Braids!

It finally happened: the long awaited hair-braiding!  In the early days of joining our family, Hibiscus shyly told me that she wanted her hair braided with beads in it.  First we had to wait for her hair to actually grow, which took a good diet and time.  Then there was a time a couple months ago that I had set aside a Saturday to go do it, but the Saturday started with a big sulky fit, and Hibiscus announced that she didn't want her hair done after all.  So we didn't, and life got busy.  During our Christmas-break errands, we made an appointment for last Monday, but then the car got towed and we never got out of the house.  So finally -- FINALLY -- the braiding happened.

Great excitement.  Great pain.  To braid the new hair in, the hair gets pulled very tight, and remains taught for a day or two.  The crying has been increasing all day, to an angry crescendo at bedtime.  I left her with books and music, and her plan was to stay up and never lay her head against anything all night.  I am hoping that is working out very badly for her, and she actually fell asleep, but I'm kind of afraid to go check.

Here are some observations.

#1.  Women all over the world make sacrifices for beauty, but I think African women manage to outdo themselves in this regard.

#2.  I do think she looks really cute.  I guess we are culturally used to girls having hair around their faces, and she looks softer, sweeter, and more feminine.  The colored beads also help her look more little-girl-ish, and less like an avenging warrior princess or something.  And the short, jaunty braids and crazy-colored beads suit her personality so well!

#3.  Buttercup is not getting her hair braided any time soon, even if she manages to get it to grow and doesn't keep cutting off random bits with scissors.  I think she'll look cute with hair around her face, too, but maybe we can wait until it actually grows out.  I don't think three years old is old enough to understand making sacrifices for beauty.

#4.  Maybe all this sacrifice builds stoicism, something I know is valued in many local cultures.  Well, my girls has plenty of fighting spirit, but not one single drop of stoicism.  Uff, not one single drop!  ("Mama, mama mamamamamama, it's pai-AAAAIII-ning me!")

#5.  Maybe we are building some.  Short term sacrifice for long term gain is something I would like to see more of around here, although I usually approach it more along the lines of "if you carry fruit home from the market, then you get to eat fruit."

#6.  The other beauty advantage that Hibiscus told me she was craving?  Getting her ears pierced.

#7.  Sooooooo not happening!!!

Passports!

While I was in Kenya, I got a call from Miss B, saying that the lawyer's office called her and told her that we could pick up the passports on Monday morning.  Where to pick them up, and why they called Miss B, remained mysteries.  (It turned out because they had tried calling me but the call wouldn't go through, but for some reason Miss B's phone reached mine in Kenya without issue.)

So yesterday we got home and were all grumpy, and today is Monday and this is what happened.  I asked the driver to come at 8 for the "first thing Monday morning," but we did not actually get our bodies in the car and going out the gate until 9:30.  I tried calling the lawyer, but no one answered, so I decided we would go to the passport office and not the lawyer's office, since I thought the lawyer's office was closed but apparently the passport office was having a brief spurt of activity.  We got there, had to park down the street, got all the kids out of the car, went over to the gate, where the policeman passive-aggressively insulted me for not having the correct documents.  We left the line and tried calling the lawyer again, and eventually we got ahold of the person in the office who helps us through the passport logistics, and had a crummy-cell-phone conversation, in which I understood that she told me to bring my passport, the guardianship order, and the girls' birth certificates.  I had the first and the last, but not the middle.

As we drove away, I called the IOM office, where we need to make a medical appointment, and they send the results to the Embassy.  This is the appointment they would not let me make without the passports, and the last piece of paper before the Embassy itself.  I told the children to be quiet while I was on the phone, which lasted for about ten seconds before Hibiscus started throwing herself around the car and giggling.  The driver told her to stop, and started batting at her because she was being dangerously obnoxious.  She subsided for a moment, until I got to the part in making the appointment about giving the children's names.  I used their Ugandan names, which are their only official names, and Hibiscus started correcting me and then yelling at me because she absolutely hates her Ugandan name and never even wants to hear it, let alone have it refer to her.  Then I said that Buttercup was two years old, again because that is what her official papers say, and Hibiscus totally lost it.  That is the way phone conversations go around here.  But I got an appointment for that afternoon... "just for the paperwork, you do not have to carry the children with you," the woman helpfully advised.  Wouldn't I just love to leave them somewhere, but it is school vacation and no where else for them to go!

We had to drive all the way Ggaba Road to Konge to pick up the missing bit of paperwork.  Meanwhile, we stopped at a copy shop to copy something for the medical appointment.  Then home, grill cheese sandwiches for lunch, and try and get all the children back in the car.  Actually, they love to play in the car; the problem is to get them to potty and put their shoes on first.

Then back downtown.  The fee for the medical appointments is $100 US dollars, which is slightly complicated.  I didn't have that much cash (it's quite a lot in Uganda!) so we had to stop at an ATM.  All FOUR of them in Kabalagala were not working, which might possibly set a record.  So downtown at a big bank, where I had to wait in line.  Then a little farther down the street, to a Forex bureau, to change the money into dollars.  Then back to the passport office for our 2:00 appointment.

It turns out that we weren't supposed to bring those documents, we were supposed to bring COPIES of all those documents, so the office could keep them.  This had not occurred to me, as I thought they had copies of just about everything under the sun including Webster's dictionary, but apparently that was the office on the other side of the compound, and the passport-handing-out side wanted copies of everything for their own selves.  Also copies of my husband's passport, which I had at home but not with me.  So the lawyer's-office lady went back and forth into the crowded room for a while, and I waiting with the children on the benches and tried to keep them from driving everyone crazy.  Emerson read "The Little Engine That Could" to Hibiscus, and Buttercup wanted to read too but I wouldn't let her out of the wrap.  She was so whiney that it was no surprise when she suddenly fell fast asleep.

Eventually we went into a very crowded room (an actual indoor one).  I wrote out all my information in a big book while a burly official glared and Hibiscus's passport.  Then I turned around to another big book, where I wrote my local information and signed.  Then they gave me the passport.  The entire procedure was repeated for Buttercup's passport, except the non-asleep children had time to get curious by that point, and wanted me to hold them up, and go through gates, and other non-helpful things.  But then I held both passports in my very own hands!  And to make a good thing even better, I managed to put Buttercup in her carseat and she fell right back asleep, so she had a proper nap.

Then we needed to go to the IOM appointment.  That took driving around for a while, and eventually we found the building.  I had to hand over my passport to enter, and got a special visitors' card around my neck, which really impressed the children.  (The older ones; Buttercup slept in the car with the driver.  There are benefits to having your own driver!!)  The compound was fairly open and quiet, and maybe this helped my kids, because they were much calmer than they had been all day in crowded and noisy places.  We eventually got to the right office, where the receptionist very slowly and calmly made copies of all my documents.  Luckily, they seemed to be all there and correct!  There was one of those water jug fountains in the corner, which kept the kids happy and occupied, although of course eventually Hibiscus had to spill her whole cup of water on the floor.  We got an appointment for the actual medical exam at 8 tomorrow morning, which will mean that we have to leave the house early, but hopefully then they will have the entire day to work on whatever complicated week-long process it takes to send the reports over to the Embassy!

Now that we have the passports, we are done with the Ugandan side of things, and the passports and the IOM reports are the last things that we need in order to submit an application for a US visa.  Then they will give us a preliminary appointment (on Monday or Wednesday morning) in order to review our paperwork, and if it correct, they will give us an appointment for a hearing.  This might be as soon as the same day, or if the slots are already filled, it could be up to a three week wait.  The hearing needs to be attended by at least one adoptive parent, the children in question, and their birth parents and possibly other relatives.  They assess whether or not the child is clearly an orphan by the legal definition.  If the child is, she gets her "travel packet" two business days later.  If she is not "clearly approvable," the case gets sent to Nairobi for investigation.  That is what we DON'T want!

