barrier, the conversation wasn't really flowing.  I was glad to crawl into my bed and tuck my mosquito net around the mattress at midnight.

Oy, if I stick with this level of detail, I'll be describing this trip for the next four years.  Tomorrow I'll post something more coherent and anecdotal, I promise.  In fact, you choose the anecdote.   Viz:

1. How to get along in a language you haven't spoken for twenty years
2. How to get your Land Cruiser out of a sand trap, using only the branches of acacia trees, a rope, the entire male population of the nearest hamlet, and one chief carrying a teakettle
3. How to keep your feet from turning into hooves in the desert
4. How to keep a straight face when your (straight, male, fiftyish) traveling companion joins you for some star-watching...clad in a wife-beater and black bikini briefs
5. How not to snort when yet another traveling companion lies down, takes a nap, and begins to snore during a village meeting
6. How to cope when yet ANOTHER traveling companion shows a distressing tendency to break into song any and everywhere, including the Bamako airport
7. How to keep a straight face when the sorority girl in the seat next to you on the Amsterdam-Minneapolis flight informs you that she just shot a kudu in South Africa
8. How to beg in Bamako, if you have twins

You tell me.  Where should I start?

Oh...and in other news....TTD got a job!  Starting April 30th!  Outside Boston!  So now we are moving, and I mean imminently!  I am stunned, and glad, and sad, like the Dr. Seuss character in One Fish Two Fish ("Why am I sad, and mad, and bad?  I do not know: go ask your Dad").  Also, I am making lists with a fervor approaching the liturgical, because of course the lists will keep it all under control and everything will be OK as long as I can check it off the lists.  Right?

Home, Safe, But Inarticulate

Picture Worth a Thousand Words, Etc.

Bad Blogger, Good Christmas

Whoooo, boy.  We made it.  We got everyone (and the presents) to Boston, we had a fine Christmas, TTD had three interviews in three days (gack), we flew home a day late (thank you, American Airlines),  I went straight from the airport to a ten hour shift in the ER, and Normal Life started up again.

Well, sort of.  I leave for Mali on Sunday the 7th, so there's a lot of Organizing going on, and a lot of Guilt on my part, about the extended leaving of small children.  But today the Rabbit is in preschool and Urp is at toddler storytime at the library with the babysitter, and I am futzing around on the computer, so as I said, Normal Life is back.

Which is kind of nice, because flying with small people through O'Hare at Christmas in bad weather?  Not so good.  The day before we flew, all flights were cancelled out of Cedar Rapids, so the morning we left the airport was full, full, full, and so were the planes.  Ours was two hours late because of weather AND a crew delay (what, one delay wasn't enough?), and we disembarked in Chicago exactly at the departure time for our next flight.  We RACED through the airport, me madly pushing Rabbit in the travel stroller and TTD lugging both Urp and the million-pound diaper bag, and of course the gate we wanted was in Tierra del Fuego and we nearly had heart attacks by the time we got there.  There was the plane...with the jetway just pulling back from it and the door closed for all time.  And we knew, from investigations in Cedar Rapids, that there were no seats to be had on anything until Christmas Eve at the earliest.  I put my head on the desk and heaved a teary sigh of despair.

And the gate attendant had pity!  More than pity: she reached up to heaven and pulled down THREE SEATS ON THE NEXT FLIGHT TO BOSTON, TWO IN FIRST CLASS AND ONE IN THE FIRST ROW OF COACH.  How that happened, with most of the population of Chicago on standby for that flight, I don't know, but I wasn't about to ask irritating questions.  Instead, clutching the tickets to my sweaty breast, I leaned over and kissed TTD.  Then I kissed Urp.  Then I kissed Rabbit, and noticed that he seemed to be on fire.

