Babies Know Best

"I close my eyes, and I see your face

If home's where the heart is, then I'm out of place

Lord won't you give me strength to make it through somehow?

I've never been more homesick than now."

There is a strange and dynamic balance between the disquiet of a soul that is stretched by growing pains and the contentness of a spirit that has found where it belongs.  Every day, I wonder whether it will get easier being here, so very far away from the children and the country that has stolen my heart and fueled my dreams for over a decade.  It doesn't. Instead, I find myself enveloped in a culture whose focus is decidedly self-centered and surrounded by people who are operating on a wavelength that I just can't seem to tune into anymore.

A few days ago, my best friend said something that struck me like a ton of bricks.  I was having a pretty rough day, and admittedly, my pining for Kazembe was at an obnoxious high.  She quipped something about not feeling like we really connected anymore because I was so preoccupied with a place and a people that she has no context in.  How incredibly burdensome and heart-wrenching to hear those words and recognize them as true.

In so many ways, I desperately want and need to fit back in here. I am way too much of a social animal to survive an isolated and solitary existence.  The simultaneously terrifying and satisfying fact of the matter is that I simply am not who I was three months ago.  But somehow, I'm still me.  If that in any way makes sense to you, please feel free to explain it to me. In an odd way, I see many of my friends going through the same thing.  Relationships are starting and ending. Friend groups are rearranging themselves. Living situations have changed significantly from last year-- some of them are off-campus, some moved from dorms to apartments, some who had previously lived together split up, and some who barely knew each other are living together.  One of my friends is preparing to study abroad next semester, and another is contemplating spending next summer doing international missions somewhere (I must say, I'm pushing for Africa... I think he has the heart for it).

It's strange, really. I could not have been more out of place in Africa.  I think about the Mutomboko ceremony, where at times Zeger and I were literally the only white people in a sea of 20,000 Zambians. How is it that I felt so at home there but feel so hopelessly lost here? 

Early last semester, I was sitting at a coffee shop with a girl that I greatly admired but really didn't know very well. She has spent several summers and much of her heart in Russia. I love listening to her stories and seeing her eyes come alive as memories that only she can see flash before them.  Nearly every conversation I've ever had with her has wrapped back around to Russia somehow.  Post-Kazembe, I understand why.

That village, that culture, those kids-- they've become such a huge part of who I am.   A friend joked tonight that my list of priorities starts with Africa, followed closely by coffee, and ends with homework being somewhere way down at the bottom as an afterthought. If you tie God in there with Africa, he's pretty accurate. But I'm beginning to feel that the only way to make it through this school year alive is to somehow stifle that passion for a time.  I just don't know how to do that.

On the way back to America, I sat at a little restaurant bar in the Lusaka airport, mechanically eating a ham sandwich and trying not to think about the fact that in just an hour I would have to board that plane. The guy behind the counter tentatively said something to me in Bemba, and instantly we sprang into an exchange of what limited Bemba vocabulary I knew.  He thanked me for taking the time to learn.  "Keep studying. You will make someone very happy when you come back to Zambia and greet them in Bemba."  In the front of one of Amy's cookbooks is a story about a native who told a missionary how he knew the missionaries cared for him. His tearful explanation was, "You ate with us." In Africa, I can do that.  I can take the time to learn about their lives and their language. I can sit around a rickety table and eat Nshima with the staff.

Why is it so easy for me to find ways to connect with their culture but so difficult to connect with my own?

At the end of the day, sweet memories and sweeter Jesus carry me through.  I wrap up in my chtenga blanket that still smells a little like an African marketplace and spread my textbooks out around me. "Baba Yetu" plays gently from my iTunes, and I hum along absentmindedly as I lay down Augustine's Confessions and begin memorizing the pharmacological functions of benzodiazepine.  I send emails and write letters to some of my favorite people in the farthest reaches of the globe-- Germany, Belgium, Zambia, and even Texas.  I juggle Skype dates with work schedules and pesky time zones, and I force myself to complete at least some measurable amount of homework before I pull out my list of Bemba health vernacular.  I'm not sure how to function in this strange half-existence. All I know is that I will, because somehow I already am. And really, there isn't any other option.

One of my sweetest victories this summer was with Baby Lizzie.  She was terrified of me from day one. If one of the nannies was in the room, she would tolerate my presence. Heaven help me if I tried to pick her up and carry her away from the crowd though. Two days before I left, I was in the nursery telling them all goodnight. I sat cross-legged on the floor as half a dozen toddlers and preschoolers climbed off of my back and into bed. Lizzie looked over her shoulder, cocked her head to the side a bit, and then  seemingly made a decision. She Frankenstein-waddled over to me, a smile growing on her face. She opened her arms wide and, about two steps away from me, literally threw herself into my arms.  

As little Baby Lizzie so wisely demonstrated, some things just take time.