So, after many hours of errands, we had some fun.  We were in a nice area of town, so we found a nice restaurant that had good food and space to play.  The children immediately dove into a game that involved the brass bowls filled with water and rose petals.  I don't know what they were supposed to be for, but luckily we were the only people there that early, and Ugandans are amused by children's normal antics.  So they played in the bowls on the floor, and then the bowls started wandering around, and then all kinds of beautiful Indian decorations made it into the play, and when our food came the children grabbed trays and wanted to carry it in.  And the chefs or the waiter or someone gave them each a little bowl to put on their tray which they carried all the way to the table: Emerson and Hibiscus got a little side dish of raita, and Buttercup got a few carrots and cucumber.  She was so focused on carrying her tray and walking, and she did a wonderful job, until Hibiscus had finished her serving and came back yelling and screaming about what a great job Buttercup was doing, and then she tried to hug her, and then she was jumping up and down in her face, and I had to rush in and save the carrots and cucumbers from their highly confused handler.  I think that is a perfect summation of Hibiscus right there: that she is so enthusiastic, but has such poor judgement, that she ruins the joy of success for someone else right before it can be attained.  Buttercup was obviously so very proud of herself for carrying the tray the long distance from the kitchen, and her sister confused her into spilling it ten feet from the goal.

After dinner the kids ran around a great deal more.  They were motorcycles, and the waiter apparently was the traffic cop who kept catching them and threatening to take them to the police.  They got very sweaty and happy, which is a good ending to a long day.

Return Trip

It was the water bottle that did me in.  You know how, in modern airports, you can't bring your water through security, you have to pour it all out and get new water in the terminal to bring on the plane?  Well, it's like in Africa, they have to be as modern as other airports, but they have to twist things around to make themselves unique, and in the process they defeat the entire point but they are still stubborn and bureaucratic about it, and just stand there staring at your repeating their stupid rules.  In this case, no one cared about water going into the airport, at either the preliminary security station nor the main security check where you would expect a security check.  But at the last minute, when you are walking into the pre-boarding area at the gate, there is an extra security gate, with no signs or information or anything, but they tell you to throw away your water.  Which means no water whatsoever in the plane.  As though the water they are selling in the terminal is loaded with whatever bombs people can make out of water, or for that matter, that they want people wandering around with those water-bombs in the airport terminal at all.  I protested, and the guy brought over his superior, who repeated the same words mildly and stared vaguely behind my ear, which is the African way of having a passive argument.  I said "what am I supposed to do?" which is the African arguing way of not letting them be passive any more, but they didn't take the bait and just kept staring.  They brought over a third person to be unhelpful, though.  After a while, one of them said that if the water had a seal, it would be okay, which as far as I could tell he made up on the spot to appear agreeable, although of course it could be airport policy -- who knows, as the airport policy is not posted any where.  The water bottle in question had about four sips taken out of it and had cost me 160 Kenyan shillings, and of course we wouldn't have taken four sips if we had known about this so-called airport policy.  I pointed out that other airports all over the world do not randomly take your water away when you are boarding the plane.  One of the guards said calmly that they were not any other airport, and they did not follow any other policy, they were Boma Jaipa airport (or whatever the name is) and that is their policy.  Obviously, duh!  (Those last were not technically words, but very clear.)

I am generally an incredibly non-confrontational person.  As in, if I even think about saying something rude, I start to cry and have to go away in private and think about it the rest of the afternoon.  I'm losing it in Africa, I really am -- my sanity or my Type 9-ness, I'm not sure which.  Although less healthy Type 9's are known for being passive aggressive, and maybe that includes violently throwing your water bottle at the trash can as you walk away.  I didn't actually throw it at a human being, which would be more on the aggressive side.  Actually, come to think of it, it probably IS passive aggressive, because that is what they are experts at around here, and they all expertly ignored me.


The trip back to Uganda technically went smoothly.  There were no lines to check in or go through security, we found our gate, the flight was on time and the bathrooms functioning, I got American dollars for the Ugandan visas, I found a toy that I had promised Emerson for good-shopping-behavior in the terminal, I even had time to get a couple Kenyan souvenirs.  (It takes some searching to find Kenyan souvenirs that are not exactly the same things as Ugandan souvenirs, except maybe there is a different country name painted on it.  In fact, the terminal was full of general east-African souvenirs with every possible East African country name painted on it, just in case you wanted to feel specific to a whole bunch of places.)  Most importantly, the Ugandan customs official laughed and joked with Emerson, and didn't make any kind of fuss about putting the new stamps in our passports.  This was quite a concern, because not only have I heard a lot of airport-official horror stories by this point, the customs official on the way out did not like all my visa extensions, and delayed me for quite some time even thought I was just trying to LEAVE the country.  It is quite certain that she would not have let me back in.  So the trip went smoothly.

But I was so tired.  I actually got more sleep in Kenya than I usually do at home, so there was no physical reason to feel so exhausted, but it was one of those days when I felt like everything was through a fog and my limbs were moving in syrup.  I think it was the fact of returning to Uganda.  The closer we got, the more tired I became, just in anticipation.


The few days in Kenya were such a treat.  Of course it was nice to not have to worry about fixing meals or doing laundry or worrying about paperwork, but the vacation-y-ness wasn't the main thing.  It was so rejuvenating to see something new and think about something new and do something new!  With three children in the suburbs, I am so confined.  I am either at home, doing the same-ol' at home things, or I am doing necessary errands... and with all the children out of school, those errands are gut-wrenchingly tiring and stressful.  It was so nice mentally to think about different shaped buildings, and how the history of the two countries had created such different realities in such geographical proximity, and listen to cheesy stories about elephants, knowing that I had absolutely no connection to the elephants and I wasn't going to come back again or show it to someone else or where I would stand next time, and basically just have NOTHING TO DO with the stupid elephants except to stand there and watch them.  That was refreshing.

And it was refreshing to be a one-child mama again.  It's more than just the number of children, it's that Emerson and I have a rhythm, we understand each other.  There is no question that I have spent more time alone with Emerson than anyone else in the world, since I was his age and spending that much time with my own mother.  (Three weeks older than he is now, my sister was born and that intimacy changed into something new, too.)  Going around Nairobi together was familiar like going around Kampala was a few months ago, a routine that we knew, the excitement and exploration that we remembered, and that we both enjoy.  But there are years of memories like that; Emerson and I have done a lot of traveling alone together.  So it was like settling in with an old friend, to be with my son the way I remembered being with my son.  It was a treat.  But more than that, it was fine; it was normal; it was enough.


The pilot forgot to ask my opinion, but as far as I was concerned, that plane could have kept on flying.  We could have gone right over east Africa and headed back home.  There was nothing I needed to stop for in Uganda; nothing that was so important that I wanted to head down into this morass again.

Almost as often as people try and convince me that the baby I'm carrying isn't actually my baby, they tell me what a saint I am for helping out other people's babies.  That's not true either; people adopt for selfish reasons: they want to dress a girl in pretty clothes or play baseball with a boy or show that they are a unique and open-minded family, whatever it is.  I feel like my decision to adopt has some selfless and loving reasons in it, but it certainly has a lot of selfishness too.


Going back to Kampala this December was not selfish.  I sat there, content with my son and the special bond we shared, and I thought that there wasn't anything in Uganda that would make me, personally, more happy than NOT being in Uganda any more.


And of course, the plane went on, and we got off, and we're back in our apartment in Konge, and I know that's the right decision to make and I wouldn't make a different one.  That was the feeling of a moment, not of a lifetime.  So we went back home, and the girls didn't want to look at me, and our routine was all broken up, and we were all tired, so it was a really exhausting afternoon and evening and they were all crazy difficult, and I yelled at them, more than once.  I never used to yell, never ever.  It wasn't self control, I never felt like yelling.  I felt like walking away when things (and children) got too frustrating -- and I still do, for that matter, but apparently months of not being able to walk away for even a moment has uncovered the yelling-part of me.  My toolbox of parenting ideas has apparently tipped over and everything has fallen out... and don't you dare give me suggestions, or I'll probably end up yelling at you, too!  The only thing left seems to be to imagine the plane flying off, off and away over Africa, leaving it behind.... But no matter how I felt, I have made too many promises to the girls to even acutualy consider not fulfilling my promises to them, and coming back as soon as possible.   I wouldn't really leave.
         