Oh yes, everyone got sick for Christmas.  Urp and Rabbit both featured fevers, ear aches (Urp with bloody gunk pouring from his tubes), and coughs like sixty year old, three-pack-a-day smokers.  They had a hell of a time sleeping, and were quite pitiful when not dosed with Tylenol, so we did something we don't usually do and called in antibiotics for them ourselves.  I mean, it was Christmas Eve, and I didn't want to spend it in the ER, when I was perfectly capable of diagnosing bronchitis and otitis myself.

So we spent Christmas where it should be spent, with the grandparents, and had presents and a fire in the fireplace and a proper turkey dinner and various friends and relations about, and it was lovely.  Exhausting to the bone, because of the non-sleeping, sick, excited children, but good, because there we all were, crammed into the same house, alive and kicking and mostly compos mentis.  Also, TTD went off on his own and bought me jewelry!  Which he has never done before!  Wow!

Then began the nonstop interview process, about which I don't want to write too much because really that's TTD's story, not mine, to tell.  Suffice it to say, at least one place pretty much came out and made him an offer, and a very generous one at that.  Reasonable schedule, not very stressful practice, start date as soon as he can get his MA license, which, knowing the MA beauracracy, probably means sometime in 2010.  He is currently in the midst of nitty-gritty negotiations with them, and I am trying to sit back and take my sticky fingers off the controls, as Anne Lamott says.  I hope she is better at it than I am.

And then, after all that, we had to fly home.  Bags packed, children stuffed into decent clothes, everyone to the airport, bags checked, everyone through security (shoes off, coats off, stroller folded, computer out, plastic baggie with Tylenol and Motrin bottles out, everyone through, reverse process), everyone fed and watered and tinkled and cleaned up, to gate, flight still showing on-time on the board...and huh?  The sign at the gate, at noon, said something about a flight for DC departing at 11am, and there was a discouraging knot of passengers around one VEEERRRRY SLOOWWWWW gate agent.  Discreet inquiries produced the news that yes, our flight was leaving from this gate; the knot was from a cancelled flight earlier. 

I refrained from shrieking, "Well then move the bloody passengers somewhere else to rebook them, lady!" and returned to the boys, who were playing robots with some other kids.  Our flight didn't board and wasn't called.  Eventually it emerged that the captain was going to be late coming in from another flight, and rather than board us and have the plane ready to go when he arrived, they were going to wait for him, THEN board.  Meaning we would miss our connection in St. Louis.  The gate agent was the opposite of the heaven-sent one on our outward flight from O'Hare: she stared at me as though I were an idiot when I asked about alternate flights and rebooking, and all but said, "Lady, you are wasting my time and I wish you'd spontaneously combust."  So I  cut our losses and rebooked for a 6 am flight the next day, and we called the folks and they sent my brother, bless his heart, to drive through the suddenly-developing snowstorm and pick us up.

So we got up at 3:45 the next morning, did the whole thing all over again, and this time it worked.  We even got an earlier connexion out of O'Hare, because...oh, who cares, at least we got home.  Or the boys got home.  I got home, took a shower, and turned right back around to drive to Cedar Rapids again for ten hours of ER.  I don't think I managed to kill anyone, but it was probably close.  Then I got home at midnight (1 am Boston time) and fell first into the shower, then into bed, after a 22 hour day.

Mali should be no problem.

Or so I tell myself.  Really, I am thrilled to be going myself, and not at all worried about the trip, because this is easy stuff....ten days, a schedule, someone to meet me on the other end, no problem at all.  But leaving the boys for ten days makes my heart ache.  Not for me, because honestly?  After four years I am looking forward to a real break from them.  No, my heart aches for them, because I remember how deeply I missed my mother when she went on trips when I was small.  I remember the long ache of her absence, and how the world was tolerable but not right, and I remember how the day of her homecoming was like Christmas, and how every day of her absence was slow, slow, slow. I am being selfish to ask my children to go through the same thing--and Rabbit will, I know he will, though I think Urp will be fine.  Five days visiting the grandparents with their father is no problem, but ten days at home without me, even though their father and their usual babysitters will be with them the whole time, is big.

Tell me it's going to be OK!