cake

In the porcelain tub the water runs hot and long. I lather my hair with soaps smelling of flowers, and then I wash it again because I can. Using the blade against my legs as the water runs down the drain. 30 hours later I am under running water that drizzles lightly from the faucet and is cold with a lack of power. A spider scurries up the wall beside me. I am thirsty, and put water on the stove to boil for 20 minutes in order to have something drinkable. I lie on the bed and soak in the moments. In many moments I feel like I never left this place. And in the periphery of some of those very same moments I feel like the foreign, the challenge, is all I see. I am struck by the differences, the lack of American understanding. The immense challenge that we the people face to even touch the fringes of understanding and then begin to move that understanding to advocacy, action and change. I lay remembering the feathertop mattress in my room and the doctor’s appointment I so easily attained at home. I don’t think one way of life or the other is wrong, I don’t disagree or think a culture should be downplayed, discarded, or deemed wrong.  But I do think that something greater exits, that being a part of the bigger story is possible for all of us.

Driving through the village, everything is green. When I left 3 months ago dust kicked into the air under the feet of every passerby. Brown covered the land. The water was cherished by the drop. Sickness spread and people wandered miles to haul a Jerican of water back home. Now the water overflows washing away roads, filling damns and lighting up the land with color and life. Water means growth and crops and survival. It also means typhoid and mosquitoes which mean malaria. It seems the challenges never end.

I spend an hour in the land rover learning to drive a stick shift. I wish I would have learned years ago. Instead I am learning here, driving on the other side of the road, through mud shin deep among the goats and children running through the village. After killing the engine several times on the hill, Michael looks at me and laughs  “QB, this is easy like eating cake with juice!” The kids laugh at me in the back seat, teasing me every step of the way. We celebrate as I conquer the hill. The laughter and ease settles me and I drive along navigating the muddy roads pretending I am eating cake. Hours later I am sitting in the hospital waiting room with students, one is going deaf, another is having anxiety attacks as a result of home life, one is suffering from typhoid and another has possible appendicitis, hunched over for hours in pain. It doesn’t feel like eating cake.

I think maybe it’s about laughing and celebrating and eating cake with your friends in the moments we are given, and standing together navigating the cake-less moments as they come.