But I want to stop feeling so angry.  And I really want to get out of here.
 

Pictures from Kenya

Our first day....

We spent a long time over breakfast, due to the presence of legos.  A new lego set will do that to a boy!  Then we went out walking, which was fine for a while, but Emerson wanted a more directed activity.  I offered up things to see downtown, eating lunch, or museums: the National Museum, Train Museum, or Snake Museum.  I thought the trains would be a shoe-in, but Emerson thought about it and set his heart on the National Museum.  "I don't want to just see a museum with one thing, like snakes or trains," he told me.  "Then what if I get tired of looking at snakes or trains?  I want to go to a museum with lots of different things, and then we can go and see different parts of the museum."  He even eschewed lunch in favor of heading over to see many new things.  So to the National Museum we went, and it lived up to his hopes.  It had many different galleries, including modern art, culture, animals, skulls, and outside areas including a circle garden, flowing (but not large) botanical gardens, and other small specific gardens.  We also had lunch.

Then we took another cab to a big mall.  I was hoping to get some of the shopping in for things that are difficult to find in Uganda.  Indeed, I found a new charger for the iPads in an actual Apple store, a soft measuring tape longer than 20 inches in an actual fabric store, and some new clothes.  That took a while, of course, but I hope I have something kind of wearable and respectable now.  I think our clothes are getting to be in as bad of shape as the locals, which I don't mind wearing to go buy bananas, but I'm beginning to feel a little silly going to the lawyer's office like that!

The specific stories are written on each photo:
Pictures in Kenya

To Kenya!

I am writing this fro the National Museum of Nairobi.  That's right, Nairobi.  We had to do something about the problem that, for those of us who are America, our Ugandan visas are running out.  So we left the girls with their teacher's family, and Mark got us tickets for Nairobi.  So I spent most of Christmas Day packing and making calls, and we took off on the morning of the 26th.  Because this is Uganda, nothing can go smoothly, and in this case Uganda Air lost or didn't notice our tickets until right before we were supposed to leave.  I tried to contact them all day on the 25th to no avail, and I had figured that they weren't working on Christmas (although you would think that the airport would have someone in it!).  Then, of all things, I got an email at MIDNIGHT apologizing for the inconvienance, and that they would have the ticket resolved by our flight in the morning.  When we went to check in at 10 they still didn't have our reservation, but with a little bit of searching they found it.  Whew!

So Emerson and I flew to Kenya, and here we are!  When I was a child traveling with my father in the summers, I kept a running tally and I had visited the same number of countries as I was years old, for quite a while.  Then I got behind in my late teens, but a year in Europe in college solved that.  This trip has gone on for a while but hasn't added many new countries, so I'm sure I'm behind now, but Emerson has turned 5 and entered his 5th country!

As we drove out of the airport, my little third-culture boy was silent for a while, watching the scenery pass by.  Finally he commented, with amazement, "this reminds me of driving to Portland!"    Now, what little American boy would drive past an acacia-filled savanna, then Massai with their huge herds of Brahman cattle in the median, then Asian-looking modern manufacturing building and bulk stores, and comment on how much it looked like Oregon?!  But I knew what he meant: it was because we were driving on this thing that was flat, and paved, and went on straight in both directions, with no cows or pushcarts in the middle of it, allowing the cars to use their accelerators without engaging the steering wheel in dramatic maneuvers.  We haven't seen a highway in a long time.

We got to our hotel, which is fairly nice in a middle-of-the-road kind of way.  I was looking forward to taking advantage of what was left of the afternoon to walk around and see a little bit of Nairobi from the street, but the girl at the desk told us flatly that it was not safe to walk out because it was a holiday and there were not many people on the street.  She conceeded that we could walk right in front of the hotel, on this street, very near here.  So we went out walking, and it seemed to be a little bit of a market area, with small shops open and vendors selling clothes and shoes on tarps and on tables under umbrellas on the sidewalk.  All of which is familiar to us, but the vendors are much more agressive here than what we are used to in Uganda, and they kept bothering us to come in and buy.  We took a longer walk than what the hotel lady probably advised, but I kept within the loose market-ish area, and made sure that there were plenty of people (including well-dressed ones) around us, even though there were still some pedestrians beyond the shops.  I was thinking, that if this is "no one is out," then Nairobi must be a very crowded city indeed!

This morning the holiday is over, but the desk clerk still did not approve of us going out.  I asked for directions on how to walk to the city center, which I knew we were near, thinking that we could walk around and see what it was like when we were there.  She said where would we like to go, and she could call a taxi.  I said we wanted to walk around, and which direction to start out.  She laughed and said I could not walk with the baby, we could take a taxi.  I said the baby could walk just fine, and took out the map in my guidebook to show her some landmarks that we could aim for.  She called another bellboy over to give me directions to a cinema, and I said I didn't want to go to a cinema, and he offered to call a taxi so I could get to the cinema.  I didn't want to go to the cinema.  By then he was looking at my map, and pointed out a cinema on it, which I STILL didn't want to go to.  (Maybe they teach map-reading in Kenyan schools; most Ugandans don't even know what they are.)  I said I wanted to walk, and he said I couldn't walk with the baby, and we should take a taxi.  I asked which direction was downtown, and they told me not to walk, they would call a taxi.  I said that we were just plain going to go out of the building and start walking if they didn't tell me which direction to go in, and finally yet another bellhop came over and took me to a window, and pointed which direction to go.  It took all of ten minutes to walk downtown, even at five-year-old pace!



When I go on a trip I usually bring teabags, but this time when I was packing I glanced at them and remembered that on all the previous trips so far, there has been no way to get hot water or mugs, so they don't do me any good.  So I didn't bring them.  And there is an electric kettle an accessories right in our hotel room!  We had a similarly effective conversation with that bellhop, who was pointing out the amenities, including the kettle.
"...and you can have your coffee," he concluded, indicating instant coffee packets.
"Do you have tea?" I asked.
"Yes, it is right there," he answered, pointing to the coffee.
"But are there also tea bags?" I asked.
"You want coffee?  Very nice, it is coffee right here," he replied.
"No, I don't want coffee, I want tea."
"Yes, we have very nice coffee, any time you want, it is right here."
"But I don't want coffee!"
"Yes, is okay, you like coffee, is here."
"No, I don't like coffee, I like tea."
"Whenever you want, here it is, you can drink."
"Tea bags!!!  Do you have tea bags!!!  I do NOT WANT COFFEE, I am asking if you have tea!"
"Oh, for tea you call the restaurant, number 256, they bring you right away nice tea."  (For a price, of course.)
I think this is an excellent example of the African representation of Yes Is Better Than No.  It doesn't matter so much if you answer the actual question, it is important that you are very agreeable.  I think the Asian variant is to just say "yes" whether or not you have any intention of following up; the one around here seems to keep answering a slightly different question.  Some solution to the not-saying-no problem seems to be in existence in many places around the world, but however you find it, it tends to be highly unpopular with Americans.



I am used to looking like I stand out, but being able to act like I fit in, but now in Kenya I look out of place and I actually am.  I don't mind needing to ask questions to get around, or taking pictures of tourist-y things, but I don't need to be treated like an idiot.  Or a baby.  Or like I just got off the plane from the civilized West.

For instance, I know how to bargain and not pay twice as much for a taxi ride.  Although the expression of deep and abiding grief (upon arriving at a fair price) was a charming touch.

I would prefer not being told about how to walk down the street.  I know to keep my hand on my purse, and how to avoid getting run over by random vehicles not following traffic rules.

I really have very little interest in charming outdoor markets with the tomatoes piled in cute towers.  You can tell me where the nice, shiny Western-style establishments are.

I don't need to "take my little boy to see animals, very good price."

We know what chapatis are.  Oh, do we ever know what chapatis are!!

And the absolute clincher: today we were walking around the museum and I was taking some pictures of Emerson, as most people were doing with their children.  At one point he was looking at an exhibit with a couple of little Kenyan children.  As I came closer, their father said something about a picture, which I didn't quite catch, but I apologized for taking a picture of his children, and explained that I had just meant to photo my son.  But that wasn't what he meant.  He lined the kids up and offered them to my camera again, so I could take a picture of Emerson together with his children.

What, so I can have a photo of my little boy along with some black children?  For local flavor?  Um, thanks; I think we have that one covered!!!

Santa

My husband and I decided that we wouldn't make a big deal out of Santa, and apparently we have succeeded.  I am not initiating anything for Christmas, and none of the children seem to know or remember that Santa might potentially do anything tonight.  They are excited to see pictures of the jolly old elf in various decorations, and were really intrigued by a life-size Santa doll at the grocery store, but they haven't mentioned any expectations for him.  I doubt the girls have ever really properly encountered the American Santa mythology, but Emerson apparently doesn't remember or care either.  So we have gone to bed on Christmas Eve with not the slightest mention of stockings or cookies.

However, during bedtime prayers and blessings, Hibiscus and I did have a Santa discussion.  And, my friends, I will be blunt with you: I did not maintain the magic.  Or even try and create magic.

Our family decision was that we wouldn't pretend that Santa was a literal personage, and our tradition at home included "being" Santa as well as "getting" Santa, but we also haven't specifically disabused the Santa notion.  Children can enjoy the joyous fantasy if they want to, was our idea.  So when Emerson has heard about Santa at school and come home and asked me questions, I've basically done the "what do you think?" or "oh really," and he continues with his story.  I don't know if he has thought Santa was a literal person or not.  I also don't know what the African children discuss at school and what the local Santa traditions are, other than swallowing the American ones whole-sale, which seems quite likely given the pine trees and fake snow all over the place.

Tonight Hibiscus asked me point-blank if Santa was real.  I asked what she thought and she was confused, and asked me again.  And I said no, he wasn't.  He is a storybook character, like Jay Jay that we read about tonight, or Madeline.  This made sense to her and she nodded, but then her expression clouded as she remember other stories about meeting Santa.  I told her that some people like to dress up like Santa as a fun game, which confused her.  She said "if I meet Santa, I'm going to say 'hi, Santa.'" I told her that was okay, and it was fun to play the game and everyone pretends together that the person is Santa, and they say "hi Santa."

Then, to clarify, I said it was like she could dress up as Cinderella and people could call her "Cinderella" all day, and she got REALLY excited about that!  Apparently she really likes the idea of dress-up, and it had never occurred to her that she could be someone else all day.  So then we talked in great detail about the logistics of dressing up like Cinderella, and how she could be Cinderella like someone else could be Santa.


So, if your children play with mine, I'm awfully sorry if Hibiscus is pretty blunt about Santa's dress-up and story-book self, because she's pretty blunt about everything.  And if you love the beauty and generosity of the Santa myth, I'm sorry that Hibiscus never got to experience it.

First of all, I decided she's kind of too old anyways.  Learning about Santa when you are almost 7, and having your first proper Santa-Christmas when you're almost 8... that's the age when many faithful and well-convinced children are having doubts.  Secondly, she suddenly asked about Santa when I was in the part of the prayer about God protecting our house and keeping everything from getting in at night, because she's been really worried about things sneaking into our house at night.  This context made me feel like Santa might be kind of sinister in her mind, creeping into houses in the middle of the night.  Currently in her poor little mind, things getting into the house in the middle of the night is the height of evil; let's keep Santa locked up in a story book!

But most importantly, her life has already been confusion.  There is logistical confusion about basic concepts like "mother" and "home" and "love" and "obey."  There is fantastical confusion when adults tell her about monsters that will grab her for bad behavior.  There is spiritual confusion that many of the adults around her have taken things like monsters and witchcraft seriously in their own minds.  And there is religious confusion, about... well, everything religious, apparently!  In my mind, the last thing she needed was to wonder about a vague story like Santa Claus.  Let's keep it simple: Santa Claus is a character in a book or for dress-up.  I didn't even bring St Nicolas (the real one) into the picture, although in general I mean to.  He's not for today.


Meanwhile, I had thought that maybe I would wrap a gift or two for the children to wake up and see.  But it's been a long day, and I'm tired, and I won't.  I picked up some crafts and wrapping paper today, but I think I'll have them clean up the living room before I give them anything more than what we have.  And Santa can be busy sneaking into other people's houses, and just plain leave us alone!

Pictures of the Christmas Cantata

 Waiting in the second waiting area.

The stage set up before the concert.  Notice all the trees, lights, spotlights, giant screen.  That pink thing in the middle is the waterfall.

 Breakdancing street cleaners on the side stage.

 Here they are in their bright street-clenar vests!

 Looking out at the audience.

 These were the ballet dancers who turned into break dancers.

Must have an angel choir of children.  Our kids thought they were about their own age; I thought they were quite a bit older!

Mary and Joseph on a side stage, with choir and stuff behind.

Christmas outfits for breakdancing.

Add captionSome more dancing.

 Snow for the grand finale!

This is one of the stories that Emerson and I were reading together.  He could read every other paragraph no problem!

More on the Christmas Cantata

When we considered older child adoption, we discussed many potential challenges and difficulties, including many of the things that we have faced.  But one thing we forgot to consider: musical taste.  We are a household that has earned degrees in music, both classical and jazz; there are two grand pianos in our living room, and another piano living with a friend; and other instruments include traditional drums and flutes from different cultures, classical strings (violins in several different sizes and a viola), and more guitar-like instruments than I can count.  What are we going to do with a child who has spent six years listening to this combination of hip-hop and pop music, complete with three chords and an insistent drumbeat, turned up way too loud.  How many years do we have to balance out this influence before she's old enough to buy her own music, and turn up the stereo on the back bedroom??!!

So Hibiscus thought the concert was awesome and amazing, and wants to go back today.  It was ridiculously loud and ridiculously dramatic, which seem to be the main criteria around here.  It seemed to be a lot of skits with really corny messages, that morphed into a song, and then all the secondary characters around the stage broke into some kind of crazy breakdancing.

For instance, a woman walks by talking on a cell phone and blowing her nose, and then drops the tissue on the ground.  Another woman is sitting on a bench, and reminds her to put the tissue in the bin.  Cell-phone woman rolls her eyes and walks away.  Nice Woman puts the tissue in the trash, and has a long discussion with the man sweeping the sidewalk about how important it is to put trash in the bin and take care of our beautiful city.  (Ugandans attitude towards trash seems to be a lot like that about lying, that they preach a lot about it but  honesty and picking up after oneself doesn't really enter into everyday behavior.)  Then it turns out that the sweeper-man is expecting his sister-in-law to call and announce the birth of his first child any moment, and that he and his wife have been waiting for a child for six years.  Then Nice Woman goes into a little spiel about how that reminds her of Jesus, and how the people waited for their Savior for all this time, but he finally came, and that is about God because of something-or-other, and then the Wise Men brought gifts and did you know that is where gift-giving was started?  Meanwhile, a spotlight comes on a little area on top of the high-rises, and we see Mary and Joseph struggling along, and the spotlight goes off and instantly they are on the side stage in a different spotlight, while the Wise Men appear as Nice Woman discusses them in the story.  Then suddenly they all burst out in song, and Joseph holds the Baby Jesus bundle above his head and swings around while singing this crazy exuberant pop-gospel stuff, and I am very glad that the bundle does not look like the shape that might mean an actual child is inside.  And a dozen other people come along in some kind of random costume and start dancing too.  And the song is not "We Three Kings" or anything that seems kind of related to the story, because "We Three Kings" would not be loud and excited enough, and I think it would be very difficult to add in the required bass and drum section to allow for the necessary switch into break-dancing.  Because everything has to turn into a break-dancing sequence.  Although they added speed and drums to several traditional carols in such a way to totally ruin them as "carols," let alone "traditional," which is apparently what Ugandans are used to because they all hummed and clapped along.

The program started with the (white) preacher enthusiastically welcoming everyone, and then we all sang "Silent Night" together.  The dancers had not yet appeared, so we only needed to go at about 170% of normal speed.  I don't know if Ugandans have a genetic predisposition towards alto-ness, but they certainly have a learned habit of singing in a really throaty voice.  This was funny because there is one sustained, moderately-high note in "Silent Night," and suddenly you could hear my voice singing it, because apparently I was the only person among the couple thousand who knew how to sustain a high note!

The main stage was this giant area in front, which when empty had a large waterfall surrounded by poinsettias and pine trees in the middle.  Then the couple-hundred voice choir filed in and filled most of the space in the middle in risers.  I think their purpose was mostly to look enthusiastic and sparkly, because they didn't do much more than hum in the background on a few songs.  There was a group song at the beginning and the end and they sang along with those ones, and the one at the end was some kind of enthusiastic praise-Jesus kind of thing, so some of them waved their hands around too.  There was a stage on a couple of levels in front of the choir, with a park bench and a few other props, and this is where most of the skits took place.  There was some kind of platform above the choir, which occasionally they used to dramatic effect, and a giant white screen all the way across the stage above that, which they used for different images.  Then there was another stage on either side of the main area, filled with pine trees.  The one towards our side had a manger, and Mary and Joseph appeared on it occasionally when someone sang about them.

I told a couple of the highlights of the cantata yesterday, so the story today is kind of out of order.  So I will go back to the beginning.  We were supposed to pick up our friends at 12:30, to arrive at 1 to wait for the 3:30 show.  But I knew we were on Africa time, so I didn't get everyone ready and over to their house until 1.  The children were all ready to jump in the car, but the mom wasn't, so we waited a while there.  Then we drove downtown.  Ggaba Road has been very slow lately, but it actually went smoothly, but then the traffic was just plain absolutely stopped once we got to town.  We could have walked it twice as fast, even with all seven children.  Finally, we got to the right place and found a parking spot.  Then it was time to wait.

First of all, we sat and waited under a series of giant tents set up outside, as the ushers gradually filled the tent sections in the order we would be allowed to leave them.  In another part of the parking lot there was a stand selling chapatis, popcorn, hot dogs, drinks, and other snacks, and behind the tents were a grand total of six porta-potties.  We arrived at 3 for the 3:00 performance, so we missed it, and waited the whole two hours for the next one -- but at least we were near the front of the line for that one.

About an hour after we started waiting, we were ushered out, through a church, and up to another room kind of to the side, which was also filled with plastic chairs.  It was the second room filled with people like that; I would estimate at least 300 people were in our room.  Luckily, we were up towards one corner, so the kids played with going back and forth out the edge.  I had a book in my backpack, so Emerson and I read that one together.  He was grumpy and tired and didn't really feel like reading, so he didn't want to read on his own.  We took turns reading the stories, switching at the paragraph for a while, until Emerson decided to switch every time we encountered the word "the."  That was interesting!  But inside my head, I was just amazed.  Back in September, he was still reading the Bob books and getting frustrated, and we were going very carefully over simple rules like what does "ea" say so he wouldn't be so frustrated.  Then something clicked, and he has been reading all kinds of children's books, like the paragraph-full Early Readers at school, and the Madeline books at home.  But this is a whole new level; this is totally text-dense read-aloud only, with unique vocabulary and small text.  He's gotten to the point where he wants to read something, and I say "okay, so read it," and he just starts, instead of worrying that it is too hard.  And really, most books in the world are mostly the same words over and over, so once you start in on it you can get a lot of the point, even if you have never yet encountered "vision" or "malicious."

I described sitting down to the concert, which was quite an adventure, so I will go back to some of the program.  The skits all started off corny, and ended with one of the characters delivering a little lesson about Jesus.  One of them was about difficulty, describing the basic story of the engagement, the census, and so forth, and that it was not actually simple or easy for them, and they probably kind of didn't feel happy all the time.  This was the LESSON.  There were definitely children in the audience, but it was not a children's show, and most of it seemed aimed towards the adults.  Is the assumption that adult Christians are not sure about when or why Joseph agreed to wed Mary, or that they had to travel for a census?   I have been shocked and frustrated with how confused Hibiscus is about basic Biblical characters, but I am beginning to understand why: it seems to me that most of the religion around here is totally based on homily and assumption, and very little on the actual Bible.  The children are told that if they are rude to their older brothers and sisters they will go to Hell, and given very specific definitions of Hell, and lists of other behavior that will land them there.  Which is The Divine Comedy, it is not the Bible.  Then they sing lots of songs with "praise God" and "Jesus loves me," and they turn around and tell me that they will beat all the people who are mean to them and to Jesus.  Hibiscus even described a helicopter with bombs she would drop on people who are mean to Jesus!  This is a nice sweet idea about loving Jesus, but when it is paired with no actual knowledge about anything Jesus ever did or said, it turns into a discussion about where he fits when he is inside you, under one's bellybutton or in the rib cage.

This is the child perspective, and it seems like many people do not really deepen their understanding as they get older.  The religious message that I have overheard again and again is how if you believe in God and really love him, LOVE LOVE LOVE, with lots of swinging your arms around and stamping your feet and singing really loudly... then you'll get rich.  Because God blesses the people who love him, especially when they sing really loudly.  I have actually had discussions with my friend the priest on how prevalent this view of loving God = getting rich and lucky, which he finds a big problem, so I am not naively imagining this.

And this bring us to why Hibiscus wants to have a helicopter to drop bombs on mean people, which was the part of the Cantata that made me absolutely livid.  If you are really into melodrama, I suppose Jesus' birth scores you lots of sequins, but the real drama is in the death.  So it couldn't be left out of a Christmas program.  (Unlike the entire life, ministry, and philosophy of Jesus, which was not alluded to in any way!)  I think it followed the young man's monologue about how he slowly descended into peer pressure, parties, alcohol and drugs, until he realized that his life was empty and the only thing that could fill it was Christ.  I realize that a lot of modern churches really like this "testimony," although personally, I would rather my kids don't hear so much about drugs and descending into "coolness."  But then there were some lighting changes, and another guy came out and sang some very dramatic and sad song.  At least I assume it was; I wasn't paying much attention to him.  Because behind him, they started playing a movie on the big screen of the crucifixion.  It might have been part of Mel Gibson's movie, or it might have been something else.  But it was gory, and it was detailed.  It started with Jesus carrying the cross and falling down, and we got close-ups of his arms and his back.  Later we saw nails positioned in the hands, and a hammer swinging.  It was several minutes long, and all fade-ins and fade-outs to different gruesome parts of the crucifixion.  I didn't see most of it, because I don't like to watch things like that, and then I was busy trying to convince the children not to watch.  Emerson was on one side of me, and all the children until Teacher Monica on the far side.  I started in on Emerson, because I know he has this fascination and deep terror of scary things.  He wouldn't look away, and I could cover his eyes but he yelled at me.  On the other side, Hibiscus was watching with her eyes literally bugging out.  Lately she has been especially terrified of bad things happening at night, and bad people coming into our house, and monsters nabbing her.  I know that images of someone being beaten bloody are exactly the kind of thing that pops into your mind when you are afraid of the dark and you want your mama to stay next to you, but she actually has to do your sister's bath at that moment.  So I tried to convince her not to watch, but she told me she liked it, as the tears started to fall.  Then I noticed Hosta on the other side of her, who had huddled up with her knees up to her forehead (she spent most of the program on her feet, jumping up and down), her face totally covered with tears, but she also could not tear her eyes off the video.  After that I was trying to distract Emerson again, and meanwhile thinking about how I could lean my body so Buttercup, in my wrap, wouldn't have an ideal view of the screen.  In the end, I'm not sure how much it helped, and all the children saw way more than was good for them.

So what happens today?  The children have mentioned half a dozen times how much they liked seeing Mary and Joseph, since they just did a little pageant of their own at school.  And then they've spent a significant portion of the day pretending to fall on the cross and discussion exactly where the nails were placed on the feet, and banging pretend nails into each other.  It really makes me mad.  Overall the cantata was not my cup of tea but it was a fun experience, but supposing I actually lived here, I would seriously consider not attending again next year just to avoid that disgusting video. (Or whatever they replace it with next time.)  It is NOT something that is appropriate to put into children's hearts and minds!  First of all, they have so many of their own difficulties to cope with, and this was just plain gory and unpleasant, and these images now live inside them.  Secondly, they are too young to get any actual meaning from it.  The first thing, that we have already discussed several times, is that this was a MOVIE, not the Bible.  In my own home and church life, I certainly expose my child(ren) to the story of the crucifixion, but I keep it simple and based on the actual Bible.  A young child will remember their first exposure to the story, and I want it to be the actual, literal story, not some film-maker's interpretation.  You never know if what will stay with a child will be the parts that he took from the text, or something random that was never important.  (Like Jesus being tall and blond, which he was.)  But the deeper issue is that if the children are too young to understand the meaning and the reason behind the crucifixion, they are way too young to be thinking about the details of death.  Never mind calling for bomb-dropping helicopters, Jesus actively refused even mild violence on his behalf, and refused to protest or defend himself.  Why?  THAT is what Christianity is about.  If you're not old enough to discuss that, you're not old enough to discuss what they used to whip Jesus, and how much he was bleeding.  Period.

So, that was my philosophical rant; let's get back to the cantata.  Shall we discuss breakdancing?  There was really quite a lot of it.  The theme seemed to be a city park, so we had streetcleaners breaking out in breakdancing several times.  However, there was some attempt at variety.  For one number, a ballerina (the one white woman in the entire thing, actually) was in a spotlight in the little stage that was above all the other stages, and she twirled a couple times, and then lights came on the main stage and a bunch of girls in ballerina-like outfits swooped out, twirled a couple times... and started breakdancing.  A later troupe of mostly male dancers were wearing black and white, leather jackets, and sunglasses.  It was a little hard to see how that fit in with the sequins-and-Christmas theme, but they certainly were matching costumes.  And the breakdancing was quite good, and they did a bunch of fancy tricks.  I probably would have been impressed if I weren't so amused by how everyone kept breakdancing!

Another part of the cantata for me was dealing with the children.  I decided to keep Buttercup on my back, where she could see (and incidentally not escape).  She figured out pretty fast that she had a good view and was perfectly content, although that involved lots of jumping up and down in place.  I had also gotten snacks before we went in, and gradually handed them out to the children. I started off with half a chapati each while we waited for the show to start, which went smoothly.  But I had tried to get something at the snack stand that wasn't JUST simple carbs, so I got little slurpy yogurts.  These are small plastic bags filled with sweet yogurt, and you cut off a corner and stick a straw in and drink it out.  This works pretty well if you do it properly, which half the children managed to do.  Unfortunately, half the children wanted to put their yogurt down for a while, and since they are just plastic bags, this is not very technically possible when you are sitting crammed in a pew jumping up and down.  So when Buttercup got full, I gave the rest to Hibiscus, and then I refused to get Hibiscus her own because she'd already eaten half of one and I didn't want her to put down the next one, but when Hosta got tired of drinking I gave that to Hibiscus too.  Needless to say, that made everyone mad at me.  The friends' children managed to drink their yogurts without incident, although the older girl was still carrying the bag when we were trying to walk to the car.  Her mother had to ask her to drop it, which shows how deeply the no-littering lessons sink in -- although she had to ask twice, so maybe the child noticed the discrepancy and the next generation will manage to do better.  But it was Emerson who won the yogurt award.  He asked me to hold his yogurt several times, or offered it to me to take a drink, so I took a drink and handed it back.  But at one point he got the straw stuck inside the bag, so he put it on my lap so I can fix it.  Imagine: it is dark, there are strobelights, you are trying to figure out which of the next six children wants a yogurt, and there is a bag with a hole in it somewhere plopped in your lap.  It ended up spilling yogurt all over my dress, the wrap, the camera case, the floor, and who-knows-what else.  And then Emerson took it back and sucked the rest of the yogurt directly out of the hole, which worked well, except he took forever to do it (like most things that he does), and I think yogurt bags were designed for speedy consumption.

As for the grand finale: Snow.  Snow is really spectacular here in equatorial Africa, and they had an amazing production of it.  We are not in rich Dubai, which apparently has an indoor ski mountain, so it wasn't the actual cold stuff, but it poured from the ceiling in huge quantities for several minutes.  (I think it was some kind of bubbles.)  The kids were very excited and impressed, and jumped around and squealed and tried to catch it.

And now I will conclude my story with what Hibiscus told me the next day.  First of all, she keeps repeating that she wants to go back, and I have not the slightest intention of reliving the rest of the exhausting day in order to attend the performance again!  But then she told me this morning that she was glad we went to this show, because Ugandan people don't go to shows, and no one in Uganda knows about shows like this.  This is pretty amazing information, given that probably between a thousand and two thousand people were happily watching the show, and I saw exactly one other group like ours, which had a couple Americans mixed in with the locals.  There have been two shows a day for the last ten days or so, and they will switch to four shows a day from tomorrow until Christmas -- just at this church, and I think the other churches do their own shows, and a few of the other mega-churches definitely have mega-shows.  A quick estimate gives about 40,000 Ugandans attending this particular show, along with a hundred or so muzungos, which is a slightly different number than "none."  I reminded Hibiscus about the Ugandans who had been all around her, and that our Ugandan friends had brought us, so it was pretty clear that some Ugandans knew about shows like this.  She calmly and didactically informed me that her daddy in Bbunga did not know about shows like this, and she had never been to a show like this while she lived in Bbunga, and no one else went to shows like this either.  Therefore no one in Uganda knows about big shows.  Obviously, mom.

In preparing for adoption, we talked about the significance of taking a child away from their culture, but I think this is the equally important side of the same coin: a naive six-year-old, starting a new life, comes to the assumption that she is the expert on her own culture.  In many ways she knows more about the Buganda than I do, but in other ways, her experience is so narrow and misunderstood, she really knows almost nothing about her own culture.  But since we take her away from it, she thinks she knows everything.  It makes me very glad that we are spending these months here, and hopefully we can combat a little bit of her own assumptions through the coming years, so that she does not believe that her miserable little life in the slums is the only option for Ugandans.  That some people are kind to their friends, and some children like to read, and some Ugandans go to concerts.

We can have those discussions while not engaged in our full-immersion program of symphonies, jazz quartets, and choirs with actual sopranos in them.  And Christmas performances of The Nutcracker, but only if it has been pre-screened for not switching to breakdancing part way through!

b

Car Troubles

I had a blog post in mind.  I was going to start with a picture somewhat like this:

and the dramatic announcement that it was kind of ours, and at least that I was driving it.  Which would mean that anyone who has visited a country like Uganda would think I am absolutely insane to drive, like my husband does.  But I've been here for a while now, and once you kind of understand it the traffic isn't really that bad.  Everyone goes slowly, anyways.

Our American neighbor recommended hiring a car to me, and the company that she uses.  She had been very helpful by driving us around to places, and she said it wasn't really that bad and she wouldn't recommend anything that wasn't safe.  I was planning mostly on driving around our area of town, so I could do things like get groceries, and take the kids to the pool or playground, and visit friends.

It seems like every place we have moved to has gotten more isolated, which isn't a coincidence.  The only towns that are actully on our end of Ggaba Road are Ggaba itself, and Bbunga, both of which we need to avoid.  Because we apparently got tangled up with some crazy crime ring in Ggaba (I'm exaggerating; I don't know that it's a ring, but I don't know that it isn't), and the girls' birth family is around Bbunga.  I have nothing whatsoever against seeing their birth family, but it gets a little awkward bumping into them whenever we go out the door; I would rather have the chance to mentally prepare myself.  And Bbunga is not nearly far enough away if it is a crime ring. So by now we're way up in the hills on the upscale side of Ggaba road, and a car would be increasingly less inconvienant.

We had "hired" the car about five days ago.  But it took the entire first day for it just to show up (at about 11 at night), and then the next day it went out for a check-up and oil change, which took two days to reappear.  When it came back, I asked the driver to come too because we had a lot of errands, and he drove us around for the day.  I was going to go grocery shopping the next day, but we were tired and didn't leave the house.  I had driven a couple of short distances, like moving from one house to the other, and back from Ggaba Road where the driver left me, but yesterday was the first day I properly drove for an entire outing.

And.... disaster.  The driving wasn't actually that difficult, even though I ended up going downtown, I had a good navigator.  The traffic was manageable, and it does pretty much make sense, in a kind of free-flowing way.

But when we came out of the show, the car was missing.  What happened to it?  I can give you a short story here, but it took hours to figure out.  Some company that repossess cars, or something like that, towed it away.  Maybe the owner had fines on it, or maybe a previous renter had gotten tickets, but somehow the car was in this data-base of cars that could be taken away, and it got impounded.  We are still very unclear on why.  Supposedly they are only supposed to take cars with millions of shillings owed on them, and also they should have informed the church it was parked near that they were taking it (so their security team doesn't spend hours looking for criminal evidence), so possibly it was a way over-enthusiastic towtruck guy.  The owner of the car showed up after a while, apparently yelled at everyone (I was out looking for the car with the security guys), and eventually reported that she owed 18,000 shillings on the car but they company wanted 60,000 (which is about $8 vs $30, so not a huge amount of money).  Monica said later that she was lying, and the company wouldn't take the car unless it had millions of shillings owed.  Unless, of course, the car repossessing company was cheating, which is perfectly likely.  There also could be a yet unknown entity that was cheating both the other parties.  A literal interpretation of truth is not exactly a big cultural value around here.  And once money gets involved, there is no reason to trust anything that you hear.

As far as I'm concerned, luckily I only paid for two days upfront for the car, and I would kind of like my carseat, books, and sweaters back, but other than that I don't mind just plain walking away from the problem.  They said that they would un-im-pound the car and get it back to me on Monday, but we'll see about that.  Sometimes the best option is to say "hmm"  and just get home.  And after a great deal of fussing about, the owner and driver did go and find a "special hire" for us and pay him to drive us home.  (Which, by the way, was even more people -- since we had the driver too -- and in a significantly smaller car.  There was one mom and six children in the small back seat!)

So, will I accept the car again on Monday?  Or look for a different company or a different car?

On the one hand is the instinct I wrote about last night: that we should just hide under the bed until someone offers us visas, or at least until school starts up again.  That it seems like everything that could go wrong, promptly is doing just that, and we should just plain avoid everything.

But on the other hand, what is the point of spending our opportunity to live in a foreign country hiding in fear?  I've been feeling really grumpy, but maybe it would be possible to eke out a few more wonderful memories out of our unexpected extra time here, instead of sitting around sulking for the next few weeks.  And that was part of the point of the car: that with a car and school vacation, we could actually do a few little fun outings.

Not to mention, grocery shopping.  It makes the project so much easier to just drive, especially with all three kids.  My husband keeps mentioning that I could just hire the car and driver, which I could, but that just takes more planning, and I feel a little stupid having a driver along for simple outings; I guess I'm just used to taking care of myself!  I don't feel weird when we have a bunch of errands to do, and especially downtown it feels safer to leave someone with the car and the things.  But just to go to the grocery store?  That's a lot of planning for one little trip.  Or at day at the pool?  It just feels silly to pay someone to sit around all day while we swim.  And I can't help adding the cost of the car and the driver to the day's expense, and quickly it becomes too expensive to do much of anything.  Like driving to a playground across town, which would be maybe 10 or 20 thousand shillings per child plus lunches.  Add 100 thousand for the driver and eh?, why go?  ($4-8 dollars for the entrance fee, $40 to drive over.)  And then I combine errands and don't get a car very often, and we sit around and stagnate most of the time, and then do these crazy long errand days which leave everyone grumpy.

Actually, the best solution is to JUST GO HOME, where we have a very nice car just sitting in the driveway (costing us money), and not only that, we have PLACES WORTH GOING TO.  Like playgrounds that aren't $24 to just walk in the door.


Now with that little rant over, I need to decide what to do tomorrow morning, which is almost Christmas Eve and no one is going to feel like handing us a visa or two even if I grump about it.  It could be that the repossessing company was trying to get a little extra money out of a fairly honest owner, in which case I might as well take the car back.  In their favor, they handled most of the other details well and courteously towards me.  Or, this car owner lady could be a total scammer, and it could be a stolen car that she was renting to me or something dramatic like that, and I shouldn't go near her with a ten-foot pole.  In which case, I could ask another friend for a recommendation of a more honest car to hire.  Or I could assume that other random things will continue to go wrong, and just hole up at home and forget the car idea.

I am trying to come up with a nice concluding statement for this story, but nothing is coming to mind.  Kind of like everything else in my life.

Christmas Cantata

It is after 10:30 at night, and I am just sitting down to my second meal of oatmeal of the day.  That might be an ambiguous sentence, but it is true either way: it is the second time I've eaten oatmeal for a meal today, and it is the second time I have sat down and eaten a meal.

We have spent the last eleven hours or so attending a "Christmas Cantata," with our friends, the family who runs the American Montessori School (including Hosta).  It was quite something, to say the least.  Also, I am coming to the conclusion that I should take my children and lock all of us in the bedroom, perhaps with some individuals under the bed, and stay there until we have all the proper paperwork to get on the plane. Disasters large and small seem to dog us wherever we go and whatever we do!  Perhaps this entire trip is cursed.  Or Satan is trying to get at us, as Teacher Monica suggested.

I should eat my oatmeal and go to bed, so I will just write a few things and tell the rest of the stories in the morning.  The Cantata was a very Ugandan extravaganza, including the part about waiting for more than two hours in order to get in.  After all, what Christmas would be complete without breakdancing angels?

As for the venue, visualize an American mega-church, with a balcony and stage and everything, and then squash it down Ugandan style.  So the grandeur remains, but take out all the pretty details like carpets and mood lighting, and make it about a half or a third of the size but maintain the same number of people.  There were three different staging areas in order to get the audience into the church!  First of all we all crammed into the space you might ordinarily expect about the average American family with its 2.2 children to sit, as long as neither adult was particularly overweight.  After a while, the ushers came by and asked us to put the children on our laps so we would take up less room.  Since we were two mothers with seven children, we both already had full laps but there were still a lot of small bums leftover.  The usher moved on and was settling people in the aisles, but they had to stand on the side so the performers could go by.  A couple of enterprising ladies came over and announced that they could carry the children on their laps, thus allowing their own bums to be on a pew and the children to spend the entire two plus hours on the lap of a stranger.  Request denied, although it was not so much a request at all.

Then: LIGHTS!!!!  FOG MACHINES!!!!  GIANT CHOIR ON HIGHRISES!!!!  SKITS!!!!  MARY AND JOSEPH!!!!  SINGING VERY DRAMATICALLY!!!!  AMPS TURNED WAY UP!!!!  And so forth.

Oh, and a revival call, or whatever they are called when sinners are invited to stand up and take Jesus into their lives at that very moment.  I personally feel strongly that one's relationship with Jesus is a lifetime of growth, almost all of which happens inside one's own heart and mind and not by standing up when you are told to by a guy with a microphone, but whatever floats your boat.  Who wouldn't want to listen to a nice Christmas music session without being invited to stand up and declare one's sinner-ness?  Well, I'm obliging enough to watch, until you get MY children involved. First of all, Emerson was so exhausted by that point, that when he kept hearing "stand up, stand up," he just kind of automatically stood up.  And since the church floor was flat, it was hard for the children to see and they had kept sitting on the top of the pew, especially Hibiscus (the other kids had been standing more), and the lady behind her had been hissing at her every few minutes "sit down, sit down."  And now she started hissing "stand up, stand up," which got Hibiscus totally confused, and thought maybe she ought to do it.  Maybe it might be a deeply moving religious experience for some people to stand up at a revival call, but I feel strongly that it is not an appropriate time to manipulate 5-ish-year-olds into confessing something that they don't understand in the least.  Actually, I deeply believe (and have witnessed) that children have a deep, intrinsic connection to the Divine, if we give them the space and trust to find it on their own.  Which this could not be more opposite!


And as for the conclusion of the day, unfortunately my bowl of oatmeal is almost finished so I cannot do the story justice.  I will just say, that we gathered up our seven very amped-up, tired, hungry, and wiggly children, navigated the sea of people, then the giant holes in the sidewalk with cars blocking either side in the gradually fading afternoon light, and walked to where we had left the car.  And we said "isn't this where the car was?"  And it had been, and it was not any more.

Six-Days-Before-Christmas Update

I still haven't found my proper, comfortable indoor shoes.  I know I packed them somewhere obvious at the very end, but they have not emerged.  It gives me joint pain to walk on tile floors with bare feet, not to mention then it's cold and you can feel all the dirt, so this is a big deal.  However, perhaps we are on the upwards side of the moving pain, because I did cook a proper dinner tonight, with boiling pots and everything.

✪ Apparently the children agreed that Emerson was on duty last night.  He is not nearly as dedicated as the girls are to finding little things that bother him multiple times a night, but when he does decide that something is wrong, he engages said dedication to making sure it is really wrong and I miss a nice big block of sleep.  Last night something bothered him on the skin around his eyes, and it really hurt.  We probably spent an hour in the wee 'smas trying to clean whatever it was off of him.

✪ The toys were all in such disaster when I packed them up, that it made me feel like never giving the children any more toys to play with, just letting them mess around with sticks and plastic cups and things like that, if they can't take care of their nice things.  Except Emerson's legos; Emerson has been taking meticulous care of his legos.  But I underestimated him: he also very carefully packed his special "no-sharing" basket, and he did better than I did insofar that he remembered exactly where it was, and he has unpacked it to play with his favorite toys.  Obviously, this creates a big problem because the girls don't know what they like or where it is and it's all mixed up anyways, so all they see is Emerson's no-sharing toys.  I'll let you imagine the ensuing "conversations."  Meanwhile, Hibiscus left some toys outside, drops others on the floor and doesn't even bother to not step on them, and was chewing on something else until it was un-fixable.  Obviously, my first instinct that all the children were not taking care of their toys was incorrect, and Emerson is actually quite meticulous for his age.  On the other hand, Hibiscus is actively destroying everything destroyable.  Buttercup is kind of like a three-year-old, more or less.  I am debating the parental validity of taking toys away from only one child.

✪ My original idea was that the cat would be mostly an outdoor cat, and he (or she) could come in and play when the children were around.  However, I forgot to take into account how when you move, it is not reasonable to put a cat out into the yard and hope that he won't happen to wander away looking for home and just disappear.  So I kept him inside until he had gotten some meals and some snuggles.  Needless to say, he quickly and completely became an indoor cat!

After a little while, I started to become concerned about the littler box situation, or rather, the non-litter-box situation.  We don't have one, and I don't intend on getting one, partly because this is supposed to be an outdoor cat, and partly because I doubt he would know what to do with one if he bumped into it in the night.  So where is he doing his business?  I can smell a little smell, if you know what I mean...

It turns out that the answer is: down the drains.  Almost all bathroom in Uganda, like most of Africa and Asia, have a drain in the floor.  The cat is going on top of the drain, and neatly scraping the tile floor to "dig" himself a little hole.  I have seen the footprints, and watched him in action.  It is really incredibly clever, and he could not have possibly found a better potty-ing solution.  Unfortunately, he is more clever than the engineers and construction workers who actually made the drains.  Which should be at the BOTTOM of the bathroom, and are not.  When I go to dump a little water down to flush them out, the water sits around the level floor of the upstairs bathroom.  Downstairs, it actually floods out into the hallway.  It's the little things that can drive you crazy!

✪ Our highly-recommended potential maid has quit before she has even begun.  I guess I should start asking around to see who else is highly recommended, unlike the last horror story I heard, of a maid "jumping" while she was watching the children, including a 9-month-old baby.  (Meaning she just up and left.)  Meanwhile, I am feeling extremely resentful about the probability of doing my own dishes.

Which is a little silly, but if you've got to live in a third-world country and drive on roads with river beds down the middle, and spend three days getting the obvious appliances in your new apartment to materialize; then you might as well have someone to wash your stupid dishes.

✪ I suppose we are actually making some logistical progress.  I find myself starting to get excited, like we're actually getting somewhere, and then remember feeling that way when we got all our paperwork submitted.  Which was almost four months ago.  Or when we were actually assigned a court date.  Two months ago.  Or when we woke up in the morning and it actually WAS the court date.  Exactly a month ago.  And you notice that right now we are moving into a new apartment, which is in Kampala, so none of those dates got us any closer to America whatsoever.  So I think "NOW the series of predictable paperwork events is actually starting!" and then I think to myself "shut up, being excited, and go clean the cat poo out of the drain."

So at this point, we have the verbal confirmation that we have guardianship of the girls, and then the lawyer got the actual written and sealed ruling, and this morning we had our appointment at the passport "office," and then we went and picked up the ruling, the irrevocable consents from the birth parents, and about four inches of paperwork to hand to the Embassy.  This officially means that Uganda considers us the only and forever parents, but since they already considered us the complete parents for three years, and America has yet to acknowledge that we have the right to parent these children, it does not actually make much difference in our actual lives.  Once we get the passports, we can have the medical appointments, and once we have that we can ask for our first interview with the Embassy for American visas, at which point we learn how long we have to wait for our real interview.

The passport non-office was interesting.  We walked through security into a compound with various drab concrete buildings in a square around the edges, but all the action was under a bunch of tents in the middle.  Several tables were set up at the front, with various government workers, and other people filing back and forth putting folders in front of someone or arranging them on another desk.  Then a great many benches were set up faces the desk areas, like a church congregation, except you couldn't actually see what happened at the front, and it didn't seem to matter.  We had an 8:30 appointment and probably arrived around 8:40, and sat down right next to another family.  I was attracted by the American-looking mother with the African children.  My children were attracted by the games she had out, and immediately joined right in.  It turns out that we had actually had court on the same day as well, so had slightly met each other before.  It was nice to spend the couple hours of waiting time with someone to talk with, and something new for the children to do.  Because of course there were a couple hours of waiting time!  We had also met a representative of our lawyer's office, who told us what to do.  After a while, she drifted by and informed us that someone had said our paperwork was "very fine."  Somewhat later, she told us to be ready, and I told the children to put their backpacks on, and she kind of laughed and didn't actually mean THAT ready.

Eventually, we went up to the desks for our "interview."  The man flipped through the other family's file, specifically looked for a couple of papers which the lawyer's representative showed him, and stamped his stamp on just about every page.  Then he sent that family to another desk, and looked through our file.  The only question he has was why the file only had Hibiscus's name on it if there were two girls, and the lawyer's assistant mumbled something that they had submitted two files but it wasn't allowed, and he asked again and she wrote Buttercup's name underneath the first name.  And he stamp, stamp, stamped.  That was the entire "interview."  He didn't even ask to see my passport, although there was a copy in the file, but he did look at us, so it was possible that he was confirming that we were who we were supposed to be.

Today is Thursday, and the passport people won't be at work next week.  So possibly, with a great deal of prayer (says our lawyer), the passports will be ready before the vacation.  But probably not.  So we are on the wheel of possibly-predictable productive paperwork, but there is a giant roadblock right in front of us, by the name of Christmas Vacation.


Meanwhile, there are way too many mosquitos in our new house.  I am not sure where they all come from, but apparently I've got another month or so of them!